> Anyone who's familiar with the NYC->BOS Acela route
And that is literally like almost nobody. I bet less then 1% of anyone living in NYC or Boston metropolitan area have ever ridden on Amtrak, let alone the Acela.
Amtrak is extremely popular in the Northeast Corridor. The Acela has 3,442,188 yearly riders. 10 million Amtrak passengers pass through Penn Station every year. The Northeast Corridor line has 12 million yearly riders.
Your numbers for that station include inter-city rail, commuter rail, and subway lines. My numbers were only for Amtrak (inter-city rail). If everything is included, then Penn Station serves about 600k passengers per day.
Divided by about 200 workdays a year and you end up with about 17,000. Even tripling that as you adjust for things and you probably have less than 25,000 semi-regular riders or better.
That's an odd accounting. Acela isn't commuter rail. I'm sure some people use it for regular commuting, but your numbers seem to suggest that's its primary use. It's not.
If you took the set of people in DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston who had salaries at $100K+ and who also had long-term business/job interests in one of those cities besides their home city (that is, had business travel), I bet ~50% of them have taken the Acela. The people who take the Acela basically run the country, and you can witness the country being run on any given Acela train.
- https://media.amtrak.com/2017/11/amtrak-sets-ridership-reven...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_Amtrak_station...
- https://www.railpassengers.org/all-aboard/tools-info/ridersh...