Passenger rail ridership and revenue forecasts on the Chicago to St. Louis corridor

The Chicago to St. Louis Corridor is 284 miles long and has distinct line configuration/ownership arrangements by line section which have been preventing the realization of a true high-speed line between the two cities. More than 90 percent of the over 35 million corridor trips have origins or destinations in Chicago or St. Louis. A more balanced transportation system in the corridor would provide travelers with greater mobility options. To achieve this, either a new transportation mode must be introduced or improvements to an existing, less frequently used intercity passenger rail mode must be made.

How we helped

Under a Passenger Rail Program Management contract led by WSP (formerly PB) for Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), Steer has been producing passenger rail ridership and revenue forecasts on the Chicago to St. Louis corridor for the Tier 1 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) document that IDOT submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for passenger rail service improvements in the corridor. Steer was again retained to perform the ridership and revenue forecasting analysis for the Tier 2 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) of the Chicago-St. Louis High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail (HSIPR) Corridor. 

As part of preparing the demand forecasting work, Steer developed an intercity long-distance travel demand model and obtained travel demand models from all the Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) in the corridor, which were then combined into a single network model used to forecast diverted and induced ridership. Detailed sensitivity analyses of the forecasts with respect to changes in key level-of-service and socio-economic variables were also performed.

In addition, we also performed an unconstrained revenue maximizing analysis to evaluate revenue maximizing fares for this corridor. This was a particularly useful analysis given the fact that this corridor has one of the lowest per-mile fare structures of all the Amtrak services in the country. A significant task for this project involved the development and application of a methodology for developing an intercity auto trip table based on data obtained from cell phone movements on the corridor.

This project also involved original data collection in the form of stated preference surveys, intercept surveys and intercity bus origin-destination trip table development based on on-board counts and on-off counts at various bus stops along the corridor.

Successes and outcomes

Reduced travel time, increased service reliability, and enhanced safety will attract travelers from automobile and air travel to the new and improved rail mode of transportation.

In 2017 the IDOT supported the improvements along the existing Amtrak Lincoln Service route. In 2018, IDOT will complete additional improvements along the line and Amtrak will complete installation of Positive Train Control (PTC) on the Amtrak owned locomotives. These enhancements are designed to increase safety and accommodate the operation of higher speed passenger trains.