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%

Public Service Announcement

Tonight my roommate and I set out on a quest, a quest to determine "What are the two cities in America that are the hardest to fly between?" This question came up after I found that if I wanted to travel from Baltimore, MD to Liberal, KS (don't ask why I'd want to do this) I could do it in 3 stops (Detroit, Kansas City, and Great Bend) for only $316 one-way.

So then we tossed out city pairs that we thought would be difficult to travel between. I suggested Worland, WY to Bangor, ME (you can do it in 3 stops, Laramie, Denver, and Cincinnati). My roommate suggested Salisbury, MD to Nome, AK (you can do that in 3 stops, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Anchorage). Now, Kayak.com lets you sort by number of stops, and you can certainly find stupid, stupid itineraries (for example, 5 stops from Worland to Bangor and Salisbury to Maine).

So the real question is, can you find a city pair with 4 as the minimum number of stops? To do this we actually consulted the Alaska Airlines route map. It can be very difficult to get to Wrangell, AK, but I felt like that was kind of cheating. We only picked Wrangell because it looks hard to get to on the Alaska Airlines route map. Who cares if they are one of the oldest non-native settlements in Alaska? I've never heard of them before today.

We tried a lot of other Salisbury, MD combinations. Salisbury, MD to Vladivostok, Russia (3 stops - Philadelphia, Toronto, Moscow). Salisbury, MD to Hobart, Tasmania, Australia (3 stops - Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Sidney).

Finally, we struck gold by going back to Alaska. Salisbury, MD to Barrow, AK will take you a minimum of 4 stops and 17h, 46m. The 4 stops are Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. That's the best you can do.

The worst you can do from Salisbury to Barrow is 6 stops and 32h, 50m (Philadelphia, Denver, Seattle, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Prudhoe Bay). Can you imagine stopping three times in Alaska before you reached your final destination?

So now I think the challenge is to find the city pair (extra credit if it involves Salisbury, MD) that takes 4 stops minimum AND is located in the lower 48. Worland, WY to Salisbury, MD won't do it (3 stops). Dodge City, KS to Salisbury, MD won't work either (Kansas City, Indianapolis, Charlotte). Bozeman, MT to Salisbury, MD in 2 stops! (Seatle and Philadelphia). As you can see, this is quite a challenge.

Another fun question is "If there are city pairs in the lower 48 that requires 4 stops to fly between, which city pair has the minimum distance between them?"

So you might wonder why I titled this post "Public Service Announcement." It's because this is a public service, people need to know the answers to these questions. We've just answered the question of whether or not you can find two cities that take a minimum of 4 stops to fly between. Trust me, you would have asked that question eventually.


PS - In case you're curious, on the other end of the spectrum, it's impossible to find an itinerary from Baltimore to Chicago with more than 1 stop. (A partial answer to "What is the easiest city to travel to from Baltimore?")

Virgin Atlantic Sucks (Part 4 of 4)

Today brought some good news from Virgin Atlantic. Apparently, they found my girlfriend's luggage and would deliver it. Can't complain too much about that. Unfortunately the suitcase just showed up now at 6:30 PM. I say unfortunately because she left on another flight to see visit her parents for the Fourth of July week at 4 PM.

I have to say, 48 hours to return a lost bag is not the worst record in the world, but that does not excuse the customer service that my girlfriend received over the last couple days. It's nice that they found the suitcase and returned it, but it would have been a lot nicer if they could have pretended to care about the inconvenience it caused.

Virgin Atlantic could have done some small things to make this experience a lot better. For example, offer some sort of parking voucher or pass so that I didn't have to pay an extra $8 for the hour and a half that I had to wait around in vain.

• Or offer $25 towards some clean clothes. Something that shows that this is not business as usual for your company.

• Or have some people on the phone that don't lie through their teeth to customers (my girlfriend was promised four different times that she would receive a call back within the hour - it NEVER once happened).

