Measuring the Benefits of Intercity Passenger Rail: A Study

In FFY 2009, the Heartland Flyer rail service diverted an estimated 39,427 vehicle-trips
from parallel roadways in the intercity travel corridor between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth.
A vast majority (95 percent) of these vehicles were personal vehicles, while the balance was
either rental cars or company-owned vehicles. Rail passengers that reported a preference for
“passenger in a private vehicle” accounted for approximately 7,000 person-trips. Based on these
figures, the average occupancy of a diverted vehicle-trip was 1.2 persons per vehicle. While this
was a relatively small number of vehicles on a daily basis (recall the AADT on the Red River
bridge was 33,000 vehicles per day during the same period), there appears to be at least some
traffic-reducing benefits associated with the rail service. From these estimates of automobile
traveler diversion onto the Heartland Flyer, interested parties can compute other sketch-level
measures can be computed to gauge how the passenger rail service supports other transportation
policy goals. Assuming that, on average, each diverted vehicle-trip would have traveled
approximately 200 miles, researchers estimate that the Heartland Flyer rail service removes
approximately 7.9 million annual vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) from parallel roadways.
Additional assumptions of vehicle speed, fleet composition, or fuel economy can be applied to
this VMT estimate to project the impacts of passenger rail service on measures such as highway
level-of-service, fuel consumption, and vehicle emissions.
Although the automobile was the primary alternative travel mode for Heartland Flyer
passengers, other corridor travel options were reported in the survey findings. Researchers
estimate that almost 4,400 commercial airline passenger trips and more than 2,200 intercity bus
passenger trips were diverted onto the Heartland Flyer during FFY 2009. Induced trips, or trips
that would not have happened if the Heartland Flyer service did not exist, accounted for more
than 20,000 rail passenger trips in FFY 2009. These trips do not result in any net benefits to the
parallel surface and air transportation networks in the corridor. However, other benefits from
these induced trips (not directly related to transportation) are realized, some of which will be
examined in subsequent sections.
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