NTRAC Final Study - Nebraska Department of Roads - State of ...

CHAPTER 3 – RIDERSHIP POTENTIAL
2. Intercity trips per 1995 American Travel Survey (ATS), unless otherwise specified. Trips are between
cities.
3. Fresno-Bakersfield has 69,198 Amtrak riders. An estimated 20 percent have origins and destinations
in Bakersfield and Fresno. An estimated 80 percent are transferring to connecting buses to the Los
Angeles area.
4. Omaha-Lincoln total trips provided by NDOR.
5. Springfield-Windsor-Hartford total intercity trips estimated from Connecticut Department of
Transportation Average Daily Traffic figures, plus 1 percent for bus, and Amtrak figures.
6. St. Louis-Kansas City figures from unpublished ATS data.
The “Southeast High Speed Rail Market and Demand Study” also measured rail shares, plus bus
shares (please see the calculations in the Appendix Table A-3). Its conclusion is that the average
rail share is just under 1.81 percent in the various markets. The chief difference in the two data
sets is that the O/D pairs in the high speed corridors tend to have longer distances that those
shown in Table 3-4. It would appear that the longer the distance, the higher the rail capture rate.
For the purposes of this analysis, a middle range, optimistic rail capture of 1 percent is assumed.
The high speed study showed an average bus share of 0.11 percent, including many of the same
markets counted for rail. This study assumes an optimistic bus capture rate of half that for rail,
i.e. 0.5 percent: this rate is reasonably close to the bus capture rate achieved in some markets
counted in the high speed rail study.
In Table 3-5, these rail and bus capture rates are applied to the estimated 2010 motor vehicle
volume between various cities in a corridor. The 2010 O-D volume was updated from the 2000
O-D volume provided by NDOR and shown in Chapter 2. Updates were based on the average of
the projected increase in total population of the counties in which the O-D cities are located (per
the Bureau of Business Research, UNL). The update approach differs from that used to estimate
2010 work trips in previous tables, in that the growth in work trips between 2000 and 2010 was a
direct function of the growth in work trips during the preceding decade. While Table 3-5 is not
directly comparable to the previous tables, it does provide a logical basis for analysis to total
intercity trips in the corridor.
That said, clearly, the corridor with the largest intercity rail and bus potential is between Kearney
and Omaha (both directions represented). This is because it incorporates Lincoln-Omaha travel,
of which part is commuting between the two cities. The volume for the South Sioux City to
Nebraska City corridor does not include travel between Sioux City, Iowa and Nebraska cities in
the corridor. Presumably, the majority of travel between Sioux City, IA and Omaha, the largest
Nebraska population center, goes by I-29 through Iowa.
It must be noted that the estimated rail and bus shares for 2010 may be somewhat more or less
than those experienced today. For example, the most recent Amtrak data showed 100 annual
riders between Lincoln and Omaha, a number higher than the total estimated in Table 3-5 below.
Still, the 87 trips shown is representative of the scale of annual ridership that could be expected.
The same would hold true for bus.
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NEBRASKA TRANSIT CORRIDORS STUDY
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WILBUR SMITH ASSOCIATES