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Amtrak Carried 86% of Pre-Pandemic PM in May

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak carried 492 million passenger-miles in May 2023, which was just 86.4 percent of the 569 million passenger-miles it carried in the same month of 2019, according to Amtrak’s latest monthly performance report. Considering that Amtrak’s April passenger-miles were nearly 91 percent as many in 2023 as 2019, this is a disappointing result. Since Amtrak ridership usually usually picks up in May due to increased vacationers, this suggests that Americans aren’t enthusiastic about riding trains for discretionary travel in a post-COVID world.

For detailed comments on transit and highways, see my July 12 post.

All three types of Amtrak trains underperformed in May, with Northeast Corridor trains carrying less than 88 percent of pre-pandemic riders, long-distance trains carrying 85 percent, and state-supported day trains carrying less than 81 percent. It is worth noting that Amtrak is putting most of the money it received for expansion in the infrastructure bill into state-supported trains even though they are the worst-performing part of its network. Amtrak’s reasoning is that Congress gave it money for capital improvements but not operating costs, so it will need to persuade the states to pay for operating costs of any new routes or increased frequencies. Continue reading →

Amtrak Carried 91% of Pre-Pandemic PM in April

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 90.9 percent as many passenger-miles in April 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to the company’s monthly performance report posted yesterday. This was only the second time Amtrak exceeded 90 percent since the pandemic began.

April ridership was strongest in the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak carried 93.9 percent as many riders as in the same month of 2019. Long-distance trains were next at 88.9 percent. State-supported trains were weakest at 84.5 percent. Continue reading →

Amtrak Carries 87% of Pre-Pandemic Pass-Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak carried 87.0 percent as many passenger-miles in January 2023 as in January 2019, according to the state-owned company’s monthly performance report released earlier this week. That’s up from December’s 80 percent but down from November’s 91 percent.

Amtrak ridership seems to be bouncing around between 80 and 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Amtrak’s January ticket revenues were only 83 percent of January 2019, but its basic operating expenses were 122 percent of 2019’s. As a result, its net losses were 52 percent greater in January 2023 than the same month in 2019. Continue reading →

Amtrak November PM 91% of November 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak carried 90.8 percent as many passenger-miles in November 2022 as it did in November 2019, according to the monthly performance report released by the company last week. This is the first time since the pandemic that it has exceeded 90 percent of pre-pandemic numbers.

Amtrak remains behind air travel, which first breached 90 percent in April 2021. Yet it appears that Amtrak, unlike transit, will eventually come pretty close to 100 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

Amtrak Reaches 87% of 2019 Passenger-Miles

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Amtrak carried almost 87 percent as many passenger-miles in October 2022 as it did in October 2019, according to the monthly performance report released by the state-owned company yesterday. This is a significant increase from the 80.5 percent recorded in September.

This is an update of a chart posted last week. I’ll provide another update when October driving data are available.

This is still short of the 94.5 percent carried by domestic and international airlines. Domestic air travel alone is even higher, but unfortunately those data are somewhat behind — the latest is for September, when domestic air travel was several percent higher than the average of domestic and international travel. Continue reading →

Slow & Boring vs. Fast & Wasteful

By | | Transportation
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Matthew Yglesias thinks that Amtrak’s latest “vision” is “slow and boring” and that Amtrak instead should spend money on high-speed trains in the Boston-Washington corridor. But Yglesias’ vision is no better; it might be faster, but it also means faster spending of money on worthless projects.

Amtrak’s 2021 “vision” for expanding its rail service. Click image for a larger view.

The first thing to note is that Amtrak’s latest plan is not so much a vision as it is a smorgasbord of pork barrel. Amtrak told the states, “We have this free federal money to spend; if you want some of it, draw some lines on a map where there are rail lines and maybe we’ll spend it there.” What Yglesias calls a vision is a taxpayers’ nightmare of idiotic rail projects. Continue reading →

Is Amtrak Looking for More Ways to Lie?

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak still hasn’t published its August performance report. But I noticed a paragraph on its “Reports and Documents” page under “Monthly Performance Reports.”

“Going forward,” the page says, “Amtrak will report Adjusted Operating Earnings as the key financial measure to evaluate results, Net Income/(Loss) will continue to be reported for reference. Adjusted Operating earnings represents Amtrak’s cash funding needs and is a reasonable proxy for Federal Operating Support needed in line with the appropriation.”

This isn’t really new; according to archive.org, it has been there since 2018 but wasn’t on the Reports and Documents page in 2017. What the statement means is that, instead of following generally accepted accounting principles, Amtrak will claim its net income is equal to the amount of operating subsidies it needs from the federal government, not including capital subsidies or state subsidies. Continue reading →

Amtrak Carried 84% of Pre-Pandemic PMs

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 83.6 percent as many passenger-miles in June 2022 as it did in June 2019, according to the monthly performance report it posted yesterday. That’s an increase from 78.5 percent in May.

See yesterday’s Antiplanner for sources of transit and airline data.

Relative to its pre-pandemic numbers, Amtrak passenger-miles have been rising at about 5.5 percent per month. In terms of actual passenger-miles, they have been rising at 20 percent per month. However, much of Amtrak ridership is seasonal and it is normal for June ridership to be much higher than February’s. In 2019, for example, June’s passenger-miles were 125 percent greater than February’s compared with only 107 percent in 2022. Continue reading →

Brightline Demands $45 Million to Improve Safety

By | | Transportation
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Brightline celebrated its third year of operating passenger trains in south Florida this month by killing two people in two days and then a third person a few days later. This makes a total of 63 deaths due to Brightline, which has been rated the most dangerous railroad in the country.

Of course, as shown in the above video, Brightline blames all of the fatalities on the victims. The deaths have nothing to do with Brightline adding fast, frequent passenger trains to a corridor that previously was used only by slow, infrequent freight trains. Continue reading →

How Much Does Amtrak Delay Freight Trains?

By | | Transportation
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At a time when almost everyone in the nation is affected by supply-chain problems but almost no one is riding Amtrak, the Federal Railroad Administration is frantic about how Amtrak trains are being delayed by freight trains. According to the agency’s latest report, Amtrak trains were delayed by a total of 1.3 million minutes (that’s 21,666 hours) in the first quarter of 2022, up 9 percent from the previous quarter.

Who is delaying whom? Photo by Patrick Dirden.

“The largest cause of delays was freight train interference at 299,252 minutes of delay — 22 percent of total delay minutes, an increase of 12 percent from the previous quarter,” says the report. However, the report makes no attempt to estimate the number of minutes of delays to freight trains caused by Amtrak. Passenger train delays, continues the report, caused a minuscule 2 percent of Amtrak riders — about 18,290 — who were connecting with a different train to miss their connections. Continue reading →