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The estimation of changes in rail ridership through an onboard survey: did free Wi-Fi make a difference to Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service?

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Abstract

Amtrak launched free Wi-Fi internet service (“AmtrakConnect”) on all trains of the California Capitol Corridor route (CC) on November 28, 2011. In March 2012, an onboard survey was conducted to evaluate the impact of the Wi-Fi service on ridership. We develop descriptive statistics and estimate a linear regression model of the impact of Wi-Fi on passengers’ trip frequency. As higher-frequency riders are overrepresented in the original sample, we weight cases to reflect the distribution of passengers, rather than person-trips, more accurately. We segment the linear regression model for three groups of travelers, based on their ridership frequency, to better understand the impact of selected variables on the expected number of trips in 2012. Several conventional factors (trip frequency in 2011, trip purpose, station-to-station distance and employment) as well as Wi-Fi have some impact on the self-reported projected trip frequency in 2012. Using the estimated parameters from the model, the expected number of trips on CC trains for 2012 is 2.7 % higher than it would have been without free Wi-Fi. In particular, new riders expect to make 8.6 % more trips than if Wi-Fi were not available, while the expected number of trips made by lower-frequency continuing riders (those using CC less than once a week in 2011) and higher-frequency continuing riders (those using CC once a week or more in 2011) increase by 6.2 and 1.0 %, respectively.

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Notes

  1. There were 16 stations when we conducted the survey; the Santa Clara/University station opened in August 2012.

  2. To date, entertainment options are partially limited by some restrictions on video streaming and access to voice over internet protocol (VOIP) services, enforced to conserve bandwidth.

  3. If the respondent checked “Less than once a month” but did not fill in the exact number of trips, we assumed six trips. Due to space constraints and because the question was prospective rather than retrospective, no blank was provided for the 2012 question. Thus, if this category were checked only for 2012, it was translated to six trips a year.

  4. Three of the 111 cases were missing the frequency category for either 2011 or 2012. These cases (together with the other 36 cases missing either of the two frequencies) were excluded from the frequency model presented in this paper, but are included in the descriptive statistics where possible.

  5. It is only “somewhat” random because we did not take a true random sample of train runs across the year, plus there are the usual biases generated by those who declined to respond.

  6. Note the additional simplifications, (1) that passengers riding once a week “on average” never ride more than once a week, and (2) that “a week” means the five days of the typical workweek. In general, the approach described here is oriented toward making the sample more representative of the population of weekday CC passengers. For these calculations we also (3) implicitly assume 100 % response among those invited to take the survey, which is a restrictive assumption to the extent that response rates differ by frequency category.

  7. Among the ten possible combinations of two out of five weekdays, the only one for which a passenger would not be sampled is if she traveled on a Monday and Friday that week.

  8. In this case, Eq. (2) does not apply for i = 5, and P 5(j) is defined to be 0 (if only four trips were taken in the entire year, then five trips could not be taken in the survey week).

  9. As an external reality check on the weights, we note that between June 2011 and May 2012, Capitol Corridor observed a 5.7 % increase in ridership (Allison 2012). According to Mokhtarian et al. (2013), the total net adjusted increase in trips from 2011 to 2012 for the weighted sample is 4.6 %, which, given the independent data from Capitol Corridor, is much more reasonable than the 14.4 % increase found for the unweighted sample.

  10. Capitol Corridor trains are priced at a relatively high level for public transportation in the area (e.g. $26 for a 71-mile (114.2-km) one-way trip from Sacramento to Richmond). Both price and amenities offered tend to attract higher-income travelers.

  11. As a result, the role of Wi-Fi may be slightly understated, as some respondents for whom it was a legitimate answer may have checked an earlier answer and skipped directly to the next question.

  12. The remaining 23 reported decreasing their trip frequency and attributed the change to Wi-Fi; among other possible reasons, anecdotal information suggests that some passengers were concerned about possible health impacts of the electromagnetic radiation involved in providing the Wi-Fi service.

  13. When we included Commuting in the model for higher-frequency riders, none of the employment variables were significant, and the adjusted R 2 decreased as well.

  14. The average distances for new riders are 86.9 miles for commute trips and 88.4 miles for social/entertainment trips, while the average numbers of expected 2012 trips for those purposes are 31.4 and 4.0, respectively.

  15. The difference from the 133 cases giving Wi-Fi as a reason mentioned in “Wi-Fi variables and other reasons for frequency changes” section is due to the exclusion of some cases with missing data in some explanatory variables.

  16. Upon reflection, it is not surprising that a change in frequency for already higher-frequency riders would more likely be downward than upward (which makes the positive impact of Wi-Fi for this segment even more impressive).

  17. These travelers might still associate higher utility with the availability of free Wi-Fi, without being able to increase the frequency with which they travel on Capitol Corridor trains.

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Acknowledgments

This project was funded by the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA) and the Sustainable Transportation Center of UC Davis, which receives funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation and Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, through the University Transportation Centers program. The first author was also supported by a fellowship from the China Scholarship Council and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Research on Transportation Pattern of Urban Agglomeration based on the Travel Service Chain (No. 51178346). The authors wish to thank Amanda Neufeld, who played an important role in the design and administration of the survey and contributed significantly to the data handling and analyses, and Aliaksandr Malokin, who provided very valuable input on the design and administration of the survey. Andre Tu, Aurina Lam, Cheng Zhuo, Eileen Coleto and Kelly Caines provided additional assistance during the data collection and data cleaning. Daryl Chan from the CCJPA provided invaluable assistance in collecting the data. Comments from three anonymous reviewers helped to improve the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Highway, Chang’an University, Southern Middle Section of the Second Circular Road, Xi’an, 710064, China

    Zhi Dong

  2. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Zhi Dong & Giovanni Circella

  3. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 790 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Patricia L. Mokhtarian & Giovanni Circella

  4. Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority, 300 Lakeside Dr., 14th Floor East, Oakland, CA, 94612, USA

    James R. Allison

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  1. Zhi Dong
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  2. Patricia L. Mokhtarian
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  3. Giovanni Circella
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  4. James R. Allison
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Correspondence to Patricia L. Mokhtarian.

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Dong, Z., Mokhtarian, P.L., Circella, G. et al. The estimation of changes in rail ridership through an onboard survey: did free Wi-Fi make a difference to Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service?. Transportation 42, 123–142 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-014-9532-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-014-9532-7

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