Transit riders = newspaper readers?

Interesting quote toward the end of a David Carr column on newspapering in today's New York Times (emphasis added):

With mass transit, a downtown full of history and warm bodies, a tabloid (The Philadelphia Daily News, which is also owned by McClatchy [along with the Philadelphia Inquirer] and also on the block) to stir the pot and newsstands on many corners, Philadelphia is a glorious newspaper town.

Gut instinct suggests that people who aren't driving themselves to work can use their commute time to read the paper. With so many cities putting in their first light-rail and commuter-rail systems in the last decade, it should be possible to see if you can correlate transit use and newspaper circulation.

Interesting thought, the idea that "transit-oriented development" can refer to culture as well as real estate.

The pseudo stat you'll never see in a Northwest Airlines news release:

Northwest's "loss per passenger" was $87.60 in the first quarter of this year.

Where did that calculation come from? From the airline itself. Sorta.

In this release Northwest reported a net loss of $1.104 billion in the first quarter.
And in this release, the airline reported boarding 12.6 million passengers in the same period.

As always, the only people who reguarly cite "loss per passenger" are Amtrak critics, who keep insisting that it means something. But real investors are not fooled.

US Airways swings to the black. Guess how?

The old fashioned way, of course--by raising fares.

First off, recall that the airline we now know as US Airways is a merger between the "old" US Airways and America West Airlines. Now, with that out of the way . . .

Reuters reports that revenue per available seat mile on the America West side rose 16.2%, to 10.27 cents. "Old" US Airways' RASM rose 27.7%, to 13.34 cents.

RASM is a useful measure because it takes load factor into account. An empty seat generates zero revenue per available seat mile--so if you pack the planes fuller, RASM will rise. But the planes were already pretty full to begin with. You don't get those kinds of RASM increases with higher loads alone. Fares have risen, too.

This is bad news for the so-called railfans who clamor for Amtrak to be "run like a business" even as they complain that Amtrak fares are "too expensive."