Has E-Ticketing had a direct influence on Ridership?

[cuppb001]

I ask this question, since before e-ticketing I would only board at staffed stations like JAX, ORL, SAV, ATL. Part of the problem was that I typically book my trips at the last minute and it is mostly Florida or Georgia only travel and didnt have time to have tickets mailed to me. With e-ticketing I have no hesitation to now board at JSP which is significantly closer than many of the stations I have listed. Is it known at all if unstaffed stations have had an increase in ridership with the ease of e-tickets? I have seen on here where people chastise JSP for even being a stop but each time I am there anywhere from 20-30 people board and detrain.

 

[zepherdude]

When airlines went to E-Tickets, I read tons of bad press of what could happen as trips could be lost or mishandled. I always asked for a paper ticket, in the beginning. All that fear is long gone and never had an issue with E-tickets. When Amtrak got into it, I suspect, most people were used to it and most find it uneventful now. Since I-Phones, the ability to produce a ticket to scan from the phone is a helpful advantage as well and makes it easy to board anywhere.

 

[amtkstn]

I like as Amtrak passenger not to have to get to the boarding station as early due having to get paper tickets. Also I don't have have to have tickets mailed a week ahead if boarding at a station with no agent.

 

[fairviewroad]

When the next round of annual ridership figures come out, it would certainly be interesting to compare boardings at non-staffed stations as far as pre-and-post e-ticketing. I suspect it's made a relatively small difference, but it's certainly can't hurt. But how many of those "new" boardings would simply be people like yourself who shift which station

they use, as opposed to actual new riders lured by the convenience. I'm guessing most once-a-year riders bought their tickets far enough in advance to where this wasn't an issue for them.

 

[MikefromCrete]

I think it will have the most effect on the short distance routes where people decide at the last minute to ride. Those taking long trips probably make plans months in advance.

 

[battalion51]

I'd be willing to guess the biggest difference will be in the number of tickets Conductors sell on board. Right now the only time a Conductor is likely to sell a ticket is if someone boards at an unstaffed station and wants to pay cash.

 

[dlagrua]

Throughout history technology never stands still. Go back just 30 years and hardly anyone had a cell phone, the internet was in its infancy and nearly everyone read newspapers, paid their bills and corresponded by USPS mail. All that has changed and now eTickets are common. They are used for sports events, Broadway Shows, tourist attractions, lodging, airline tickets and now for Amtrak ticketing. They save businesses money and generate a somewhat lower paper waste.
eTickets are a good thing because if you lose them they can be re-printed or accessed online by computer or smartphone. You can also print duplicates to guard for any loss or to have a backup set when heading out for train trips. You also don't have any of the old printed tickets to return by mail for a cancellation.
To answer the question; I would say eTicketing has no effect on ridership. I like them. .

 

[BCL]

I'd be willing to guess the biggest difference will be in the number of tickets Conductors sell on board. Right now the only time a Conductor is likely to sell a ticket is if someone boards at an unstaffed station and wants to pay cash.

There is of course an extra fee for that.

Along the route I've taken for my commute there are three stations without QT kiosks. I'm thinking of boarding at one of these stations just to try it out.

 

[BCL]

When airlines went to E-Tickets, I read tons of bad press of what could happen as trips could be lost or mishandled. I always asked for a paper ticket, in the beginning. All that fear is long gone and never had an issue with E-tickets. When Amtrak got into it, I suspect, most people were used to it and most find it uneventful now. Since I-Phones, the ability to produce a ticket to scan from the phone is a helpful advantage as well and makes it easy to board anywhere.

I think electronic ticketing has made it much better in terms of airlines "managing inventory". It's made it far easier to shop for air travel as one doesn't need to pick up tickets (and many airlines no longer have ticket offices in major cities).

However, what makes it work is that someone will check ID against the name on the ticket. The name on the boarding pass is always checked against photo ID. I do worry that if I drop an eTicket printout that maybe someone decides to try to use it. I've never been asked to produce ID taking Amtrak, and in my dealings with Amtrak have only been asked for ID when buying tickets at a staffed station (seemed more like it was to spell the names correctly) and getting a refund via eVoucher.

 

[zepherdude]

Throughout history technology never stands still. Go back just 30 years and hardly anyone had a cell phone, the internet was in its infancy and nearly everyone read newspapers, paid their bills and corresponded by USPS mail. All that has changed and now eTickets are common. They are used for sports events, Broadway Shows, tourist attractions, lodging, airline tickets and now for Amtrak ticketing. They save businesses money and generate a somewhat lower paper waste.eTickets are a good thing because if you lose them they can be re-printed or accessed online by computer or smartphone. You can also print duplicates to guard for any loss or to have a backup set when heading out for train trips. You also don't have any of the old printed tickets to return by mail for a cancellation.

To answer the question; I would say eTicketing has no effect on ridership. I like them. .

Great point about ID. I never used to carry my passport except when traveling out of the country. It is a breeze getting though any security with it in hand. I now carry it whenever I travel as times are so much different since 9-11.

