L
Lawdude
Guest
1. With respect to people who don't like to fly, people who are afraid to do it but do it anyway don't count. The only "afraid to fly" market that counts is the market of people who are so insane about the (minimal) dangers of flying that they will never hold their nose and board an airplane (or at least will never do so domestically), even if it means taking a far less convenient mode of transportation. And THAT market is tiny. Taking a poll and saying x percent are afraid to fly is meaningless-- many of those people fly, whatever they might say. (And that's before we get to where they are located and whether they will pay enough money to make a profit for Amtrak.)This is actually a minimum of 6.5% of the US population last I checked and is a very large market. Estimates of people who are *uncomfortable* with flying, and so will preferentially choose driving if they can get away with it are up to 20%.]And then there are a handful of people who are afraid to fly,
Add in the people who should not fly for medical reasons (which seems to be another 5% of the population, roughly), and you have an extremely large market.
It's a MUCH larger market than you think it is.
Most of them -- even the ones going to New York City -- are currently driving. Many will pay slightly more than the driving cost to have a more comfortable trip on a train.
Common misconception. Actually, on the majority of routes, Amtrak's fares cover the variable costs of operation, same as your private car, or Greyhound, or the airlines. The fixed costs are subsidized, just as the airlines get subsidized airports, while cars and buses get subsidized roads.With respect to cost, Amtrak's fares are already subsidized by the government.
Where the roads are less subsidized, Amtrak is more popular. This is true in North Dakota along the route without an Interstate, and it's true in the New York-Chicago nexus where the expressways are toll roads and parking is pricey.
No, they wouldn't need to -- not where it matters.Whatever the future of those subsidies, I don't think anyone sees a scenario in the near future where they get bigger. And they'd need to get much bigger to compete with driving.
Between New York and Chicago, Amtrak in coach is already routinely cheaper than driving, and Amtrak could raise prices and still be cheaper than driving. Three points:
(1) Very high parking costs in NY. Also in Chicago. (And Philadelphia. Etc.)
(2) Tolls.
(3) People *from* New York City -- including those in fairly high social classes -- often don't have cars at all and would have to rent them.
I found an estimate of the direct cost of driving from NYC to Chicago a few years ago: gas & tolls. Estimate was $167. Coach on the LSL is cheaper than that. If you don't want to drive 12+ hours straight, add in a $50 hotel room (if you can stand to sleep in Pittsburgh) to get $217.
Sleeper on the LSL from NY to Chicago is currently significantly more expensive than this, but people have proven that they're willing to pay for it. I think this is because if your alternative involves staying overnight in a hotel room, *it's actually faster* than driving.
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I mentioned that in NYC a lot of people will tolerate longer commutes than you would expect -- the "commuter belt" is larger than it would be in other cities.
Similarly, certain types of cities "punch above their weight" in terms of how much intercity passenger train usage they will generate. In these cities, the "corridor belt", the time range where people will seriously consider taking a train rather than driving or flying, extends out more hours, and starts to extend to overnight trips, and indeed overnight + a day trips. (Theoretically it could extend even farther, but there are no examples in the US.)
These "punch above their weight" cities are cities with:
- large percentages of people with no cars
- lots of colleges (college students are less likely to have cars with them)
- expensive parking
- substantial road tolls
- few expressways
- substantial road congestion
These are the "versus driving" factors. The reason why there are no good routes which are double-overnight is that by the time you've gone that far away from New York, you're west of Chicago and there are no tolls, no road congestion, free parking, etc.
These "punch above their weight" cities are also cities with:
- airports way outside of town (New York, Chicago O'Hare, DC Dulles, Denver, San Francisco), train station in town
- really congested airports (New York)
- really slow airports (Denver, which can take a full hour to walk from the ticket counter to the gate)
These are the "versus flying" factors.
And these "punch above their weight" cities are cities with:
- substantial urban/local rail systems
This is the final factor and I'd call it the "train habit", but it also might reflect how easy it is to get around without a car when you arrive.
The extreme case for pretty much all of these factors is New York City, and I think it's completely unsurprising that sleeping car services out of New York City, as a whole, do better financially than sleeping car services not out of New York City.
For some reason, whenever anyone talks about sleepers or "long-distance" trains, everyone immediately thinks of those 5 "problem trains" in the West. The train which touches neither New York nor Chicago nor DC -- the Sunset Limited -- seems to have the lowest price per mile for sleeping cars.
When people talk about sleepers or "long-distance" trains, I want people to think New York City routes. I believe there is a real growth market for sleeper service, but I believe it's in the east, on routes out of New York City, and to a lesser extent out of Chicago/Boston/Philadelphia/DC.
