A misleading lede

I was surprised by this lede in a recent Financial Times story: “Most Americans spurned air and road travel over the Labor Day holiday weekend but flocked on to trains as high oil prices and the economic downturn continued to hold sway over US consumers’ spending patterns.”

First, most Americans (like me) did spurn weekend travel. According to the FT story, 51 million people traveled by air, train, or more than fifty miles by car. The story is right that air travel is down and train travel is up, but look at the figures:

• Airline passengers: down 1 million people, or 6.5 percent, to 16 million people.
• Road warriors: down 320,000 people, or 1 percent, to 34.4 million people.
• Amtrakkers: up 10 percent to a total of 322,000.

Does that sound like “flocking” to you? 1,300,000 fewer people traveled on airlines and highways over Labor Day than last year, and the FT would have you believe that 30,000 more travelers on Amtrak constitutes a massive shift in mode preference.

(And why does the FT reporter leave out bus travel? Greyhound serves almost as many passengers per year as Amtrak at 25 million, let alone all the other motorcoach operators. Surely coaches can be much more easily substituted for travel than Amtrak.)

Outside of the dense northeast corridor, Amtrak is simply not a viable substitute for air and car. Its cross-country routes are too long, its schedules too infrequent, its destinations too few, and its delays too common. That’s not to say that some sort of high-speed rail system won’t work here–just that Amtrak ain’t it.