• How about having a manager on staff? Once the call center person actually said "Well, this call center is based in India and it's 3 AM here, so we don't have a manager." Locating your call center in India is a business decision you made, it shouldn't effect the level of service we receive. What are we supposed to do, wait until 1 AM on the east coast to call India to try to catch a manager?

• Hire more call center employees! I don't care where they are located, so long as I never hear the words "We are experiencing an abnormally high call volume." Bullshit. I'm going to just call bullshit on that recording. Call volume can't be abnormally high all the time, that's just normal call volume and you're hoping that we'll hang up and use your worthless website instead.

Overall, I'm just tired of companies trying to avoid actually interacting with their customers or meeting the needs of their customers. Especially airlines. It's as if they have completely forgotten that we are contracting a service from them, the transportation of a person and a some baggage from one point to another. If they fail to live up to their side of the contract of course we're going to be pissed.

In a world where FedEx can deliver a package to any address in the country on the next day and give me real-time tracking updates, how is it at all acceptable that airlines can completely lose a bag for 24 hours or more? We have bar codes and hand held scanners, why isn't there a system of scanning bags every time they move from one place to another?

All the things I've suggested are not incredibly difficult to implement. However, I doubt we see anything like that any time soon. As long as companies can look around the industry and say "we're not really that much worse than everyone else," there is little impetus for change. It takes guts to do your job well, to do it better than everyone else, and I don't see any airlines demonstrating that kind of will to excel. They're too busy trying to cut another inch out of the legroom in coach.

Virgin Atlantic Sucks (part 3 of ?)

As we've been told countless times by automated messages and unhelpful people that emailing this address is the fastest way to get a response. To quote the email above: "We'll write back as soon as we can, within the next 21 days."

Does this sound like an acceptable level of customer service?

When will companies learn that automated replies are more frustrating than anything? This is why I hate emailing companies, it's much easier to ignore email than a phone call.

Virgin Atlantic Sucks (part 2 of ?)

Believe it or not, no one from Virgin Atlantic called back! My girlfriend tried their baggage help number again. Once again, the person on the other end can not help her find her reference number and recommends that she send an email to customer.relations.us@fly.virgin.com.

Like I said, every step of the way it's just been "I can't help you, try this phone number instead." The people on the phone say try the internet. The website lists a phone number. Is anyone at that company able to do anything for customers?

Virgin Atlantic Sucks

My girlfriend arrived at IAD yesterday from CDG via London-Heathrow. So before she even got to Dulles customs she was pissed at Virgin Atlantic. Why? They have a one carry-on only policy, but didn't tell her this in Paris. So she arrived at Heathrow with two carry-ons. Virgin Atlantic would not even let her into the transfer area with two carry-ons (apparently they've never heard of "gate-check"). So she had to go through British customs to check one of her carry-ons.

When she arrives at Dulles, one of her checked bags never shows up. Dulles customs sucks bad enough without losing your bag. Believe it or not, this is just the beginning of how terrible Virgin Atlantic is at customer service. So she fills out the lost bag form and goes through customs.

Now, they give her an phone number for baggage services (1-800-880-6253), who of course say "It's too early to know where your bag is, give us until tomorrow." She asked to be transferred to the customer service department and is told that the Virgin Atlantic customer service department doesn't have a phone number!

She's still mad, so she wants to talk to a customer service agent. However, the Virgin Atlantic baggage office is closed and locked. We waited there for half an hour, then went upstairs to the ticket counter.

The woman at the ticket counter is entirely unhelpful. She keeps repeating that it's too early to search for her bag. No shit! We want to know if you are going to give her a couple dollars to buy some underwear and a clean T-shirt. My girlfriend remains remarkably calm in the face of such ridiculous service and asks if we can speak to a manager. We are speaking to the ticket counter manager.
-Where is the baggage manager?
-At the gate for the next departure.
-When will he or she be back?
-Probably about 8 PM (this is at 6 PM).
-Is there anyone else we can talk to?
-Try this pamphlet with phone numbers.

