Other than Chicago - Milwaukee with 8 round trips per day, the other Chicago based operations do not exceed the 5 or 6 trains per day that seems to be the threshold that is hard to exceed outside of the NEC.
Northeast Regional discussion
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Most have only 3-4 round trips per day. The Hiawatha has 7, and the Piedmont/Carolinian and CHI-STL service have 5. With that kind of frequency, you're not going to have significant market share. There are 17 BOS-WAS trains a day, plus more NYP -WAS and NYP PHL trains each day. That's what all the corridors should be aiming for.
12 Capitol Corridor trains/ day between Oakland and Sacramento, 7 of which also serve San Jose.
6 Cascade trains/day plus the Coast Starlight serving Seattle - Portland, only 2 per day serving Seattle and Vancouver, BC
10 Pacific Surfliners per day serving LA and San Diego, 5 to Goleta and Santa Barabara, and 2 to San Luis Obispo.
crescent-zephyr
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Sorry.. I don't think I understood your point. Originally you said "passenger rail is a significant part of the transportation mix" - I definitely think Chicago qualifies when you count all of the Amtrak corridor trains, Metra, and South Shore.
fdaley
OBS Chief
I would think the online population of each route would be a factor in trains' market share. On population alone, for example, it seems likely that the Downeaster, with five round trips per day, is capturing a bigger share of the total Boston-Portland travel market than a Chicago-St. Louis service with the same number of frequencies, given that Chicago is bigger than Boston and St. Louis is much more populous than Portland.
Of course, distance is a factor too. Boston-Portland is less than half the distance of Chicago-St. L, so likely there are more people shuttling back and forth between BON and POR. And when you get to distances like Chicago-St. Louis and Chicago-Detroit, planes start to take a more significant share.
Anyway, no question that more frequencies will capture more market share. But what constitutes the optimal level of service on each route is probably influenced by these other factors.
Of course, distance is a factor too. Boston-Portland is less than half the distance of Chicago-St. L, so likely there are more people shuttling back and forth between BON and POR. And when you get to distances like Chicago-St. Louis and Chicago-Detroit, planes start to take a more significant share.
Anyway, no question that more frequencies will capture more market share. But what constitutes the optimal level of service on each route is probably influenced by these other factors.
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cirdan
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shouldn't that be the other way round?
fdaley
OBS Chief
Well, assuming the trains have the same capacity, five trains serving a much larger market will necessarily be carrying a smaller share of that market.
cirdan
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from that point of view, yes. I thought you were implying that market share should necessarily be higher for places with lower population.
fdaley
OBS Chief
I dunno. I can remember some naysayers back in the late '80s saying that commuter rail would never work in southern California, that nobody would use it because everything was too spread out and Californians love their cars. And now of course there's a very extensive and well-used network of Metrolink and Amtrak routes. Even so, in terms of market share, it probably doesn't come close to the share that uses rail to get into and out of metro New York.
I suspect the development pattern does play a role in how much market share you can attract. Certainly having a major city with a well-developed transit system at one end, such as a New York, Boston or Chicago, makes a rail corridor more likely to succeed. And along the NEC, you have a whole string of such cities. But the potential is there for a lot of other routes, and if you develop a good service, maybe over time that can influence development patterns in a way that makes the service more useful to more travelers.
west point
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I was one of the skeptics who thought that commuter rail would be not succeed or be used by very few persons as I saw no comparsion to the NEC or even San Francisco. -How wrong I was..
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cirdan
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other factors might include status of airline competition, as well as speed, quality and reliability of the train service. Also of importance are the passengers generated by intermediate stations, connections to commuter lines and indeed local bus lines that could funnel in passengers. Not to forget of course how well stations are located in the cities they serve. And finally some city pairs just inherently have more potential than others because of structural ties, economic, and other patterns leading to more people travelling between those cities. The reasons for such behavior are not always easy to discern or explain.
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cirdan
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Often this is a chicken and egg question. Car-centric cities tend to be spread out as they have no incentive to place things close together. Transit-centric cities often build around the transit stations with real estate closer to a station being more desirable and this reinforces the virtuous cycle of offices, shops and homes being built close to stations. So once you have a well established commuter or light rail system, real estate development tends to be attracted to the locations best served which starts the virtuous cycle, although such a transition can take decades if not generations to complete.
Good points!
Also good! Brightline development in Florida is proving that...indeed, it was the driving force for its creation wasn't it?
The population density of the NEC is sort of unique in the USA:
Metro area population
New York - 19.6 million'
Washington - 6.2 million
Philadelphia 6.2 million
Boston 4.9 million
Baltimore 2.8 million
Richmond 1.3 million
I don't think any of the other corridors have so many intermediate cities with such large populations.
