It is with some hesitancy that I post a link to the report Long Distance Trains: A Foundation for National Mobility. I hesitate because the report is provided by the National Association of Railroad Passengers, an organization which has its critics. Actually, I was led to the report by those very critics. If, I wondered, NARP is so ineffective wouldn't it be reasonable to see for myself why it is ineffective? And so I did a little net surfing around the NARP website. The report here is of interest because its main focus is on long distance trains and long distance trains get the most criticism.
There are a few important statistics: Since 2000 our population has grown 11.6 per cent. Road travel has grown a little over half at 6.7 per cent. Air travel has grown at a much slower level, 2.2 per cent. The report argues the reason is because our roads and air routes are "plateaued," so crowded that many people now avoid them. Also, air lines tend to concentrate on our largest cities leaving mid sized cities with few flights and high fares while small places have lost their service entirely. Amtrak President Joe Boardman has pointed out intercity bus service is actualy declining because buses also are backing away from smaller places to serve only large cities which the the only places they can make a profit. So if our roads and airways cannot keep up with our need to travel, what is left?
Of course trains are left. Amtrak trains provide our long distance service and much intercity service. (The report does not deal with commuter service between cities). Intercity train ridership has grown 3 times as fast as our population and long distance ridership has grown twice as fast as population. NARP believes that either we increase Amtrak service or we increasingly limit the mobility of Americans.
The link: http://www.narprail.org/cms/images/uploads/nationalnetwork.pdf
The above statistics may be found on page 2 and footnotes 1 and 2.
One can argue facts until blue in the face. Funding of Amtrak is political and will continue as a way of sharing the wealth. North Dakota senators will not vote for Hurricane Sandy relief unless they get money for Amtrak. (Quite frankly, North Dakota gets farm money by the wheel barrows full and is now overflowing with oil money, so it may not need Amtrak money to balance things out). The newsline article that "long distance trains are at a cross roads" is just the same debate that always rages. Amtrak ridership has increased about 40% since the mid '90's because air fares have gone thru the roof (and will go higher once there is only one domestic airline).
I don't think anything will happen with Amtrak as it is one way the rural population gets some of its cash back from the feds.
North Dakota ranked 44th in per capita contribution to the federal government. as of 2007, each resident receiving $4856 more than sent to DC. Compare that to Minnesota #2, which sends $7431 more to DC than it receives, per capita.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Yes, half of farm income is welfare and they have a very good lobbying team. Would like to know how much of that welfare goes back to lobby against shippers who want to make a few bucks.
petitnjOne can argue facts until blue in the face. Funding of Amtrak is political and will continue as a way of sharing the wealth.
And we often do argue the facts until we are blue in the face. Since Amtrak is the only show in town I hope it continues. Then I read about the guy who wants to wage a "holy jihad" against Amtrak. I just hope I can ride Amtrak without being made to feel my safety is threatened.
Off topic but
FederaL support for agriculture varies highly by crop. Probably the worse case support is sugar, but people have their own pet examples such as the ethanol subsidies. Many folks in farm states wish the Feds would simply end their involvement in the industry or restrict it to crop insurance activities.
However, the total subsidies are a relatively small item. Did you know that 75% of the Department of Agriculture's budget is SNAP (formerly called food stamps), and it is expanding rapidly?
Long distance Amtrak trains are essential for cross-continent mobility for the handicapped and elderlly. A much repeated statementm and probablly will have to be repeated a thouseand times more.
That is not Amtrak's mandate. It is supposed to provide transportation for the most people, which means providing a fast service many times per day on routes serving many major metro areas. Providing land cruises for niche markets is not.
daveklepperLong distance Amtrak trains are essential for cross-continent mobility for the handicapped and elderlly.
If we need this, then let's do it...efficiently - with better coverage. Amtrak's LD trains are a very expensive and inefficient way of accomplishing this.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
oltmanndIf we need this, then let's do it...efficiently - with better coverage.
I'm not sure I'm following you here, Don. NARP has a plan for better passenger rail coverage of the nation but I don't think that is what you mean. Do you have your own map with your own lines on it?
John
John WR oltmanndIf we need this, then let's do it...efficiently - with better coverage. I'm not sure I'm following you here, Don. NARP has a plan for better passenger rail coverage of the nation but I don't think that is what you mean. Do you have your own map with your own lines on it? John
Streak,
Are you saying Don's mid range plan is too expensive to be realistic?
John WR Streak, Are you saying Don's mid range plan is too expensive to be realistic? John
Taxicabs
Buses with wheelchair elevators
Free tickets on scheduled airlines
...any of these would be a cheaper way of providing mobility to the disabled with better coverage.
