The airlines carried 11.7 percent more passengers in January 2025, while Amtrak carried 7.8 percent more passenger-miles, than in the same month in 2019. The air travel data are based on passenger counts from the Transportation Security Administration, while the Amtrak data are based on its monthly performance report.
The big question is where are the highway data? The Federal Highway Administration usually releases traffic volume trends about 45 days after the end of any given month. In other words, December data should have been out in the middle of February, but here we are in March and it hasn’t yet been posted. Did Elon Musk fire the people in the Federal Highway Administration who keep track of this data? If so, it would be hypocritical for me to complain as I believe the federal government is too big, but I still hope the data appear soon.
As I’ve noted before, Amtrak data are in passenger-miles while airline data are in passenger counts because the Bureau of Transportation Statistics doesn’t release passenger-mile data until about three months have passed. The latest are from November 2024 and say that domestic air passenger-miles were about 5.8 percent more than in the same month of 2019 (compared with Amtrak’s 6.2 percent more).
January transit data should be available soon if Musk hasn’t fired the people responsible for those data yet.
The entire FTA should be fired. For half a century, they have shown that they can’t distinguish a good expenditure from a bad one.