Good News for Passenger Rail

I saw some really good news today, Amtrak believes that they're in for their busiest year ever in FY10! (previous record was set in FY08). What's interesting was that even in the depths of the worst recession in ages, it turns out that Amtrak scored it's 2nd-best ridership year in FY09 (Amtrak reports all of it's stats by government financial year, so FY09 was October 2008 to September 2009, so it really encompassed the financial crisis).

Last September I grabbed some data on Amtrak ridership in Maryland. Turns out that Amtrak still had old state fact sheets hosted on their website, just no links (found this out using Google), so I was able to pull up data all the way back to FY03. I've just added in the data for FY09 and thought I'd publish the data here (keep in mind that this is ridership data; where ridership = boardings + alightings, so if you buy a round-trip ticket you get counted twice):

Baltimore and BWI Rail Station dominate Maryland Station usage, but there is a sizable contingent from New Carrolton and a non-negligible usage at Aberdeen. Overall, the ridership grew by 6.2% at Maryland stations, but the individual station usage is more noisy. Ranging from Rockville's 70.58% increase to New Carrollton's -21.7%. I'd guess that changes in service patterns probably explain a lot of changes in New Carrollton, but I don't follow rail travel closely enough to know. It is really interesting that the two least used stations (Cumberland and Rockville) saw ~70% increases and both saw increased usage in FY09 vs FY08.

Another thing that you have to consider is that many, many people who technically live in Maryland use Union Station as their Amtrak station (it is the 2nd most used Amtrak station in the country). So I also took a look at how all the Maryland stations stacked up against Union Station:

Union Station saw a drop from FY08 to FY09, but certainly not as much as Maryland. I imagine this has something to do with the fact that Marylanders could drive or car pool instead of taking the train but people in DC don't own cars. Or maybe it reflects all the bank executives that had to take the train to DC for bail-outs.

Even though travel to-from Union Station dwarfs travel to-from Maryland stations, there just aren't many states that use Amtrak as much as Maryland. Nearby stations in the top 25:

#2 - Union Station (4,278,930)

#8 - Baltimore (932,827)

#11 - Wilmington, DE (664,429)

#16 - BWI Rail Station (617,349)

Interestingly enough, if you increase the geographical area to include nearby parts of Pennsylvania, you'd pick up the #3, #20, and #22 rail stations (Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Lancaster respectively). For reasons I can not fathom, Pittsburgh gets fewer passengers than New Carrollton.

Overall, as a fan of train travel, I think a healthy passenger rail system would be a great thing for this country to develop (and I believe we're taking steps in that direction) so increased ridership is great news. Perhaps someday Amtrak will even make money outside of the Northeast Corridor!

Anyway, there's a ton of interesting info available from the Amtrak Information and Facts website. Basically you can look up total ridership statistics from any Amtrak station in the country and marvel at the fact that more people use the Aberdeen Amtrak station in FY09 than use Amtrak at all in Kansas, Utah, or West Virginia. Or learn that less than 5,600 people used the single Amtrak station in Idaho.

In case you're a big nerd like me, here's the raw data on Maryland total ridership:

	Aberdeen	Baltimore	BWI	Cumberland	New Carrollton	Rockville
FY03	40,658	855,675	541,438	6,831	229,101	1,961
FY04	43,755	918,624	590,610	6,919	216,579	2,654
FY05	48,047	980,122	578,554	7,839	218,184	2,554
FY06	37,414	910,523	561,505	9,100	206,830	2,984
FY07	38,702	977,379	587,845	9,182	204,008	2,905
FY08	45,052	1,020,304	644,640	11,257	203,449	3,178
FY09	44,495	923,827	617,349	11,484	179,344	3,345
Increase, FY03 to FY08	10.81%	19.24%	19.06%	64.79%	-11.20%	62.06%
Increase, FY03 to FY09	9.44%	7.96%	14.02%	68.12%	-21.72%	70.58%
	MD Total	DC
FY03	1,675,664	3,570,920
FY04	1,779,141	3,744,710
FY05	1,835,300	3,734,287
FY06	1,728,356	3,859,117
FY07	1,820,021	4,108,569
FY08	1,927,880	4,489,955
FY09	1,779,844	4,278,930
Increase, FY03 to FY08	15.05%	25.74%
Increase, FY03 to FY09	6.22%	19.83%

Stimulate that MARC train!

