What if Amtrak cared about its Hartford riders?

Welcome to another installment of our "What if?" series, where we ask what would happen if the people who ran our transit system treated it as an essential service that people relied on, rather than a luxury or a charity. In the past we've asked what if New York City Transit gave a shit about passengers at the Smith/9th Street subway station, riders on the #7 train from Woodside to Flushing or the M6 bus, Rockaway subway riders, subway riders in general, or the riders of any bus with onboard fare enforcement.

Digging cross track at HART Interlocking in Hartford, July 29. Photo: ConnDOT.

I've also asked what it would look like if the NYPD traffic brass cared about pedestrian safety, if the LIRR cared about people going through Jamaica, and if New Jersey Transit cared about transit riders or were interested in attracting new riders. I've gone further afield and asked what if the Port Authority of Allegheny County cared about people who want to get dahntahn.

But several of my "What ifs" have been about Connecticut. What if Amtrak cared about riders between New York and Boston crossing the Thames River east of New London, or the Niantic River west of the town? What if Amtrak and Metro-North cared about people traveling between Fairfield and Bridgeport?

Tonight the question is: what if Amtrak and the Connecticut DOT cared about riders between New Haven, Hartford and Springfield? The Hartford line has been neglected since the demise of the Penn Central, and one track has been removed for much of its length. It was treated by Amtrak as part of the Northeast Corridor, and several of the trains from New York and Washington used to go north to Springfield. Some even continued east from Springfield to Boston on the former Boston and Albany main line. When Amtrak introduced the Acela Express service and upgraded the Shore Line through Providence, it rerouted almost all the trains along the Shore, with four connecting "shuttles" running from New Haven to Springfield.

Amtrak and ConnDOT are working on improving service, which means they care, right? The AP says, "Work began Monday on the project that will boost north-south rail transportation from six daily round-trip trains to 17 a day south of Hartford and 12 north of Hartford."

Except if you read the details you'll see that they're destroying the frequency in order to save it. In the previous schedule (PDF) there were six trains a day in each direction; three of them are being bustituted. For two and a half years.

Train number	Leave Springfield	Notes
141	5:55AM	Through train Springfield to DC
495	7:10AM	Bustituted
493	10:30AM	Bustituted
55	2:50PM	The Vermonter - through train St. Albans to DC
475	4:05PM	Bustituted
479	7:40PM	Not bustituted

According to Amtrak's monthly report (PDF), between October 2013 and September 2014 there were 370,896 riders on the Hartford-Springfield line, all week long. This does not include the Vermonter, so if we assume that all five other runs have the same number of passengers, and that ridership is the same every day of the week, we're talking about almost 400,000 trips being bustituted over the next two and a half years.

Why are they being bustituted? There is no explanation given in any of the press releases besides "double tracking." Amtrak's website refers to it as "Mid-Day Shuttle Service," which is a funny way of talking about trains that travel s early as 7:10 AM and as late as 6:50 PM. The Environmental Assessment has a bit more:

The project includes replacement of approximately 35 miles of second track removed by Amtrak in the early 1980s. The track, consisting of s sub-ballast foundation, wood or concrete railroad ties and steel rail, will be restored on the previously engineered Amtrak track bed. It will be aligned to support speeds of up to 110 mph. There are five sections of new double track, including one (MP 31.1 to MP 35.1) where the second track physically still remains, but is no longer in service and will be removed and replaced…

I understand that sometimes when you're double-tracking you need to disrupt the existing track, for hours at a time, like in the photo above. I also understand the desire to bustitute a whole bunch of trains for the whole length of the project, so that everyone knows what to expect and nobody gets confused and misses the bus on Tuesday the 17th because they got it mixed up with Wednesday the 18th. And yet, as with all the other Amtrak disruptions in Connecticut, it feels like Amtrak and ConnDOT really don't take Amtrak passengers seriously. I get the sense that they think of their future Commuter Rail passengers as Serious Business People, but the current Amtrak passengers are Recreational Travelers who won't mind sitting on a bus in rush hour I-91 traffic through Hartford or New Haven.

That sense makes me wonder if they're really doing all they can for the riders. How many people are working on this double-tracking project? Does it really take two and a half years? Are we closing all sixty miles of track for just one crew that will be traveling up and down the line, double-tracking as they go? Could the budget be rearranged to add more crews, so that the project could be finished in half the time?

Decking the Sunnyside Yards: the history of a fantasy

Becoming the Yards:

1643: Burger Jorrisen receives the first patent for farmland near the swamps surrounding the Dutch Kills.
1861: The Long Island Railroad builds tracks from Hunters Point along the Dutch Kills to Jamaica.
1903: The Pennsylvania Railroad begins purchasing property in the area and draining the land.
1915: The Sunnyside Yards are opened.

(Background from the Greater Astoria Historical Society and Untapped Cities, among others.)

Development proposed on decks over the Yards:

1925: Post Office building
1951: Transportation Hub
1971: Housing
1973: Sports stadium
1989: Housing and offices
1997: Olympic village
2006: Housing, stores, schools, playing fields and parks
2008: Housing
2014: A hospital, affordable housing buildings, a school, a public space or some combination of those

The transportation hypocrisy of civil libertarians

It was in the news yesterday that the Drug Enforcement Administration paid an Amtrak employee over $800,000 over twenty years for confidential passenger information that it could have gotten for free. The Albuquerque Journal reported in April 2001 that they were getting it through "a computer with access to Amtrak's ticketing information." People like Senator Grassley are spinning it as government waste, but to me there's a bigger story: why should Amtrak have given this information to the DEA in the first place?

That was the response of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico back in 2001, and they were then "pondering whether to take legal action." A few months later they clearly had bigger fish to fry, so it's understandable why this issue went on the back burner.

Photo: Joseph Barillari / Wikipedia

What's not understandable is why transit freedom has gone on the back burner, and pretty much stayed there, since 2001. Some of you may actually be too young to know that before then, you could board an intercity bus or train without giving your name or showing identification. You just walked up to the ticket counter and handed over your cash.

