Amtrak’s inspector general issued a report last week that reveals an utter cluelessness about Amtrak and how it works. The report argues that late trains are costing Amtrak revenues and that, instead of trying to run the trains on time, Amtrak should spend some of its precious resources building a computer model to estimate how many riders it loses for each late train.
The report, titled Better Estimates Needed of the Financial Impacts of Poor On-Time Performance, devotes many of its pages to building such a model itself and concludes that improving on-time performance by 5 percent could increase revenues by $12 million. Since Amtrak’s 2018 operating losses are $171 million, says the report, such an improvement could significantly reduce those losses. Continue reading