 

[battalion51]

I'd be willing to guess the biggest difference will be in the number of tickets Conductors sell on board. Right now the only time a Conductor is likely to sell a ticket is if someone boards at an unstaffed station and wants to pay cash.

There is of course an extra fee for that.

Along the route I've taken for my commute there are three stations without QT kiosks. I'm thinking of boarding at one of these stations just to try it out.

IIRC, if the station is unstaffed (or ticket windows are closed) you can buy on board, with the only penalty being the highest bucket. Whereas, if you bought on board at a staffed station there is a penalty in addition to the highest bucket.

 

[VentureForth]

Back in December, I literally bought a ticket while in line with my cell phone to board a Southbound Silver Meteor.

I think this will help unstaffed stations a lot. Everytime I've been to JSP when Amtrak arrived, there were plenty of people getting on or off.

IIRC, if the station is unstaffed (or ticket windows are closed) you can buy on board, with the only penalty being the highest bucket. Whereas, if you bought on board at a staffed station there is a penalty in addition to the highest bucket.

I thought before e-tickets, it was bucket price unless you were at a staffed station, then it was top bucket. Today, it's always top bucket; I don't know if there is a penalty for buying on board when boarding from a staffed station.

 

[battalion51]

I believe you are right Venture that the buckets were there before e-ticketing. Back then you could also make a reservation and pay that price when you board, whereas that generally isn't the case anymore. As Amtrak.com says...

On most Amtrak trains, only the full, undiscounted, unrestricted fare will be available for purchase onboard the train. This is regardless of reservations made or fares previously quoted. To secure the best available fare, passengers should purchase tickets prior to boarding the trains.

 

[calwatch]

It certainly makes rewards redemption a lot easier to do, and also gives an another advantage over Greyhound for those rural and small urban city pairs, since Greyhound requires a paper ticket.

 

[BCL]

I'd be willing to guess the biggest difference will be in the number of tickets Conductors sell on board. Right now the only time a Conductor is likely to sell a ticket is if someone boards at an unstaffed station and wants to pay cash.

There is of course an extra fee for that.

Along the route I've taken for my commute there are three stations without QT kiosks. I'm thinking of boarding at one of these stations just to try it out.

IIRC, if the station is unstaffed (or ticket windows are closed) you can buy on board, with the only penalty being the highest bucket. Whereas, if you bought on board at a staffed station there is a penalty in addition to the highest bucket.

I typically take Capitol Corridor, which has fixed prices except for the 10% AAA discounts or the occasional weekend fare special. For a while it took me some time to figure out what this "bucket" was that people were arguing about.

I've occasionally used the Santa Clara (SCC) station. It's primarily a Caltrain station and doesn't have a QT kiosk. It's got an old classic railroad depot, but that's now only a museum after Caltrain stopped having people sell tickets (and one used to buy them on board on weekends when the ticket windows were closed). I've seen people get on at Hayward and pay for a ticket, including someone with the biggest one year old I've ever seen (when he didn't pay a fare for her).

Why the Oakland Coliseum station doesn't have a station sort of puzzles me, although perhaps they're thinking with the neighborhood that maybe there's a chance of vandalism. As unstaffed stations go, that's a pretty heavily used one.

 

[BCL]

Back in December, I literally bought a ticket while in line with my cell phone to board a Southbound Silver Meteor.

There is that AT&T Mobile commercial where someone changes his ticket on his mobile phone just so he can sit across from a woman on a train who catches his eye. The commercial goes backwards where this meeting led them to have a child who became President of the United States.

 

[fairviewroad]

Back in December, I literally bought a ticket while in line with my cell phone to board a Southbound Silver Meteor.

There is that AT&T Mobile commercial where someone changes his ticket on his mobile phone just so he can sit across from a woman on a train who catches his eye. The commercial goes backwards where this meeting led them to have a child who became President of the United States.

Yes, because commuter trains like that require reservations. :wacko:

 

[afigg]

When the next round of annual ridership figures come out, it would certainly be interesting to compare boardings at non-staffed stations as far as pre-and-post e-ticketing. I suspect it's made a relatively small difference, but it's certainly can't hurt. But how many of those "new" boardings would simply be people like yourself who shift which station they use, as opposed to actual new riders lured by the convenience. I'm guessing most once-a-year riders bought their tickets far enough in advance to where this wasn't an issue for them.

I think eTickets will help ridership at the unstaffed stations and stations w/o Quik-Trak machines, but the increase due to eTickets will be difficult to separate from other factors: overall ridership growth, service improvements on the route, etc. Ridership is up +6.7% on the Vermonter for the first 6 months of the fiscal year. Is some of that due to eTickets or is that due to other factors?

There may be a demographic factor with eTickets with more younger riders and college students from towns with non-staffed stations taking Amtrak. Before eTickets, the reaction among the college age group who got on-line and discovered that their ticket would have to be mailed to them might have run along these lines: "Mail me the ticket!? What, SNAIL MAIL? Who uses MAIL anymore? What is this, the 20th Century? The heck with that." But, unless Amtrak puts some marketing stats about eTicketing into a report, we won't know if there is any demographic components to eTicketing.