So I immediately dial the "Virgin Atlantic Customer Relations (US)" phone number (1-800-496-6661). You should dial it, it's an amazing exercise in futility. It takes you to a recording that tells you that "the fastest way to get a response is to use email at customer.relations.us@fly.virgin.com" After that it tells you that you can mail them at Virgin Atlantic Airways 501 W. Fort Ave. PM Box 331 Norwalk, CT 06851 or fax them at 866-258-0951. Then it asks if you would like to repeat the message. If you don't repeat the message, it hangs up. It is literally impossible to speak to a live person who works for Virgin Atlantic customer service.

I try to explain this to the manager at the ticket counter. She says, I'm not kidding, "Are you sure? There's a lot of numbers on that sheet." My other choices are all international phone numbers.

So eventually we give up and leave the airport. Today it gets even better. My girlfriend tries to log onto their website to check on her bag. It asks for a 10 digit file number. She has no such thing. She's got a bag tag number (a British Airways tag at that, because the flight from London to Dulles was actually BA) and a Virgin Atlantic Property Irregularity Report number (6 digits).

She calls them twice more, each time the person asks for the file reference number and can't help her without it. So she tried explaining to them that she doesn't have one and could they please give her that number so she can check online and stop calling? The guy says that he'll call her back in an hour. That was at 10:35 AM. As I type this, it's 11:05 AM.

Given everything above, what is the likelihood that Virgin Atlantic will call back? They've got 30 minutes.

Moral of the story - Don't fly Virgin Atlantic, they could honestly care less about customer service.

Challenge to Virgin Atlantic - If you as a company ever discover this post and feel that it does not properly represent how you "put customer service and commitment to our passengers at the heart of what [you] do,"* then you should:

1. Create a comment on this post to justify why on earth a company that cares at all about it customers would have a customer service department that can never be reached by phone.
2. Admit and apologize for the behavior of your company. At every step of the process anyone that we have interacted with has said "Have you tried waiting and then using the internet instead of calling us?" Here's a hint for all companies - that's the worst possible thing to say to someone who's just been on hold for five minutes!

Here's an update - 11:17 AM, still no call back.


* - Source: http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/customerrelations/index.jsp

I'm a Nerd

Whenever I get my car serviced, I write it down. I also record the mileage, because that can be important too. I happened to do this in Excel, so yesterday I was curious...what if I plotted the mileage of my car over time? Turns out it's pretty linear over the nearly 3 years that I've owned my car. In fact, it's kind of surprising how the linear regression lines up to the data. That is probably strongly influenced by the fact I'm only sampling every couple months so it ends up being dominated by my daily commute to work. I haven't really changed my commute over this time period, so I suppose I shouldn't be very surprised I drive about the same amount each day throughout the year.

Actually, you can see one big aberration that causes the linear regression to overestimate most data points - I went on an ~3,000 road trip over Christmas/New Year's last year. It doesn't make a huge impact on the average, about 2 miles per day it seems like.

Since I purchased my car, it appears that I drive 41.2 miles per day. This is obviously skewed by that road trip and a trip to Ottawa last summer; the data also shows that over periods without a long road trip I trend closer to 29 miles per day. Since I drive a pretty fuel efficient car, that's average Marylander uses like 415 gallons per year (2004 data). Some math tells me that I'm driving almost exactly 15,000 miles per year. History tells me that 32 mpg is a reasonable average for my car. That says that my car is using 470 gallons of gas per year. I could argue that for all of the long road trips (>150 miles round trip) that I've taken, I've had passengers, so they aren't all my gallons, but that's splitting hairs I guess. Wow, that puts me at the US average (~464 gallons per year (also 2004 data)).

This discovery really concerns me because I like the environment; that's why I bought a fuel efficient car! I'm going to have to try harder not to drive on the weekends (since I can't really control my need to drive to and from work). Now I'm sad, I had thought that I used less than the average amount of gasoline for an American. Turns out I'm part of the problem after all...

