May 15, 2008
Transit on Thursday: The 'Amtrak, Man' Edition
Hopefully, you didn't miss us too much last week. But it seems that we weren't the only transit columnists that got stuck on Amtrak during last weekend's travel.
WTOP's Adam Tuss writes a sadly typical tale about his Amtrak train to New York's Penn Station breaking down twice and eventually stopping permanently in Newark, New Jersey, due to multiple power failures.
This happened on Amtrak's National Train Day promotion, no less. Cute.
While Amtrak didn't manage to supply us with that sort of tailor-made irony, our train to Philadelphia last Thursday night was also halted for about 40 minutes outside of Baltimore - and again on the return trip Sunday near Aberdeen, Maryland - both caused by the ubiquitous "power failure." Tuss' delay time totaled two hours, while we spent about an hour and a half idly waiting on the tracks. Of course, we should likely be thanking our lucky stars - Tuss mentions his experiences in college sitting in the aisles and seven-hour trips between here and New York. We've got our own tales about 13-hour trips (that are eight-hour rides by car) between Pittsburgh and Connecticut. Chances are you've got your own horror stories, too.
So how can an organization have such an overwhelmingly negative reputation and still manage to sell tickets to 25 million people?
Well, it's not much of a secret: there's little choice when it comes to traveling between destinations on the Northeast Corridor, unless you'd like your trip to consist solely of travel. There's Greyhound, the many Chinatown buses, and their newer competitors. And then there's driving. That's pretty much it, as the City Paper cover boy Joshua Kucera's quasi-epic journey through MARC, senior buses, and Philadelphia regional rail proves.
So, how do we fix Amtrak? Or better put, how can Amtrak fix itself? Some ideas, after the jump.
Photo by rsplatpc
Here's a startling figure from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics: In 2006, Amtrak made 29.7 cents of revenue per passenger, per mile (PPPM). Inversely, commercial airlines (arguably Amtrak's toughest competition) made 13 cents PPPM. What's this tell us? Well, Amtrak makes a ton of revenue from passenger tickets. And it doesn't look as if this will change — that PPPM figure has been going up every year since 1994. For an organization who makes this much money from ticketing on top of the $1.332 billion it received in federal funding for fiscal year 2008, this seems more than a bit off. Amtrak needs to have external pressure placed on it to either improve service or reduce ticket prices. You can't halve your cake and eat it too.
Similarly, the price structure for Acela Express trains is so out-of-whack, it's almost like Amtrak makes the figures up out of thin air. If anyone wants to explain the logic in a ticket that's advertised as "the fastest way to get to New York," but is only about 25 minutes quicker (a gain that can easily be wiped out with any delay) and 76 percent more expensive - please do fill us in.
The Guest Rewards program could use an overhaul. Currently, you earn two points for every dollar you spend. But for a one-way coach ticket, you need 3,000 points (the equivalent of at least $1,500). Again: that's one-way. Amtrak should do its most loyal customers a favor and at least make it plausible to get a round-trip fare without subletting your apartment.
To increase customer satisfaction, other small efforts could be made. For example, on our Thursday night train to Philadelphia, before boarding, we had to show our ticket to an Amtrak employee before accessing the platform — except there was only one ticket-checker for a full train on the busiest route Amtrak has. One extra set of eyes for 15 minutes would have moved things quicker and made people happier.
The real question lies in the fact that no one knows what to do next. Privatizing Amtrak would likely lead to its demise, while the organization hasn't (obviously) done enough to garner support for more public subsidies (which is why the trains in Europe run so efficiently). Do leave any bright ideas you might have in the comments.
Less Money for Escalator Fixes (Cue "What Fixes?" Joke): Metro will delay some repairs to escalators and elevators in order to supply funding for urgent repairs which John Catoe identified a few months ago. This $157 million, of which two-thirds will be diverted from other projects, will be used partially to appease the FTA, which is closely monitoring WMATA's ability to fund $489 million in much-needed projects through non-federal funding. Lena Sun's report is a good roundup of the falling dominoes that seem to be Metro's funding these days - this divergence, which leads to Dulles Rail monies, which is a major part of WMATA's ability to get a large amount of funding from Virginia over the next ten years - transit: it's a very fluid business.
