You can say, do, prove and disprove anything you want with any given statistic. You have to know the topic, the statistic, the derivation of the statistic, what the statistic represents, what it refers to, how it was derived, and what you want to say or not say.
I’ve got $100 at the end of the day. I made $100. I made a100% profit. I doubled my money. My profit margin is 30%. My mark up is 20%. I discounted my price 20%. Really, what does any of this mean if you don’t know the whole story of the business or what I am talking about. Did I or didn’t I make a $100 profit? Any one of those statistical sketches could prove or disprove what the $100 represents and how it relates to the other sketches. Statistics don’t lie…users of statistics do.
I’m glad to hear this. I know I’ve been reading that ridership is up and Congress needs to keepAmtrak running. A lot of people depend on the train in some rural areas, some people do not like to fly, the cost of gasoline is getting out of sight and some of us just love riding trains.
I don’t agree with the notion that the indicated load factors are evidence that “people won’t ride Amtrak” or “won’t ride Amtrak in enough numbers to cover expenses.”
Airlines have much higher load factors at the expense of providing a much lower grade of service. see
Maybe railroad load factors are so low because people will not put up with the kind of inconvenience that airline travel presents in order to ride a much slower mode. But rail load factors are not evidence of people not being willing to ride, rather, there is an economic tradeoff between load factor and inconvenience, and Amtrak is operating on a different part of the curve.
This comparsion of load factor argument needs some thought. As someone who has flown for years it comes down to this: Any trip that has intermediate stops looses load factor. I once flew a seven stop trip that had an average load factor in the low 40s % to high 30s%. why was it kept you may ask? 2 non adjaecent legs were full constantly. Only at holiday periods were the other legs near full. Airlines in the late 1950s - 1970s had many trips that could not fly long legs so the airlines had load factors in the 40% to 60 % depepnding on the season.
With the advent of aircraft that can fly the US coast to coast non stop and with hub and spoke operations routes can be designed to bring load factors up much higher and the ability to offer lower fares . Now our very limited RR route structure does not yet permit that kind of load planning.
I rode the TGV from Paris - Lyon - french coast 2 stop. Sold out to both legs. Came back on a 5 or 6 stop with only 1 leg sold out. Same as the US
If some people live in areas without air service, if some people are fearful of or just don’t like flying, or some “just love riding trains” then the fares on those LD train routes need to be raised to come much closer to covering their high operating expenses. If it weren’t for the LD trains, Amtrak would come fairly close to breaking even in terms of covering its operating expenses, to say nothing of being able to invest capital more wisely into the needed new equipment for the shorter haul corridors rather than wasting it on new LD coaches and sleepers, etc.
We should subsidize people who “just don’t like to”? I just don’t like having to do my own grocery shopping. Will the gov’t please provide an affordable shopping service for me?
In Fy10 The Downeaster had an average load factor of 32.7%. Undoubtedly, it was probably sold out on a few occasions. More often than not, however, it ran with light loads. In any case, the load factor was not sufficient to cover its costs. In FY10 it lost $1.9 million before depreciation and interest.
Have been in touch with the NNERPA and they state that many (unfortunately no % but were on 4 coach 1 lounge bussiness class car train capacity approximately 300) trains were sold out thie summer. Aug 2011 ridership up 7% over 2010.
The load factors do not support the contention that Amtrak’s routes are constrained by equipment shortages. Clearly, on select dates, especially holidays, some trains may be sold out. But it does not happen very often.
Amtrak has just released its PRIIA performance improvement plan for silver service. It is on their web site under reports. Amtrak stated that they were able to add an additional coach to each Silver Meteor train set (changed each set from 4 coaches to 5 coaches) (4 sets + 1 spare) with some difficulty by temporilarily reducing cars out of service. The additional cars operated June 10 - Sep 6 enabled the Metoer to carry 6457 more passengers than same period last year despite the hurricane cancellations this year.
Amtrak’s accountants probably have the numbers to show the incremental costs of adding an additional car to a train. I too wish that they would publish them, but they are not likely to do so because most people would not understand how they get the numbers.
The above cited PRIIA report stated that for the Meteor additional revenue was $900,000 and net benefit was $700,000 giving ~ $200,000 additional cost. The time period is about 90 days with a 180 train days so about $5000/ day additional operating costs???. Meteor route is 1389