I've been taking Trailways buses since I was a kid, and I remember when it all changed, sometime shortly after September 11, 2001. I walked up to the ticket window at the Port Authority and asked for a ticket, and the person asked for my name. "Why?" "Security." "I don't want my name on some list!" "Nobody's going to put your name on a list." I sounded like a goddamn schizophrenic. After some back-and-forth he said, "Just give me a name!" Okay, I gave him a name that could plausibly have been a nickname for me, but wasn't, and he put it in the computer - and on some list, of course. Soon after that, they began requiring photo ID or a credit card to buy the tickets. I think they even tried to get the drivers to check the photo ID before they let people on the bus, but that one at least didn't fly.

What has amazed me to this day is that there was absolutely no mention of any of this by anyone but me. People complain (with good reason) about taking off their shoes at airports and about no-fly lists, and even about draconian treatment on buses near the Mexican border, but I don't remember seeing a single mention of buses or trains requiring a name for intercity tickets. Hell, I still don't know what counts as intercity. I don't have to give my name for a ticket to Nyack or Poughkeepsie, but I do for a ticket to New Paltz.

But what really burns me up is when civil libertarians complain about license plate scans or toll surveillance. Driving is not a right, it's a privilege, especially in a place like New York where transit is plentiful. And these civil libertarians don't even acknowledge that the MTA has a record of the movements of everyone who buys a Metrocard with a credit card.

And yes, it's true that potential criminals or even terrorists can use buses and trains to move around. But we live in a free country, where it's not a crime to be a potential criminal or terrorist, or just someone who doesn't want to drive. Or at least we used to.

The expense of East Side Access

The news is that the Long Island Rail Road East Side Access project, initially forecast to cost $4.3 billion and be completed in 2009 is not due to open until 2023, and it will cost $10.8 billion. Some have faulted the tunneling process and the engineers' estimates of the cost. Some have faulted the decision to run the trains into a deep cavern under Grand Central rather than on the loop tracks. I agree completely. But it recently occurred to me that a big part of the expense and delay - what makes it "the biggest " is a tunnel. Not the tunnel under the East River, that was dug 44 years ago. A tunnel through unstable soil in a filled swamp under the Sunnyside rail yards.

And why dig a tunnel? If you're building a new track that crosses an old track, the cheapest option is an at-grade crossing, but with two busy new tracks crossing lots of existing tracks - including storage tracks with trains parked on them and eight of the busiest tracks in the country - it's easy to see why the design team ruled out that option. It's harder to see why they ruled out a bridge. The yards are in a valley. Just a few blocks west, Queens Boulevard and the three tracks of very busy #7 train line have been crossing them on a double-decker bridge for over a century. There are five or six other bridges, depending on how you count.

There's no concern about blocking the sunlight because the only people in that yard are railroad employees. Sometimes a tunnel is chosen over a bridge to mitigate noise, but the trains will emerge from the tunnel close to the densest residential population, in Sunnyside Gardens. Grade elevation isn't a major concern because the yards are wide and the northernmost tracks are elevated, allowing for a relatively gentle slope, but if the grade is too steep, it would be possible to put in a bend.

Map: New York Observer.

And yet in the Final Environmental Impact Statement there is only one option considered for the Queens route: "crossing beneath the railroad yards." There's only one real reason I can think of to tunnel instead of building a bridge: a tunnel would get in the way of the convention center.

For years, developers, city planners and politicians have been quietly preparing to build a deck over the Yards and develop the area. Because NIMBYs were so successful at "protecting the residential quality" of most of the city's neighborhoods, the amount of new housing that can be built as of right in the city is not enough to accommodate everyone who wants to live here and bring rents down. Planners and developers see one of the largest uninhabited areas in the city, right next to the huge Queens Plaza station and the underused 36th Street stop, and they want to put something there. It figured prominently in the city's discussions about Olympic development, and a report from Alex Garvin and Associates to the Economic Development Corporation in 2006 called it "the city's single greatest opportunity to increase the housing supply and simultaneously improve the quality of the public realm."

Building over a rail yard is a strategy that made millions for the New York Central Railroad a hundred years ago. Railroad managers, now mostly government employees in the city, long to replicate that success. That was the idea behind the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn and now the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan, and they've got other yards in the Bronx to follow Sunnyside. Never mind that Atlantic Yards was a crappy deal for the MTA and the Hudson Yards isn't looking quite as successful as forecast. The city's elites are still hung up on the idea: in 2012 Dan Doctoroff found some interest for it at the Municipal Art Society.

If you look at the map above, the East Side Access tunnel is there, under sections B and C. If it had been built as a bridge, at least part of it would be right where the deck would go, and get in the way of some of the buildings and streets.

I don't know for sure how much the East Side Access designers were thinking about this. But if it played a role at all in their decision to dig a phenomenally expensive tunnel instead of building a bridge, then a significant portion of this multi-billion-dollar federally-funded "transit" project is actually subsidizing a possible future residential and commercial mega-project. Yay?

We can't depend on the Northeast Corridor

The big news this weekend is the major derailment and crash on the New Haven line between Fairfield and Bridgeport yesterday. The National Transportation Safety Board is shutting down that entire stretch of track for several days while they do a thorough investigation, and only after that can the repairs begin.

Map: New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in 1929.

Metro-North and Amtrak trains are suspended indefinitely in both directions, and the lack of alternative service is just pathetic. "If all the trains use the same tracks, it doesn't really seem like there are many alternatives for getting into the city," New Haven resident Robert Li told the Stamford Advocate. "Especially if you don't have a car." There were bus bridges to get people home last night, but there are no buses, let alone trains, all weekend. This evening Eric Gershon of Yale News tweeted, "830 pm Peter Pan bus NYC to New Haven packed due to Fri MetroN #train #derailment. Long lines, short tempers at Port Authority."

Jim Cameron of the appointed Connecticut Parking Garage Rail Commuter Council has been tweeting up a storm. Unfortunately, he's been talking almost entirely about where you can drive to catch a train on Monday morning, I guess because he thinks people who don't drive - or don't want to be behind the wheel in a mess like that - aren't part of his constituency. Most of his tweets about buses are along the lines of, "No way you could handle that many people with buses," but he seems to think that the highway and parking infrastructure is more than up for the task. Yeah.

Anyway, there's a major rail outage, and that means it's time to play the "what if these people actually gave a shit about the riders?" game! Back in 2007, the bridge over the Thames River between Groton and New London was being replaced, and in 2009 it was the Niantic Bridge being replaced. In both cases Amtrak completely suspended service for an entire weekend, and in both cases I pointed out parallel train lines that could be used to bring people between New York and Boston, in particular the Inland Route (currently a slow, non-electrified line with low platforms) and the Air Line (currently railbanked as a trail).