Yeah, The Traffic Sucks in Maryland, Too: We spend so much space lamenting the state of Northern Virginia's roads that similar traffic messes in Montgomery County are often overlooked - when in some cases, they're just as bad as their brethren to the south. This Post article sparks discussion with some interesting quotes like, "[The congestion] is a real, real disaster." Another interesting point? The county planners who reviewed said "disaster" find that there's there's some potential fixes - from adding bus lines to (shudder) widening intersections. Since the review committee didn't consider the proposed Purple Line in its report, we have to kind of agree with Montgomery County Council member Marc Erlich when he said, "Things are going to get worse before they get better."
Engines and Cabooses: Don't forget, Friday is Bike to Work Day, so do enjoy having an excuse to come into work sweaty - you can still register here...Old subway cars are recycled as artificial coral reefs on Maryland's Atlantic shore...Yup, that mess on the Green and Yellow lines is still happening this weekend...First bit of Dulles Rail funding begins to sift in...Got something to say about HOT lanes? Well, now's your chance...Metro plans to install ten CCTV cameras at Metro station entrances to assist in crime fighting.
|
You can't halve your cake and eat it too.
other halve for me plz.
i couldn't agree more about the Acela trains. what a ripoff.
i don't think Amtrak will do anything to fix itself because as you said, they have no rail competition and will continue to get federal funding.
Well I will spare everyone here and not talk about my bad amtrak experiences. I probably have about a dozen of them. Just to put them on a scale, running an hour late does not even come close to being a bad experience.
I have the same opinion about trains as I do about internet/cable connectivity. The public should own the infrastructure (in this case rails) and the rail companies should be privately owned and would lease usage of the tracks including agreements on service levels, reliability, etc. to actually deliver the passengers.
I've had really bad Amtrak experiences, but for what it's worth, most of them were years ago. On the other hand, I've also had even worse airline experiences, and those have only gotten more common.
I can't believe I wasted my life reading about a quasi-epic, TOTALLY POINTLESS journey to New York. Take the bus, kid. Don't bore us with your free shuttle rides around Maryland.
Acela was doomed from the start. Instead of ponying up the dough up front for dedicated high-speed rail like in France or Japan, they opted to go the cheapie route and use existing rails that THEY HAVE TO SHARE WITH FREIGHT CARS. It's like what they did when they first built Metro: they could have paid the extra money for a third express line, but they couldn't get the money, so they went with two tracks. That third track would come in really handy right now, since Metro's been doing capacity business.
Anyway, heavy rail is so 19th Century. City-to-city gondola transit is the wave of the future! DC to Manhattan in only 11 days!
There is a lot of misunderstandings when it come to Amtrak. Things to know:
1) No one has ever made money off of passenger rail. It always costs money to move people -- that is why the freight railroads begged the government to take over passenger rail, which led to the creation of Amtrak. Roads are not self-sustaining (a myth). It takes billions in local property and sales taxes to make up the gap between need and gas tax receipts.
2) Amtrak needs to make more profit per ticket than airlines because Amtrak pays for all of its infrastructure. Airlines have their infrastructure paid for by the government.
3) The Acela is expensive because businesses are willing to pay a premium for the service, which has a 90% on time performance as compared to 70% for the airlines.
4) Privatization of rail in other countries has led to increased government subsidies. See Britain's experience.
I find it amusing that people conveniently forget their plane horror stories when talking about Amtrak. Often, travel involves trouble, whether by car, train or plane.
"The public should own the infrastructure (in this case rails) and the rail companies should be privately owned and would lease usage of the tracks including agreements on service levels, reliability, etc. to actually deliver the passengers."
