If Amtrak carried 4 times the current 30 million peasengers a year and lost 4 times the current losses (say 6-8 billion per year) how would we feel as the American people, as taxpayers etc. There would be no tri-weekly trains, most routes would have two or more trains each way, corridors would have 6-9 trains each way and there would be more corridors, most of the pre 1979 routes would be back plus a few more giving us a system similar to the ilnterstate highway system.
What are your thoughts?
Who says carrying four times the current passenger load would amount to four times the loss? That’s ridiculous thinking. Carrying more people actually could reduce the losses, maybe even make a profit. This is a very niave assumption of non facts but either of fear or lack of knowledge of how economics, business, and services work to say the least.
Henry,
You have no more evidence to support your supposition than the original poster has for his. No need to be so cranky.
Mac
The Vision Report proposes a plan where carrying 10 times the current passenger-mile volume will require 10 times the current level of government funding.
That figure is correlated with the level of expenditure in Europe in relation to their rail passenger usage.
The number of passengers is not the optimum way to look at the issue. A better way is to look at the passenger miles sold vs the available seat miles.
In FY11 Amtrak had 12,530,314,000 seat miles for sale, of which it sold 6,532,250,000 passenger miles for an average load factor of 52.1 per cent. If it had sold 65 per cent of its average capacity, it would have 8,165,312,000 passenger miles. If it had sold 80 per cent of its capacity, which would rival the average load factor for the nation’s airlines, it would have had 10,024,251,000 passenger miles.
The average trip in FY11 was 216.4 miles. If the same ratios held up for the aforementioned expanded capacities, it could carry 37.7 million riders at an average load factor of 65 per cent capacity and 46.3 million riders at an average load factor of 80 per cent of capacity.
On average Amtrak has the scalability to increase its load factors without have to make a significant increase in its capacity. It probably could do so with a relatively low marginal increase in costs. Beyond 80 per cent of existing capacity would require a heavy investment in incremental capacity, which would not be a good idea until Amtrak could demonstrate higher utilization of its existing capacity.
Is there a market (aggregate demand) for an expanded intercity passenger rail market? I doubt it, at least for now, although there could be in the future as congestion, pollution, convenience, improved transit, etc. make passenger rail a more desirable choice. Even the highly praised Acela trains had an average load factor of just a bit over 62 per cent during FY11.
In addition to a lack of demand to fill its trains, Amtrak would have a major challenge on its hands if it tried to expand its operations over its partner railroads. Witness the failed attempt to get the UP to hoist the Texas Eagle on a daily basis between San Antonio and Los Angeles.
Since you ask, Dixie:
I do agree with Henry. Railroads are a classic example of a decreasing cost industry. Generally, the more people who ride trains the lower the expenses per rider.
But supposing your assumptions are true and we could have Amtrak 4 times as big as it is with 4 times the subsidy. The costs I am concerned about are the costs of our dependency on automobiles. Some of these costs are easily quantifiable. Some–such as air pollution–have broad implications for our future. And there are the costs of the conflicts in the middle east over petroleum products. And these conflicts have costs in people who are disabled by them and people who loose their lives because of them. I would be willing to fund not only Amtrak but other things that could reduce or eliminate our wars.
Comparing the percentage of seat miles sold is not a fair measure of rail vs air. Most air travel is from point a to point b. That makes it much easier to size the aircraft and thus the number of seats to the route. A train travels a long route with intermediate stops all along the way. The train must have enough seats for the highest volume portion of the route. They cannot then shed seats for the remainder of the trip. They must therefore bear the burden of unneeded seats for part of the trip.
WELL EXCUSSSSSSE MMEEEE! I was not being cranky until you brought it up…go…to…
The measure is about asset turnover, which is a measure of productivity. Fairness has nothing to do with it.
The Pennsylvanian, as an example, on its run from Pittsburgh to New York, makes 16 stops including the end points. A typical Southwest Airlines bird may go from Dallas to Houston, Harlingen, back to Dallas, Lubbock, Albuquerque, Denver, San Jose, LA, and Phoenix, where it ties up for the night. And it does it all in one day. Same concept as the train, except the airplane is more efficient than the train.
Using sophisticated mathematical models, Southwest deploys enough seats for its high volume periods. No one, as far as I know, takes out seats if the airplane or the train or the bus does not sell out. It is all about anticipated load factors, which are predicated on seat mile yield, which in turn determine the type of airplane to be deployed as well as the frequency of the flights.
The problem for a railway train is unit productivity. It simply cannot match the productivity of an airplane except over relatively short distances with high volumes.
The Vision Report proposes spending half a trillion dollars over a 50 year period to increase the passenger miles of Amtrak 10-fold, from .1 percent of total passenger miles to a full 1 percent of passenger miles.
