The Opportunity within AMTRAK: America’s Railroad
Using interactive Tableau maps to locate Amtrak’s future customers
Interact with and explore the dynamic maps in this article
How this project began
Every year around the holidays, I buy a round-trip plane ticket home from Denver to the midwest. This year, in the merry spirit of climate anxiety, I’m attempting to find ways to limit my air travel, and decided to board a 19-hour Amtrak train home for Christmas. This got me thinking: I must not be the only one who’s willing to increase travel time to decrease environmental impact. Grist found that Google searches for ‘climate anxiety’ rose by 565% in the past 12 months, and a similarly noteworthy search spike occurred for ‘what can I do about climate change.’ A recent study of 10,000 young people globally found that two thirds are sad, afraid, or anxious about climate change.
With this backdrop that I am, in fact, not the only one, I decided to focus my third data science bootcamp project on Amtrak — a low-carbon travel option with a wealth of potential.
Amtrak’s challenge
This project from the METIS bootcamp’s Business Module prompted us to choose a realistic business problem to approach with a data-driven solution. Amtrak is largely dependent on government subsidies, especially since COVID, when ridership dropped 95%. The company is working with a very tight budget that is unpredictable year over year. This budget is allocated toward a variety of urgent problems — old and precarious infrastructure, staffing, COVID precautions, and of course, financially sustaining and growing the business. With this in mind, I paid extra attention to making my approach realistic — no extraneous bells and whistles, just a solid data-driven strategy to be executed at a low cost.
In an attempt to grow the business as they recover from COVID, Amtrak states that a near-term goal is to gain more riders, especially younger riders. I believe they have the tools to do so despite their financial strain by exposing a new audience to brand new messaging.
Why Amtrak?
Amtrak has a major advantage over air and car travel in terms of energy efficiency. In their 5-year plan, Amtrak states that they are 47% more energy efficient than car travel and 36% more than traveling by airplane. They continue to set goals to decrease emissions, and have introduced new ‘Acela’ trains that produce less emissions than the rest of their fleet. Amtrak also has a number of amenities that can help persuade potential young riders to opt for a longer travel day— Wifi, food, ample space, mobile route tracking, and minimal security hurdles.
So, why aren’t the youth of America flocking to rail stations? I can only speculate on a universal answer, but I can attribute my personal delay in using Amtrak to lack of awareness. Additionally, it wasn’t immediately clear to me upon visiting Amtrak’s site that they are an environmentally sustainable option.
So, here’s the strategy.
My hypothesis is that environmentally-focused advertising targeted at young, climate-conscious air travelers will increase ridership and revenue for Amtrak. Using a variety of datasets on U.S. air travel, U.S. climate opinions, and college/university details, I was able to drill down to a small, specific population with which to pilot a climate-focused ad campaign.
Step 1: Identify popular air routes
(Just a note — the next few sections are accompanied by interactive Tableau maps that cannot be embedded here. To explore them dynamically, visit this link.)
As a starting point, I focused on routes where there is clear potential for Amtrak to siphon off users from airlines. Using the Bureau of Transportation Statistics airline market dataset from 2017–2019, which samples 10% of flights from each year, I identified the most popular pairs of U.S. air destinations by ridership, without regard to the direction of the route. I then filtered those routes down — to be considered for the pilot, they must be shorter than 1000 miles and be served by existing Amtrak stations within a 24 hour trip or shorter. Here are the 32 popular air routes with those criteria:
Interestingly, the majority of these routes are served by Amtrak’s ‘long distance’ lines, a sector of their business that has been de-prioritized during COVID. As they continue to recover, these long distance lines may present a larger opportunity than previously thought.
Step 2: Locate a receptive audience
With high-potential routes identified, it’s important to ensure that our advertisements will be targeted at a population that is receptive to climate-focused messaging. Opinions on climate change vary widely across the U.S., and I was able to gauge the mindset of the populations in my routes’ geographies using the 2020 Climate Opinion Study. I focused on three agree/disagree statements from the study: Global warming is happening, I’m worried about global warming, and Citizens should do more to address global warming. For each geography, I added together the population’s distances from the respective national averages for these statements. For instance, the national average for ‘Global warming is happening’ is 72% agreement. The Chicago area showed almost 77% agreement, and I combined their extra percentage points into a total sum of distances from the statement averages (for Chicago, the sum for the three chosen statements is +13.27%). The darker regions on the map shown below are areas showing above-average agreement. To see this in action, interact with the map here.
I then overlaid the Amtrak routes that are still in play. We can see that for some of our routes, like Chicago to Denver, both destinations are more likely to have populations receptive to climate messaging. Whereas other routes, like Chicago to Dallas, have a destination that reports being less worried about climate change, and might be better served by an ad campaign of a different focus. At this point, I also ruled out some additional routes for length, and only kept those under 22 hours. The routes that were ruled out are colored in gray below.
Step 3: Drill down to a pilot population
While all of the orange routes could be promising, recall that we are working on a very tight and unpredictable budget. It will be most beneficial for our ads to be incredibly targeted at a small population to start. To find these individuals, I pulled in residential college & university data for each of our chosen geographies. Out-of-state college students generally need to leave campus at least twice a year, and we have the opportunity to persuade them to travel home by rail. Of the potential schools at our route destinations, I only included schools where at least 5% of the freshman class are residents of the state at the other end of the Amtrak route. For instance, Illinois has many potential schools, but upon closer inspection, very few Illinois college students are residents of Colorado, and so would not have a need for Amtrak’s service to Denver.
When we consider only the schools where students have a need to travel the chosen Amtrak route, we come to a total of 49 campuses with which to pilot an ad campaign prior to the holidays. If even that population is too large, we can increase ROI by filtering to schools with more than 5000 students — a total of 23 campuses. Below are our final recommendations for pilot routes and campuses, where campuses are represented as squares.
For a quick case study, take the city of Boston. Boston has a number of schools where at least 5% of freshmen live in New Jersey, DC, and Pennsylvania — the destination states of our chosen routes. These students likely travel home by car or air, and with more information on Amtrak’s environmental impact and amenities, could be persuaded to switch to rail.
What next?
To measure success in this project, I would hope to increase ridership of 18–35 year olds by 5% in our chosen geographies. Given the successes and failures of a pilot and a potential A/B test, we could reassess, iterate, and continue forward. However, there’s also a great opportunity for a more complex solution here.
To gain additional confidence about who might be receptive to this messaging, Amtrak could collect demographic & previous travel mode data at reservation purchase time (e.g. age, new/old customer, If this is your first time at Amtrak, what motivated you to switch to rail travel?). Using such data, we could build a predictive model to understand which characteristics make someone more likely to switch to rail travel. With this data as a foundation, we could revamp the process above to more accurately locate a pilot population.
Takeaway
Amtrak is in a pivotal moment for recovery and growth. Whether with predictive modeling or even more basic data mapping, Amtrak has major potential to increase ridership while simultaneously shifting U.S. travel habits toward a lower-carbon future.
Thank you to Maxen Haveles for his feedback on this post. To explore my project repository, visit this link.