Unfortunately, it's exactly the opposite now. Amtrak owns only a small amount of its own rail, and all of that in the northeast. Outside the northeast, Amtrak trains run on rail owned by the freight railroads, which are supposed to give passenger trains priority over cargo but routinely don't. And even in the northeast, big chunks of the lines that Amtrak uses are owned by state or local transportation authorities, which have often not made the upgrades necessary to allow the Accela trains to go at their top speed. (In fact, the only place Accela reaches its top speed is in a couple of stretches in RI and MA, and nowhere near that between DC and NY).
We need a single national entity that would own, maintain, and improve the rail lines, and that would be responsible for managing the competing needs of freight, long-distance passenger rail, and commuter rail. And that entity should be separate from whoever actually operates the trains, regardless of whether that operator is public or private.
I think Krisa's solution is in the right direction. Amtrak is a fatally flawed corporation; a private company could do it better. The public though does have an interest in this and should own (and IMPROVE ) the infrastructure and put up the initial outlay for upgrading the system. Every time I go to another country (either in Europe or Asia) I feel like we're in a 3rd world country when it comes to infrastructure. If we had trains like they do in France or Japan we could make the DC-NY trip in about 90 minutes. Pricing should be more competitive (maybe have multiple companies use those public tracks). A decent, reasonably priced rail system in the NE corridor would not only reduce horrendous traffic on 95 but help reduce air delays as well. It should be a priority.
One thing that the Amtrak article fails to address is actual ownership of the rails. Before we can discuss a dedicated rail for Acela (a la the TGV in France), we need to address the issue that Amtrak is at the mercy of CRX Freight. CRX owns the rails, which Amtrak has to use.
Granted, I think that Amtrak could do better on a customer service front. But, the fundamental problem with Amtrak is infrastructure. The government stopped investing in the rails when it started investing in the highway system. And the rails have been doomed ever since.
(I saw a History Channel thing on this.)
i've been taking Amtrak since i moved here two years ago, and i love it. just the thought of sitting in Memorial Day traffic on 95 makes me want to hibernate forever. although i can't sing on the train like i do in the car, i'll take sitting in a seat with a book or movie than sitting behind the wheel getting leg cramps.
however, i do not recommend getting the tuna sandwich on the train. it's expensive, and they put relish in it. who puts relish in tuna?! yuck.
I've rarely had train experiences that were worse than traffic experiences (train delays are altogether too common, but at least predictably so), and this despite the roads getting tons more investment than the rails (maybe something that should be reconsidered). I'd like to think the next administration would see the environmental wisdom in rail travel and subsidize it, because until then the need to charge expensive prices will limit Amtrak's demand.
"Airlines have their infrastructure paid for by the government"
Theoretically that infrastructure is paid through landing fees, gate rentals and food or other taxes at the airport.
drew, et al:
Regarding the track ownership problem:
Obviously, the infrastructure of Amtrak is something that needs some serious work. The fact that many of Amtrak's delays come from the need to yield to freight cars is telling. Your point is well-taken.
However, the chances of such a heavy investment (one that would yield in Amtrak's ability to either buy out some CSX/Conrail tracks, or lay down their own track) from even the most train-loving federal administration is pretty much slim to none. And even if they were to secure such funding, it'd be another 20-30 years before we saw any benefits.
Instead, I wanted to focus on smaller things that Amtrak could do in the short-term to make riding the train a little more palatable. For instance, if it didn't take thirty-minutes to get to the platform, maybe I wouldn't have cared so much about the (relatively) small delay outside of Baltimore.
The solution to Amtrak's problem seems obvious enough to me and it involves the words "strippers" and "barbecue sauce."
The only problem with Amtrak is that it costs more than most flights.
Otherwise, it's THE BEST!!! It's just about the same time as flying for most destinations within a 400 mile distance of DC on the East Coast, if you take the following into account: The length of time necessary to get to the airport, get through security, then wait at the gate, fly to the destination, claim baggage, and then drive wherever you are going.
