by ryanwc
That's pretty well done, and I appreciate the instinct to dig in under the press releases. However:
>Using an average capacity of 125 seats, that’s roughly 3,300 seats each way in the air corridor
As I had posted above, the actual usage of the air corridor is available. You don't need to make assumptions. And he is simply wrong, exaggerating it by nearly 50%.
>Amtrak’s data only measures direct costs like crew and fuel and microwave pizza. It doesn’t include indirect costs shared by Borealis and the Builder and items like debt service and depreciation, etc
Yeah, this is what I said above - it's meeting operating expenses, but there are likely asterisks.
On the other hand, most importantly, he wrote
> $300,000 in gross ticket revenue but $600,000 in operating revenue. That other $300,000 constitutes state subsidies to the train.
This is good new information. It is something I suspected but didn't figure out how to explore -- the "profit" is basically that it didn't need all of its subsidies. A good thing, but hardly true profit.
But I suspect this is the reason that they're talking about adding the third frequency so soon. They have already appropriated money on hand to cover it.
The bottom line he misses, though, is that few MSP-Chgo travelers yet know about the service, and that should mean gradual, incremental growth for at least a year and probably more. Ridership held strong in June, proving that the early results weren't rail fans.
>Using an average capacity of 125 seats, that’s roughly 3,300 seats each way in the air corridor
As I had posted above, the actual usage of the air corridor is available. You don't need to make assumptions. And he is simply wrong, exaggerating it by nearly 50%.
>Amtrak’s data only measures direct costs like crew and fuel and microwave pizza. It doesn’t include indirect costs shared by Borealis and the Builder and items like debt service and depreciation, etc
Yeah, this is what I said above - it's meeting operating expenses, but there are likely asterisks.
On the other hand, most importantly, he wrote
> $300,000 in gross ticket revenue but $600,000 in operating revenue. That other $300,000 constitutes state subsidies to the train.
This is good new information. It is something I suspected but didn't figure out how to explore -- the "profit" is basically that it didn't need all of its subsidies. A good thing, but hardly true profit.
But I suspect this is the reason that they're talking about adding the third frequency so soon. They have already appropriated money on hand to cover it.
The bottom line he misses, though, is that few MSP-Chgo travelers yet know about the service, and that should mean gradual, incremental growth for at least a year and probably more. Ridership held strong in June, proving that the early results weren't rail fans.
