Anyone hear Norman Minata talk Amtrak on National Public Radio?

[DSchmitt]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Paul Milenkovic

Don Oltmann:

I am really interested in the matter of Amtrak load factors and fuel economy because of the burgeoning debate. Various "right-wing Amtrak and rail critics" give numbers and arguments why rail doesn't measure up, but you have to run those articles "through a filter" because they have a political platform. I am trying to work off numbers from government agencies which should be at least neutral on this.

I followed jeaton's suggestion of going to the Amtrak Monthly Financial Statements, which is rough sledding because they are huge things to download and a lot of their spreadsheets are turned sideways. They place a big, big emphasis on riders (a "political" metric) and the sort of railroad operations numbers of passenger miles, load factors, train-car miles are buried someplace.

They seem to be reporting 55 percent summer load factors, about 45 percent year-round load factors -- that is great news because you can't push load factors much higher without really making Amtrak travel inconvenient and unavailable. But they were reporting an annual fuel/electric bill of 180 million dollars, and assuming they are paying a wholesale/before road tax fuel/energy price of about a dollar per gallon of gas equivalent, and dividing into their fiscal-year passenger miles, I came up with 25 passenger miles per gallon, which squares with the Oak Ridge boys (the ORNL-DOE report).

I want to keep working on getting better numbers because those numbers are key to answering Amtrak critics. How do the different types of train (long-distance, NEC, other corridor) do on fuel use, car-miles, passenger-miles load factor. The pro-Amtrak side needs hard numbers, not pro-train sentiments, and if the numbers are mixed, some favorable others unfavorable, we need to know what they are and face the facts.

You can't believe "Left wing" or "pro-Amtrak" arguments either. By the way they are not necessairly the same and "Right wing" does not necessairly mean anti-passenger rail either.

For instance Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation is a strong supporter of passenger rail local, regional, and long distance. He wants a system that works.

You are correct about how to answer Amtraks critics. However, fuel savings is not the only criteria that requires hard numbers. For instance there is a lot written about the cost to society due to highway congestion, but little about the cost to society of lost time on public transit over the time it takes drive an automobile between the real origin and destination of a trip (not between public transit stops). Environmental costs are also often overstated for the automobile and understated for trains.

We need the truth in order to make good decisions.

[daveklepper]

Possibly Amtrak should have spent a bit more money and insured that Acela trainsets and the new electric locomotives used regnerative, not dynamic, braking.

[oltmannd]

The Russ Capon NARP rebuttal

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4533118

I found it interesting that even he admits that Amtrak could be more labor and managment efficient. I guess I'm not the only one who wonders what all those employees do!

He does a nice job of debunking the "states supply the operating subsidy" myth.

Any other thoughts?