BTW What is the better measure, do you think, loss per seat mile offered or loss per passenger mile?

The largest losses came from the trains running less than daily, — Sunset Limited and the Cardinal, no surprise. So I understand why Amtrak is moving to add cars and frequencies there first.

Surprisingly good numbers on the St Louis-Kansas City route. Did you notice that Missouri’s bid for HSR funds included a plan to buy new cars on that route? Maybe they noticed how business improved with greater frequency STL-CHI.

And you are quite right that the Heartland Flyer numbers look good here. (I couldn’t see where the state subsidies got into these figures, or if they did.) That’s very encouraging.

If they are running only three or four cars (which might earn the adjective “weak”) and still doing so well, it indicates great potential.

More links attract more passengers. So if the Heartland Flyer gets linked to Tulsa and/or to Wichita/Topeka/Kansas City, or eventually to St Louis or even Chicago at the northern end, and to the Sunset Limited at San Antonio, it could be a big success.

Not to mention those passengers riding because of the coing-soon fort Worth streetcar lines.

I’m not sure whether the numbers include state support or not. Given that the main state-supported routes – Empire and the California routes – lose large amounts of money, I’d guess that the numbers don’t include state support.

The same can be said for Royal Oak & Dearborn, MI; Gary, IN, Joliet, & Glenview IL; DFW, TX; and Tacoma & Everett, WA.

You can’t stop the HSRail every five or ten miles, but given the sprawl of American cities, its a rare large metro area that is not at least three stations wide.

Its not at the inner urban station that a noticeable benefit to ridership for local transport will occur, but at the outer suburban stations.

You must have access to better sources than I do.

I looked at the NARP website. It reported 79,434 passengers on the Heartland Flyer in 2008. That was up nicely from the year before, when it carried only 67,302.

So 79,434 divided by 365 = 217.627, rounded up that is 218 passengers per train. Up nicely from 184 the year before.

The Heartland Flyer must run very short trains to “frequently sell out” with an average of 218 passengers a day.

Glad to hear the route almost broke even operationally. Do you mean before or after the subsidies from the States of Oklahoma and Texas?

What am I missing here?

I was challenged on this assertion by one of the many folks posting hereabouts who are far better informed than I am. The challenger said that rail stations added very few passengers to transit totals, which were overwhelmingly local commuters, students, shoppers, etc.

Pondering this possibility for about half a minute, I realized that the challenger was right, and I was wrong, certainly about big systems. All the passengers arriving at Penn Station are a spoonful in the bucket of the NYC subway and bus totals. Likewise Union Station and Metro in D.C., which I use once or twice a year.

But I thought, in a smaller transit system the out-of-town train passengers could matter more. So I went to look at Sacramento, which just a few years ago extended its light rail system to its busy Capital Corridor station, with more than a dozen daily connections to the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

I looked at the ridership figures this way and that. They went up a lot one year and not so much another. Obviously other factors were at work, like the price of gas or the state of the economy. But I couldn’t see any impact from the extension to the station. Some newspaper articles quoted passengers who were pleased that they would not have to walk four or five blocks to get to the light rail and where they wanted to go. But I could not determine any influx of new transit passengers statistically or anecdotally.

OTOH The impact of transit stops at train stations may be huge. If you look at a weak route, like the Heartland Flyer now running from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth with barely 200 passengers a day on average, let’s say 225 a day. Oh dear. But add a transit system that feeds in another couple of dozen passengers to the train station. And you’ve got an 11% increase on the Heartland Flyer, enough to make a substatial impact on the bottom line for that route.

As it happens, both Oklahoma City and Fort Worth are talking about putting in rail transit. Fort Worth seems much farther along, with studies on-going for a route that would extend to its cultural district on one line — the Kimball, the Amon Carter, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Will Rodgers Center that hosts musical acts and horse shows etc., and a college campus — while another line reaches to a hospital-medical center.

And Fort Worth is talking about building rail without going through the ordeal of applying for federal funds. Adding the street car lines would make a weekend visit to the city an easy thing for folks who would just as soon leave the car behind, and folks from Fort Worth looking to travel to the cities and towns to the north.

So that figure of an extra 24 riders a day that I pulled out of my secret hiding place is not so improbable. And those 24 new riders from transit lines carrying thousands would have a major impact on the farebox recovery of the Heartland Flyer. That good news would come even without extending that train to Kansas City or San Antonio, or increasing the frequency to twice a day or better.

And On The Third Hand, talk about linking a transit system to intercity passenger rail seems to be a good talking point when local leaders try to promote rail transit to the voters. I’d say it’s harmless.

That the point may be sort of bogus as far as transit surely infuriates opponents. That it probably helps passenger rail does not mollify them at all, since members of the Ayn Rand cult hate Amtrak as part of their core beliefs.

When I went to look for a list of planned, proposed, or actually underway transit expansions, I found 60-70 cities listed, at various stages between dream and reality. Not all of them have Amtrak service– Las Vegas and Phoenix, conspicuously do not — but most do.

If Ray Lahood keeps tweaking the funding system towards reality and can cut the approval time from a decade to one election cycle, and if Obama can find the kind of funds for transit that he put aside for HSR, we could see dozens of new transit lines coming down the tracks with a stop at the Amtrak station. And that’s even before any HSR gets built.