For FY11 Amtrak carried 30.2 million passengers. How many customers did it have? The same question could be asked of the airlines (635 million passengers in FY11) and intercity bus carriers (approximately 30 million passengers in FY11). I am not sure about the intercity bus carrier numbers, although Greyhound said that it carried slightly more than 20.1 million passengers in FY11. As of the end of FY10 there were approximately 210 million licensed drivers in the U.S.
The number of customers would be less than the number of passengers. I am an Amtrak customer. To date (2012) I have taken nine trips on Amtrak. Each of those trips would be shown in the passenger statistics. But I am only one customer. Has anyone seen how many customers Amtrak has as opposed to passengers?
In FY11 the average system subsidy per Amtrak passenger was $41.37. It would be interesting to know the average subsidy per customer.
Sam,
You report that in Fiscal 2011 Amtrak had 30.2 million passengers. I assume you refer to passengers riding Amtrak trains.
However, if we include all people who ride on Amtrak tracks the number is quite different.
In 2010 New Jersey Transit had 79.6 million passengers. NJT does not provide figures broken out by rail lines. However, the Northeast Corridor line carries by far the most passengers. Also about half of the trains from most other lines use Amtrak tracks: The North Jersey Coast LIne, the Main and Bergen County line, the Montclair Boonton line, the Morris and Essex line and the Raritan Valley line. The Pascak Valley line which is lightly used does not run on Amtrak tracks. The Atlantic City line. also lightly used, does not run on Amtrak tracks except to enter 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.
Also, Connecticut has a commuter line from New Haven to New London on Amtrak's tracks. Metro North has a New York to New Haven line on Amtrak's tracks. The South East Pennsylvania Transit Authority uses Amtrak tracks for its Trenton line and its Wilmington, Delaware line. Finally MARC, Maryland's transit agency uses Amtrac tracks.
That is just on the east coast. I don't know about the west coast. However, if we looked at all of the people who use Amtrak tracks the numbers would be very different.
Amtrak does not collect fares from commuter riders on trains using its tracks. The commuter agencies collect them. Amtrak collects rents from the commuter agencies accessing its tracks, offset by the rents that it pays the commuter railroads when it runs on their tracks.
Amtrak owns 363 of the 457 NEC miles. It collects rents from the operating agencies that use its route miles and pays the owners rents for use of the other route miles.
My question is whether anyone knows how many customers Amtrak has as opposed to passengers.
John WR Sam, You report that in Fiscal 2011 Amtrak had 30.2 million passengers. I assume you refer to passengers riding Amtrak trains. However, if we include all people who ride on Amtrak tracks the number is quite different. In 2010 New Jersey Transit had 79.6 million passengers. NJT does not provide figures broken out by rail lines. However, the Northeast Corridor line carries by far the most passengers. Also about half of the trains from most other lines use Amtrak tracks: The North Jersey Coast LIne, the Main and Bergen County line, the Montclair Boonton line, the Morris and Essex line and the Raritan Valley line. The Pascak Valley line which is lightly used does not run on Amtrak tracks. The Atlantic City line. also lightly used, does not run on Amtrak tracks except to enter 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. Also, Connecticut has a commuter line from New Haven to New London on Amtrak's tracks. Metro North has a New York to New Haven line on Amtrak's tracks. The South East Pennsylvania Transit Authority uses Amtrak tracks for its Trenton line and its Wilmington, Delaware line. Finally MARC, Maryland's transit agency uses Amtrac tracks. That is just on the east coast. I don't know about the west coast. However, if we looked at all of the people who use Amtrak tracks the numbers would be very different.
Couple of bits of misinformation here. First, NJT Main/Bergen and Pascack Valley lines do no use the Corridor; the Raritan Valley line only a few miles from Hunter Tower to Newark.. Morris & Esses and Montclair Boonton Line only from the junction in the Meadows and only a stop at Secaucus to make connections for trains on the Main/Bergen/PV lines; they also have trains to Hoboken exclusively. MNRR owns the Shore LIne to New Haven and the Hudson Line to Poughkeepsie. And SEPTA does run trains from Trenton to 30th St. and 30th St to Wilmington, DE and MARC from about 25 miles north of Baltimore to Washington DC. on the Corridor. These commuter services passenger numbers do not show up in Amtrak numbers nor should they. When discussing Amtrak passenger counts you cannot include commuter counts because of the difference in services: Amtrak is inter city and commuter services aren't; they theoreticallly don't compete against each other. But the agencies do pay Amtrak for the use of the tracks and has to be handled as a seperate income than from seats sold.