Some further research shows that I pay ~$86 in federal and >$100 in state taxes each year (it would be $110/year if I bought all of my gas in Maryland).

I still feel much worse about all my gasoline consumption than I do about finding out I pay an additional $200/year in taxes...and by now you know how I feel about paying taxes.

Camelback

This week I was on a business trip in the Phoenix area. Not a whole lot to comment on, aside from the fact that it's shockingly hard to find a hotel room in the Phoenix area in mid-March. I was running into the problem of spring-training baseball, really spectacular weather (sunny and in the high 70's), and a couple conferences in town.

We finished up all our business by about 3:30 PM, so we hiked up Camelback Mountain near Scottsdale. Thanks to technology that keeps my cell phone out of my workplace, I can bring you these pictures from Arizona.

This is a view from the parking lot, you can't see the summit from here; beautiful scenery though.

"Hiking" is kind of a misnomer for this trail, it's actually more of a rock scramble in a lot of places. 1200 vertical feet in 1.2 miles. We're about a half-mile into the hike at this point. The next picture was taken from the peak visible in this picture.

Here's a view of Scottsdale, Arizona from the summit of Camelback Mountain.

By the way, the most impressive thing about this hike is the people who were jogging up the trail. Next time I'm out there, I'm taking some running shoes and trying it myself, probably will kick my ass, but it'll be fun to try. On the other hand, the next time I'm out there, it may well be >100 degrees, so maybe running in the desert isn't the best choice.

A Modest Proposal

Recently, I was thinking about Eastern European countries that you don't really hear too much about, such as Slovakia. I was reading up on Bratislava and considering how difficult it might be to visit such a place. Kayak.com told that it would actually be cheaper to fly into Vienna than into Bratislava.

"Vienna?" I said to myself, "If I'm going to fly into Vienna, why would I drive to Bratislava? I've never been to Vienna either! Anyway, how far is it from Bratislava to Vienna?"

The answer: about 50 km!

So, here's my proposal: Slovakia, you're not a rich country. I'm sure Bratislava is a very nice city, but let's face it: no one is going to pick Bratislava over Vienna. So why not make some lemonade with those lemons? Drop all the taxes off of your airport. Heck, subsidize flights into the airport. Become the T.F. Green of Eastern Europe!

It's a great plan. People will rent Slovakian cars, buy meals at Slovakian restaurants, maybe stay a night in Slovakian hotels, and perhaps decide "What the hell? Let's spend a day sight-seeing in Bratislava before we continue to Vienna!"

So, in the interest of international development and cheaper flights to Vienna, please pass this along to any high-ranking officials you may know in Slovakia.

Kayak.com is NOT a website about kayaking

Since the moment I first laid eyes on this website, I've been pretty evangelical about it. The problem with telling people about neat websites is that no one ever remembers the address unless you actually email it to them. So from now on, when they say "What's the address?" I'll just say, "There's a link in my blog." Of course, about half the time people aren't going to be aware I even have a blog, so maybe this isn't the most efficient way to do things...

Whatever, Kayak.com is so freaking efficient it'll make up for the fact that you had to find my blog before you could find the website.

Anyway, bottom line, Kayak.com is probably the best travel website I've seen. They definitely have the most authoritative listing of airfares (of course, they can't browse Southwest fares, but Southwest is so good at providing ridiculously cheap fares that I don't mind going to their website in addition to searching a general travel site).

Back in the Good ol' USA!

So, I have just returned from a 10-day vacation in China. Just like any other American who visits Asia for the first time, especially China, I'm pretty overwhelmed with things to say about it. Overall, pretty cool place; although I recommend traveling before November 15th (when they turn on the heat and the air pollution becomes unbelievable...more on that later).

I'll probably post some more of my thoughts over the next few days, for now:

See those little square things along the top of that mountain ridge? That's part of the Great Wall (at Simatai). I mean, seriously, were you really that concerned that someone is going to move an invading army across that mountain? Are you insane?