The way to reduce the operating subsidy is this:
1. Minimize non-revenue space
2. Maximize seats per train
3. Maximize seats per on-board employee
4. Maximize stops at the greatest travel markets on the route at times people are awake.
This means you chop and flip the Eastern LD train into day trains and drop thier diners and sleepers. Serve the intra-FL market with intra-FL trains. Fix the food service - contract it out or re-engineer the whole thing.
Start with a clean sheet of paper, not the 1950 Official Guide.
Not to detract at all from your point: I think there are others:
Improve on-time performance to boost ridership
Consider fuel savings in new (and rebuilt) equipment and locomotive choices. (Looks like that may already be happening with that new EMD design, if the picture is more than hopeful angling... ;-} )
Add amenities (more subsidy cost in the short run) to improve both ridership and returning customers (less subsidy cost, unless additional passengers up to some point require additional subsidy per head rather than having an effective marginal cost of almost zero)
Bring back the package express idea, this time in collaboration with the railroads, FedEx Ground, the USPS, etc. (Might be at least one thing harking back to the '50 OG at that!)
I am not sure about that "maximize seats per train"; it sounds to me like a Menk/Biaggini shortening-the-seat-track-to-fit-more-in-a-car kind of "economy". The only time to 'maximize seats' is on services, like those deserving bilevels in the NEC, where existing equipment is maxed out and people are more concerned with *any* seat than getting a comfortable one.
One of the great advantages I see in train travel is that you aren't limited to a bus-class seat. I can bear miserable footroom on an airplane, or even in a car. NOT on a bus, or anything else that runs relatively slow with lots of other people's stops...
Be interesting to see at what point various kinds of labor-saving device, electronic or 'virtual' aids, and the like will reduce the need for actual crew on these trains. I have a kind of half-dread of a "Julie"-like app that has answers right on my cell phone for things that stewards and conductors now offer... or that lets me pre-order a packaged meal that comes in on a cart or a tray for me to pick up and eat by my lonesome. Nice for some Corridor-type service, perhaps not so nice elsewhere. Is there a perceived 'minimum human service' that fits budget cutting while preserving much of the essence of what has been railroad travel? If so, where would you 'peg' it for various kinds of Amtrak train?
It appears that a breakdown of the costs of LD travel needs a strong look - see.
Like many other posters I have wondered at the published fgures and have wondered whether some of the costs of short haul is present in reported LD costs. Maybe looking at the avoiadable costs can give us a better idea of what is going on.?? In no particular order these are just some of those costs.
1. Host RR charges. A whole bucket of worms and maybe is subject to confidentiality agreements maybe at least as a total per mile charge for each route.
a. Charges based on max passenger train speeds on each section of track ?.
b. Type of dispatching. CTC,, ABS, dark territory? How much effort to dispatch ex;.. BNSF's speedway vs the no traffic Raton route.?
c. Charges for loaner host locos
d. Host RR crews
e. Detour vs. Freight RR charges
2. Station cost. -- Can vary by at least ownership by local owner with no charges to AMTRAK to charges for every little glitch..
a. Owned and maintained by local government.
b. locally owned but leased by AMTRAK ----- maintenance by ?
c. Leased from host RR
d. AMTRAK owned
e, Un manned
f. AMTRAK agents either part tiime or full time. -- How costed ?
g. utilities
h. costs for each stqtion needs listing.
2. How are trains charged when the LD trains when on AMTRAK'S TRACKAGE IE; NEC
3. How are LD terminal charges allocated at locations such as BOS, NH, NYP, SUNNYSIDE, PHL,WILMINGTON, BAL, WASH, RICHMOND, JAX, MIA, NEW ORLEANS, CHI LAX, EMERYVILLE, and other locations?
4. Added passengers whenever a train fails and passengers have to transfer ?
5. Locomotive charges, electricity charges,motor charges, cleaning & maintenance, etc
6. Mileage charges for rolling stock
7. Dinning car expenses vs revenue as well as lounge cars + cost of pulling cars. A real bucket of worms because to loss of a certain number of passengers with no DC or lounge service.
8. Bsck office allocations.
9. All the other avoidable and non avoidable costs allocation ?
All this can be looked at by taking the avoidable cost from the AMTRAK LD operqting revenues. Would our posters like to know what the operating loss for LD trains would be if these avoidable costs were used to figure the operating avoidable cost loss ??
oltmannd Taxicabs Buses with wheelchair elevators Free tickets on scheduled airlines
********************
I've already said that I think it is unrealistic to see Amtrak trains as part of an entitlement for people with disabilities. Joe Boardman points out that in the last year there has been a 16 per cent increase in identifiable people with disabilities who choose Amtrak. I think, then, they would need to be persuaded to use taxicabs or buses. Free airline tickets are not now available to them.
