When President Obama announced that high-speed rail would be a part of the 2009 economic stimulus program, Illinois immediately applied for federal funding for a high- (really moderate-) speed rail route from Chicago to St. Louis. According to the application (54 megabytes), the state would double track the existing line, owned mostly by Union Pacific, and run trains at up to 110 miles per hour. It would also increase the frequency of those trains from five to eight per day.
The state predicted that ridership would more than double from 521,000 trips year in 2008 to 1,210,000 trips in 2014, the first full year of operation. By 2018, the fifth full year, ridership would further increase to 1,339,000. (The application is actually inconsistent about how many riders were carried in 2008; page 33 says 521,000 while page 59 says 881,000. According to Amtrak, it was 476,000.)
So how well has that worked out? According to Amtrak’s FY 2018 performance report, ridership on the Chicago-St. Louis trains had grown to 586,200 trips in 2018. That’s 23 percent more than Amtrak’s number for 2008, but 56 percent short of the projected ridership. Continue reading