Amtrak's Vision for this part of the Northeast Corridor.

Amtrak and the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut are now working to upgrade the Inland Route, in part due to a large influx of stimulus money, and Amtrak's Vision (PDF) for the Northeast Corridor includes a parallel route through the middle of Connecticut. Unfortunately, that part of the Vision is expected to cost $58 billion (with a "b") and not go live until 2040.

The railroads of Connecticut in 1893.

In the meantime we can work on the existing track. It would cost a lot less than $58 billion to rebuild the New Haven and Derby Railroad, abandoned in 1932, and to upgrade the track on the Berkshire Railroad and the New York and New England, electrify them and install high level platforms at stations. This would ensure that Northeast Corridor and Metro-North trains can go from New Haven to Stamford and get back on the main line, or to Brewster and get on the Harlem Line without having to pass through Bridgeport. (For that last you would also have to convert the Harlem Line to catenary power.)

For a lot less money, you could simply have diesel locomotives pull Amtrak cars through the Inland Route and along the unelectrified track from Meriden through Waterbury and Danbury to Stamford and maybe White Plains, with temporary platforms at a few stations. You could run extra shuttle service from Bridgeport and New Haven to meet the train in Meriden and Waterbury, and in Stamford and White Plains people could transfer to electric trains to Manhattan. It would be slower and less frequent than normal service, but it would be a lot better than nothing.

With the way that Amtrak and Metro-North are currently handling this, it looks like there are a lot of Connecticut commuters who will have a long, slow commute on Monday. I hope you'll all take the time to write to Governor Molloy and to Jim Cameron urging them to put an alternate route in place.

Goals for long distance trains

Man, you railfans are a chatty bunch! I think my two recent posts on the competitive environment for long distance trains and long distance trains around the world have gotten the first and fifth most comments out of all of my posts. But as C.P. Norris wrote on the earlier post, "I think this debate needs to start with exactly what problem you're trying to solve." And Norris is right: I really should have started with this. So now, let's try to see how long distance trains fit in with our goals, helpfully stated for you at the top of the page.

First, regarding access for all: are all people equally deserving of access, or are some a higher priority than others? To the extent that some are a higher priority than others, it is as a counterweight to existing disadvantages, which means that poor people, Black and Hispanic people, and women should be higher priorities. We should also be looking for the best bang for our subsidy buck, so trains that serve the largest number of people per dollar should count more.

I don't have the numbers, but my impression is that the Silver Meteor and Silver Star are the long distance trains with the highest proportion of African American riders; I have certainly seen and spoken with many on those trains who were traveling between work in Northern cities and family or retirement in the South. I'm not sure what the income of Black Silver Service riders is compared with that of the African American community at large. But if any long distance trains deserve support on access grounds per person, my guess would be that it's the Silver Service.

Transit reduces pollution and carnage, increases efficiency and improves society to the extent that it gets people out of cars. Long distance trains, in addition, can do this by getting people off of planes.

I have a strong desire to preserve the long distance train network. So much of it has disappeared and not come back, and I worry that losing any more routes will start a snowball effect, swallowing up any remaining trains that are not profitable or state-subsidized. But I have to admit that I'm hard pressed to see how that fits with any of my goals.

The problem is that it's not really clear how many people the long distance trains are keeping out of cars and planes, and it's not clear how many more we can get out of cars and planes by improving service.

The only way I can think of that maintaining a route like the Southwest Chief can get people out of their cars is a long term one: that there's more political support for maintaining or improving a route than for restarting one. Just look at the stimulus rail money. Two projects (Ohio and Florida) were for corridors that don't currently have service on them; the rest are all for existing corridors, including the California High-Speed Rail project, which is a fancy bypass for the San Joaquins.

It would seem, then, that operating subsidies tend to motivate capital subsidies beyond what the freight railroads are willing to spend. That means that they may be worth keeping on certain long distance routes, if they can someday draw enough people out of cars and planes, with the right combination of capital investment and road and air disinvestment. The question becomes figuring out which routes those are.

When you comment on this post, please be clear about your goals, so that others can decide whether they share them.

Long distance trains don't work?

Everyone seems to have figured out exactly why long distance trains don't work, and can't work, in the US. I wrote before about the efficiency arguments that Jarrett Walker and Bruce Nourish make against them, and a whole raft of people weighed in in the comments with well-constructed cases against routes longer than 750 miles.

Photo: stevec77 / Flickr

The problem with these arguments is that they're too good. They ignore the fact that in many places outside the US, long distance trains are still popular, even with competition from subsidized planes and high-speed rail. The Trans-Siberian Railway is the most famous, but it is just one line in the large network built by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Wikipedia lists the networks of India, China and Malaysia, as well as Germany, Italy, Morocco and the United Kingdom. There are even still a few long-distance trains in Argentina and South Africa.

This is not a question of population density: there are parts of Morocco, China, India and the former Soviet republics that are essentially uninhabited. So what do they have that we don't, and how can we get it? I'll leave this to all the commenters, since they know what's going on so much better than I do...

The density to support long distance trains

There's a new dust-up among transit bloggers, stirred by a recent report showing that while Amtrak's Northeast Corridor makes a profit and the state-sponsored corridor trains break even, the long distance trains are still losing money (although Don Phillips disputes those numbers). Eric Jaffe gives three arguments in favor of keeping the subsidies for the long distance trains, while Jarrett Walker and Bruce Nourish make an austerity case for dropping them. Paul Druce won't go that far, but argues that we should at least charge market clearing prices for berths in the sleeping cars.

"Overnight Train to Beijing." Jay Dedman / Flickr.

Here's the key quote from Jarrett's comment on Jaffe's post: "Rail is optimal for particular distances. Europe has lots of great rail services, but still, if you’re going 2000 miles within Europe, and you’re not a tourist or time-rich wanderer, you’re definitely going to fly. ... Australia is too big for rail networks to be national, and so are the US and Canada."

I've faulted Jarrett in the past for transportation myopia, and here it's causing him to repeat the old "density to support transit" canard. These are the three questions that get you out of this myopic viewpoint:

1. Would transit work if it had a better mode share?
2. Does the area have the density to support roads or airplanes either?
3. Would people live or work more densely if the car or air infrastructure were less subsidized?

