One of the lesser-noticed victories for people who care about passenger trains in the U.S. happened in December of 2020, when new rules took effect requiring detailed public reporting on dozens of things that make your trip great -- or terrible. These were the famous “metrics and standards” rules Congress wanted written a decade earlier, and which finally took effect after squabbling, litigation, and inertia were all overcome.
Thanks to this little victory, we were finally able to say with some confidence what was happening with on-time performance, train delay minutes, Amtrak’s financial performance, customer satisfaction scores by route, data on stations, and so forth. We also for the first time got good data to measure public benefits such as the levels of service to underserved communities, the number of missed connections, the degree to which routes connect other communities, and how many people in large metropolitan statistical areas across the country have access to trains.
It was -- and is -- great stuff. But unless you’re a data nerd like me, looking through the quarterly list of spreadsheets, each with hundreds and hundreds of rows of data down to the route level, could be intimidating.
The Federal Railroad Administration this week did our whole community a solid, releasing an interactive dashboard to make a lot of that data easy to search and even easier to visualize. You can go look at that dashboard here: https://explore.dot.gov/t/FRA/views/AmtrakMetricsandStandardsDashboard/Introduction (Full disclosure, when I was in charge of the editorial data operation at Aviation Week 12 years ago I was an internal cheerleader for the tool FRA is using, called Tableau, to make that data accessible. So I guess I have a pony in this race...)
One thing grassroots advocates, railfans, and others love to do is to make confident declarations about why something might be happening with Amtrak trains. Sometimes they’re based on fact, and other times they’re based on, well, I’ll call it “unearned certainty.” Thanks to this dashboard project, which our friend Katie List at FRA says took many, many months and cooperative efforts across the agency and the Dept. of Transportation’s Volpe Center, there’s now an easy way to get real, credible answers.
You can dive deep into on-time performance, looking at one particular quarter, or a string of quarters starting and ending where you choose. You can look at individual routes, with a helpful route map, a color-coded performance indicator, and tables with causes of delays and delay minutes per 10,000 train miles all in one place. Or, if ridership is your jam, you can look at ridership sliced across Amtrak service lines, within a service line, by individual route, by individual routes you select, or any other combination. And you can do it with current data, historical data, or sliced any way you’d like.
It’s a terrific addition to the knowledge base of our entire community -- and the FRA deserves real credit for pulling it together.
This level of transparency was the result of Congress asking, and later demanding, to see real data around passenger-rail performance. Dozens of successive Congresses under different political leadership supported passenger rail, funded it, and wrote requirements into law to make sure that things like on-time performance and enforcing Amtrak’s rights to not get stuck behind freight trains were honored in the observance and not just the breach.
DOT and FRA did what Executive branch departments are supposed to do, develop and write regulations to carry out what Congress wanted. But there was nothing in the law that said FRA had to produce a dashboard. A crude regurgitation of numbers on a quarterly document would have fulfilled the letter of the law, if not really the spirit animating Congress’ intent. DOT and FRA have taken an extra step here by making this information easily digested by the general public, and produced in a form that makes it much easier to work with.
Go give it a try. Let us know what you think. And if it turns out that it’s hard to load, just give it some grace -- I think it’s going to be more popular, and more heavily used, than anyone at FRA or Volpe might have expected. To paraphrase that great line from the classic movie Jaws, “I think they’re gonna need a bigger server...”
Maybe it's me, but the line graphs need some kind of legend. It would help folks who aren't that adept at reading graphs.