Let’s just keep this theme going, as the evidence piles up.
As Highway and Air Travel Slump, Intercity Train Trips Increase
If your holiday plans happen to include taking the train to another city, you’re in good company. As has been widely reported, Amtrak has broken ridership records throughout the year. A total of 31.2 million passengers boarded Amtrak trains in the fiscal year that ended September 30; that’s an increase of 3.5 percent over the previous year.
What’s also interesting, as reported by our friends at All Aboard Ohio, is that as more people opt for intercity trains, highway driving is dipping and air travel is losing ground.
Over the past 12 years, Amtrak ridership has grown 46 percent [PDF]. Meanwhile, highway travel — excluding freight — is down 7 percent over that time. Total plane boardings grew just 3 percent over the same period, compared to U.S. population growth of 12 percent.
The costs of driving rose 54 percent from 32.5 cents per mile in 2000 to 50 cents in 2010. It climbed higher in 2012, to 55.5 cents per mile.
I thought that Amtrak annual ridership figure seemed pretty low so I consulted the lazy man’s source – Wikipedia – which suggests that SkyTrain had 117.4 million passengers in 2010. Granted, the AmTrak trips do include commuter rail but also include occasional and non-commuter trips which don’t provide the same sort of regular day-to-day churn as commuter rail, but the disparity is still pretty shocking.
Amtrak, 1 year passengers, US-wide : ~30 million
SkyTrain, 1 year passengers, Metro Van : ~117 million
VIA rail, 1 year passengers, Canada-wide : ~4 million
GO Trains only (excl. bus), 1 year passengers, Toronto & region : ~48 million
In 2011, there were 79,914,207 SkyTrain trips and 39,668,773 Canada Line trips (total of 119.6 million). Up 1.63% from 2010 (most of that coming on the Canada Line).
By comparison, there were 226 million bus trips.
All of these numbers are boardings, which counts each passenger multiple times when they transfer.Translink also publishes “passenger trip” statistics, that count each passenger when they first board the system. By that metric, there were 78.8 million trips on SkyTrain and Canada Line.
2011 Figures (and all historical numbers) available here: http://www.metrovancouver.org/about/publications/Publications/Transit%20Ridership.pdf
You cannot compare an INTERCITY operator with an URBAN and SUBURBAN rail operator. It is quite obvious that there will be more trips with the second operator. By the way, Amtrak can move more passengers only IF they had more passenger cars and more lines, there were cuts of important services in 1979 and 1997, the second one mainly because of lacking of cars to mantain all services running daily.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much good news on long distance, passenger rail in Canada. Via Rail recently cut 1/3 of Vancouver’s passenger rail service to Eastern Canada – from an already inadequate 3 trains per week to two – between October and April. Ironically, the U.S. nows provides more long, distance passenger rail service – 2 trains per day – to Vancouver than Canada does. This sad turn of events was barely commented upon in Vancouver’s media.
http://transportactionbc.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/the-slow-death-of-passenger-rail-in-canada-continues/