I'm going to submit a couple of reasons:How is that level of penetration "not unrealistic" given the average one-way airfares?
DC-Orlando: $149
Philadelphia-Orlando: $171
New York-Orlando: $175
Chicago-Orlando: $188
Albany-Orlando: $204
Boston-Orlando: $145
All numbers Q3 2013
(1) If I'm not mistaken, those fares are generally exclusive of non-tax fees (i.e. baggage fees). In most of those cases, you're adding somewhere in the range of $20-30 for baggage fees per person. Only Southwest doesn't charge for bag fees at this point (though their fares seem a bit higher overall), so I'd universally add baggage fees to the calculation. Southwest also wins an award for creative connections between New York and Florida (connections available at Atlanta, Nashville, MIdway, and Houston).
(2) PPR for sleepers on the Star is $241.32. For the Meteor it is $269.88. Both figures FY13. PPR in coach is substantially lower in both cases, but I'm going to consider those numbers to be utterly useless given that those include a lot of short-hop tickets (the Star being particularly bad in this respect, what with the south-of-Orlando turnover providing a big slug of traffic for that train). For the record, the Meteor's PPR was $106.01 for FY13 overall; I would nudge that up a bit for through traffic on the basis of actual ticket prices and the aforementioned traffic situation.
(3) That level of penetration assumes sleeper penetration of somewhere under 2% for the region (2.5% on core airports, 0.5% on the surrounding areas). I'm still assuming that the majority of people travel coach on those numbers. (Edit: I also assume that at least some share of that comes from driving...and north of DC, driving to Florida is not a one-day trip).
(4) An implicit assumption is quite frankly that Amtrak would be able to scale a number of things on multiple trains. Amtrak did 3 round-trips to Miami with 10 sets of equipment versus 2 trips with 8 sets now. I do figure that you'd have similar scaling in effect (probably around 20-22 sets with 6 trains, depending on scheduling) as well as at least some efficiency in crew shuffling. Some other things would scale, additional station costs would be near $0, and as has been discussed at length elsewhere the Florida trains are already at break-even on direct costs. In such a situation, I'm guessing that fares would be about what they are now or less.
(5) Finally, another implicit assumption traces back to the travel situation: The vast majority of these trips are, if I am not mistaken, leisure and not business (so an exact arrival time into Florida is not a huge deal), so taking the train does in fact save a good portion of a day. Let me run down the list using January 15th 2015 in all cases for the SB leg, using January 21 2015 for a return:
-Southwest's earliest available arrival from EWR is at 1350, from LGA at 1305. ISP has a lone direct flight
that gets in before noon...which is also already $425 almost two months out.
-United has two flights that get you there before mid-afternoon. One departs EWR at about 6 AM and gets you to MCO at 1030 (price $368 before any fees). The other is 0735 to 1034 (and is, in fact, direct). Price: $323 before fees (though I cannot even begin to guess what the fare pricing).
-Delta is in the same boat (pricing starts at $330 for the most part, though there's a stray $295 thrown in). You've got multiple morning arrivals, though a lot of those are mix-and-match connection combos involving departures from different NYC-area airports connecting to the same flight in Atlanta.
More in a moment; I'm worried my browser will die on me.
Edit:
Ok, Nathanael, I need to make a correction: In that post when I said that domestic FC was on par with Amtrak's long-distance coach, I was incorrect. Domestic FC is on par with Regional coach. That's my bad.
As to California, there is a city pair in the sleeper sweet spot there: Los Angeles-San Francisco. Northbound travel time is 10:01; a 100-series local takes 93 minutes from there to 4th and King while a 300-series Baby Bullet takes 59 minutes. Assuming a 10-minute stop at SJC and a Baby Bullet schedule you'd be looking at 11:10 end-to-end from LAUS to 4th and King, which would enable such options as a 2000 departure and an arrival at 0710 (probably timetabled at 0730 or so for padding purposes, with the train running discharge-only from SJC onwards). Los Angeles-Phoenix and Los Angeles-Las Vegas are both pretty close to it as well (both falling a bit short but close enough to make work with a bit of a schedule massage...and Las Vegas might well be the single most flexible city in terms of scheduling arrivals and departures in the country, if I had to guess).
Edit2: There's always something else, isn't there?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/9-airports-where-flying-lot-141839938.html
The article mentions a stack of airports facing various issues with crowding; MCO, EWR, BWI, and BOS are all on the list and relevant to my Florida discussion.
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