How could you clain that providing Amtrak riders with free airline tickets would be much cheaper than providing the train itself. Airlines are gladly given fifteen to twnty billion dollars is subsidies. Who pays for air traffic control? ,TSA?, air terminal costs? You seem to parrot the same old tripe that Dubya palmed off when he wanted to zero out funding for Amtrak and you know (I hope you would) the credibility of GWB or the lack thereof.
Trolley Farmer How could you clain that providing Amtrak riders with free airline tickets would be much cheaper than providing the train itself. Airlines are gladly given fifteen to twnty billion dollars is subsidies. Who pays for air traffic control? ,TSA?, air terminal costs? You seem to parrot the same old tripe that Dubya palmed off when he wanted to zero out funding for Amtrak and you know (I hope you would) the credibility of GWB or the lack thereof.
Well, he could start by noting the amount of the airline subsidies that come out of Amtrak's budget. Amtrak's assigned subsidies being the only 'subsidy' topic that is relevant in this discussion.
It's immaterial from Amtrak's point of view whether airlines are subsidized any amount, and I am not exactly sure why you do not or will not understand that.
If all those costs are subsidized from a different branch of the government, and the result is lower ticket prices, then Amtrak along with anyone else would get the benefit of that lower price.
And this is not a political forum, so leave the 'Dubya' crap at home.
I agree with Don's points below but reach a different conclusion. I agree that you need to maximize the capacity to say the 400-500 passenger range. But to do that you need a lot of origin-destination pairs.
One of the main points of the paper linked to at the beginning of the article is that if you chop out the middle of a long distance route, you loose a substantial number of possible OD pairs. They did their analysis from actual passenger data.
If you chop the eastern trains then you end up with severed OD pairs. What if you wanted to travel Birmingham to Greensboro. If they chop was Atlanta, then you will not do the trip, well except by car if you are able. The whole point is to maximize the number of OD pairs possible without a transfer of your seat, though a daylight transfer can work, it just is valued less in a passenger's estimation.
Interestingly, a private operator, in partnership with the national rail provider in Italy, is in fact offering a reduced cost overnight train. It has couchettes and sleepers. The cheapest fare was one way for about $0.065/PSG Mile in a shared couchette, aka Megabus price range, but for a bed. It only has one food service car and the rest of the consist is revenue space. It does have a contracted out food service vendor. If you want a dinning car experience it is expensive but available as an add.
www.seat61.com/thello-train-from-paris-to-italy.htm
"oltmannd wrote the following post at Fri, Apr 5 2013 12:35 PM:
This means you chop and flip the Eastern LD train into day trains and drop thier diners and sleepers. Serve the intra-FL market with intra-FL trains. Fix the food service - contract it out or re-engineer the whole thing. "
oltmannd The way to reduce the operating subsidy is this: 1. Minimize non-revenue space 2. Maximize seats per train 3. Maximize seats per on-board employee 4. Maximize stops at the greatest travel markets on the route at times people are awake. This means you chop and flip the Eastern LD train into day trains and drop thier diners and sleepers. Serve the intra-FL market with intra-FL trains. Fix the food service - contract it out or re-engineer the whole thing. Start with a clean sheet of paper, not the 1950 Official Guide.
blue streak 1ow all we need to do is convince Congress ???????
That's right. All we have to do is to convince the Congress to give Amtrak the money. Meanwhile John Boehner won't talk to Barak Obama because although the President has agreed to reduce Social Security Benefits he hasn't agreed to reduce them enough.
OvermodAmtrak's assigned subsidies being the only 'subsidy' topic that is relevant in this discussion.
You may believe that but many who post here compare Amtrak with other kinds of transportation.
John WR It is with some hesitancy that I post a link to the report Long Distance Trains: A Foundation for National Mobility. I hesitate because the report is provided by the National Association of Railroad Passengers, an organization which has its critics. Actually, I was led to the report by those very critics. If, I wondered, NARP is so ineffective wouldn't it be reasonable to see for myself why it is ineffective? And so I did a little net surfing around the NARP website. The report here is of interest because its main focus is on long distance trains and long distance trains get the most criticism. There are a few important statistics: Since 2000 our population has grown 11.6 per cent. Road travel has grown a little over half at 6.7 per cent. Air travel has grown at a much slower level, 2.2 per cent. The report argues the reason is because our roads and air routes are "plateaued," so crowded that many people now avoid them. Also, air lines tend to concentrate on our largest cities leaving mid sized cities with few flights and high fares while small places have lost their service entirely. Amtrak President Joe Boardman has pointed out intercity bus service is actualy declining because buses also are backing away from smaller places to serve only large cities which the the only places they can make a profit. So if our roads and airways cannot keep up with our need to travel, what is left? Of course trains are left. Amtrak trains provide our long distance service and much intercity service. (The report does not deal with commuter service between cities). Intercity train ridership has grown 3 times as fast as our population and long distance ridership has grown twice as fast as population. NARP believes that either we increase Amtrak service or we increasingly limit the mobility of Americans. The link: http://www.narprail.org/cms/images/uploads/nationalnetwork.pdf The above statistics may be found on page 2 and footnotes 1 and 2.
