Intercity passenger trains are experiencing a “renaissance” with Amtrak ridership growing “faster than other major travel modes,” says a new report from the Brookings Institution. Unfortunately, the authors of the report are guilty of selectively using data to make their case.
“Amtrak ridership grew by 55 percent since 1997,” says the report. Why 1997? Fifteen years is a strange time period to use unless there were no data before then; but annual passenger travel data go back many decades before 1997 so that’s no excuse. As it happens, in 1997 Amtrak was nearing bottom: gas prices were low and few people felt the need to resort to government-subsidized travel. Ridership actually bottomed out in 1996 at 5.1 billion passenger miles, but grew to just 5.2 billion in 1997. This makes the growth since 1997 look especially impressive.
Another problem with Brookings data is that it is based on trips rather than passenger miles. A journey of 1,000 miles potentially accesses four times as many destinations as a journey of 500 miles, so measurements based on passenger miles are a much better indication of value than measurements based on trips.
