I appreciate your sentiment, but look at the airlines. They have absolutely slashed capacity, which often results in lengthy connections. Thanks to a resurgence of Covid-19, especially in the south, the airlines are eliminating many of the flights that they were going to add in August and September. This isn't about increasing profits. This is about survival.
Well yes that is true the airlines have slashed capacity and in some cases service to select cities what they are doing is nowhere near comparable to what Amtrak is proposing and is now doing to my home routes. The airlines often times are running multiple frequencies per day between two cities with the exception of a handful of more vanity routes. The AS Flight to CHS or the LH flight to CLT being examples of both. It should be noted that both of those routes are designed around a significant business travel the AS flight deals with Boeing traffic, and the LH route involves BMW traffic.
For instance from my home airport of Columbia, SC (CAE) the load factor standardly is 83 percent for the CAE-CLT connection flight which operates 7 times per day on average. If American Airlines who is the carrier contracting the various regionals PSA (subsidiary of AA), Republic, Sky West, etc..... to operate that route decides to slash capacity on that route they have to cancel a frequency, so instead of the average of every 2 hour service we drop to twice a day service. That still doesn't equate to what Amtrak did to the Silver Star.
American could probably preserve that 83 percent load factor by slashing capacity by cutting the frequency to three times daily flights between the two cities and it would still be considered a very usable service. Amtrak cut the 14 Weekly departures down to 6 which is 42 percent of the normal schedule. AA slashed capacity by eliminating two daily flights in each direction or 14 departures a week. Down from 49 departures or 28 percent. Of note the two flights they canceled are the ones that cater mostly to business travel first in the morning, last in the evening making connections to most destinations.
Which tells me that the business market is the one that isn't doing as well as the leisure market. Looking at the flights for tomorrow in the computer it looks like tomorrows load factor bar any late purchases is around 62 percent which isn't god awful.
Amtrak in Columbia generally boards/detrains 42 passengers per train per day according to RPA which is almost a full Amfleet II coach, couple that with the other exclusive stops to the Silver Star route and you are filling a single Amfleet II Coach on just those markets. That isn't counting anything from Raleigh north to points south of Savannah.
So if AA's load factor declined by 21 percent let's just use that for the base line example on Amtrak instead of getting 42 passengers you are now getting 8 less passengers per night per train. I'm basing that on leisure travel making a faster come back than business travel based on the assumption of that is what the AA traffic patterns are showing me.
So by Amtrak inflicting a completely short sided cut on a strong leisure route they are really selling themselves short. Tri Weekly doesn't have to be god awful for Columbia except they chose to stack all of our service days on weekends which makes absolutely no sense from a passenger service stand point.
My point is that these cuts Amtrak has made so far are detrimental to the service, and detrimental to the health of Amtrak.
Now all that being said that is basing large assumptions on one small market that is only serviced in the middle of the night on Amtrak and by regional jets by the big three airlines (except one or two DL Mainline jets).
I would be happy to look up any AA route to compile it's load factor, and it's normal capacity, and it's current capacity.
I love Amtrak, I love flying, and above all I love researching the transportation business.
