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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by ohlemeier [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by dgwicks [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by ohlemeier [quote]Originally posted by futuremodal [/quote] Easy there, Big Fella! Where do you get your numbers? Is that 25 million discrete people, or trips? It is probably trips. My wife took two trips on Amtrak this year, and so did I. Were we counted as two specific people or four trips? Probably four trips. NYC has about 8 million but I doubt many of them ride Amtrak. A lot ride the subway, Metro North, and NJT. MN has an annual ridership of approx. 62 million. And that is trips. So obviously there aren't a lot of New Yorkers riding Amtrak in comparison to Metro North. NEC ridership is about 11 million. In the case of MN and the NEC I suspect that a lot of these trips are repeat business so 11 million different people are not riding Amtrak in the NEC. On MN I would imagine most people are commuters making 10 trips a week so the number of individuals would be about 120,000. Yes, 120,000 because they do it five days a week, 52 weeks a year, and MN says their ridership is 240,000 trips per day. Applying that same analysis to the Amtrak number of 25 million and assuming they are all 5 day a week commuters that would be about 1.7% of the people ride Amtrak. Since we know that isn't a valid assumption, because my wife and I do not commute on Amtrak, the true number is probably greater but far less than the 10% that you claim because Amtrak is counting trips, not individuals. Also, serving, or being available doesn't mean people will ride it. New York City proves that. A population of 8 million, more if you incude everything on the Bos-Wash corridor, and only 11 million riders in a year? To quote you, "I respectfully suggest you do some research before making sweeping generalizations." [/quote] Nice try, but that in no way indicates 99.7% of Americans haven't tried or don't have access to Amtrak. So..... the 500 million or so who flew last year.... they in no way can be per person. Those are likely people that have flown 20-30 times a year and include many foreigners. Get this: Amtrak ridership - INCLUDING THE LDS - is at an all-time high. Even that isn't enough to please picky "railfans" who would prefer people fly. What a joke. (They don't advocate privatizing the airline infrastructure and stiffing THAT industry out of proper funding). Again, so-called railfans continue slamming Amtrak. If we only repeat lies long enough, the monster that no one wants will go away.... [/quote] Who are you calling a liar? Myself and others are repeating the statistics that are well known and available to anyone who bothers to pull his or her head out of the sand and see the truth about Amtrak. Whether or not Amtrak's ridership is increasing or not is totally irrelevant to the miserably low market share. I don't care if it's 0.3%, 1.0%, 4.3%, or even 10%, it is still not enough to justify a national subsidy. Highways and airports are legitimate in their subsidization (if indeed there is such a thing as a legitimate subsidy) because a majority or plurality of the nation's population use them. If highways and airports only resulted in Amtrak-esque ridership numbers, we'd be calling for those subsidies to end too, but the fact is they do garner enough of a market share, so case closed. Most of us so-called "so-called railfans" would probably even support an increase in subsidies for passenger rail if it earned at least a 25% or 30% share in today's transportation climate, but the fact may be that the market niche necessary for such a share probably doesn't even exist, even with tax breaks and other incentives. And no, we don't want to start quadrupling the gas tax to force people to use passenger rail, because such a move would destroy the economy and we'd be left with double digit unemployment like France and Germany. Quadrupling the gas tax would not result in people switching to passenger rail, because the fundamentals needed for them to use it still would not exist, and the end result would only be to make peoples lives more miserable, without really aiding the cause of passenger rail. Amtrak was and is a miserable failure, it was designed to be a failure by an incompetent federal government, it can only continue to exist as a miserable failure in the future......UNLESS.....the whole thing is dumped and reconfigured from the ground up to allow some form of competitive spirit to exist (the better to facilitate innovations that will please potential patrons) and for the niche markets to be developed out of the theoretical spectrum into a basic reality. If passenger rail can somehow be allowed to evolve into a transportation option that a plurality of all Americans will use, then and only then will we see if all the ascribed characteristics associated with the concept of passenger rail worldwide (e.g. can't make a profit, can't compete with airlines without high speed spending, can't compete with highways, et al) are fundamental truisms or simply steriotypical urban myths.
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