If ridership does go up at the smaller and rural unstaffed stations, one way we might see it is to compare total percentage of passengers at the staffed stations vs unstaffed / no QT machine stations for the FYs prior to eTicketing against the several FYs afterwards. Since eTicketing was only rolled last year, won't be able to make that comparison until FY14 station numbers are available. But, speaking from a statistics standpoint, a shift to more ridership in rural stations may be offset by the significant shift to population growth in cities over rural and small town America that is underway.

 

[VentureForth]

Back in December, I literally bought a ticket while in line with my cell phone to board a Southbound Silver Meteor.

There is that AT&T Mobile commercial where someone changes his ticket on his mobile phone just so he can sit across from a woman on a train who catches his eye. The commercial goes backwards where this meeting led them to have a child who became President of the United States.

Yes, because commuter trains like that require reservations. :wacko:

Yes - I remember that commercial. Thought it was funny that a US telecon company was showing off a service that didn't exist, using European models....sigh...

 

[BCL]

Yes, because commuter trains like that require reservations. :wacko:

Well - Caltrain no longer sells tickets on board, although they're not linked to any kind of eTicket. One can only use paper tickets purchased at a ticket machine or debit fares from a Clipper Card. I'm not sure what that commercial is trying to represent though. It may very well be that they're attempting to pass it off as an Amtrak-like system but didn't seek Amtrak's permission. The phone screen says "M Railways", so it's not all that clear what they're trying to portray.

 

[Ryan]

Wasn't it also AT&T that just ran essentially the same commercial, but with people on an actual Acela and touting actual Amtrak's e-ticketing?

I wonder if that commercial was supposed to run when this one did and a delay in e-Ticket rollout forced AT&T to go back and genereisize the commercial in 2010....

 

[Aaron]

In Amtrak's FY2013 budget (http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/345/484/AmtrakFY13-Budget-Comprehensive-Business-Plan-w-appx-052413.pdf), they used the services of a consulting firm with sophisticated models (read: monkey with a dart board) to break down the projected revenue increase in 2013 and identify which source is responsible for which portion of the increase. Their conclusion is that "Impact of eTicketing" adds $900,000 additional revenue during the 2013 fiscal year. That's less of an impact than "Improved Acela WiFI" (2.2 million), or "Impact of WiFi on short distance routes" (1.5 million), but still greater than $0.

Of course, the budget also says an additional $2.8 million is required in FY2013 to finish rolling out eTicketing to all ticketing and passenger scenarios. There's nothing that points to a reduction in operating expenses due to the impact of eTicketing. You would think there might be one, but might be currently offset by additional training costs or something. Even if there was a net reduction, I don't know if their consultant would know how to develop a formula to guess at that.

 

[hmy1]

Yes - I remember that commercial. Thought it was funny that a US telecon company was showing off a service that didn't exist, using European models....sigh...

Huh? That commercial was filmed at LAUS using Surfliner equipment.

 

[leemell]

Throughout history technology never stands still. Go back just 30 years and hardly anyone had a cell phone, the internet was in its infancy and nearly everyone read newspapers, paid their bills and corresponded by USPS mail. All that has changed and now eTickets are common. They are used for sports events, Broadway Shows, tourist attractions, lodging, airline tickets and now for Amtrak ticketing. They save businesses money and generate a somewhat lower paper waste.

Close on the cell phone, nobody had it until the first consumer use of the cell phone in October of 1983. The first commercial use of the Internet was not until the middle 90's. It had extensive academic, research, educational, and military use from about the late 70's.

 

[BCL]

Throughout history technology never stands still. Go back just 30 years and hardly anyone had a cell phone, the internet was in its infancy and nearly everyone read newspapers, paid their bills and corresponded by USPS mail. All that has changed and now eTickets are common. They are used for sports events, Broadway Shows, tourist attractions, lodging, airline tickets and now for Amtrak ticketing. They save businesses money and generate a somewhat lower paper waste.

Close on the cell phone, nobody had it until the first consumer use of the cell phone in October of 1983. The first commercial use of the Internet was not until the middle 90's. It had extensive academic, research, educational, and military use from about the late 70's.

There was commercial use of the Internet for years - primarily text-only email communications. However, the World Wide Web wasn't really much until the mid-90s. I remember the first time I'd discovered a web browser (Mosaic) at a university computing center. Someone suggested I try the commercial successor - Netscape Navigator. I remember looking around to see what companies I knew had websites. I'd even just randomly check to see if a certain company had a domain name reserved. Some companies were pretty early to the show.

Now there were mobile phones before actual cell phones, but they were extremely expensive. I remember seeing some on TV shows and movies. The Thrill of It All with James Garner had a scene where his obstetrician character is talking to a rich man on a car phone while his wife is giving birth. I think most required connecting via an operator and were operated similar to old switchboards.