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Airline quarterly and annual financial reports certainly do report ridership and all other operational stats. For example:
US Airways 3rd Quarter 2013 Report - Page 32
All other airlines are similar.
What % of the population takes Amtrak?
- Thread starter MiRider
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US Airways 3rd Quarter 2013 Report - Page 32
All other airlines are similar.
the_traveler
Engineer
Until airlines have roomettes, bedrooms and dining cars, I'll continue to fly Amtrak!
Something I think is often overlooked when discussing the changing circumstances for Amtrak since A-day has been the growth of the growth in rail transit systems in the US since the low point of the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, there were plans to build comprehensive heavy rail transit systems in DC, San Francisco/Bay region, Baltimore, Atlanta, Miami, LA, and I gather in other cities as well. It certainly was not smooth sailing for those transit plans as only DC Metro and BART were completed to the extent of their original plans, Atlanta MARTA got truncated, and Baltimore & Miami ended up with one line. Although Miami added a spur to the airport recently.
While heavy rail transit systems have stalled to being expanded only in the cities that already have it, we are seeing a wave of light rail and commuter systems opening or under construction over the past 20 some years. Not in all large cities of course, as there is still significant resistance in some states and communities to the concept and upfront costs of public rail transit and still only a small percentage of the US population takes trains on a regular basis. But there has been a significant overall change since the everybody should have cars & drive everywhere days of the 1960s and early 1970s.
The relevance to Amtrak is that there are many more cities and stations with local rail transit connections than when Amtrak started. DC has undergone a remarkable change from the shutdown of the streetcar system in 1962 to Union Station as the busiest DC Metro station in a 106 mile system and with 4 Amtrak stations in the DC metro area co-located with Metro stops. LA Union Station is the center of an expanding transit system. The new Norfolk station is on the starter segment of the The Tide light rail system. Soon, Amtrak will move the Twin Cities station to St Paul Union Depot which will have a light rail line opening in 2014.
The more Amtrak stations that have local rail transit systems to connect to, the larger the potential customer base is for Amtrak and intercity passenger rail. If we want to grow support for intercity passenger rail in the US, one component would to be increase the federal funding for rail transit systems, be it light rail, (well designed) street car lines, heavy rail transit, or commuter rail. The more cities that have rail transit systems, the more that ask why don't have we more intercity passenger trains to take to other cities?
Lots of fascinating statistics in that report. I've fiddled around on the APTA site a few times, but hadn't stumbled upon that before. Thanks for linking to it.
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Nathanael
Guest
This is a very entertaining link. An interesting point: You can see from the "net income" charts that, on the whole, the airlines lose money, averaged across the years. (Warren Buffett has said that over the entire course of the airline industry it has lost extraordinary amounts of money for investors.)
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Nathanael
Guest
Have flown on Lufthansa with business class seats that reclined to near horizontal (with a nice pillow and blanket provided) and a sumptious breakfast on this overnight flight from India to Germany. Although I did have to insist from the rather snotty stewardess that I really wanted milk with my breakfast instead of coffee, tea, or liquor.
Devil's Advocate
⠀⠀⠀
Perhaps LH and 2V have the same OBS trainers.
The main difference would appear to be that LH keeps their hardware updated and maintains fairly dependable scheduling.
Or at least that's what I've been told. I don't share the Lufthansa Lovefest so couldn't comment firsthand.
Swadian Hardcore
Engineer
I don't fly much either, but Amtrak won't take me across the Atlantic or Pacific.
FAs are always hit-and-miss, you can't easily make an angry person into a happy person. Legroom is OK, seats are above-average comfortable, and food is usually good.
I've never heard of a Lufthansa Lovefest, but I do know the Emirates Lovefest and Singapore Lovefest.
Look, just because I'm riding Amtrak dosen't mean I'm not riding trains, and it dosen't mean I'm flying all the time.
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Nathanael
Guest
After I swore off flying out of US airports thanks to the TSA "policies" (note: they don't really qualify as "policies" if they're arbitrary and capricious, which they are), I researched ship travel.