1. Would long distance trains work if they had a better mode share? Absolutely. Take the ridership on just about any Amtrak long distance route and there are more than a hundred times that many people driving or flying. Shift half of those drivers or flyers to the train, and you can charge enough to break even.

2. Does the area have the density to support roads or airplanes either? No. There are very few highways that pay for themselves, and I don't think any of those compete with trains. Air service is heavily subsidized: public airports, publicly funded air traffic control, Essential Air Service.

3. Would people live or work more densely if the car or air infrastructure were less subsidized? Yeah. You'd still have people living in Seattle and Phoenix and along train lines connecting them, but a lot less in small towns scattered around the country.

So we see that it's not that Australia, the US and Canada are too big for national rail networks. It's that they're too big for three national networks, road, rail and air. Cut the subsidies to one of the other two, and we can get enough passengers for rail.

Jarrett makes a further argument based on efficiency with his remark about the "time-rich wanderer," which is echoed by Nourish. That may have merit, but it's a separate issue, and it doesn't help anyone if you conflate them. I'll deal with it in another post.

If you care about the Northeast Corridor...

Last week I mentioned that the Northeast Corridor between Washington, DC and New York City has a wealth of transit options, all of them generating operational profits for the transit provider. Credit for this success is in part due to the citizens of New York and New Jersey, who have resisted pressure from road builders to destroy town and country for planned highways like the Somerset Expressway and the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and in part due to the managers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who implemented high tolls with congestion pricing.

The Northeast Corridor (left) and the New Jersey Turnpike (right) compete with each other across the state. Photo: David Pfeiffer / Flickr.

When our governments did not simply continue to build roads and keep the tolls low, people needed alternatives. As car traffic has increased on the New Jersey Turnpike and parallel highways and the price of gas has risen, people have steadily switched to trains and buses. The result is that Northeast Corridor passengers now subsidize the rest of the Amtrak network, and a whole range of bus operators from Eastern up to Vamoose Gold make enough money to not just pay for gas, wages and maintenance, but for new buses, and even generate a profit.

Those options are under threat now from unchecked government spending to interfere in the market, and the person directing this interference is none other than that darling of the right and famed budget-cutter, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. You may remember, specifically, that Christie cancelled the ARC Tunnel project because he thought it would place too great a burden on future generations of New Jersey taxpayers.

It turns out that Christie didn't just lie about New Jersey's share of the cost and redirect three billion dollars to road projects. Tri-State has the news (from the Star-Ledger) that even three billion dollars isn't enough to finish those projects, and the Turnpike Authority will borrow an additional $1.4 billion to complete them - putting that burden on future generations of New Jersey drivers and taxpayers.

One of those projects in particular is a really bad idea and could seriously undermine transit in the Northeast Corridor. There is a bottleneck on the New Jersey Turnpike between Mansfield and New Brunswick where the highway is "only" six lanes wide. A lot of that $4.4 billion is being spent to widen the Turnpike to twelve lanes in that section.

Eventually, as with most road expansions, those twelve lanes will probably be just as congested as the six lanes are today,. Or maybe not. If other driving costs like gas and insurance continue to rise, driving may drop there just as it is all over the country. But for a while it will be smooth sailing, and that could spell trouble for Northeast Corridor transit.

It's no coincidence that the Pennsylvania and Lehigh Valley railroads started to lose money after the Turnpike was opened, or that the Erie and New York Central lost money after the New York State Thruway was built, or the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western went downhill after Routes 78 and 80 opened. The Northeast Corridor, which is the successor to the Pennsylvania Railroad, is just beginning to recover.

Just as those highways drew passengers from the parallel railroads, the time savings on this newly widened Turnpike will draw passengers from the trains and buses of the Northeast Corridor. This is massive government-sponsored, debt-financed sabotage of a profitable market, done by a Republican with a reputation as a budget-cutter. Combined with the way the Democrats gummed up curbside bus pickup here in New York City, we may well see a drop in Northeast Corridor bus and train ridership over the next several years. I hope I'm wrong.

After the Port Authority raised tolls in 2010 there was a huge stink. After Christie cancelled the ARC Tunnel there was outrage from transit advocates. So far this massive highway widening hasn't gotten much more than a few angry Tri-State blog posts, and nothing from budget hawks. Will anything change?

A trip at every price

Recently I've been impressed at how on the Northeast Corridor there's transit for everyone. At almost any price, there's some combination of speed, flexibility and quality that will get you from New York to Washington. And they're all operationally profitable for their providers. Here's what I was able to find for a Wednesday a couple weeks from now - and I'm actually leaving out a bunch of buses that are in the same price range, like Bolt Bus and the other Chinatown buses.



This gives people tremendous flexibility. Homeless and unemployed? An hour of panhandling and some library time, and you can get a Megabus ticket. Filthy rich? Helicopter or limo. And there's a whole range of small steps in between.

The small steps are key, because they take away a lot of the anxiety. Imagine you usually take the DC2NY bus. It's a little more than the cost of Megabus, but you get a more convenient pick-up location and a newer bus.

Now suppose you get a bonus at work, or you inherit a small amount of money from a relative. You can afford a little extra, so you pay twenty dollars more for a Northeast Regional train. It makes a lot of stops, but it's a smoother ride with wider seats, and you can get up and walk around.

So you take the train for a year and enjoy it. Then the money runs out and you're back on the DC2NY bus. It's kind of a pain, but you can deal. At least you're not standing in the cold with the Megabus riders. A small increase or decrease in your spending power translates into a small change in your comfort and/or convenience.

I'll talk about why this is so important in a future post.

How the high Acela fares save taxpayers money

We know that Amtrak's Acela and Northeast Regional services are among the few Amtrak services that take in enough in tickets to cover their operating costs. We also know that the fares on those trains are considered high: they're higher than any parallel commuter rail line or bus. Malcolm Kenton of the National Association of Railroad Passengers (of which I am a card-carrying member) argues that without sufficient taxpayer support, these high fares are necessary. Here's how necessary they are:

First-class breakfast on the Acela. Photo: Christopher S. Penn / Flickr.