The Vision Report also claims a reduction by 50 percent in the fuel use per passenger mile of trains substituting for cars.
US oil usage is about 20 million barrels per day out of a world consumption of about 85 million barrels per day. About 40 percent of each barrel of oil is turned into gasoline for cars – I have seen one source claiming as high as 47 percent. There are 42 gallons in a barrel. Hence, 144 billion gallons of gasoline per year, mostly for auto transportation but there is also commercial and ag usage.
Auto (or auto and light truck) passenger miles run about 4 trillion per year. This comes out to about 28 passenger miles per gallon – the vehicle gas mileage is somewhat lower but the passengers per trip is somewhat bigger than one. Assuming 120,000 BTUs per gallon of gas, th
I’d say, money well spent, vs. the value we get from most of our $1.5-trillion budget. But, then, my wife and I are just off another superlative Amtrak trip!
Paul,
Certainly the rest of the world uses a lot of petroleum products. However, I think we fight wars because of our own dependency on petroleum. No American soldier was killed or injured by an IED to help China industrialize; many were injured because the US wants that oil.
I found two “Vision Reports” on Amtrak’s website. Both have to do with Northeast Corridor Service which uses electric trains mostly.
Certainly electric cars also promise to reduce our dependency on petroleum products. I think we both agree that in years to come they will be increasingly successful. I have lived on the East Coast most of my life and I have seen several reports that say we could generate about once quarter of the electricity we need with wind turbines off our coast.
No doubt automobile technology will continue to improve and rail technology will continue to improve. As far as planes go, it takes far, far more energy to lift human bodies hundreds or thousands of feet above the earth and move them than it does to move them along the earth’s surface. Train travel also offers hope of reducing plane travel and dependency on oil.
Our recent wars have been in a part of the world we for many years have exploited for oil. If there is any true meaning to sunk costs those words refer to the costs of war both in dollars and in men and women left with serious injuries and in lives lost. I just don’t see increasing numbers of automobiles as a solution to this problem.
John
Oil is a necessity, for now and into the foreseeable future … a fact of life. Howl against it as you will, changes nothing. The obscenity is the extent to which we must fight foreign wars for supply we could produce for ourselves at home, if it weren’t for the nut cases, in-office and otherwise.
It is cheaper to just leave the consist alone than change it out to tailer the supply at the point of greatest demand. I really don’t know what total occupancy over the route tells you. The percentage of occupancy at the highest demand point tells you if you could expand.
I don’t know if the vision report was really meant to answer the question of incremental cost. My understanding would be about $0.05/pm for a subisdy, everything included.
The United States federal government has not adopted a budget during the current administration. According to the U.S. Financial Statements for FY11, the federal government spent approximately $3.7 trillion on a variety of government activities. The President’s 2012 budget proposed spending $3.8 trillion; however, it was not adopted by the Congress.
The average load factor gives one an idea of how well the assets are being utilized. Clearly, there could be points along the route or times during the year when the capacity is maxed out. But an average load factor of 52.1 per cent suggests that there are route segments or times of the year when there are opportunities to increase the load without increasing capacity.
Amtrak is offering significantly discounted fares from Sacramento to Bakersfield. It is probably doing so because the average load factor on the San Joaquin’s was only 40.8 per cent in FY11. Since the fare applies from end point to end point, it tells me that the train’s capacity is being under utilized all along the route.
I agree, Fred, that our current culture depends on oil and this is despite our wars. But it does not follow that I must live in a way that I must mindlessly contribute to that dependency.
Edmund Burke observed "No man made a bigger mistake than the one who did nothing because he could only do a little. Certainly riding a train rather than a car or a plane by one person is only a little. But I prefer to do that little.
John
Wind power can be a significant part of electric generation in the United States as well as other areas of the world. It is an important component of the generation mix for Texas.
There is, however, one important point to keep in mind. For every megawatt of installed wind generation, one needs a megawatt of fossil, nuclear, or hydro generation for those times when the wind stops blowing. Or people would have to agree to do without power in the case of a wind failure. People might agree to do so in theory, but if they have to turn off the TV and shut down their computers because the power is down, they are not likely to be happy.
The wind can stop blowing. In February 2010 the wind suddenly stopped blowing in west Texas. It happened so fast that it nearly brought the grid down. It was a mad scramble to bring the fossil units on line to make up the deficiency in generation.
US oil production last year rose to its highest level in almost a decade, thanks to an increase in the use of “unconventional” extraction techniques .
As a result, analysts believe the US was the largest contributor to the increase in global oil supplies last year over 2009, and is on track to increase domestic production by 25 per cent by the second half of the decade.
Please disregard.