"HELL, NO, YOU WON'T KILL AMTRAK"

[Save Our Trains Michigan]

"HELL, NO, YOU WON'T KILL AMTRAK"

Union News UTU

 

[RichBohlman]

JOIN THE FIGHT AT:

National Association of Railroad Passengers

AND WORK TO SAVE AMTRAK! :angry:

 

[Guest]

For every airline passenger in America, five travel via rail passenger, rail commuter or rail transit. By zeroing out Amtrak in its fiscal 2006 budget request, the Bush administration ignores that no form of transportation in America is more important than rail.

Is that supposed to be a joke?

The train station in my city is dead. Even Union Station in Chicago doesn't come close to Ohare.

 

[AlanB]

For every airline passenger in America, five travel via rail passenger, rail commuter or rail transit. By zeroing out Amtrak in its fiscal 2006 budget request, the Bush administration ignores that no form of transportation in America is more important than rail.

Is that supposed to be a joke?

The train station in my city is dead. Even Union Station in Chicago doesn't come close to Ohare.

Well I can't speak to Ohare vs. Union Station easily, but I suspect that it is quite possible that Union Station does see more passengers than Ohare, or at least comes very close. Certainly when one combines all of the downtown terminals, trains do indeed move more passengers than Ohare does.

What I can tell you for sure is, that the Long Island RR moves almost almost as many passengers through Penn Station in one month than JFK, LGA, EWR, and Teterboro combined. The LIRR averages 300,000 passengers per day in and out of Penn, and that number does not include passengers who travel to and from destinations other than Penn. For example, I believe that close to 100,000 pax go through Flatbush Avenue every work day.

Comparing stats for last November, the most recent available from the Port Authority one finds the following.

The LIRR averages 274,000 pax per weekday into Penn Station, which equals 6,028,000 (22 X 274,000). They average about 125,000 on the weekends, which adds another 1,000,000, for a grand total of 7,028,000. Please note that these numbers are averages, from about a year ago. So it is possible that the total # may be higher now, since ridership has been steadily increasing from a low point right after the WTC disaster.

The airports combined, before non-revenue passengers, moved 7,781,580. The stats are available

here on the PA's website.

Then of course you have Amtrak adding about 60,000 pax per day at Penn and New Jersey Transit adding another 180,000 per day. Metro North brings in another 200,000 or so to Grand Central.

So when one considers all the commuter RR's, subways, and Amtrak numbers in the US, it is quite likely that trains do indeed move more passengers every day than planes do.

 

[Allen Dee]

For every airline passenger in America, five travel via rail passenger, rail commuter or rail transit. By zeroing out Amtrak in its fiscal 2006 budget request, the Bush administration ignores that no form of transportation in America is more important than rail.

Is that supposed to be a joke?

The train station in my city is dead. Even Union Station in Chicago doesn't come close to Ohare.

Guest,

You are as uninformed as El Presidente Jorge Bush.

Penn Station (NYP) has more passengers pass through it in the evening rush hours than pass through O'Hare in 24 hours. Granted, most of the rail passengers are traveling much shorter distances than most air travelers. We're not talking about passenger miles here, just total passengers.

In some areas of the country, just opposite is true. Two examples come to mind. Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix is one of the top ten busiest airports in the world, but Phoenix has no passenger train service at all. The same can be said for Las Vegas, unless you count the monorail.

But, the nation-wide total of rail passengers (intercity, commuter, and transit) dwarfs the total of air passengers.

 

[Guest]

I misread. I thought he was specifically talking about Amtrak but on another thread I read that Amtrak ALONE had a ridership of 25 million in 2004 which seems pretty small compared to that of the airlines.

And if what you are saying is true, it seems to me that if Amtrak would concentrate more on shorter distance travel they would have higher ridership. Yet they only seem to offer short-distance in certain areas of the country.

I only said what I did because where I live Amtrak only offers long distance service and the times are not convenient at all. Trust me, if Amtrak offered convenient short-distance transportation where I live, I would be upset if they got their funding cut.

 

[AmtrakWPK]

Seems like an appropriate move would be for those close to the mega-rail terminals to get with station management (who presumably would like to remain employed by an Amtrak that will survive) and find someplace in the max traffic areas for pax to provide materials, (with attention-getting posters, etc.,) for those pax to pick up, take on their trains, fill out, and mail to all their reps and senators. You've got a huge number of rail pax who, if you convince them their ride is seriously in jeopardy, should be more than willing to start a paper snowstorm to their elected representatives. I would include, on the forms, places for them to put information like how many times a week they ride the train, and the fact that they could actually lose their jobs if the train wasn't available, which I expect is probably the truth for thousands of them. Maybe NARP and the regional organizations would be willing to take this on. It would increase the expense, but if they could somehow include a carbon-less postcard copy that went to NARP, NARP would be given a priceless statistical data source for arguments they could make at a national level, and for them to use in lobbying.

That ready and untapped pool of existing pax should be more than willing to make noise in order to save their rides. Seems like maybe Amtrak OBS folks should also be given that sort of thing to give to any pax that sounded like they might be mad at you-know-who for what he's proposing. Maybe include a leaflet inside the timetables that are available in the rail cars and stations. Existing pax ought to be your best army of letter-and-email writers since they will lose their transportation if Mr. B. has his way. Put it to them exactly that way, and do that all through the system. I've already written to my reps more than once, and will do so again now that this ridiculous insulting asinine insane budget has actually been proposed. Don't bother with national newspaper ads - use that money to target the hundreds of thousands of existing pax. They're your army. Not the railfans. I know if I relied on a train to get me to and from my job, I'd be spitting fire right about now.

 

[battalion51]

I personally think that if Amtrak were to allow NARP to put an information sheet (with copies available for you to take) in each car back by the restrooms you might be able to generate some noise. Only once (a few years ago) have I ever seen a flyer encouraging people to make noise for a network ready to crumble.

 

[Save Our Trains Michigan]

Our group does it in Michigan we put flyers on the trains when we can and have flyers in most of the Michigan stations.

 

[PRR 60]

Comparing rail transit with intercity airline traffic is an extreme apples and oranges comparison. One is “intra”city transit and the other is “inter”city transportation. At Penn Station New York, Amtrak’s busiest, Amtrak represents only about 5% of all the boardings. The rest are the LIRR and NJT.

Amtrak is a better comparison with air travel and Amtrak’s intercity services moves a miniscule portion of all daily intercity passengers. Amtrak moves less than 5% of the combined air and rail passengers and less than 2% of the intercity rail passenger miles. If Amtrak were ranked with the airlines, they would be about the size of America West: a mid-major at best. That is not to say that they do not have a major impact in some markets, but on a national scale, Amtrak is simply not that important to intercity transportation.

Looking at pure numbers, the subsidy to Amtrak is grossly disproportionate to the contribution Amtrak makes to overall transportation. If you just consider passenger counts, the $1.2 billion given to Amtrak would be better spent on rail transit like the LIRR and NJT. There are other reasons Amtrak should be subsidized, but pure passenger counts and statistical transportation impact are not among them.