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[quote user="dakotafred"] [quote user="Paul Milenkovic"] And Essential Air Service, which gets a lot of love around here, is a kind of Amtrak in the air. [/quote] This would be true if EAS boarded 31 million passengers a year, instead of the 959,867 it boarded in 2010 at a taxpayer cost for operations almost half of Amtrak's, or $235 million in FY 2013. (Sorry about the disagreeing years; best I could find.)  In my state, North Dakota, this service subsidizes expense-account travelers in Devils Lake, Jamestown, Dickinson and Williston. Other travelers from those cities drive 100 miles, saving hundreds of dollars, to fly out of real airports in Bismarck, Minot, Fargo and Grand Forks. Alaska, the one state for which you could make a case for air service being "essential" for ordinary people, needed only $15 million for EAS in 2013. The Lower 48 required $220 million. [/quote] What is the source for the number of Essential Air Services Program passengers boarded in 2010.   Using your numbers, the average subsidy would be $244.83 per passenger.  However, your numbers are mixing apples and oranges.  According to Wikipedia, the EAS spend in 2011, which is the closest that I could find to 2010, was $131.5 million, which would make the average EAS subsidy $137 per passenger, assuming that the FY10 spend was not more than the FY11 spend. Comparatively, the average loss for Amtrak's long distance train passengers in FY13 was $147.14 per passenger. Assuming that the EAS spend in FY13 was $235 million, which is close to what Wikipeda shows, the total loss for the EAS program was considerably less than the total loss for Amtrak's long distance trains. In FY13 the long distance trains had an operating loss of $627.1 million before depreciation and interest. If the long distance trains wear 10 per cent of Amtrak's depreciation and interest expense, the total loss for the long distance trains was $699.5 million.  If one assumes that the long distance trains only attract five per cent of the company's depreciation and interest expenses, the loss was $663.3 million. The EAS Program should be terminated.  Having said that, I don't see how the EAS Program losses can be used as a justification - by implication - for continuing to run long distance trains that serve a minuscule portion of the population.
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