If you wanted to go from midtown Manhattan to New Haven on a weekday morning, you could pay $70 for a business class ticket on the Acela Express, or $123 for a first class ticket. There are 260 business class seats and 44 first class seats on every train, for an average fare of $77.67. Or you could pay $14.75 and take the Metro-North commuter train. That $14.75 is just 19% of the average Acela fare.

All those $70 and $123 fares add up: total Acela revenue from last October through July was $427,414,994. That's a 76% surplus over the operating costs of $242,800,000. That money could be used to buy more train cars or upgrade signals, but currently it seems to be used to cross-subsidize some of the less-profitable lines.

People complain about the high Acela fares, but they haven't gotten Amtrak to lower them. Imagine if they had! What if all Acela seats to New Haven cost $14.75? Then the total revenue from October to July would be $81,167,577, only a third of the cost. That leaves $162 million that would have to be paid by the taxpayer.

The story is similar for the Northeast Regional trains: $38 for coach, $57 for business class, for an average of $39.65. The total revenue for October through July was $446,466,387, a 21% surplus over the cost of $369,000,000. If all seats were $14.75, the trains would only bring in $166,078,642, 45% of the cost, requiring a taxpayer subsidy of $202,921,358.

Just to remind you: these are market rates, and the $374 first class round trip fare between New York and Boston is still a bargain compared to the $470 coach fare on the Delta air shuttle, let alone the $568 first class fare. The trains are mostly full. If Amtrak charged lower fares the trains would always be full, and a lot of people still wouldn't get a chance to ride. Lower fares wouldn't allow more people to ride, they would just give poorer people a better chance to ride.

The reason that there hasn't been much pressure on Amtrak to reduce its fares is because there is a cheaper alternative for people who can't afford to pay $38 to ride to New Haven. They can pay $14.75 for a Metro-North ticket, which takes half an hour longer, doesn't guarantee a seat and has no cafe car. Or they can pay $22 for a Greyhound or Peter Pan bus. They may even get a Megabus seat for $5. For those going to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington or Washington, there are also Chinatown buses and Bolt Bus. That frees Amtrak from the requirement to offer charity service in the Northeast Corridor and allows them to charge market rate fares.

Amtrak revenue update update

In response to my post last night about Amtrak ridership and revenue, Paul Druce pointed out that Amtrak's revenue numbers include government operating support, but that the same PDF lists ticket revenues on Page A-3.5. So if we combine them into one spreadsheet, here are the top ten routes in terms of "farebox recovery" for Fiscal Year 2012, October through July:

Route	Ticket revenue	Total costs	Ticket contribution (loss)	"Farebox" recovery ratio
Acela	$ 427,414,994	($242,800,000)	$184,614,994	176 %
Washington-Lynchburg	9,654,320	(6,600,000)	3,054,320	146 %
Northeast Regional	446,466,387	(369,000,000)	77,466,387	121 %
Washington-Newport News	28,270,176	(25,900,000)	2,370,176	109 %
Carolinian	15,300,066	(16,600,000)	(1,299,934)	92 %
Albany-Niagara Falls-Toronto	20,102,961	(23,200,000)	(3,097,039)	87 %
Keystone	27,517,953	(37,800,000)	(10,282,047)	73 %
Empire	36,594,768	(52,400,000)	(15,805,232)	70 %
Auto Train	62,356,483	(89,900,000)	(27,543,517)	69 %
Palmetto	14,320,227	(23,500,000)	(9,179,773)	61 %

It's a whole different game when you look at it that way.

Amtrak ridership update

People have been talking about the gross numbers of Amtrak carrying more riders than at any time since its founding in 1972. I have a couple of thoughts on this.

First, we now need a new benchmark to measure Amtrak ridership by. It's tricky, because Amtrak didn't take over all the passenger trains in the country. Commuter services were often retained by the railroads, eventually being taken over by state-run agencies or authorities like Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, Metra, the MBTA and Caltrain. When they are reinstated, they are often controlled by state agencies or authorities like Sound Transit, Valley Metro or Denver's RTD.

We could compare Amtrak ridership with pre-Amtrak ridership on all non-commuter trains, but now Amtrak runs some routes that primarily serve commuters (the trains to Lynchburg and Newport News in Virginia, for example), and some current non-commuter routes are run by other organizations, such as the LIRR's Montauk service, the Alaska Railroad and the Grand Canyon Railway. So it would be nice to see the ridership on all pre-Amtrak long-distance trains compared to all Amtrak long-distance trains, for example.

My second point is that there are some very interesting specifics in the data, particularly on Pages C-1 and C-2 of the July Monthly Performance Report (PDF). Last July, there were only four services that ran an operating surplus from January to July: the Acela and Northeast Regional, the Lynchburg service and the "Non NEC Special Trains," whatever they are.

This year all four of those are making a larger operating surplus, and so are the "NEC Special Trains," the Washington-Newport News service ($3 million surplus), the Pere Marquette (Grand Rapids to Chicago, $100,000) and the Carolinian (Raleigh to Charlotte, $700,000).

Even more interesting, many of the "state sponsored trains" are close to breaking even. The Ethan Allen Express has a year-to-date loss of less than $100,000. The Piedmont, which goes from Washington to Charlotte, has a year-to-date loss of $300,000. Kansas City-Saint Louis service is down $1.4 million. All three of them earn a significant chunk of their revenue in the fall, presumably from leaf-peepers and skiers, and all three will probably run a net surplus for this year.

The following trains all have year-to-date operating losses of less than three million dollars: the Adirondack ($2 million), the Heartland Flyer (Fort Worth to Oklahoma City, $2.2 million), the Maple Leaf ($2.3 million), the Illinois Zephyr (Chicago to Quincy, $2.4 million), the Downeaster ($2.5 million), the Vermonter and the Hiawathas ($2.6 million), and the Blue Water (Chicago to Port Huron, $2.8 million). Of those trains, only the Blue Water had an annual operating loss over a million dollars in 2011. Most of them will probably make a slight operating profit this year.

The question then is what to do with these services. I don't know the details of Amtrak's agreements with the states. It may make sense for the states to shift their contribution from operating to capital and buy more rolling stock. If we get a congress that wants to invest in Amtrak, it may buy the rolling stock, leaving the states with money to invest in new routes.

