The London Telegraph reports that flying is less expensive than taking the train in about half the routes in Britain. This shouldn’t be a surprise: trains require far more infrastructure than planes and maintaining that infrastructure is expensive.
Passenger trains in the United States have an advantage over those in Britain: the former share most of their rail infrastructure costs with freight, but rails carry very little freight in Britain. According to data from the European Union, British lorries carry more than 6.6 times as much freight as trains, while data for the United States indicate rails carry at least 120 percent as much freight as the highways.
Partly due to this advantage, but mainly due to heavy subsidies from the state and federal governments, Amtrak fares are lower than airfares for many city pairs. Still, the airlines nearly meet and sometimes beat Amtrak fares in a number of corridors. American Airlines fares between Portland and Oakland start at $79 compared with Amtrak’s $80. Delta is $112 between Baltimore and Atlanta vs. Amtrak’s $115. Jet Blue is $60 between Los Angeles and Oakland, compared with Amtrak’s $56.
A new cut-rate airline called Spirit offers truly amazing prices. As it happens, Spirit’s routes don’t compete with Amtrak in many corridors, but where they do Spirit almost always wins. From Chicago to Minneapolis, Amtrak wants $102; Spirit $54. From Chicago to Detroit Amtrak wants $32 vs. Spirit’s $31. (To get all these prices, I picked a mid-week date–October 17–far enough in the future that prices should be reasonably low.)
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Sources include the Airline Data Project for airline passenger miles and airline passenger revenues; and Amtrak monthly performance reports (I used September reports, which provide fiscal year-end totals). For early years, I used table 3-16 from the 2010 National Transportation Statistics. (For some reason this table is not included in more recent editions of that report.)
Rail has only recently become the high-cost carrier. Before Amtrak took over America’s passenger trains, rail fares were only half of airline fares. They remained below air fares through 1985, but sometime between 1985 and 1990 Amtrak fares matched average airfares. They really zoomed upward since 1995 until today Amtrak fares average twice air fares. The difference is even greater because the miles between two points by rail are almost always greater than by air.
The fares are only the beginning of the story, of course. Amtrak collected $1.85 billion in fares in fiscal 2011 but also reported $1.25 billion in losses. That’s after state operating subsidies of nearly $0.2 billion, bringing actual losses to 1.44 billion, which is an average of 22 cents per passenger mile. By comparison, federal, state, and local subsidies to airlines amount to around a penny per passenger mile. This means Amtrak’s actual costs are more than three times greater than airline costs.
Yeah, but the price isn’t all that much. Cut rate airlines those are the ones with the bare minimum of services or provisions but if speed is your paramount take the plane. If cost is your paramount and the distance isn’t that much, you’ll take the bus. And admittedly the airlines are more susceptible to swings in fuel prices.
I would rather drive if the distance is not more than about 1,000 miles.
*singing*
If you having car problems I feel bad for you son, I got 999 miles…….
I would hold Sprint Airlines up as a paragon of low-price virtue. They operate on the nickel-and-dime business model where the quoted fare is low and everything else costs extra, including using the overhead carry on bag bins. When you add up all of the extras, it’s not that good of a deal. If you want to compare amtrak with airlines, use a better baseline, like Southwest.
Oh, one of those companies. That sucks, it’s true.
And of course, the first sentence of the above paragraph should read “I would NOT hold Sprint Airlines up as a paragon of low-price virtue.”
There are costs other than money. The #7 and #8s, the Empire Builders that one would ride from Chicago to MSP, are notoriously late. There ontime performance for the current year is a huge failure of 68%. July made that unacceptable performance look great at a mere 14%. If you value certainty on getting to your destination on time, Amtrak’s cost is a lot higher.
There is also the cost of convenience, or in the case Amtrak the lack of it. The route is soaked with flights. Years ago UAL, AMR and NWA all essentially had shuttle service on the route. I’d imagine that’s changed but beside Spirit flying on that route there now is also SWA flying MDW – MSP.
Another cost to Amtrak is time. When it’s on-time, it’s an 8 hour train ride. It’s an 80 minute flight. Throw in a couple hours on each end for TSA groping and a thunderstorm delay and that still gives you an extra half day of time in the Windy City to tour the Goose Island brewery or hit the Minneapolis Institute of Art ( no admission, it’s free! ).
