Brookings Butchers Amtrak Data

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.

Extending the time horizon back 20 years to 1992 and using passenger miles produces quite a different picture. From 1992 to 2012, Amtrak passenger miles grew by a paltry 12 percent (compared with 32 percent between 1997 and 2012), while airline passenger miles grew by 60 percent (vs. 26 percent from 1997 to 2012). Let’s see: air travel grew 60 percent; Amtrak 12 percent. Where is your rail renaissance now?

Of course, in picking 1992 I could be selectively using data too. As it happens, until 2010, 1991 was the peak year for Amtrak, seeing 6.3 billion passenger miles, while 1992 was just shy of that with 6.1 billion. If going 15 years back makes Amtrak today look especially good, going 20 years back makes Amtrak’s growth since then look especially anemic.

In order to avoid biases, the chart above shows annual passenger miles since 1990. The problem is that Amtrak numbers are totally swamped by the airlines, which since 1996 have carried 80 to 100 times as many passenger miles as Amtrak. Amtrak would appear even more insignificant if the vertical scale were changed to show intercity driving of personal vehicles (as opposed to trucks and buses), which moves about 200 times as many passenger miles as Amtrak.

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Amtrak’s performance looks even more dismal on a per capita basis. Amtrak may have posted record ridership in 2012, but the nation’s population was also 23 percent greater than two decades before. Per capita Amtrak ridership actually peaked in 1991, and in 2012 was 13 percent less than it was then.

Since 1990, air travel grew from about 1,300 miles per capita to a peak of 2,000 miles in 2007 falling to 1,800 in 2012. Intercity highway travel grew from about 3,700 miles per capita in 1990 to a peak of 4,600 miles in 2005 and is now at 4,200. By comparison, Amtrak’s numbers are less than a blip in the data: per capita Amtrak travel peaked at 25 miles in 1991 and is now about 22 miles.

If Amtrak is a “major mode of travel,” then so is intercity bus, which carries more passenger miles each year than Amtrak. Brookings gets away with ignoring buses because there is no central clearinghouse of bus ridership data. The closest is the Chaddick Institute at DePaul University, which has taken it upon itself to be the nation’s monitor of intercity bus service.

A recent report from the institute reveals that intercity bus service is growing far faster than Amtrak. Since 2005, it has grown by 60 percent, while Amtrak has grown by just 26 percent. Unfortunately, the Chaddick Institute doesn’t get the headlines that Brookings does.

Chaddick doesn’t have the data to count passenger miles or even seat miles but merely the number of bus operations per year. One bus trip from, say, Chicago to Detroit would be a single “operation” whether or not the bus stopped in intermediate communities.

If new operations have the same number of seats as old and fill the same percentage of those seats, then bus ridership is growing more than twice as fast as Amtrak. Bus operators aim to fill about two-thirds of seats and quickly adjust or shut down service if they don’t meet that target, but the number of bus seats per operation may be growing considering that fast-growing Megabus uses 81-seat double-decker buses instead of 55-seat single-deckers. I estimate that passenger miles on scheduled intercity buses are about three times those on Amtrak, meaning buses are at least as “major” a transport mode as trains.

Tomorrow I’ll look at Brookings’ financial analysis of Amtrak.