The most profitable routes, like Washington-Lynchburg, may be of interest to private companies. What makes the most sense would be for the host railroad, in this case Norfolk Southern, to take it back and maybe extend it to Danville and Greensboro. In any case, it's good news.

Can we push for more buses AND trains?

Alon Levy has posted a nice long response to my posts about bus service on the Northeast Corridor. Now, Alon and I are friends and we could probably hash this out over coffee the next time he's in New York. But I think it's helpful to air this discussion on our blogs so that you all can join in, and of course get the benefit of our tremendous knowledge and wisdom.

The Megabus stop in Secaucus. Photo: Charles F. / Yelp.

First, some clarifications. I really, really don't want you to start loving the bus. I don't particularly like them myself. Even if they weren't smelly and cramped, they're always going to lurch. I would love it if we had enough passenger train capacity that I could go wherever I wanted to go by train.

I am advocating investment in bus stations at various locations around the metro area, but not government investment. Of course, where there are existing government-owned bus stations, like in White Plains, the intercity buses should be offered space. Similarly, they should be allowed to use municipal lots and garages, like those in Flushing and Williamsburg, for pickups and layovers. And in Chinatown, as in most of Manhattan, land may be so expensive that none of the bus companies can afford to build their own terminals.

That said, it seems likely to me that if we provide a reasonable amount of curbside pickup space in places like Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Bay Ridge, a bus company will eventually be able to accumulate enough profit and/or credit to build a terminal. That also assumes that there would be the necessary zoning and/or waivers to allow such a terminal to be built in a convenient location.

Alon is probably right, in part at least, that what's motivating me to advocate expanding the bus network is "desperation" and "defeatism" about the likelihood of reforming Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration - or about getting another train tunnel dug under the Hudson. Part of my motivation is also that we may have extra advocacy hours beyond what we need to get rail improvements, and we should spend those on expanding the non-car, non-plane mode share. But that's not all.

It's also that the timeframe for bus improvements is shorter. If we get the FRA to relax its regulations, and then get Amtrak to buy more train cars, we still need to get Congress to pay for the new cars, and then it takes a few years for the cars to be built. A new tunnel would take even longer.

We should absolutely do all of those. But what do we do in the meantime with all the people who really want to go to Boston without driving? Let's satisfy that demand over the short term with buses, warehouse it, and then when Amtrak gets their new train cars it will free up a bunch of bus capacity, which will then be available to absorb the next wave of transit demand. This process can be repeated when the new tunnels are completed, and again when the Poughkeepsie Bridge is reactivated.

The question, I guess, is how much time anyone's putting into these goals, besides just writing about it on blogs. If someone spends half an hour writing a letter to Steve Levin asking for his support in putting a bus stop in Williamsburg, is that a half hour they wouldn't have spent writing to Nydia Velasquez asking for FRA reform?

Buses or trains on the Northeast Corridor?

On Sunday I posted about setting goals and working through disagreements. One area I had in mind was the Northeast Corridor. We currently have 86% of trips, or 137 million per year, going by car or plane, and I asked what it would take to flip that so we have no more than 14% of trips, or 24 million, by car or plane.

My original thought was that with so many passengers traveling through New York Penn Station, and the often-repeated claim that the North River Tunnels leading into Penn being maxed out, any increase would have to be in buses. In the comments, Alon convinced me that there is capacity in the tunnels, and that Amtrak can move more passengers by running longer trains, improving signaling and increasing the number of seats per train. Increasing the number of seats may be counterproductive, because it will lower the quality of the experience and thus limit what Amtrak can charge for a seat.

Photo: MattHurst / Flickr

The question then comes down to a strategic issue. Which is likely to get more people out of their cars, improving signaling and increasing train length, or increasing the number of buses? It's a little more complicated, though, because the strategies are unequal in various ways. It might be better to ask which gives you the biggest bang for the buck, but it's not all about money. Which strategy gets the largest number of people out of their cars per hour of activism?

Signal improvements and train cars are fairly straightforward because there's no constituency that feels threatened by better train signals or longer Amtrak trains. There is only the constituency that wants to deny Amtrak funding. Activist hours would simply be spent fighting for that funding.

In contrast, there are constituencies that are opposed to various ways of providing more bus capacity. The intercity bus companies seem to be able to buy new buses with fare revenue and maybe even build terminals in other cities, but they don't seem to have enough income to build their own terminals in Manhattan, so any indoor terminal or garage would have to be built with public funding.

Up to now, intercity buses have expanded on the cheap by simply using curb space. This has fueled the explosive growth in this sector of the market, but by enabling "community review" of bus stops and other onerous requirements, New York City has put the curb out of reach of many intercity operators.

That leads us to the final set of questions for tonight: Given the new law, how can we continue to expand intercity bus service in the Northeast Corridor? What is the best use of activists' time? Would an hour spent on bus service get more people out of their cars than spending an hour lobbying for longer Amtrak trains and better signals?

What does mode shift look like?

Last week I mentioned estimates that 86% of travel in the Northeast Corridor is by heavily polluting modes (5% by plane, 81% by private car), and only 14% by transit (6% by train, 8% by bus). What if we wanted to flip that and make it 14% by plane and car, and 86% by bus and train? How could we get there?

In the comments on last week's post about Amtrak and the Chinatown buses, Ryan Miller points out that I neglected to mention that Amtrak is sold out for the peak hours at least. This point is also made by his cousin Stephen Miller, the new Streetsblog reporter, in a post on September 5.

The North River Tunnels that carry the Northeast Corridor from New Jersey into Penn Station are at capacity. There are only three ways that Amtrak can add more trains, two being a new tunnel under the Hudson or rebuilding the Maybrook line, and both of those are far off. Increasing the speed of the trains may allow a few more runs to fit in, but that won't allow Amtrak to double its ridership. That means that in the next ten years, trains will continue to carry the same number of people, and any increase in Northeast Corridor transit ridership is going to come from buses.

The expansion of bus service will most likely take place at the lower-cost end of the market. Jarrett Walker likes to talk about how buses are theoretically no less comfortable than trains, but it's much harder for a bus to achieve a train-comparable level of comfort on a long-distance run. Even on the smoothest highway (i.e. not the New Jersey Turnpike), the curves are sharper and lane changes are relatively frequent. There is no cafe car.

