As noted by
afigg, February is a tough month to do year-over-year comparisons since this year's February had more days than last year's, and the extra day being a Monday to boot, meaning that corridor routes are especially tough to get a grasp on (unless they went down in ridership - see Chicago Corridors below). Theoretically, with one extra day, most routes should see ridership growth year-over-year and we can cast the evil eye on any that didn't, but I'm not sure it's that easy. YTD comparisons will also be difficult from now to the end of the fiscal year, but I will try to be as fair as I can be.
Some random observations:
Downeaster had another good bounce back month from FY15, which they attribute to warm winter weather (which is true). But keeping in mind they also had a very dismal FY15, I bet a good portion of this is just a return to somewhat normal.
LSL had pretty bad OTP, but still managed a really solid gain in ridership.
I'm still perplexed on how they come up with their "Budget" ridership and revenue figures - take the Norfolk Regional for example, they expected a gain of 2,000+ riders from last February to this year, which makes the fact that it
only gained 220 rather embarrassing. I'd love to know who concocts these figures and what they take into consideration.
Rinse and repeat for Chicago-based corridors, pretty mediocre there. Hiawatha did well, Blue Water seems to be on a good streak of gains, everything else was rather poor.
Continuing my recent tradition of looking at Long Distance
Coach ridership, I will focus mainly on routes that lost coach ridership from Feb2015 to Feb2016, with one exception:
- Silver Star - still losing coach passengers, but better this month than the last several. Coach ridership down 1,029 Feb2015 to Feb2016, or a daily average of 35-37 lower (depending on whether you average it on a 28 day or a 29 day month). At least they didn't empty an entire coach this month!
- Texas Eagle - still not good, coach ridership down 4,560 Feb2015 to Feb2016, daily average of 157-163 lower. Second consecutive triple-digit loss.
- City of New Orleans had a bad month for both coach and sleeper, flooding and bridge fire are to blame here.
- Auto Train didn't have a good month on either the coach or sleeper side, and I'm trying to remember what may have happened. I noticed OTP was pretty bad, which most likely didn't help.
- Now the notable exception - California Zephyr has been absolutely outstanding across the board.