I saw some good news in the Baltimore Business Journal this week. The Maryland Department of Transportation has applied for $360 million of stimulus funds to be applied to commuter and passenger rail improvements. It's a laundry list of good ideas, many of them discussed the in the strategic plan for the MARC that the MTA put out a few years ago. It's great to see that we might actually get funding for some of these improvements. If this funding comes through it should help with some of the complaints everyone has about train delays and rail capacity issues. The Baltimore Business Journal article has a lot of good information on what they're looking into, but I'll highlight a few that I think are pretty interesting.

The most important is probably the $200 million to replace three bridges in Maryland. The new bridges will be three tracks instead of two, allowing for more high-speed (well, Acela at least) trains and increased passenger train usage overall. This is really an important development because increasing train capacity on these bridges is really vital to expanding train service and improving it's timeliness in the region. This is money that will go directly into engineering and construction over the next couple years and will accomplish exactly what the stimulus was meant to do - keep companies going until the economy recovers and the private sector can provide the business. It's a great opportunity to do some good infrastructure work that we'd like to be doing anyway, but might have to pay a lot more for services if there was more demand.

Maryland's Department of Transportation has also asked for $10 million to install a GPS-tracking system in the trains (sounds a lot like what I was on about on about in my complaining-about-the-MARC post).

In the category of really-important-projects-that-we-need-to-start-immediately-because-they-will-take-FOREVER-to-complete is the work to replace/improve/expand the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) tunnel in Baltimore. This tunnel is really Baltimore's claim to passenger rail fame right now, because it is the choke point for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (NEC). Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up on the B&P tunnel and on the original Baltimore & Potomac railroad. Basically, the tunnel was completed in 1873 and aside from some repairs and minor improvements to drainage in the early 1980's, it is essentially a 19th century piece of infrastructure. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

The B&P tunnel is a big problem for passenger rail travel along Amtrak's NEC because, as Amtrak's 2005 report to Congress on rail infrastructure in Baltimore (see page 2-16, Box 2-1) puts it, "A sharp curve at the south portal of the tunnel prevents southbound trains departing Baltimore Pennsylvania Station from accelerating beyond 30 mph. An uphill, milelong, 1.34 percent grade further constrains train performance." That's right, if you've ever thought "Hey, it feels like we're moving really slow," why heading south on the MARC, it's because that's exactly what was happening.

(Aside: That 2005 report is pretty fascinating, if dense, reading. After reading most of it one Sunday afternoon I got a much better appreciation of why we're still using such a difficult tunnel that opened 136 years ago. Turns out it's ridiculously difficult to build infrastructure in the Baltimore area due to geography - the "Fall Line" runs directly through Baltimore. The report was actually commissioned after the 2001 fire in the Howard St. Tunnel (another piece of 19th century infrastructure (completed in 1890)). When the Howard St. Tunnel was shut down due to a derailment, CSX freight trains on the south side of Baltimore had to detour west to Cleveland, north to Albany, and then head back south to reach the north side of Baltimore.)

So, anyway, this application for stimulus funds includes $60 million for studies and engineering on how to improve this tunnel. It's not going to be cheap, actual construction of a new tunnel will be in the billions of dollars. I have to be honest, I'm not super-optimistic we'll see that starting any time soon. Replacing the B&P tunnel will only shift the bottleneck to Baltimore's Union Tunnel on the other side of Penn Station. Although the Union Tunnel would be easier to upgrade because it's shorter and already has three tracks.

Anyway, there's your story for the day on how under-investment in passenger rail for the last 60 years has left us hamstrung now that we're winding down our love affair with the automobile. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we'll ever replace cars with public transit - I'm saying that America really needs more options for transportation. And if we don't start the projects, we'll never finish.

That's why I'm excited about this project, it's the perfect use of fiscal stimulus money. These are projects that you probably want to do anyway but might not get done when the economy is humming along. Once you're in a recession with a gap between possible output and actual demand and you decide you want the government to step in a provide some temporary demand until private demand recovers. Infrastructure projects like this fit the bill because they will improve passenger and freight movement capability and capacity when things begin to pick up again.