Re:U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013)
by ghaff on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @01:51PM
(#8724785)
You really have to look at the sum of Acela and Northeast Corridor but it was still a substantial increase. The speed increase certainly helped ridership; it's probably worth noting that electrifying north of New Haven (required for Acela) also made the regular regional trains faster because they no longer needed to change engines midway from Boston to New York.
What these speed increases did was they made train travel roughly equal (well, probably within an hour or so) in time to plane for popular routes-BOS to NYP and NYP to points south. And given post-9/11 security, that made the train pretty attractive especially going downtown to downtown. I'd argue though that "faster" isn't an automatic win though. It has to be competitive with air.
The introduction of Acela also created a huge amount of publicity for taking the train rather than the plane
What these speed increases did was they made train travel roughly equal (well, probably within an hour or so) in time to plane for popular routes-BOS to NYP and NYP to points south. And given post-9/11 security, that made the train pretty attractive especially going downtown to downtown. I'd argue though that "faster" isn't an automatic win though. It has to be competitive with air.
The introduction of Acela also created a huge amount of publicity for taking the train rather than the plane