I was hoping someone with facts at their fingertips would reply to the strange assertion in the letter on Oct. 26 stating the Downeaster train has an average occupancy of 20 passengers. But since no one had, I followed the link in the online letter and found no such statistic. This is one of Amtrak’s most popular services with fantastic growth in ridership over the last decade.
In FY2019, there were 547,293 distinct passenger trips on the 10 trains per day (excepting slightly abbreviated schedules on a couple holidays). My math suggests about 150 passengers per trip. Not all are going all the way to Brunswick from Boston so it becomes hard to figure out how many cars that takes off the congested roadways but it is certainly a lot more than the letter writer, Dick Lemieux, suggests.
While the trains do involve diesel locomotives, they are better than your average diesel car or truck for emissions per mile for a lot of reasons. And eventually, it will be much easier to convert large amounts of train travel to more efficient electric motors than the millions of vehicles on our roadways. (Amtrak already runs fully electric on much of its Northeast corridor.)
So think again about whether or not it makes sense to bring commuter rail to New Hampshire that can relieve us of ever more roadway congestion and expansion of highways to accommodate the average 1.67 passengers in light-duty vehicles.
JENNIFER J. SMITH
Pembroke