Anywho……………
An upcoming trip from the Bay Area to Chicago to visit a friend provides an excellent example of the train vs. plane analysis.
My buddy in Chicago said not to bother showing up before Tuesday, September 11 (WTC RIP). Not much point in working one Monday in what would otherwise be a 10-day vacation and the Emeryville-Chicago rail fare was a competitive $140 with the AAA discount, so I decided go go Amtrak and have a couple days of doing nothing. Returning on 9/18, I was able to find a MDW-SJC for a reasonable $209 on Southwest.
Neither Southwest nor Amtrak charge nickel-and-dime bag fees so I’m content to spend a little bit more than if I had taken bottom feeders like AA, UA or DL.
In other parts of the country, like Boston-New York-Washington, the fare differential favors the express bus, which is significantly cheaper but not much more time-consuming.
In other parts of the country, like Boston-New York-Washington, the fare differential favors the express bus, which is significantly cheaper but not much more time-consuming.
That depends on the origin and destination, doesn’t it?
I would rather not take Amtrak from my home in the Maryland exurbs of Washington, D.C. to visit friends in Orange County (Newburgh), N.Y.
Were I headed for someplace in Midtown Manhattan, then it is quite possible that I might drive to the New Carrollton or BWI rail stations and take Amtrak.
Point noted, which is why I wrote “Boston-New York-Washington” and not “Wherever, MD to Newburgh, NY.” Traveling between the latter, you’d most likely drive.
“Passenger trains in the United States have an advantage over those in Britain: the former share most of their rail infrastructure costs with freight, but rails carry very little freight in Britain. According to data from the European Union, British lorries carry more than 6.6 times as much freight as trains, while data for the United States indicate rails carry at least 120 percent as much freight as the highways.”
Britain is a much smaller country – about the same size as a US delivery area – so it doesn’t make any sense to ship it by lorry, move it onto rail, then move it back onto a lorry.
Wait…I thought that the reason why airfares are so low in the states is that airports are largely subsidized by federal and local taxes. If these subsidies were taken away, how much more would flights cost?
I found this report from 1998 that indicates a good chunk of change is tax-payer funded
http://airportnoiselaw.org/gao98-71.txt
See table 1 where you can see that about $1.5 billion came from state, local and federal governments. Another $4 billion came from tax-exempt bonds (ie- a subsidy from governments).
I am not against subsidizing airports. I think that a well-connected transportation system is essential, but the Antiplanner is not being fair in his comparisons between rail and air.
Had this same argument with PlanesnotTrains awhile ago–and lost.
Werdnagreb, that’s not surprising, O’Toole is a fraud.
O’Toole doesn’t complain about roads not making money.
Frank, why is highwayman still here anyway? What a pest.
Metrosucks you should also not confuse politics with economics either.
Ask The Antiplanner. It’s his party.
You also have to look at what the grants are really for, especially at the State level. California had a grant program for airports a few years ago to install charging stations for electric cars which had nothing to do with the operation of the airport or the airlines. Currently they are trying to push a few airports to subsidize cab drivers who use the airport into buying alternative fuel vehicles and hybrids. Again, a State Grant that has nothing to do with the airport or airlines, but everything to do with cabbies, but called an “airport grantâ€.
Speaking of electric car boondoggles, here on the west coast I am seeing state-provided charging stations popping up everywhere, including WA state rest areas on 1-5. The ones I saw didn’t seem to have a provision for charging for electricity.
1. Airports are public agencies. Like all public agencies, they can issue tax-exempt bonds. Any other government agency has the same authority. The difference is that those bonds are paid back from airport operating revenues, not a general fund contribution. This is a gigantic difference between Air Service and all other modes of transportaion.
2. The table is “all airport funding” which includes a significant number of non-commerical airports (they out-number commerical airports by a ratio of nearly 8:1 – There are 551 certificated airports that are authorized to support commericial service and 4,624 additioinal public use airports that cannot support commerical service). Commercial airports don’t see this money and the vast majority of it is spent to support government facilities, like a helipad or maintenance facility to support government use facilities. And unfortunately the rest… political pork…. For perspcetive, if you spread that $285 million across all 4,624 non commercial airports they could each hire one person for less than a year.
3. PFCs are ticket taxes paid directly to the airport. PFC use is limited to airport specific projects, usually terminal related.