Plus, more cities in the Northeast all along the line where one can live or visit car-free:
Boston
New York
Philadelphia
Washington
Other parts of the country (e.g., Chicago, San Franscisco. Seattle, Portland) may only have one "car free city" in the corridor. (OK, Seattle and Portland are an exception, but the metros aren't quite as big (Seattle at 4 million and Portland at 2.5 million.)
The NEC also has major regional rail systems feeding into Amtrak in Boston, New York, Newark and Philadelphia, and minor regional rail in Baltimore and Washington. Plus it has a bunch of park and ride stations (New Carrolton, BWI, Metro Park, and Rt. 128) that add suburban ridership that doesn't have access to regional rail.
And for the stuff coming out of Chicago, which does have major regional rail connections, here are the populations:
Chicago 9.4 million
Detroit 4.3 million
Minneapolis/St. Paul 3.7 million
St. Louis 2.8 million
Cincinatti 2.2 million
Kansas City 2.2 million
Indianapolis 2.1 million
Cleveland 2.1 million
Milwaukee 1.5 million
I'm sure they could develop good corridors with hourly plus service in these places outside the NEC, but it will require more than just running trains to make them successful. They'll need to do some heavy-duty transit oriented development around the stations, and [robably build some park and ride stations, too,
Metro area population
New York - 19.6 million'
Washington - 6.2 million
Philadelphia 6.2 million
Boston 4.9 million
Baltimore 2.8 million
Richmond 1.3 million
I don't think any of the other corridors have so many intermediate cities with such large populations.
Plus, more cities in the Northeast all along the line where one can live or visit car-free:
Boston
New York
Philadelphia
Washington
Other parts of the country (e.g., Chicago, San Franscisco. Seattle, Portland) may only have one "car free city" in the corridor. (OK, Seattle and Portland are an exception, but the metros aren't quite as big (Seattle at 4 million and Portland at 2.5 million.)
The NEC also has major regional rail systems feeding into Amtrak in Boston, New York, Newark and Philadelphia, and minor regional rail in Baltimore and Washington. Plus it has a bunch of park and ride stations (New Carrolton, BWI, Metro Park, and Rt. 128) that add suburban ridership that doesn't have access to regional rail.
And for the stuff coming out of Chicago, which does have major regional rail connections, here are the populations:
Chicago 9.4 million
Detroit 4.3 million
Minneapolis/St. Paul 3.7 million
St. Louis 2.8 million
Cincinatti 2.2 million
Kansas City 2.2 million
Indianapolis 2.1 million
Cleveland 2.1 million
Milwaukee 1.5 million
I'm sure they could develop good corridors with hourly plus service in these places outside the NEC, but it will require more than just running trains to make them successful. They'll need to do some heavy-duty transit oriented development around the stations, and [robably build some park and ride stations, too,
fdaley
OBS Chief
Chicago-Detroit strikes me as one that's ripe for upgrading. The current 3-per-day frequency doesn't seem like enough given the size of the endpoints, and there are several decent-sized online cities. Plus Detroit is well more than halfway to Toronto, which is a really major metro with regional rail/transit and car-free potential. I was glad to see Detroit-Toronto on Amtrak's list of potential new corridors; now if we could just get past the border-crossing issues, which are a huge thicket by themselves, plus the fact that the current Detroit and Windsor stations are in the wrong places for through service.
A rule of thumb that has worked for me is that the ridership on a well-designed service can keep growing up to the point where headways are equal to travel time between points being served. Adding more service past that point results in diminishing returns, unless it's being added to handle crowding. Adding more service does make shorter trips attractive.
A much more mathematic analysis of this phenomenon is Alon Levy's, and he shows that half the travel time is the ideal headway.
In either case, the NEC has numerous potential trips shorter than NYP <> WAS. In contrast, SEA <> PDX just this year has seven trips, resulting in headways equal to travel times, but intermediate trips such as TAC <> PDX would need more frequent service than its smaller market might support.
Amtrak has 30% fare discount for NEC travel if you’re a baseball fan. Not sure how they verify if you’re actually going to a game. Learned about this from an email sent by the Orioles (going to a game in June). It’s lists all the MLB teams on the NEC. Can be extra for business class.
Wow, interesting discount! Do you mind sending the link?
Part of the email from O’s:
You (xxx.com) received this commercial email messages from orioles.com Partners or purchased a ticket from orioles.com.
Amtrak NEC sale for MLB
