Or at least not all of Amtrak. It’s the excessively long routes covering low-density areas that lose the most money. So cut the really long routes or make states share funding responsibility for them. Leave longer trips for planes, and shorter trips for trains. Make funding conditional on pro-growth mixed-use zoning around stations. Rail requires population density:
Taken together, the 26 of Amtrak’s 44 routes that run less than 400 miles had a positive operating balance in the 2011 Fiscal Year, with a surplus of $46 million. The 14 routes longer than 750 miles posted a loss of $597 million. The former account for 83 percent of ridership; the latter 15 percent.
What makes these routes successful? In part, as this interactive ridership-funding map makes clear, it’s because they fit a vision of passenger rail service as short, quick, intermodal transport. America’s 100 largest metros generate 88 percent of Amtrak’s ridership, though they make up only 65 percent of its population.
(Via Henry Grabar)
The biggest problem with Amtrak is the severe nationwide shortage of it. But it’s getting better and better: On-time performance is way up, delays are way down. Wi-Fi is available on more than half the trains for more than half of all Amtrak riders. Stimulus funds rescued some 90 coaches from the wreck yard, and the rehabs added cars on trains that had been selling out on busy days. Recently ridership has been increasing by over a million a year. And stimulus-funded upgrades to routes across the country are beginning to be completed, cutting travel time and improving reliability.
With all the trend lines looking so good at last, NOW is the time to attack Amtrak’s national network? It’s the haters spreading confusion again. Don’t fall for the stuff.
Sure, Amtrak has shortcomings. Trains stop once a day in cities that need twice as many or more. They stop in the dead of night in places where people wait on cold platforms to fill the trains. Amtrak needs many more trains and even a few more routes, or extensions of routes.
Amtrak needs many new and more efficient diesel locomotives, hundreds or even thousands! of new coaches, as well as new sleepers, diners, baggage cars, and crew cars. Then it can add trains on its busiest routes, and work with the states to build corridor service. Without more equipment, not gonna happen.
Long distance and corridor trains are not two things in opposition; they are two aspects of passenger service. The long distance trains are long strings of overlapping city-pairs and potential corridors. For example, NYC to Richmond, Philly to Raleigh, DC to Columbia, Raleigh to Charleston, Columbia to Savannah, Charleston to Jacksonville, Savannah to Orlando,etc.
But when a route is a stump, it loses half of its potential city-pairs. So the dead-ender Pennsylvanian can give you NYC-Lancaster, Philly-Harrisburg, Elizabethtown-Johnstown, Altoona-Pittsburgh, and then STUMP! You can’t ride the Pennsylvanian Philly-Cleveland, Harrisburg-South Bend, or Pittsburgh-Toledo (with connector bus to Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Detroit) — much less carry passengers Pittsburgh-Chicago. (OK, it can sell “connections” to the Capitol Ltd if you can wait at the Pgh. station for 3 or 4 hours.) So stump trains are always at a disadvantage to thru trains that directly link dozens or even hundreds of city-pairs.
And the long distance routes contain many segments ripe for corridor service. Consider the remarkable growth of the Texas Eagle, shown on the linked table. It runs Chicago-St Louis-Little Rock-Dallas-San Antonio. Over that one section Chicago-St Louis, the Eagle is part of the Lincoln corridor service. The state-supported trains make four runs a day, plus the Texas Eagle. This corridor used to have three trains a day (2 Lincolns plus the Eagle). Then Illinois decided to fund two more trains here, increasing from 3 trains a day to 5 a day. The resulting 67% increase in frequencies led to a 100% increase in total passengers (and still growing). The Texas Eagle was part of this service, and it has shared the growth on this segment.
Despite this growth, the Texas Eagle still loses money. But to kill it would be a miscalculation. Don’t reduce the number of trains on the popular St Louis-Chicago segment when it needs more, not fewer.
Another thing, at Chicago the Eagle feeds passengers to many other trains, improving the performance of each of them. Killing the Eagle would mean fewer passengers for the Empire Builder to the Twin Cities and the Upper Midwest, fewer taking the Wolverines to Michigan, or the California Zephyr to Denver and points west, and so forth. Losing the Eagle would also cost connecting passengers to the Sunset Ltd at San Antonio and the Heartland Flyer corridor train Ft Worth-Oklahoma City.
Drop a train to eliminate its losses and drop the connections to other trains; fewer passengers on the other trains increases their losses. How can that be good business?
A business in trouble needs to find a way to grow. For a way to fix the Texas Eagle, look at the needs in Texas. Only one train a day runs San Antonio-Austin-near Fort Hood army base-near Waco-Ft Worth-Dallas-Longview. But this strip of Texas clearly has the population to become a popular corridor. Let’s add another run to this segment of the Eagle to begin building a corridor service. And restore service Houston-College Station-Dallas and get a lot more passengers heading north on the Eagle.
Does anybody seriously think that the way to start building corridor service is to eliminate the existing train on the proposed corridor? The proven way to build one is the way Illinois did it, by adding trains to supplement the existing long distance train in place.
Woody, your comment has to be one of the most spot on about Amtrak’s problem’s out the dozen’s and dozens of articles I’ve read about Amtrak over the years. All the long distance trains run over segments that would be greatly serve as a mini corridor. All of these articles criticizing Amtrak’s long distance service, while praising the corridors, should be arguing for the same concept to be applied to the long distance routes. The only “carving” that should be done is to make new corridors.
Jon is actually right. If you want to make a cute trip, go with a train. If you want to have a transportation policy that allocates resources in a cost effective manner, it takes a lot more thinking and tougher choices.
Long haul routes in big countries are tough to sustain. Canada’s VIARail has had many of the same problems Amtrak has had with long haul routes. Today you can get from Toronto to Vancouver in 3.5 days for about $1300(Can). Obviously, no business traveler is going to choose that. Are there shorter-haul routes that might be served (like Edmonton-Winnipeg) that might be lost without it? Maybe–or maybe transportation planners choose another way to connect the cities.
The US has an excellent road network and strong air infrastructure. What our transportation planning should be focused on is reducing the number of wasteful and congesting short-haul flights between metro areas like DC-PHL-NY-BOS and SD-LA-SJ-SF with new cars and infrastructure, not providing a slow and inconveniently timed tourist excursion from Austin to St. Louis. Trips like Altoona-Pittsburgh-Chicago are yesterday’s problem. If folks want a cheaper option, it might be easier and cheaper to go with quality bus lines (such things exist in Europe). If they want tourism, there’s always the Orient Express.