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.)
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.
