The estimation of changes in rail ridership through an onboard survey: did free Wi-Fi make a difference to Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service? Zhi Dong • Patricia L. Mokhtarian • Giovanni Circella • James R. Allison Published online: 2 July 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract Amtrak launched free Wi-Fi internet service (‘‘AmtrakConnect’’) on all trains of the California Capitol Corridor route (CC) on November 28, 2011. In March 2012, an onboard survey was conducted to evaluate the impact of the Wi-Fi service on ridership. We develop descriptive statistics and estimate a linear regression model of the impact of Wi-Fi on passengers’ trip frequency. As higher-frequency riders are overrepresented in the ori- ginal sample, we weight cases to reﬂect the distribution of passengers, rather than person- trips, more accurately. We segment the linear regression model for three groups of trav- elers, based on their ridership frequency, to better understand the impact of selected variables on the expected number of trips in 2012. Several conventional factors (trip frequency in 2011, trip purpose, station-to-station distance and employment) as well as Wi- Fi have some impact on the self-reported projected trip frequency in 2012. Using the estimated parameters from the model, the expected number of trips on CC trains for 2012 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2013 Transportation Research Board Meeting (Paper No. 13-3946). Z. Dong School of Highway, Chang’an University, Southern Middle Section of the Second Circular Road, Xi’an 710064, China e-mail: dongzhi65@gmail.com Z. Dong  G. Circella Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA e-mail: gcircella@ucdavis.edu P. L. Mokhtarian (&)  G. Circella School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 790 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA e-mail: patmokh@gatech.edu J. R. Allison Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority, 300 Lakeside Dr., 14th Floor East, Oakland, CA 94612, USA e-mail: JimA@capitolcorridor.org 123 Transportation (2015) 42:123–142 DOI 10.1007/s11116-014-9532-7