RIDEWITHMEHENRY is the name for our almost monthly day of riding trains and transit in either the NYCity or Philadelphia areas including all commuter lines, Amtrak, subways, light rail and trolleys, bus and ferries when warranted. No fees, just let us know you want to join the ride and pay your fares. Ask to be on our email list or find us on FB as RIDEWITHMEHENRY (all caps) to get descriptions of each outing.
To get back to the OP's original question, I gather that he wants to know how many warm bodies use Amtrak, whether once or every other day. The once would be one passenger/one customer. Every other day (except Sundays) would be 156 passengers/one customer.
For that matter, do they count passengers by boardings? That would make every round trip customer equal two passengers.
I can see where the customer count would be useful. If train ## serves ten thousand passengers, is that five thousand round trips by five thousand bodies, or five hundred bodies, or only fifty people bouncing back and forth like tennis balls? Inquiring minds want to know.
Chuck (who lives where Amtrak doesn't run)
My point here is that if we are going to discuss who benefits from Amtrak expenditures we need to discuss all people who benefit. And people who ride state transit agency trains that operate on tracks Amtrak runs on do benefit from these expenditures. To simply ignore them is to confuse part of the people who benefit with all of the people who benefit.
Perhaps you would not include "commuter counts" but Amtrak itself does. Amtrak sells both monthly and 10 trip commuter tickets to anyone who wants to buy them. Here is a link: http://tickets.amtrak.com/itd/amtrak/MultiRide/
You are correct that NJT's Main/Bergen County and Pascack Valliey lines do not connect directly with Amtrak tracks. However, passengers on those lines have access to service by changing trains at Seacaucus station.
I have heard some overheated claims during this season of political campaigning. Speaking for myself, I am here because of issues related to rail transportation and not political issues.
So if we are going to talk about who needs rail transportation I think it is important to discuss all who need it and not dismiss some people's needs while allowing other people's needs.
And if one customer buys an Amtrak monthly ticket that single customer bounces back and forth about 40 or even more times a month and is 40 or so passengers.
I live in New Jersey where Amtrak certainly does run. If I were in charge I would see to it that you too should have the opportunity to to ride an Amtrak train.
If Mr. A rides from Trenton to New York on Amtrak in the morning and returns in the evening, he is one customer making two passenger trips.
In FY11 the average annual subsidy per Amtrak passenger was $41.37. This calculation is based on 30.2 million passenger trips, which Amtrak counts as passengers.
If the typical Amtrak customer made an average of 1.5 trips per year, which is probably a low ratio, it would mean that Amtrak carried 30.2 million passengers in FY11, but it had 20 million customers. This would make the average subsidy per customer $62.44 as opposed to $41.37 per passenger.
A similar dynamic would impact all commercial carriers, i.e. air, bus, etc., but it would not change the federal subsidy per motorist because they are the customer and passenger irrespective of how many trips they make in a year. However, considering that some motorists carry one or more passengers, the federal subsidy per highway passenger would be reduced if it is spread across all the passengers.
Sam1A similar dynamic would impact all commercial carriers, i.e. air, bus, etc., but it would not change the federal subsidy per motorist because they are the customer and passenger irrespective of how many trips they make in a year.
But Sam, not all motorists receive Federal subsidies. You only get a Federal subsidy to the extent you drive on Federal roads most of which are Interstate Highways. When you drive on state, county or municipal roads you get no Federal subsidy.
However, if you drive at all you pay for Federal roads whether you use them on not because they are funded with a Federal excise tax on motor fuels.
For example, the guy who delivers food for restaurants drives a lot of miles but almost none on Federal roads. Yet he pays as much to maintain interstate highways was the guy who commutes every day on one of them. And people who drive on toll roads have to pay to drive on the roads and also pay again for the interstates they don't use. There is no fairness in that system; it is totally arbitrary.
John WR Sam1A similar dynamic would impact all commercial carriers, i.e. air, bus, etc., but it would not change the federal subsidy per motorist because they are the customer and passenger irrespective of how many trips they make in a year. But Sam, not all motorists receive Federal subsidies. You only get a Federal subsidy to the extent you drive on Federal roads most of which are Interstate Highways. When you drive on state, county or municipal roads you get no Federal subsidy. However, if you drive at all you pay for Federal roads whether you use them on not because they are funded with a Federal excise tax on motor fuels. For example, the guy who delivers food for restaurants drives a lot of miles but almost none on Federal roads. Yet he pays as much to maintain interstate highways was the guy who commutes every day on one of them. And people who drive on toll roads have to pay to drive on the roads and also pay again for the interstates they don't use. There is no fairness in that system; it is totally arbitrary.
