Surfliner Express continues new trend of being on time in December

With 95% on time rate (no more than 9 minutes behind schedule at Los Angeles), the Pacific Surfliner Express now has four months in a row with OTP above 85%. It's amazing the difference it can make to stop always using Amfleet equipment with stations and schedules designed for California's bilevel cars. Unfortunately for the Express, this has not translated into a ridership gain, which has been fairly flat since December 2011 with only 161 passengers per train in December of 2012. Ridership is back up again for the route over all however and with it double digit revenue increases. Most impressive are the national gains in revenue and ridership. Nationally Amtrak was flat for December 2011 against December 2010, so this is a true major increase rather than a mild increase made seemingly greater by losses the previous year.


Ridership

Pacific Surfliner +6.8%
Coast Starlight +9.1%
Capital Corridor -6.2%
San Joaquin +9.5%
Amtrak +9.5%
Metrolink -6.3%
Coaster -5.9%

Differing numbers of weekdays is cited as a principal reason for the decline in ridership for the commuter agencies.

Revenue

Pacific Surfliner +14.0%
Coast Starlight +10.0%
Capital Corridor +4.6%
San Joaquin +6.5%
Amtrak +8.7%

Additionally, the Pacific Surfliner food and beverage sales are noted to be up about 8% compared to the previous year with current sales around $5 million per year; this does not break even however.

On time performance was significantly up with the best performance "in at least five years."

OTP

LOSSAN-South 90.3%

LOSSAN-North 89.3%

Overall 89.3%

Metrolink-VC 95.3%

Metrolink-OC 97.0%

Metrolink-All 95.5%

Coaster 99.4%