But the TRAIN is tops: you get to drink yourself blind, walk around, sit at picnic style tables in the dining car, or look out the window at the remnants of an America that used to Make Stuff. (Speaking of which, one wonders if, in the absence of Trenton Making, whether the World is Still Taking, but I digress).
AND Erin Carly: Who says you can't sing on the train???
I've only used Amtrak once, and the trip to New York and back was delayed once on the way there, and twice on the way back, by you guessed it, power failures. Sounds like it's a fairly common problem.
On the plus side, riding on a train is a thousand times more pleasant than flying, even with the delays.
"a private company could do it better."
I'm certainly no socialist, but I am not convinced that this is true. The airlines are (heavily subsidized) private companies, and their service is terrible. Personally I think private companies are better at constructing infrastructures, but I think their advantages over public entities shrink signficantly when it comes to actually operating those infrastructures.
"It's just about the same time as flying for most destinations within a 400 mile distance of DC on the East Coast"
I'm a huge rail fan, but I disagree with this statement. At it's best, Acela still gets beat by a relatively on-time shuttle to NYC, even door to door. Here's how I figure it. Say you're going from Dupont Circle to Central Park and you leave at noon:
By train: 12:15 get to Union Station, 12:30 get on train, 3:15 get to Penn Station, 3:30 get to Central Park.
By Shuttle: 12:15 get to National, 1:00 board plane, 2:00 get off plane at LGA, 2:30 arrive at Central Park.
Of course, that's ideal on both accounts. If it's anytime between Memorial Day and Labor Day, you can tack on at least another hour to the shuttle's time.
But the point is that the disparity between the times is not that great, and it's just a lot more pleasant to ride a train (particularly the quiet car) than to take a plane.
And as pointed out in the comments of that Citypaper article, apparently the Philly City Paper wrote on the exact same topic a year before.
1. Amtrak does NOT own most of the rails in the US, CSX and other freight railroads do. Most of the delays are because freight-train interference.
2. The entire East coast had horrendous storms during the week, I bet most of the power problems were storm related.
3. You cannot ask the railroad to make a profit and still mandate that it serve tiny districts in the Midwest. It is true that no train system in the world turns a profit. Airlines are subsidized in that they do not pay to build the airports, cities do.
4. The Acela is about 20% faster than the regional. That is worth it for some.
5. If we want better train service, Congress has got to pony up. Most of the tracks in the country were ripped up in the last 50 years. We should invest in high-speed rail infrastructure and make sure that Amtrak doesn't have to worry about the coal train in front of it.
G Lover Park, you made my day- I hadn't thought about that "Trenton makes, the world takes" sign in a few years.
I adore Acela Express for the DC-NY corridor. It's less stressful, usually less expensive, and sometimes faster than flying (counting time to get to/from the station or airport). I take this route fairly often and am rarely delayed (versus about a 30% success rate in on-time departure over the last year or two on airlines).
However. Bad management, bad infrastructure, half-assed government involvement, failure to invest in any sort of change, etc etc all add up to an organization that continues its long, slow spiral of death. A major overhaul is needed at a very fundamental level for Amtrak to be successful, in any sense of the word.
Servicewise, I think Amtrak needs to investigate express routes outside the Northeast corridor. For example, an Acela south route that runs through Richmond, Charlotte and Atlanta could attract decent business use, if it offered the same tradeoff with flights that the current Acela route does.
Future Amtrak management, be it public or private, needs to figure out some sort of future plan like the above. Then, they need to work with the government to get the infrastructure in place to make that plan possible. It would take some hefty upfront investment to get away from the freight tracks or to get new, faster express trains in the system. But offering a sustainable alternative to air travel would be well worth the effort, I think.