The best strategy, therefore, is for Amtrak to consistently aim to capture the high end of the market, increasing the speed, wifi and amenities on the Acela Express to a level that will satisfy the air shuttle riders, and those on the on the Regional to just below that level. That means that Bolt and Megabus need to get to one step below that, and Peter Pan and Greyhound need to build reputations of safety, comfort and reliability that are solidly middle class, to compete with driving.

Most importantly, capacity at all levels of bus service needs to increase. And here we run into another problem noted by Stephen: the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown is also at capacity. There is no room for most of the commuter buses to park during the day, so they have to go back through the tunnel to a garage in New Jersey and come back in the afternoon.

Here's another chart from that Amtrak report (PDF, page 4), showing that in 2010 people took 161 million trips on the Northeast Corridor. If you figure that most of them traveled between 8AM and midnight, that works out to 27,568 trips per hour. If Randal O'Toole is right and 8% of that is on buses, and we guess that the buses carry an average of 30 passengers, that's 74 buses an hour, which sounds about right.

If we assume that the total number of trips will remain constant, that means that we need to plan for a tenfold increase in the number of buses cruising into New York, i.e. 662 more buses per hour. Linear projections are stupid, but let's just imagine that the "Baseline Growth" scenario of 260 million trips per year projected by Amtrak in the chart above comes to pass. If that's all absorbed by buses, it means 1227 more buses per hour; if it's the "High Growth" scenario then we're looking at 1569 buses per hour.

Are we ready for that? I didn't think so.

Could we be ready? Sure! That's the kind of thinking we transit advocates have to do. What does mode shift really look like?

How Amtrak can charge so much for the Northeast Corridor

The New York Times tells us that if you focus only on trains and planes, Amtrak's share of the Northeast Corridor travel market is about half. The Washington Post tells us that it's one of the few sectors where Amtrak brings in more in fares than it spends on operating costs. If you've priced travel options in the corridor, you know that this farebox recovery comes from high fares.

In a post on Greater Greater Washington, Malcolm Kenton of the National Association of Railroad Passengers explains why Amtrak needs to charge higher prices, but he doesn't explain how they can. You might have wondered how a publicly owned company can afford, politically, to charge market prices. In other markets, transit operators face pressure from activists and politicians to keep fares low. Why haven't Northeast Corridor politicians raised an outcry about Acela Regional tickets?

Believe it or not, Randal O'Toole has your answer: it comes from other players in the market. Like a stopped clock that's right twice a day, O'Toole comes out with a useful insight once or twice a year, buried in his usual heap of misinformation. In this case, responding to the Times article, he's absolutely correct that the Northeast Corridor intercity market contains buses and private cars in addition to trains and planes. It also contains commuter railroads, which provide slower connections between city pairs like Boston-Providence, Philadelphia-Wilmington and Baltimore-Washington. New Jersey Transit and SEPTA even coordinate to provide cheaper service from New York to Philadelphia.

O'Toole dug up this chart that Amtrak themselves compiled (PDF, page 4) from unspecified data. It tells us that Amtrak carried only 6% of trips on the Northeast Corridor, and that airplanes carried 5%. The remainder is 89%, and O'Toole estimates that bus ridership is 8-9%. As far as I can tell he pulled that figure out of his ass, but it's all we've got to go on.

From all the market surveys, we know who's riding the bus in the Northeast Corridor: the poor and students. The buses have captured the low end of the market. Amtrak could have tried to fight them for it, but they could only have gotten prices that low by using their congressional subsidies on the Northeast Corridor instead of other routes. They would have lost money on all those low-end passengers, but not made it up in volume.

The buses, on the other hand, can make a profit at lower prices because most of their infrastructure costs (for roads and many of their terminals) are borne by the government. So they can serve the poorer passengers. Everyone makes a profit, and everyone can afford to travel! Nobody complains to their representatives about high Amtrak fares, because they can take the bus.

That, of course, raises the question: will the new burdensome law restricting low-cost bus lines in New York City drive up bus fares?

Why we shouldn't extend Metro-North on the Hudson Line

Mid Hudson News reports that Metro-North is still no longer considering extending service to northern Dutchess County. I'm not sure who was asking, but there you have it.

Many years ago, there was a proposal to extend service past Poughkeepsie, with stops in Hyde Park, Staatsburg, Rhinecliff and Tivoli. There was significant NIMBY opposition, and I was all ready to cuss out those transit haters, but the more I looked at it, the more their objections made sense.

It was the same problem I had with the Northern Branch plan, but even more so, because the planners expected almost every rider to drive and park. None of those stations have anything resembling the walkable suburban downtowns of Englewood and Tenafly.

To generate enough walk-up demand for the service, you'd essentially need to rezone the area to create a whole new Tarrytown, Irvington, Dobbs Ferry and Hastings. Which might be nice, but do we really need that development eighty miles from Manhattan?

We need to look at what our goals are, and how a Metro-North extension might serve them. If people are driving too much in Dutchess County, replacing a small number of large lots with new walkable suburbs will not make the existing residents drive less.

There are small things we could do. Extend some trains to Marist and Hyde Park, and maybe the CIA, to capture some of the student and tourist travel. But that's a relatively small segment of the market; would it be worth running ten-car trains?

The largest existing town without train service in Dutchess County is Fishkill. Emily from IRidetheHarlemLine.com thought it was funny that someone would want to ask Metro-North President Howard Permut about restoring passenger service on the Beacon/Maybrook Line that the railroad owns, but it's not such a strange question. Of all the potential Dutchess County service expansions it's the one that would have the greatest ridership. It runs through the most densely populated parts of Beacon and Fishkill.

At this point it might not be worthwhile running trains all the way to Derby, Danbury or even Brewster, but a local group has proposed a shuttle from the Beacon Station to Matteawan and Fishkill. You could also run a shuttle from Croton, timed to connect with the incoming local from Grand Central.

The State is planning to upgrade the Hudson Line to improve Amtrak service. Dutchess County could use more intercity service, and restoring service to Pittsfield through Amenia, Millerton and Chatham, perhaps run by Amtrak, would capture a significant portion of the weekend crowd that currently drives up the Taconic Parkway.

Emily actually asked Permut about service north of the current terminus in Wassaic, and he mentioned that he was involved in planning the current service. "If I remember correctly, the rail trail was already in existence to Millerton, so we would have had a huge obstacle," Permut said. "How do you de-map a rail trail? There would have been significant opposition." More proof that rail-trails are not good for transit.

