As a newcomer to the forum, my question involves Amtrak ticket prices. How are the ticket prices determined? For example, the price of a regular adult fare one way ticket from Gainesville, TX to Fort Worth (about 65 miles) on the Heartland Flyer is $10. If ticket prices are that reasonable thoughout the system, that's a real bargain for the occasional traveller. When you compare travel by the airlines that only go to 500 cities in the US, I wonder why more people don't travel by train. Am I missing something?
Time is money. 65 miles can be done in a car in less than 2 hours door-to-door and scheduled departure is whenever you want. The Heartland Flyer is 1.5 hours plus travel time to and from each station and you have 1 option for scheduled departure. If you plan on making it a day trip, you'll only have 5 hours from the time you detrain til you have to reboard, assuming everything is on-time.
Sure, it is only $10 one-way, but the ease and convenience of driving makes it viable only to those who live near the station and are going to a place near the station or don't have a car. The same issue happens all over the US. The pricing is kept low enough to compete with driving and even then it is tough to do, because America is in love with our cars.
The ticket price is driven by demand, which is influenced heavily by alternative modes of transportation, e.g. bus and car in the case of a trip from Gainesville to Fort Worth.
Whether one opts for the train or bus or drives is a function of value, which consists of many variables, e.g. options, convenience, timing, economics, safety, etc.
If you are going to Fort Worth for a weekend, let's say to attend the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show, whether it would be a better deal to drive or take the Heartland Flyer depends on how many are going, where you stay, and how you plan to get to the stock yards.
For one person, who does not qualify for one of Amtrak's discounts, the cost would be $22 return. The fare is slightly higher on the weekends, since the train draws its largest crowd on Fridays and Sundays, as well as holiday periods. For a family of four, again without any discounts, and children between 2 and 15, the fare would be $72.
It is 66.54 road miles from downtown Gainesville to downtown Fort Worth. The cost to drive would depend on your personal vehicle. If you stuffed the family into my Toyota Corolla, it would cost you $38 return. This includes driving from Gainesville to Fort Worth plus adding 10 per cent to run out to the stock yards. It is also based on a fully allocated cost model. Accountants talk about variable costs and fixed costs, which is an important concept, but at the end of the day all costs are variable. I was an accountant for many years.
Even if you have an SUV that you coughed up $35,000 for, and it gets about 22 mpg, you can haul a family from Gainesville to Fort Worth and back for approximately $65. You would still beat the cost of taking them on the train. Of course, the actual cost is a function of your vehicle, how long you keep it, how well you maintain it, etc. Shockingly, how fast you drive can also have a significant impact on the cost.
Fort Worth has a good public transit system. If you stayed downtown you could walk to the hotel from the railway station (Intermodal Transportation Center). And you could take public transit to the stock yards, although you might run into some seemingly creepy people late at night. There are several nice hotels in downtown Fort Worth, as I am sure you know, but they tend to be more expensive than the many motels that ring the city.
As a rule it is less expensive for a single person to go by public transport, e.g. plane, bus, train, etc. It is equally true that it is generally less expensive for a family to take the family chariot. At the end of the day this is the reason why most families in America opt for the family buggy to go to and from work as well as take a vacation at the seashore or in the mountains.
The love affair with the car is not restricted to America. It is a world wide affair. I have seen it up close and personal in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Malaysia, Japan, and the UK.
People all over the world, given a choice, opt for private over public transport where it is a reasonable choice. The car is the selected option in most developed countries; motor bikes are the choice in many developing countries; bicycles are popular in poorer countries. People want the freedom and convenience afforded by private transport. The one exception is long distance travel, where the choice for those who can afford it is commercial air.
The only thing that will get people out of their cars and onto public transport, especially in urban areas, is when operating costs and congestion make driving impracticable or prohibitive.
This business of common-carrier ticket pricing, levels of subsidy, effects of transportation choices has a practical component, and it has an emotional component. One of the things I have been arguing is for the passenger train advocacy community to look a little bit beyond the emotional component and figure out how the practical component can be better worked into advocating for trains.