Amtrak’s relative inadequacies (sub-par on time performance, aging infrastructure, and ticket pricing) have little to do with the fact that it is subsidized by the federal government (to the tune of $1.4 billion per year), but that Amtrak has always been somewhat of a stepchild in the federal government. When you factor in the astronomical capital expenses required to rebuild the Northeast Corridor, no one is ever going to make money running trains between New York and Boston. While Amtrak manages to squeeze a small profit from its Northeast Corridor operations, it is hardly enough to cover the cost of major infrastructure investments that need to be made in order to speed up travel times and improve reliability. Given the current state of the Northeast Corridor, without massive investment by the federal government, a private operator would likely be plagued by the same problems as Amtrak.
Given that segments of the Northeast corridor dates back 150 years, running truly high speed trains similar to France’s TGV or Japan’s Shinkansen is simply impossible. Those countries made a policy decision decades ago to invest in high speed rail by constructing dedicated high speed rail lines. Rather, the U.S. built the interstate highway system. To think that we will ever have TGV-like trains in the Northeast with our current infrastructure or by simply privatizing Amtrak is naïve. Only an investment of tens of billions of dollars will achieve this (which in all practicality could only come from the federal government). Another rail operator won’t pay for the massive upgrades on the existing Northeast corridor to speed up service either. The federal government and the states that are served by the corridor need to decide whether they want spend a considerable amount of money to upgrade service and reliability, spend an either more unfathomable amount of money (well I guess its equivalent to a few weeks of the war in Iraq) on an entire new corridor similar to the TGV, or muddle along with the current state of things.
Sort of seconding dsade, the delays in the Northeast corridor are nothing compared to the cross-country routes. Think 8-12 hour delays on a regular basis.
As for the Guest Rewards program...it used to be the best in the biz. They had a no-annual fee, 6.9% APR credit card (MBNA) that earned 1pt/$1 plus a bonus when buying Amtrak tickets; they had near constant 3-for-2 deals on Acela; and points traded 1-to-1 with Continental. I was living abroad at the time and using that credit card for everything and quickly got 50,000 Amtrak points. I haven't paid for a NY-DC trip for years.
Sadly, the credit card went away and their new one is at a much higher APR with lower bonuses and the Continental partnership when the way of the dodo. I made the mistake once of using my miles to upgrade to "business" class from NC to NYC. From the best I can gather, all you get for the bump is free soda in a dinky cooler in the back of the car.
Come on, because the rail infrastructure doesn't exist already, we might as well not even try to reinvest and improve it? That's like saying we've already built the capital beltway so why bother trying to improve metro? Land can be reclaimed. Deals can be renegotiated. As the density of the corridor increases, it will only get more important. It's just going to take a huge amount of political will, which obviously is a big challenge. But I definitely don't buy that such transit can't be profitable after the proper planning and investments. I also agree with the statement about targeted 'express' routes, but to beat air travel they have to be relatively close. Atlanta would be good, though probably pushing it.
Anyone taking Amtrak on the east coast has no idea how bad it can get. Try taking it anyplace else in the country...
"Anyone taking Amtrak on the east coast has no idea how bad it can get. Try taking it anyplace else in the country..."
Hey, don't count California out. We have the Surfliner here which runs reasonably on-time between San Luis Obispo and San Diego and ridership is booming. The service is complemented by Metrolink in Orange and LA counties, and the Coaster in San Diego county.
The reason Acela costs more is that it runs with maximum priority. Even if your regional train is running late, it will step aside (where it can) to allow an Acela past, thereby becoming even later. You're paying for increased reliability. Saving 25 min might not seem much, but in terms of express trains it's a lot. I think that the government in the UK just finished paying out about $10bn to shave 30 min from 3-5h journeys (London to Manchester/Liverpool/Glasgow). You might do the same here and get DC to Washington down to 2h15 with the same amount of money.
Amtrak is is perceived as expensive, and the service as quite poor. It's a shame that this is enough to put most people off! New infrastructure is required, but whom except the government is going to pay for it?
The timing comparison between the shuttle and Acela seems optimistic. What is the best-case price comparison - including taxis / metro?