Of course, my question for Permut, which Emily did not ask, was "If you could tear down one highway in the region, which one do you think would increase Metro-North ridership the most?" Dutchess County actually doesn't have many highways. There's one interstate (84), plus the Taconic Parkway. There are some relatively short limited-access sections of Routes 9, 44 and 55.

I would probably first get rid of the "Arterials" in Poughkeepsie, a horrible plan where two neighborhood avenues were turned into three-lane segments of a one-way pair, simultaneously killing both the pedestrian environment and commerce on Main Street. I'm baffled that the arrangement has lasted as long as it has, and I can only surmise that that's because no New Urbanist has ever visited Poughkeepsie. Restoring the Arterials to neighborhood streets, and restoring Main Street to east-west traffic, would make a lot more people want to live within walking distance of the train station. Green tracks trolleys on the former "Arterial" streets would bring more people to the train without driving.

All that said, if we really want to reduce driving in the metropolitan area, it's probably better to focus on other areas than Dutchess County. According to reports compiled by the EPA, Dutchess only accounts for two percent of the region's vehicle-miles traveled. Meanwhile, Nassau accounts for 8% of VMT, and Suffolk 13%. If only they had train service...

Passenger trains are becoming profitable.

Your Cap'n is not psychic, he just has his finger on the pulse of the universe. A week ago, Yonah Freemark tweeted a story about Amtrak trains in Michigan. In February the State of Michigan completed stimulus-funded upgrades to a section of state-owned track between Kalamazoo and the Indiana state line, allowing passenger trains to travel up to 110 miles per hour. Last week Norfolk Southern Railroad, which owns the track from Kalamazoo to Dearborn and is trying to sell it to the state, placed "slow orders" on that section, forcing all trains to travel below 30 miles per hour.

In a press release, Norfolk Southern management made it clear that they had no incentive to upgrade the line. “Until ownership of the Michigan Line is transferred, Norfolk Southern is willing to perform work on the line on behalf of Amtrak or Michigan DOT to address any passenger operating concerns,” said John V. Edwards, Norfolk Southern’s general director passenger policy. “This work is not necessary to provide freight service, but if the passenger service providers want to provide the necessary funding, we will do it."

After thinking about it, I tweeted, "At some point it'll be profitable for railroad companies to offer passenger AND freight service in the US. Until then: http://www.nscorp.com/nscportal/nscorp/Media/News%20Releases/2012/ns_slows_train_speeds.html".

Until the late twentieth century it was the norm for passenger trains to be operated by private companies, usually the same companies that owned or leased the tracks, but sometimes a different railroad company under an agreement. It was only when Penn Central went bankrupt that Amtrak was formed to take over the intercity passenger trains, but the railroads had been losing money on passenger service for decades. How could they compete with government-subsidized roads and parking?

So it recently occurred to me that with the price of gas rising and road budgets across the country being cut, ridership on passenger trains may rise enough to generate profits, and nobody's better placed to reap those profits than the companies that own the tracks. Clearly, Norfolk Southern doesn't see enough demand on the Michigan Line to justify upgrades, but they must have noticed that Amtrak is making a $2 million annual operating profit between Lynchburg, Virginia and Washington, DC, because starting soon they're going to be getting most of that money in "access fees."

When I tweeted that I figured it was only a matter of time before some railroad executive figured out that if the market conditions are right they didn't need Amtrak or state governments to run passenger trains. Turns out it took about a week. Yesterday, the Florida East Coast Railway announced that they're planning to invest a billion dollars to start passenger service on the tracks they own between Miami and Orlando.

I wonder who's next?

The train to where?

I have a question about the California High Speed Rail project. This post is inspired by Alon Levy's recent California high-speed rail post, but I've been wondering about it for over a year now. I've looked in the most obvious places (like the "Frequently Asked Questions" section of the California High Speed Rail Authority's website, and Wikipedia), but haven't found the answer.

So most of you have probably read the announcements that the initial segment of the high-speed rail project would be a 54-mile stretch of track between the towns of Corcoran (population 24,813) and Borden (which doesn't even have a population figure), at a cost of $4.15 billion. This was derided by the usual suspects as a "train to nowhere."

Being a big supporter of intercity rail, I was immediately ready to jump to the project's defense. No, the California High Speed Rail Authority couldn't be building a 200 mph shuttle to carry migrant strawberry pickers 65 miles. They're not even building it to go from Merced to Corcoran.

I assumed that the plan was simply to upgrade the San Joaquin route, so that these diesel passenger trains can move off the older, congested Santa Fe freight line and travel as fast as they can on a brand-new, dedicated, elevated, straight section of track. If that cuts the time from Corcoran to Madera from 1:19 to an hour, that's a nice improvement, right? It could win some hearts, and then the rest of the line can be upgraded south to Bakersfield and north to Modesto (at least), maybe shaving off another twenty minutes. Then they get some cash and electrify it from Oakland to Bakersfield, and then from Stockton to Sacramento. Then they worry about getting it to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Several times I've been ready to make this argument in the comments to a blog post or news article, and I've stopped myself. I realized I don't know, and I don't want to speak for the California High Speed Rail Authority. I figured I'd look into it at some point.

Well, now I've looked into it, and whaaa... ? According to the Los Angeles Times, the tracks will not even run a farmworker shuttle. There will be no trains on them. At all. They will spend over four billion dollars on tracks that will just sit there.

The idea is that eventually the tracks will be extended to San Francisco and Los Angeles and electrified, and then the trains will run. Special high-speed electric trains, like they have on the TGV. But until then, nothing. No San Joaquins. No renting the tracks out as a temporary short cut for Santa Fe freight trains to raise a little cash. They will gather dust for at least two years.

Maybe the LA Times reporters were misinformed. Maybe the plan has changed since then. But I haven't seen anything to suggest that. The High Speed Rail Authority knows that there are lots of people out there who think that the plan is either an expensive farm shuttle or a set of empty tracks. If they were planning to use the tracks, I'm guessing they would put that out on their website. But they don't.

So my question to any California high speed rail followers is very simple. Is this really the plan? Are they really planning to spend four billion dollars and just let the tracks sit completely unused for years, while the parallel tracks are congested? Do you think this is okay? Thanks in advance for your answers.