The Atlantic can be crossed on Cunard Lines, just like in the 19th century. It can actually be much cheaper than a room on Amtrak (though of course it takes more time per mile).
Crossing the Pacific requires getting a berth on a freighter. The freighter berths are even cheaper than Cunard.
OlympianHiawatha
Engineer
From what I understand it is legally impossible to book sea passage from the Mainland to Hawaii on a Liner because of Cabotage Laws. Since it involves travel between 2 American Ports, it must be conducted on American Flagged Vessels and no Liners currently are American registered.
After seeing a documentary on the Queen Mary 2, I'd really love to take a ship across the ocean. It would feel old-fashioned, and I think it would be fun. I can only imagine how gorgeous the sky is at night.
Devil's Advocate
⠀⠀⠀
The idea that average citizens cannot be reliably tracked is perpetuated for reasons other than honest transparency. The basic computational theories were understood back in the 1980's, the necessary data pools were in the process of being digitized in the 1990's, and the required processing power was commoditized in the 2000's. If you think you're not being accurately tracked you're either taking exceptional measures to avoid being tracked or you simply don't understand the nature of what's tracking you.
I tend to agree with many of your positions regarding passenger rail, but I honestly have no idea where you're getting these assumptions from.
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They Sort of Do have them on International First Class and Business First Flights! But knowing You, and your Aversion to Paying for Anything, you will have to Use Some of your Stockpiled Airline Mileage to Fly since they Don't take AGR Points!
:giggle:
Norwegian Cruise Line's Pride of America is the only large American flagged cruise ship. It sails exclusively in the Hawaiian Islands which I believe are part of the US.
American staff too with the kind of service you can expect
Granted, that's only based on reviews I've read.
This is going to venture off topic a bit,
If you're willing to fly there or back, a lot of the major cruise lines reposition their ships in the spring and fall for the warm weather European cruising season - usually May-Oct.
You can get a TA crossing in and visit numerous European and/or British ports for a lot less than you think with all of your room and board included.
Much nicer accommodations, service, and food than you'll ever find on Amtrak for a heck of a lot less per day than the cheapest roomette.
Entertainment, activities, and more. I can assure you of one thing, you'll never get attitude or poor service from cruise ship staff ever.
You can also order room service 24/7, eat from any number of specialty food venues, real white tablecloth meals in the main dining room all included in your fare.
Here's just one such repositioning cruise from Royal Caribbean, other cruise lines have them too.
14 nights from Tampa to Boston, then TA to Ireland, France, Belgium, and England starting at $1159 pp based on double occupancy.
Scroll down to see what the staterooms look like and you'll never look at a roomette as a deal again.
RCL 14 night repositioning cruise
Now, me, I love the underdog which is why I'm headed down to NOLA soon on the CONO to take another Carnival
cruise, devil be damned Again, our 7 day cruise for 2 in an aft extended balcony stateroom with all of the amenities and more that I mentioned above including port taxes and prepaid gratuities averages out to $140/pp per day.
Our roundtrip CONO roomette averages out to $160/pp each way not including gratuities and that's not even for 24 hours.
That said, I love the train and will pay what's asked because I love it.
It's the only game in town so I have no choice.
This will be the view for 7 days from my $140 per day, all inclusive balcony. :wub:
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Sweet!!! The View from the Tin Can I was on didn't look like that on our WestPac Cruises! :giggle:
You poor thing :giggle:
I'm pretty darn lucky, that's for sure.
I love being able to take the train to a ship. :wub:
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Nathanael
Guest
It's quite straightforward to avoid being tracked *accurately*. All you need is several variant spellings of your name and several sets of distinct habits -- and this is easier to do, even by accident, than most people think it is. All the algorithms are designed for "average case" scenarios.
