So, does anyone have MARC's May Weekend ridership numbers?
When last we left this story, WTOP was reporting 6,500 riders per weekend (in March having grown from 4,000 in the opening weekend).
Cherry Blossoms saw 13,000. So maybe a fair current estimate is 7,000 per weekend?
May had 4.5 weekends. We don't know how Memorial Days "behave" but let's assume they're "normal". We'd expect about 30,000 MARC weekend riders for the whole month of May.
Amtrak says it lost 10,000 passengers to MARC in May (see quote at end). That implies that for every 1 passenger MARC "cannibalized" from Amtrak, it "stimulated" about 2 more. MARC "stole" 10,000 from Amtrak and "stimulated" 20,000 more (admittedly, some of these were likelo stolen from WMATA's B30 (Greenbelt-BWI) and the MTA's light rail lines too)
We don't know how many WAS-BWI-BAL "locals" Amtrak kept, but, roughly,
MARC weekend service has somewhere between doubled and tripled the train patronage WAS-BWI-BAL.
Amtrak writes in its
May Performance Report (page A 3.2)
This route’s decline in ridership is traceable to south of New York markets, in particular the BAL-BWI-WAS segment which lost about 10,000 trips (-26%) in May due to the recent addition of MARC weekend service in those markets. However, some of these seats in this segment were backfilled with sales in higher revenue markets.