Fairness is in the eyes of the beholder. People who benefit from a policy believe it is fair whilst those who don't shout foul. There is a degree of arbitrariness in every government program. The question is whether the program serves most of the people most of the time.
There is a difference between customers and passengers on commercial carriers but not in the case of motorists was the point that I was trying to make. This year as a customer I have made nine trips on Amtrak, which means I count as nine passengers even though I am one customer.
I am also a motorist. To the extent that the federal highway taxes (user fees) don't cover the cost of the federal highway system that I use, I receive a federal subsidy, although this an over simplification. When I am in my car, I am the motorist and the passenger. One and the same as opposed to being a customer on a commercial carrier who might account for multiple passenger trips.
John WRFor example, the guy who delivers food for restaurants drives a lot of miles but almost none on Federal roads. Yet he pays as much to maintain interstate highways was the guy who commutes every day on one of them. And people who drive on toll roads have to pay to drive on the roads and also pay again for the interstates they don't use. There is no fairness in that system; it is totally arbitrary.
"Totally arbitrary" would be wrong. I think you mean "not always completely fair". I'd be willing to bet if you plotted every tax payer's portion of federal highway funding against their federal highway usage, you get a very high R squared value.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
John WR For example, the guy who delivers food for restaurants drives a lot of miles but almost none on Federal roads. Yet he pays as much to maintain interstate highways was the guy who commutes every day on one of them. And people who drive on toll roads have to pay to drive on the roads and also pay again for the interstates they don't use. There is no fairness in that system; it is totally arbitrary.
When Dominos Pizza conducts a public campaign decrying that the gas tax their drivers pay is being used to fund Interstates instead of HSR, I will accept that you have a point there.
I think it has been argued that the gas tax is just that, simply a tax and not a user fee. The thing is that most people paying the gas tax like the idea that money is going for roads, and it is a small slice of gas tax payers who are demanding that some of the money go for trains.
The thing is that the advocacy community has laid down a marker that passenger trains have never paid for themselves through fare collection and never will, so talk about privitization of Amtrak and glide-paths to profitability are just pipe dreams. Fine. If one cannot compete in the marketplace, one then has to compete for hearts and minds of the voting public as they influence their legislators. Apart from some hardcore idealogues and idealists on both the Right and Left, most legislators are finally tuned to the desires of their constituents -- it is how they get reelected.
As I said, the cross subsidy paid by the pizza delivery industry with respect to roads is a non-starter as I don't think there is a critical mass of pizza delivery drivers who think that their gas tax money would better go to trains. But the idea that pizza delivery drivers should support trains because they don't benefit from the gas tax money going to Interstate Highways is the kind of idea one sees advanced in advocacy circles.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
This is my response to you and the following posts, Sam.
1. I agree with you that "fairness is in the eye of the beholder." I completely agree.
2. Even if I have no car and pay property tax for local and county roads I am also paying for protection of an ambulance to take me to the hospital in a medical emergency. So, for the fairness question, I have to ask how much my life is worth, which is think confirms your earlier point.
3. However, we have a complex of roads--local and country roads, state roads and Federal roads. Building and maintenance costs come from state and Federal motor fuels taxes, state sales taxes, Federal and state income taxes and property taxes. And then there are tolls for some roads. These pay obvious costs such as building and repair of roads and not so obvious costs such as the portion of our court system that is used to collect fines for traffic violations and other legal issues. My morning paper has a story about 40 motor vehicles clerks who have been caught selling drivers' licenses for between $2,500 and $7,000. Investigating them, apprehending them and trying them is an indirect cost of our road system. To determine the true costs of our road system all of these things have to be itemized, the cost of each found and everything must be added together. I don't know how to do that and I don't expect that you have some magic answer either. These are simply the costs of our culture as it has evolved. I agree we should gracefully accept it but I don't know how to put a number on it.
The infrastructure for roads and the airways is paid for by various taxes. The infrastructure for modern rail needs to be built or corridor track rebuilt. Separate from this are operating expenses which are more than covered by Acela and probably can be covered in the future in the short to medium corridors operated at 110 and up. Continued debates over how much of this mode or that are circular arguments and only delay progress.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
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