United Rail Passenger Alliance

by Andrew C. Selden

There has been much discussion lately about the comparative virtues of short corridors versus longer distance inter-regional services. The conventional view, that short corridors have higher potential profitability, is widely shared but has little basis in fact. Let us consider some of the conventional myths.

• MYTH: The longer distance services are “lightly used.”REALITY: The load factors on these trains are double the load factors of the short corridors, in California and the Northeast alike. The aggregate ridership, for example, of the few long distance trains that serve Chicago exceeds the ridership of all of the short corridor trains that serve Chicago. Much more importantly, the output of those long distance trains, measured by revenue passenger miles, exceeds the output of the Chicago-hub corridor trains by a factor of about 700%. In California, the output and revenue of the one long distance train operated by Amtrak West, the Coast Starlight, substantially exceeds the output and revenues of ALL of the Pacific Surfliners between San Diego and San Luis Obispo.

  So, one can hardly characterize the long hauls as “lightly used.” In fact, the greatest single shortcoming of the inter-regional trains today is that their capacity has declined steadily over the last decade due to management neglect (bordering on overt hostility) such that their ability to accommodate latent demand has declined as well.

• MYTH: Rail’s appeal is in the 300 mile corridors, and this is where new development should be concentrated.REALITY: The average trip length on the western long hauls already exceeds 800 miles. And rail’s aggregate market share for intercity passenger trips is the absolute lowest in the 200 to 300 mile markets but highest in the 800 to 1000 mile distances. What rational investor would undertake to invest billions of dollars in new capital into an enterprise’s weakest segment?
• MYTH: Short corridors offer the biggest return on our infrastructure funds.REALITY: In addition to mere dollars, we must take opportunity costs into account. One thing we certainly have learned by now is that high speed or low speed corridor development projects such as what we see in the Northeast Corridor (NEC) with semi-high speed, or in California with more modest speeds, require vast amounts of scarce, finite, public capital.