There is a large element of foamer-dom in passenger train advocacy -- there are people who want trains because they are trains, but the majority position out there is that people out there will patronize trains and support tax subsidies for trains if there is a perceived advantage over competing modes. This leads to a lot of the emotional arguments about how terrible cars are and how misguided people are for "having a love affair with cars" -- love is essentially an emotional reason for the car people to drive cars, now, isn't it, and if those car people would use their heads instead of following their hearts, they would ride trains, is the belief.
I am willing to work from the following suppositions. Cars and light-duty trucks are by and large a private, not common-carrier mode of transportation (taxis, airport shuttles, and van pools are exceptions), and everything else is common carrier (private railroad cars, business jets, and charter motor-coach buses are exceptions). Private transportation is overwhelmingly prefered for the flexibility mainly and for the solitude partly over any of the common-carrier modes, especially in the U.S., but also true everywhere in the world that private transportation is an option. There is a role, however, for common-carrier transportation, to serve a variety of personal as well as societal reasons.
I part company with the strict laissez-faire, Libertarian critics of Amtrak in that I see a role for public subsidy of Amtrak or other modes of transportation to the extent that they provide social benefits that are difficult to recover from fares payed by individual users. I also part company from the Amtrak right-or-wrong sentiment that any amount of subsidy to Amtrak is justified because "all of the other modes are subsidized". Not only is the sentiment that passenger trains should pay their own way, even if only in an "above the rails" or a "direct operating cost" sense subject to ridicule in many quarters, any and all attempts at Amtrak reform to reduce the rate of subsidy are viewed as back-door attempts by "the concrete lobby" to kill Amtrak.
In my opinion, the current subsidy rate of Amtrak is high enough to present a signficant political obstacle to the necessary expansion of Amtrak to realize the social benefits from having trains. I get a lot of heat on these pages for expressing that view, but I am firm in my belief that advocating for trains on the position that there is nothing wrong with Amtrak or with the rail mode of passenger travel that cannot be cured by voting more subsidy money will be ultimately disasterous for passenger train advocacy and for passenger trains in the U.S. political culture.
One disadvantage that all common-carrier modes have over private autos is in cost comparison. Many motorists compare their out-of-pocket costs, mainly gasoline, tolls, and downtown parking with fares on common-carrier modes and choose to drive because it is "so cheap." Many of us in the passenger-train and transit advocacy community seek to "educate" people that they are not properly accounting for costs and making bad economic decisions, pointing out that there are a whole host of other costs -- depreciation, repairs, insurance, residence parking (owning a garage or renting a parking space) -- associated with cars.
We go overboard in the other direction. Some folks at Madison Metro bus system figure the cost of commuting to work on a bus at $7000/year. Well, commuting 3.5 miles each way (the average bus ride) by car doesn't cost $7000/year. My wife drives a nice Chrysler purchased used that has cost next to nothing in maintenance over 10 years because it is only used for the commute and hardly any miles are put on it, and the fully-allocated commute cost is perhaps 40 percent of that figure, including the expensive parking at work. I have taken to using the free bus pass as part of "transportation demand management" (i.e. the bus has you stuck in narrow seats next to coughing strangers who are pressed up against you owing to Wisconsin body styling that they have to give bus rides away to get employees to ride it). When I am driving behind a Metro bus with the sign on the back "What would you do with an extra $7000 a year?" showing people on fancy warm-weather vacations with the money supposedly saved by bus commuting, my response is "Make lease and parking payements on a plush SUV so I don't have to be crammed into that stupid bus."
One way for common-carrier transport to compete with cars is by offering speed. For all of the complaints about planes being Spam-in-a-can and all of the complaints about airport security and hub-and-spokes networks, planes are time-competitive on 250 mile or greater trips, perhaps 150 mile trips if you are considering connecting legs of larger journeys and avoiding ground transport to one of the larger airports. My wife takes the plane on business to Minneapolis -- I would drive that one given airport lines and the choice, but my wife prefers to fly because the plane ticket is an easier reimbursement than auto mileage and prefers a common-carrier mode to having to drive that distance. The Empire Builder is an option we considered if railfan husband would drive her to Columbus, but once-a-day service coupled with the scheduling uncertainty of an LD train combined with the late evening hour for a woman travelling alone to disembark at the train station in Minneapolis make the EB a non-starter.
