Wow! Ive heard of People that are Tight but Not Being Willing to Shell Out $1.70 per Passenger is Pretty Stingy! That Town must not have heard of "To Make Money you have to Be Willing to Spend Money!"
Penny Wise and Pound Foolish as Ben Franklin said! Why doesn't Amtrak just Quit Stop[ping there and let Indiana know that other Citizens have to make up what those Skinflints won't Kick in?
It's not really penny wise/pound foolish, nor "cheap" to have a train stop from a per-passenger perspective.
Dyer, IN has okay call times....leaves for Chicago at 8:30 AM and arrives back at 6:58 PM. But they also have much more convenient options for getting to Chicago within 10-15 miles (with Metra Electric in Chicago Heights and the South Shore line in Hammond.) If I was going to Chicago from Dyer, I'd try to get to either the South Shore or Metra Electric, if for no other reason than because if I happen to miss the call time there's another train within a couple hours. Granted, I can't get to Indianapolis or points between that way, but if they're running the Hoosier State anyways I could take Metra to Chicago and board there (or take a bus if I was going to Indianapolis.)
From a financial perspective, it's also a pretty rotten deal. The Cardinal would still stop there if the Hoosier State left, so there's only 8 frequencies per week they're getting. Assuming that each train has an equal amount of people boarding (which actually puts more passengers on the Hoosier State than there likely is, as there's more destinations on the Cardinal), 1677 passengers get on or off of the Hoosier State at Dyer yearly, which comes out to 4-5 passengers a day. That's $35.77 per person getting on or off, or the city chipping in $71.54 per round trip passenger on the Hoosier State. That's a
lot of money per passenger, money that the city (likely rightfully so) finds could be better spent elsewhere, even from the perspective of increasing transit availability. You could likely hire a full-time bus driver for $60,000 a year, which could be put to use both in the city and offering connectivity to nearby transit options, with the fare that the passenger pays only having to cover the cost of the vehicle. Frankly, if I was on the city council for Dyer, I would've protested that subsidy as well.
While it's good to advocate for trains and make sure that they're advocated for, it's also good to make sure we're not advocating for something that to most outside observers seems irrational, because then these outliers are used as the norm for the subsidy for rail travel by the anti-rail crowd.
