One of the interesting things about EAS is that it seems to provide at least daily service on every route. Certain Amtrak routes do not get that level of service, and there may be an argument to be made that every Amtrak route should have at least the same frequency as the least frequent EAS route. On the other hand, maybe making that argument is pointless at this point, since the limiting factor these days may be the time required for Amtrak to buy new rolling stock.
I'm not convinced the puddle jumper approach to service to small towns is all that terrible. Track isn't cheap. I wouldn't be surprised if maintaining a small airport adequately is cheaper than maintaining 500 miles of track, or perhaps even the incremental costs of maintaining track for 79 MPH passenger service instead of 15 MPH passenger service if there was going to be occasional freight anyway (though if someone has numbers that will prove me wrong about this, I'd love to be wrong about it). The effect EAS has on petroleum imports and carbon emissions is probably tiny simply because EAS accounts for such a tiny fraction of the flights.
So, curiosity gets the best of me and I decided to do a little bit of investigating myself.
After pulling up some figures from the DOT in regards to
EAS services
here I was able to calculate some figures that are kind of interesting. You’ll have to excuse me on the rail figures though as since the government only subsidizes a few parts of rail systems I had no clue where to look to find cost associated with maintaining rail lines. You can pull data from airport operational cost but it depends on how you spread the costs out. With EAS an airline serves a small city usually to a larger hub airport. Airports fund mainly through use of PFC or Passenger Facility Charges. These usually hover around the $3 mark (per passenger departing from that airport on every flight) depending on the size of the airport and what kind of construction they are trying to fund. In addition the city or county of the surround airport usually provides some type of local funding when the airport needs it, bonds or otherwise. Having worked in the airlines and aerospace for +10 years finding FAA and DOT related figures comes real easy. Let me point out though that EAS funding is usually done over a period of 1-3 years of use making it somewhat difficult to compare in year over year markings.
I figured using Upper Peninsula Michigan and Eastern Wisconsin would be a good place to start. Since like I said I don’t have much to go by with little experience in rail, I have been following the Virginia involvement with Amtrak to get the new Lynchburg-Washington route funded which I’ll use for a comparison and is actually posted in this
thread. B)
A quick review of the LYH-WAS route will find that Amtrak said it would require almost $3.3M to run the route for one year in total (
source - note these figures were posted previous to the route being funded in early 2008). Now Amtrak said it expected revenue at 17.73 cents per mile with customers traveling over an average of 100 miles making fares to cover the route rounding up to $1.9M. Now this figure in relation to a North of Chicago run is somewhat flawed as the LYH-WAS run is an extension of the NEC and cost North of DC would be already calculated into the NEC operating costs.
Using
The Great Circle Mapper with airline codes to compare the routes the LYH-WAS is about half the length 150mi to around 300mi of say a Chicago –Green Bay - Escanaba run. From this we could say that the operating cost of a route twice as long would be $6.6 but I’m sure it would go over $7M when you add in things like start up costs etc. Being the route is almost twice as long we could even surmise to say that the revenue would be twice as great having more places to pick up and discharge passengers and alike that Chicago would allow connections to other trains. Let’s call that $3.8M in revenue from the “Escanaba Limited” and all her station stops along the way haha…
Here’s the thing I took a quick gander at EAS data downloadable in Excel format from
NOV2008 from the above mentioned
site.
Here we find that Michigan receives the following EAS subsidizes:
Escanaba/Mini/Detroit – NW Airlines - $1,435,118
Iron mountain/Mini/Detroit – NW Airlines - $1,435,118
Ironwood/Milwaukee – Great Lakes Air - $1,492,865
Manistee/Milwaukee – Great Lakes Air - $1,799,395
Total $6,162,496
(*note all the above are for operation of EAS till 10/2010) :huh:
Now take the operational cost of the route which we said was $7M double it at around $14M for two years (to make compatible in comparison with the EAS service listed above). Revenue doubled at $7.4M. Minus one from the two and you’re left with an operational cost of about $6.6M. Comparatively if we were able to use EAS funding it really would be a feasible proposition and that’s just talking about using EAS funding from Upper Michigan. Now here’s the thing, there are plenty of cities along Easter Wisconsin that could benefit from this train, Now I don’t know the original routing of the trains that went north of Chicago but fair to guess that if you routed them through Green Bay, Appleton, Oshkosh and Fort du Lack not only would the ridership jump up, but you could now get state subsidizes from both Michigan, Wisconsin and maybe even Illinois?
Basically if there is a loop hole then we (or someone of importance) should look at finding it. The EAS service is providing daily air service with aircraft that operate with only 19 to 34 seats per plane. Some of these flights to these cities operate once a day to three times a day. That makes for 19 to 102 seats/passengers per day compared at one train a day operating with over 150 seats serving more than just one or two destinations. Actually come to think, of it if the average passenger traveled 100 miles and the train traveled around 300 miles in total wouldn’t that mean the train could possibility serve well past to 300 people each day?
Alright, well I’d love to hear some thoughts and ideas on this one… give me some thoughts or constructive criticism…
Philzy
