Re:U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013)
by rayiner on Sunday December 07, 2014 @04:46PM
(#8713693)
I think Amtrak's fans are as big of a problem as its detractors. The romanticism of idyllic long haul routes where nobody is in a hurry is not what Amtrak needs as an organization. The real demand is shuttling people along the northeast corridor, and those travelers don't want idyllic. They want on-time. The money saved by shutting down the long haul routes could go a long way toward the maintenance and repair issues that hold back on-time performance in the northeast corridor.
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... or fund a Chicago-MKE-Madison-MSP route, which would actually make sense, unlike Wichita-ABQ and Omaha-Denver.
The money saved by shutting down the long haul routes could go a long way toward the maintenance and repair issues that hold back on-time performance in the northeast corridor.
Amtrak agrees and they've been trying to shut down a lot of those routes for some time now. The problem is that Congress won't allow them to.
Re:U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013)
by jeffasinger on Sunday December 07, 2014 @06:20PM
(#8714019)
I think Amtrak could see the most success by building out to support the cash cow that is the Northeast corridor. That would mean improving service on the Northeast corridor, to improve speeds for Acela, and adding additional higher speed service to connecting cities.
Two good targets for this would be Upstate NY, where you could reduce travel time to Buffalo from 8 hours to 5 hours, and make travel to Chicago and Toronto much less painful. Improving the Philadelphia -- Pittsburgh route would also make a lot of sense too.
Philly to Pittsburgh is longer than DC to NYC, or most of the ridership of the Acela put together, wouldn't serve all that many people, and would be at least a 4.5 hour trip even with the unlikely assumption that you'd get Acela's average speed for the whole trip.
I'm also not sure what building out NE service does to make Chicago more accessible. Chicago is prohibitively far from all of the east coast cities to make NE rail meaningful.
Re:U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013)
by jeffasinger on Sunday December 07, 2014 @07:18PM
(#8714255)
I think you may have misread, improving service along the NYC-Buffalo route, which is part of the route to Chicago, would speed up the trip to Chicago. Shaving off 3 hours, means that someone could get on a train in New York at 6PM, and arrive in Chicago at 9AM, which while for most people isn't competitive with flying, it is a reasonable and comfortable way to make the trip.
No, I understood the subtext; I just don't think a 10+ figure capital expenditure that leaves us with a best-case 15 hour trip from NYC to Chicago is a good use of funds. The person who suggested a high-speed post-security rail route from Penn Station to LaGuardia and JFK had a better idea. The person who called Amtrak SF-LA 12 hour service a "tourist attraction" had the right idea, too: under any imaginable scenario, that's what NYC-Chicago rail would be.
Would that it were otherwise! I live in Chicago and have lots of friends and business associates in NYC. :|
Re:U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013)
by waterlesscloud on Sunday December 07, 2014 @05:38PM
(#8713876)
Or you shut down the long haul routes and what support Amtrak has vanishes.
Similar to what tptacek said below, why should a taxpayer in Arizona support a DC-NYC shuttle?
They shouldn't. The DC-NY route generates an operational surplus, and the states along the route should shoulder the capital costs by issuing bonds, they way they do for any other infrastructure project.
Re:U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013)
by waterlesscloud on Sunday December 07, 2014 @07:02PM
(#8714195)
So all the federal dollars should come out of supporting it? I guess then we'd learn what the subsidies really are.
The northeast corridor has a major capital expenditure backlog due to years of poor financing, about $21 billion. On an ongoing basis, the required capex is probably about a billion a year, about half of which can be paid by operational surpluses. The rest should be borne by a group of states, the same way NY/NJ/CT maintain the commuter and airport infrastructure in those states.