You are quite right that most people don't do anything to avoid being tracked though, and most people are creatures of habit. So the tracking works fine for marketing, of course, because for marketing you don't really care whether all your numbers are off by 5%, or whether 5% of the people you're tracking are nonexistent/duplicates/ficticious -- 5% is immaterial. This tracking was, of course, developed for marketing purposes.
The tracking doesn't work for most legitimate government purposes. Many agencies of the government need to find actual individuals who are trying not to be tracked -- which you simply can't reliably do with this sort of easily-spoofed, easily-stuffed-with-garbage data. The NSA is very good at spying on (and collecting blackmail information on) famous public officials and corporate leaders who are constantly in the limelight, but pretty much useless at catching terrorists or other people who don't want to be found. Every other agency trying to use "big data", including the TSA, has a similar record. Apparently Tsarnaev was "misplaced" in the records simply because he used a variant spelling of his name.
Meanwhile, regarding more respectable government agencies like the IRS, Social Security Administration, or census, they usually want exact data, which this sort of marketing-tracking simply can't generate.
I'm probably exaggerating the stats, but the fact is that the airlines do not know how many unique travellers they have, largely because *they don't really care*. It's the same ticket revenue whether it's two people or one person making two trips. They know most of their frequent travellers, and they really aren't bothered about whether the remaining occasional customers are repeat customers or separate customers -- it doesn't matter so why try to find out? Furthermore, the airlines have a commercial incentive not to swap data with each other, so every time you change airline you show up as a separate traveller. Quite likely with a different misspelled variant of your name, if my experience is typical; I had three different misspellings on one trip once. (eyeroll) As for the TSA, they can't even tell apart different people with the same name, as numerous incidents have documented, so they certainly don't know.
To get back to topic, I don't think Amtrak really cares how many of its riders are unique either. It's the same ticket revenue either way.
I think the original motivation for this topic was the question of what percentage of the population was aware of, and cared about, Amtrak. This is a good question, but counting unique riders also doesn't really measure that. That depends on how many of your riders liked the experience and how many of them are talking to their friends. Worse, it's documented that social networks follow a power law, so that a small number of people have a zillion friends while a large number of people have a few friends -- so actually, "public opinion" of Amtrak depends on a relatively small number of "opinion makers" who know a huge number of people and talk to them a lot. Which means it matters whether your riders are "opinion makers" or not, so the raw number of unique riders is unimportant.
Now, one thing you can do with tracking and social network analysis is to identify which people are highly-connected opinion makers. This is one reason it's useful for marketing. Of course, if you give those people the slightest hint that you're doing something creepy like tracking them, they may turn on you.... and they're opinion makers, so... all this stuff is much harder to do competently than your average "Big Data" guy thinks it is.
I'm no Cyber or Security Expert but as a Retired Government Employee I can say that considering all the Unknown TRILLIONS of Dollars that the Government Has and Is Spending on "Intellegence" and Data Gathering", the Overall Results have been Poor to Miserable! :angry:
However, with Technology Progressing by Leaps and Bounds and Considering that most Companies in this Business Compete for Lucrative Government Contracts, I'd say that the Famous Quote that "..Big Brother is "Watching!" from 1984 is More True all the Time! (And we help them with Trackable Electronic Devices, Cameras and Volunteer Info provided to Corporations and Government! Every 20 Years we have a "Scandal" about Domestic Spying, but it seems perfectly OK to Most Americans if its done Overseas! (The CIA and NSA Charters and all the other Ultra-Secret Agencies Exist for this Purpose!)hboy:
However, with Technology Progressing by Leaps and Bounds and Considering that most Companies in this Business Compete for Lucrative Government Contracts, I'd say that the Famous Quote that "..Big Brother is "Watching!" from 1984 is More True all the Time! (And we help them with Trackable Electronic Devices, Cameras and Volunteer Info provided to Corporations and Government! Every 20 Years we have a "Scandal" about Domestic Spying, but it seems perfectly OK to Most Americans if its done Overseas! (The CIA and NSA Charters and all the other Ultra-Secret Agencies Exist for this Purpose!)
hboy:- Status