2. You have nothing other than assertion to back up that anyone driving will pay a "slightly" higher cost to take trains. But even if you were right, that's irrelevant, because unless you want Amtrak to operate at a huge loss, the price of a train is not "slightly" higher than driving. It's far higher. Go back to my numbers-- it costs $24 per person for two people to drive roundtrip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. What will a reasonable train fare be? $150 or so per person? $200 per person? That's not slightly higher. There's no way you can make Amtrak fares anywhere near slightly higher than driving. Driving is always going to be far, far cheaper.
3. There's a miasma of data that railfans point to when talking about subsidies, but Amtrak's service is subsidized over all but a couple of routes. And fixed costs are still costs. And it doesn't matter whether other forms of transportation are subsidized, when the issue being discussed is "are Amtrak fares subsidized". They are. I know that there are direct and indirect subsidies to other forms of transportation. It is still dishonest to say that Amtrak fares are not subsidized.
And the big subsidies are for sleeper and diner services, which are priced far, far below costs. Which is why the 2 day Western long distance trains have by far the biggest per passenger subsidies.
Now, as it happens I think it's fine to subsidize lower class travelers up the wazoo, as well as means of transportation that carry huge numbers of people, so I see no problem with subsidizing either coach tickets on the long distance routes or just about anyone on the corridors. But the subsidies right now aren't getting any bigger in the short term, which was my point. So you can't posit things that will cost huge amounts in additional subsidies to do. Anything Amtrak does right now in the form of additional service has to make money, period. That means fares have to be high enough to cover costs.
4. New York to Chicago, eh? At 30 to the gallon, we are talking about approximately 27 gallons of gas. At $3 (it's actually more like $2.50 right now), with 1 driver and 1 passenger, we are talking about $81. Add $50 in tolls and you get $131, and divide it by the two passengers and we are talking $65.50 per person. Add a room halfway if you want (although it's easy enough for many people to make the trip in one driving day) and maybe we are up to $100 per person. And the food's much cheaper than it is on the LSL.
But it's worse than that. Because you are figuring parking charges and such which skews the comparison. One of the CONVENIENCES of driving is having your car at your destination. If you are going to count parking charges, you have to count BOTH parking charges AND rental car charges if you are taking the train.
You aren't competing with driving. People drive because it's cheap and because they want a car. If they don't want a car at their destination and they can afford not to drive, then they might take the train. But they might take the bus or plane too. THOSE are Amtrak's competitors.
5. People are willing to pay for the sleeper on the LSL AT CURRENT FARES. However, that sleeper is seriously underpriced. It includes free meals in the diner, which lose Amtrak all sorts of money. And sleepers cost a ton more in terms of labor (including all those sleeping car attendants), maintenance (amortized over fewer passengers, but also the car is more complicated to maintain), etc. Now, if you stopped giving free food to sleeping car passengers (which Amtrak should have done 30 years ago) and charge what it actually costs to run the sleeper, there's no way it's going to be anything close to competitive with driving. It already isn't right now, even though it's getting a huge subsidy.
At any rate, even if you don't accept that sleepers are underpriced, they are still, even in their current pricing, seriously uncompetitive with driving or intercity bus service. They do stand a slight chance when compared to business travel airfares, but that requires that the sleeper be completely reliable and get in on time, every day, and it also requires a trip that takes a few hours less than the LSL does so a business traveler can leave at night and get in the next morning.
6. It's complete fantasyland to think that just because people ride subways in New York and don't have cars, large numbers would be willing to spend 18 or 24 or 36 or 48 hours on a train as opposed to flying somewhere. I don't know why anyone would believe such a thing, but suffice to say that the New York Central and Pennsylvania RR's overnight passenger services went just as belly-up as the Santa Fe's and Southern Pacific's did when this theory was tested out.
I don't think it's a fantasyland that mass-transit dependent cities are better for Amtrak, but that's basically exclusively due to the corridors. It definitely makes Acela a lot more valuable, for instance, that it goes right into the city center in Boston, New York, and Washington and connects directly to subways and buses and taxis. However, if you are in the tiny minority that wants to spend 2 days on a train, it really doesn't matter that much that once you get off that train (several hours late), you can make a quick connection to the CTA at Chicago Union STation.
7. In terms of sleeper service in New York city, sure, if you can get a train to leave at 9 pm at night and get into another city at 7 the next morning, you could do sleeper service. Amtrak used to run slumbercoaches from Washington to Boston, and that sort of thing makes perfect sense. You have a reliable train, and a time window that makes it a viable service for business travelers. And then it connects to mass transit in the center of town.
But there just aren't very many routes where you can make that work. First, you need the service to be reliable. Second, you need the commuter and freight railroads to cooperate. And third, you really need the right time window. There's no way business travelers are going to spend 20 hours on a train from New York to Chicago, for instance, or 31 hours on a train from New York to Florida.