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Originally Posted by GoTrans
1. Filling every seat makes sense even if at a discounted price as long as the total revenue increases more than the total costs of a route. You will have a greater chance of filling every seat if you offer greater frequencies with improved reliability and OTP.
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You should really at least try to understand the Economics of passenger railroading, which is characterized by a limited and instantly perishable inventory as well as high fixed costs and almost no variable costs. Therefore, the commercial goal is to achieve as much revenues as possible (given current levels of frequency and capacity), not to sell as much tickets as possible. Therefore, selling every single seat is considered a failure and not a success, as it means that you almost certainly could have sold some seats for much more than what you charged.
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2. Maybe reducing the number of food offerings would make more sense than an outright cut.
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If we are talking about daytime services, cutting back the variety of food offered from three to two types of sandwiches is not going to cut much costs, as the main cost driver is the number of on-train staff - and the menus on these kind of services is already designed so that it doesn't increase staffing requirements.
If we are talking about overnight services, you could for sure reduce from a full dining car service to some kind of reduced out-of-the-Skyline-counter service. However, the value of the food services included in a Sleeper passenger's ticket price is unlikely to exceed 10% and if you consider that passengers on the Canadian already pay prices (per-night) comparable to that of a cruise, it seems unlikely that passengers would accept the kind of food offerings with which airlines still manage to get away. And if you just lose one passenger who would have otherwise paid a $3000 ticket, you will have lost more money than cutting you one crew member on that trip would have saved you...
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3. Decreased service does not make sense. The ridership revenue decreases faster than the costs and fixed costs such as stations basically remain the same.
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As some people would have already guessed by their name, fixed costs are
fixed and therefore independent from the frequency with which you run your train. They only matter when deciding whether to keep or cut entirely a route.
Now, if your theory that revenues decrease faster than costs when cutting frequencies on non-Corridor routes was correct, the direct operating loss per train-km should have increased since 1990 (when frequencies were cut from daily service to 3 trains per week) and the cost-recovery rate (i.e. direct revenues divided by direct costs) should have decreased.
So what happens when we compare the figures from 1988 with those of 2018? On the Ocean, the direct operating loss per train-km decreased (rather than: increased) by 1.1%, whereas the cost-recovery rate improved (rather than: deteriorated) from 40.8% to 48.9%. On the Canadian, the direct operating loss per train-km even decreased dramatically (by 77.2%), whereas the cost-recovery rate almost doubled (from 48.3% to 90.3%).
Just have a look yourself:
Compiled from:
Office of the Prime Minister (1989, pp. 67+70 in the PDF),
VIA Rail's Corporate Plan 2019-2023 (p.21) and
VIA Rail's Annual Report 2018 (p.9)
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4. Increased service makes sense, BUT it requires better OTP which in turn requires better routing ( ie hfr), better and more infrastructure and better train dispatching. All this means the system needs long term infrastructure and equipment improvements, which unfortunately costs MONEY.
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This observation is of course correct, but just to underline the scale of required investment, the governments of Sweden and Norway (i.e. the European countries where population density is most comparable to Canada) invest approximately C$300 per capita annually into their rail infrastructure, which translates to C$11.4 billion for 38 million Canadians:
Source:
Allianz pro Schiene
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5. In Norway you buy your train or bus ticket on the same site, all intercity buses are timed at junctions where they wait for connecting buses and in the cities the train and bus stations are integrated with each other. These are in turn linked to the airports. This is something transit and transport planners think is an impossible foreign concept not adaptable to Canada. This is getting better but we have a long way to go.
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The biggest barrier against through-ticketing in Canada is that it implies a guaranteed connection and that providing alternative connections (including taxis or accommodation when no later service is available) is something which is simply not realistic for any service provider running less frequent service than, say, Metrolinx...
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Originally Posted by swimmer_spe
3) That has been well proven since the 1990s cuts.
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*sigh*
Who‘s going to explain it to @swimmer_spe…?
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