4. Airport revenue is from airlines rents and landing fees which pays for operating expenses and debt service. Since 1998, this share of revenue has increased significantly a percentage of the revenue equation for airports. Airlines are paying more rent and higher landing fees, concessions generate more revenue and as a result airports (the top 30 in particular) have become less dependent on the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, using AATF money primarily for airfield projects.
Every mode of transportation (including rail) gets some sort of subsidy on some level (be it direct – like money for roads or Amtrak paymens or indirect – like tax free bonds), the differnce is that HSR wants all of it’s capital expenses to be paid from the general fund because it’s revenue will not generate enough profit to even cover the interest on the bonds that will be required to be issued to build it. They don’t even want to consider funding mechanisms like a PFC to pay for a stations costs or a ticket tax to cover debt service (or at least making this cost transparent to the user). It’s insane.
Airport revenue also comes from parking lots too. Though HSR is only viable in certain areas like SF to LA, though to save on construction costs, things like the center of I-5 should be used.
I shouldn’t respond, but I want to put to rest the “center of I-5” notion.
First and foremost, putting a train down the interstate median would require substantial re-engineering of overpasses and a tremendous cost. How are you going to get a train under this, highman?
Still have to build bridges. Then you cut off both sides of the freeway with tracks; police and emergency vehicles wouldn’t be able to cross the median.
Resurfacing one side sometimes entails rerouting traffic from one side to the other. With tracks down the middle, this becomes impossible or very expensive.
Please no more “center of I-5” comments.
Parking is considered a concession in terms of airport revenue sources.
Frank those are just excuses, there are already expressways in the USA that have rail lines in the center.
If you want to call a cost/benefit analysis an excuse, go for it. I-5 is different in other expressways, especially through the Grape Vine, in that it has more sharp curves and mountains, making the median idea a fool’s errand. And when you can get to SF in less than 90 minutes, WITHOUT a massive re-engineering project, who needs HSR?
Planes:
Airport bonds are not paid back by revenue. Airports purposefully indebt themselves to the maximum bonding capacity they have, and then simply pay the interest and continually roll the debt over. This is why Denver, for example, hasn’t paid off any of its construction debt, and why other airports like DFW, for example, simply go more and more into debt as their bonding capacity expands.
There is no intention of ever paying this debt off.
Wait…I thought that the reason why airfares are so low in the states is that airports are largely subsidized by federal and local taxes. If these subsidies were taken away, how much more would flights cost?
If you assume all the air passengers would have picked up the tab on the $285 million in local and state grants for non-passenger airports and tax on the bonds of about $150 million, then fares would have had to have been be about $0.69 cents higher (out of an average fare of in 1998 given the 625 million plus air passenger boardings. That said, the tax benefit on the tax-free bonds doesn’t actually go issuer (the airport), it goes to the people who hold the bonds. So the idea that this is a subsidy to the airport (or any other government agency) is a bit of a fallacy. Saying bond revenues should be taxed is like saying when you take out a loan to buy a home you should pay 35% on the principle of that loan as income in addition to your interest on the loan.
As for Europe, the air fare tax rates are actually pretty close as a percentage to the US, but the fares are significalty higher to begin due to higher airport fees, higher traffic management fees and fuel surcharges and fuel taxes which are built into the fares. A 300 mile trip in a high density market in the US has an average pre-tax one way fare of about $85. In Europe that same average one-way trip costs about $126 pre-tax.
Britain is a much smaller country – about the same size as a US delivery area – so it doesn’t make any sense to ship it by lorry, move it onto rail, then move it back onto a lorry.
All of which doesn’t change the fact that the American passenger system benefits from its reliance on the freight lines. I don’t think anyone was criticizing the UK for its deplorable lack of rail freight.
Even with trucking there can be a lot of trans loading merchandise too.
Another logistics problem is that 40 foot shipping containers are set up only to be treated like truck trailers, if containers had doors on all four sides they could also be treated like box cars too.
Rail freight works best when you can ship direct from one facility to another by loose rail cars.
Britain doesn’t do a whole lot of manufacturing and very little natural resource extraction. It is not a farm or mineral exporter. It is located on an island where anything going any distance to somewhere else in Europe is going by water.
Hence, little call for rail freight.
Much of the role of rail freight in general in Europe is taken up by water shipment on the seas that surround it, and the major rivers like the Rhine, Danube, Vistula, which conveniently serve Silesia, the Rhur, etc.