All Aboard! More Travelers Choose Trains Over Cars and Planes
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, August 2nd. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Planning a vacation inevitably involves bracing for frustrating travel experiences, like dealing with crowds or weather delays or bumper-to-bumper traffic, not to mention the high cost of gas. So more Americans are looking past cars and planes and opting to take a train instead.
People are not as jam-packed as they are on planes. There are cafe cars. You can get up and walk around. You can appreciate the views in a different way than you can in the air.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal reporter Jacob Passy about crisscrossing the nation on the rails, the good and the bad. That's after the break.
This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. Washington Wise from Charles Schwab is an original podcast that unpacks the stories making news in Washington. Listen at schwab.com slash Washington Wise.
More Americans are foregoing travel on highways and in the air and opting to go by train. Wall Street Journal reporter Jacob Passy joins me. Jacob, just to be clear, we're not talking about commuter rails, right?
Correct. We are talking about what they refer to as intercity trains. So these are your Amtraks, and there's a new service down in Florida called Brightline that can fit into this category. But these are trains going much longer distances than the trains that are part of, like, commuter networks in major cities.
How are more Americans choosing trains over cars and planes?
How much has intercity train travel grown in popularity in the U.S.?
It is still minuscule compared to air travel and driving, but it is definitely growing. Amtrak, so far this year, during their fiscal year, they have seen ridership climb upwards of 18%, and they are on track to set an all-time record for ridership.
Why all the interest in trains right now?
The industry executives I spoke with point to a generational shift that they see happening. They say that folks in the U.S. are increasingly aware of their environmental impact, and traveling by train can be more environmentally friendly than other forms of transportation. But also, you're seeing a lot of congestion, especially on major highways, and folks are looking for methods of getting around that avoid that. So that can involve trains. And in a lot of cases, the most popular train lines are ones that roughly follow popular highway routes. And so they provide that alternative.
The Northeast corridor on Amtrak gets a lot of attention, but are routes besides that also gaining popularity?
So you're correct. The Northeast Corridor of Amtrak is the beast of train travel in the U.S. It accounts for some 9 million riders so far this year, which is vastly more than any other of Amtrak's routes. But we're also seeing growth in the West Coast. So we're seeing the Pacific Surfliner has had a major uptick in ridership, above 30%, and that's a route that goes along the coast of Southern California. The Cascades route of Amtrak is also increasingly popular. They've seen a 48% increase in ridership over the past year to date. And that route is in the Pacific Northwest from Oregon up through Vancouver in Canada. And then down in Florida, there is Brightline, which is its own whole thing separate from Amtrak.
It's a privately owned rail operator. And they've essentially doubled their ridership over the past year, in part because they launched a new route to Orlando. But that rail operator has over a million riders so far this year.
How has the rise in train travel impacted fares?
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