Nobrainer’s Think Tank

While watching C-SPAN today, I caught a bit of Congressional debate about Amtrak funding. Here’s what I recall:

• Funding is either set at 900 million, or 660 million. Either way they were trying to add 240 million. (Amtrak is seeking 1.6 billion)
• Some crazy black lady, who is apparently a Congresswoman from Florida, blabbered something about how Amtrak was so valuable in and around “the Katrina.”
• Last year’s legislation mandating changes at Amtrak saved 19 million dollars.
• It’s wrong to give up on Amtrak after they so admirably lived up to the challenge last year.
• According to some report, Amtrak is 17% more fuel efficient than autos, and 18% more efficient than planes.

Interested, I dug around a bit more.

From September 2004 through August 2005 (the latest data available here), Amtrak provided about 5.4 billion passenger miles at an expense of 2.94 billion dollars according to FY2005 data (which I think goes through September 2005, at least that’s what I gather from the FY2005 financial statement).

So, for FY2005, the cost of operating was 55 cents per passenger mile, while generating operations based revenue of 35 cents per mile.

In FY2004, it was 53 cents and 34 cents, respectively. Also in 2004, AAA estimated “[t]he average cost of driving a new passenger car in 2004 is 56.2 cents per mile” [emphasis mine].

Let that sink in. That’s 56.2 cents per vehicle–not passenger–mile for a new car that’s depreciating rapidly.

Surely the government investment is worth it since Amtrak has to be saving a ton of fuel.

Try again.

Let’s assume that those 5.4 billion passenger miles are each replaced by a person driving alone (a low estimate) in a vehicle that averages 20mpg (again a low estimate, since fleet vehicle fuel economy is closer to 25mpg). That means that without Amtrak, according to this estimate, Amtrak riders would instead be using about 270 million gallons of fuel to move themselves around. But, according to what I heard on C-SPAN, Amtrak is only a 17% improvement, which means maybe 46 million gallons of fuel are saved each year, thanks to Amtrak. And as usual that sounds like a lot. But that really translates to 3000 barrels per day, or about 0.015% of our daily oil consumption.

Looking at it another way, if the $900 million dollars of government money is applied only because of fuel savings, then the government is paying about $825 per barrel, or $19.66 per gallon of of fuel.

Again, I haven’t verified all this information, and certainly some of the comparisons and calculations aren’t really fair to Amtrak. It should, however, provide some food for thought.

UPDATE: I thought about that “17%” figure and thought it must be way low. Has to be. Well, it is what I heard (reading/listening to Congressional speeches inspires suicide by shotgun). It’s taken from a report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory… supposedly.

A report from the Heritage Foundation uses data from the ORNL Transportation Energy Data Book. It gives numbers for Amtrak’s energy use per passenger mile at a figure (4830) I can’t find contained in the book. I found 2935 BTU/revenue-passenger-mile for Amtrak (table 9.13). Using the book though, if you take fleet fuel efficiency at 25mpg, and average occupancy at 1.6 (figures 8.1 and 8.2), then a 17% fuel economy savings relates to an average energy density of our fuel of 137000 BTU/gallon, which is a little high I’d say, but pretty ball park.

I was using some data from the Heritage report below in comments about subsidizing other modes of transport. A government report does incidate that federal highways return a surplus. He author seems to mislead in the ability of airlines to do the same. I have little trust in the Heritage report at this point. Still, it would also be worth distilling the difference between highway funding and other road funding.

UPDATE 2: The Bureau of Transportation Statistics disagrees with Oak Ridge. Table 4-20 indicates that Amtrak, as of 2001, was about 42% more efficient than highway passenger cars.

I’m beginning to wish that I didn’t get curious.