Auto passenger miles to Amtrak passenger miles are in the ratio of roughly 1000:1. Air passenger miles to Amtrak passenger miles are in the ratio of roughly 100:1.
In rough round numbers, you are speaking to a 10-year period over which air travel has had a shortfall of 10 percent in relation to population. 10 percent of airline travel is 10 Amtraks. The Vision Report puts a price tag of 500 billion on that. That is also 50 billion per year over the course of 10 years -- roughly comparable to the Federal highway budget. Some people around here, however, are cool with "fair is fair" and spending equal amounts on highways or trains, but when we didn't have divided government in Washington, the best we could come up with was 8 billion in the one-time Stimulus bill.
Auto travel then has a 6 percent shortfall in relation to population. 6 percent of auto travel is 60 Amtraks -- what would that be, about 3 trillion? Spent over 10 years that would be 300 billion a year? What is that, roughly half the Defense budget. Some people around here would be cool with slashing Defense in half and spending it all on trains, but there are a whole lot of higher priorities on any Defense savings. Like healthcare.
Before someone starts in on me for "beating on the dead horse of the Vision Report" when it came out, everyone I knew advocating for trains was cool with it, I didn't hear one word of criticism "if we are ever to get more train money out of Congress, we have to do better than that." Not . . . one . . . word. Also, who has better numbers on what it costs to develop more train service? Do we hear such a thing out of NARP (no) URPA (maybe)?
So the idea that trains can provide a one-for-one substitution for auto and air travel by Congress coming up with 350 billion dollars per year or 3.5 trillion in a 10-year plan is pure and complete fantasy coming out of NARP.
Why does NARP continue to do this, when they are pitching a slow fat ball over the middle for the train critics to knock out of the park? Dunno, some people are not good with math? The folks at NARP want trains "just because" and they are making up reasons without seeing if the numbers add up?
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Before people start sharpening their knives about my references to the Vision Report, how about people first sharpen their pencils?
The Vision Report estimates that expanding passenger rail capacity requires "50 billion dollars per Amtrak."
The Madison, WI extension of the Hiawatha was nearly a billion dollars to provide what, a doubling of the roughly 500,000 yearly passengers times roughly 100 miles or 50 million passenger miles? This is a billion dollars for 1 percent of an Amtrak or "100 billion dollars per Amtrak."
So before you start telling me that the Vision Report is not credible at 50 billion dollars per Amtrak, we have a real-world data point of 100 billion dollars per Amtrak-worth of passenger rail capacity. So maybe making up the transportation shortfall is a 7 trillion dollar proposition if we do it with passenger rail?
With regard to Amtrak growing at 3 times population growth, so what? That is about on third of an Amtrak. The "need" is for 60-70 Amtraks or 6000-7000 percent growth in passenger rail -- just to cover the decline in growth of autos and airline travel.
But I guess I am beating a dead horse and I am influencing nobody. We start with the proposition "America Needs Trains!" (I had that banner in 2 foot-high letters, with the exclamation point adorning one of my model train layouts at the Madison Model Railroad Show), and we rally whatever reasons we can to support that. Even if the numbers don't hold up.
There are still some people who believe that we can do better in cost effectiveness of providing passenger trains and that we need to better if we are to get Amtrak off dead center. The reasoning, "Well everyone else is getting their cut of subsidy money" just isn't going to do it, even if you have a train-favorable Congress as in 2009.
By dropping diners, lounges, baggage cars, you would effectively kill the LD trains. Hey, these ammenities are what riders want. This IS the experiece that Train riders WANT. people are riding the train because they are treated BETTER that the airlines do. They don't hve to put up with the BS that flyers have to endure. Little wonder that Amtrak is enjoying the 55% increase in ridrship.
Trolley FarmerBy dropping diners, lounges, baggage cars, you would effectively kill the LD trains.
Are you sure you are not Joe Boardman writing under a pseudonym?
Amtrak's fare recovery still is way ahead of most commuter lines.
daveklepperAmtrak's fare recovery still is way ahead of most commuter lines.
Dave,
From what I read New Jersey Transit makes a profit on its North East Corridor line but all other lines loose money. However, our trains carry money out of New York. Many commuters work in New York and that is where they earn the salaries that enable them to pay the highest property taxes in the country.
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