Speed competition is not restricted to planes. The NEC Acela service is speed competitive on many of its route segments, and the fact that Amtrak charges an arm and a leg, comparable to airline fares, indicates that this is one place where Amtrak is competing on speed when you take into account downtown-downtown times, airport security, highway congestion, and all the usual suspects.
Outside the NEC, Amtrak largely competes on price. Part of the reason the subsidy is so high is that Amtrak fares have to be competitive on gas for driving a car. My train-advocate colleagues point out that if you leave the politics of subsidy aside for a minute, the train has a lot of costs not reflected in fares on account of subsidy, the motorist has a lot of costs not accounted by out-of-pocket gas-meals-tolls-and-parking, and on balance, subsidizing Amtrak provides a common-carrier alternative to driving for all the people who need such a thing, who would also include my wife who prefers a common carrier mode for business travel over driving, all things being equal.
But look what happens when the price of gas zooms up. The high price of gas tilts the fares-vs-out-of-pocket-driving costs in the direction of Amtrak, and people pile on to Amtrak trains, and the WisARP newsletter gloats about how local Amtrak ridership is up sharply, implying that Amtrak travel is the answer to the energy crisis. Keep in mind that the preponderance of travel is by road, and if only a tiny fraction of motorists switch to Amtrak on account of their personal calculations of gas costs, Amtrak will see vigorous ridership gains. Many other motorists continue to drive light trucks for single-person trips, and you don't even see anyone slowing down to legal posted speeds at gas in excess of $3/gallon. The only people slowing down are some of the semi-truckers, where the incremental time/wage cost saving of speeding is recently balanced by the incremental fuel cost at the fuel consumption rates of the big rigs.
That Amtrak fares are cheap enough relative to some motorists perceived "direct operating cost of driving" with the high gas prices is as much an artifact of Amtrak subsidy as it is of any energy efficiency advantage and the proper social policy choice. Since no one has a clue as to the energy usage of the Amtrak corridor consists in contrast with the LD trains, whether increase in local Amtrak ridership is helping with the energy crisis is anyone's guess.
The last trip where I had an Amtrak alternative invoked a trip from Madison, WI to Jackson, MI, where that would have required figuring out how to get to Chicago or figuring out how to get to Milwaukee and making connections between the Hiawatha and Michigan trains, and it would have required renting a car at the other end. The Camry averages 35 MPG on the highway at legal speeds -- with my wife and I, that works out to 1700 BTU/passenger mile, more energy-efficient than the 2500-3000 BTU/passenger mile values reported for Amtrak travel. Even with the horrid Dan Ryan congestion, auto travel was much faster than train travel taking into account the connections and arriving at the station in advance to get parking. The only downside to the Camry is that people in Michigan drive so much over their already high legal limit, and combined with the split car-truck speed limits, merging on to I-94 in a 4-cylinder car was an interesting experience. Oh, and even at $3/gallon, gas was much cheaper than Amtrak fares for two people.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Mr. Milenkovic's analysis of Amtrak's ticket pricing and comparable transport costs is maybe the best analysis that I have read on this site.
He rightly points out, amongst other things, that most American's don't know how much it costs them to own and operate a personal vehicle, i.e. car, truck, motorcycle, etc. When I was working as an accountant and financial planner - I am retired, I told several of my colleagues, who lived in the country and drove more than 60 miles a day to and from work, how much it was costing them. They were shocked. And they were at least associate accountants. Unfortunately, they did not have an alternative mode of transport.
Today is Sunday. A week ago Friday, the Jerusalem Post had a letter from an irate reader living in one of the suburbs (that occasionally makes the newspapers) complaining she and her husband could not find a parking place to be on hand for the Mount Zion Hanukah Menorah lighting ceremony. (She pointed out that there WAS room for everybody at the Biblical Jerusalem Temple!) This past Friday the Post printed my letter saying that if access roads and parking were provide for everyone at that ceremony, there would not be any room in Jerusalem for anything else, and that most cities relied on public transportation for access to the central core. Although Jerusalem's public transportation is not (yet) the best in the world, it is better than some cities visited. Next time please try riding the bus. (And the buses from her particular suburb are usually very modern and comfortable, the same as used in intercity service, but this was not mentioned in my letter.)
All this discussion about the wonderful advantages of the personal private car assumes you have a place to put the darn thing when you get to your destination. This is not always the case and sometimes when there is a place, it can be very expensive.
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