As a North Carolinian, I'm incredibly psyched about this map. Not only because it finally includes an Asheville connection, but because connecting the piedmont cities with high speed rail could be a game changer for job mobilitiy and affordable home ownership in the region. Many people don't realize how dense the population of the NC piedmont is, because it's not localized around one big city. But if you follow that line between Charlotte and Raleigh, you'll actually find about 6.5million people over 11.2k sq miles, which is comparable to Atlanta's 6.5 million over 10.5k sq miles![1]
Right now, the best jobs in the state are divided between Charlotte-area, and Triangle area (Raleigh and Durham). House prices are going up like crazy in those areas, meanwhile the more affordable cities that are outside the range of a comfortable commute to those cities (High Point -> Triangle), (Winston -> Charlotte) can't quite compete with the network effects around banking, healthcare, and tech that are driving the growth in the big areas. Those cities wouldn't actually be a terrible a commute away from Charlotte or The Triangle (45min-1hour in ideal conditions), but traffic during peak hours and constant road construction along those routes would make it miserable.
If there was fast, reliable train service, I could definitely see commuters giving those areas a closer look. Especially since so many jobs these days seem to be less stringent about office time (ie, only go into the office 2x a week).
Winston may not be keeping up with Charlotte or RTP but it has Novant and Wake Forest School of Medicine which are decent anchors for its own growth and continued transition from tobacco economy.
This proposal seems totally disconnected from reality.
First, Amtrak is not a competitive transportation option. It can be a fun novelty, but it's expensive and slow. Going from Portland to Oakland is supposed to take 18 hours but actually took 20 when I rode it. The same trip in a car takes 10 hours. By plane is 90 minutes. It gets worse: Amtrak cost me more than a plane ticket to the same destination.
Second, hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't get you much train in the US. California tried to build a high speed rail route between SF and LA. The estimated completion cost has skyrocketed to $100 billion and the completion date is 25 years after voters approved the project. The state has since given up on connecting LA & SF by high speed rail.
There is simply no future in which passenger rail competes with air travel in the US. Even in circumstances where the distances are not too great, and the political and bureaucratic hurdles are.
> Even in circumstances where the distances are not too great, and the political and bureaucratic hurdles are.
NIMBY-ism as well? Because I can't fathom how a 400 miles high-speed rail route can cost $100bn unless you're spending years re-drafting your route because every asshole on the way has to be heard.
25 years is not completely nonsensical though, if you want to do this right it does take time.
For a fairly recent example, the french LGV Est is 252 miles (406km), it cost 4bn (including 800 millions worth of rolling stock), and took 16 years before the construction and financing protocol of the first phase was signed and the opening of the second phase. First phase opened a year late, and second phase 3 months late because of the Eckwersheim testing accident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckwersheim_derailment).
Obviously building in California would require additional studies and expenses for earthquake safety and the like, but 12x… seems a bit much.
The cost only makes sense if it's basically all tunnels and briges, like Chūō Shinkansen: that's estimated to cost north of $90 billion for 177 miles, but it's going straight through mountains, 90% of the way is through tunnels.
The longer we wait to do rail right the more expensive it gets because of NIMBY-ism and property ownership. We need to do it now.
Trains are slower in some cases, but the views you simply cannot get from a plane or car.
You can work on a train.
You can get a private cab.
You can get up and move around.
You can go to the viewing car and see the beauty of America.
You can't do any of that in a plane or car. It is traveling in a much better way, even if longer.
Take the Southwest Chief from Flagstaff to Colorado routes and you'd be amazed at how pretty New Mexico is, the deserts of Arizona and the mountains in Colorado. Take any of the coastal lines. You will simply be blown away.
The great thing about trains or infrastructure like fiber across America maybe, people will see govt/business in action. It will build platforms of market value that people can see, people in small towns, people all around.
People need visuals just like clients need visuals to see progress, even though lots of the work is not visible maybe in code or other areas.
The time to train is now. In a way it is the last chance to really get it going before everything is full.
We have been robbed of amazing train rides and views. Take any of these routes/lines and tell me you don't enjoy the views. [1]
Before you vote on anything related to trains, go take one on our underfunded Amtrak routes. It will change your mind if you are not for it. Imagine if we did this right.
Trains use much less fuel, help make pricing for cars/planes competitive and more. Having a third major transportation option besides a bus is needed as we get more packed in.
The view from a train might be marginally nicer, but when I travel it's usually because I want to be somewhere else. Not because I want to sit for hours and watch the scenery go by.
But do you want to spend 1hr getting to the airport, then waiting 2+ Hours to board the plane, wait for air traffic control, taxi, etc and then repeat on the other side? It takes five to six hours to go from SF to LA about the same as it takes to drive. A train would be far better.
Not to mention getting groped and treated like a terrorist by TSA staff. Or paying through your nose for baggage, with the added privilege of carriers regularly losing your stuff.
Expecting nothing good to come from NA, I fully expect the US would follow Canada in making domestic train as inconvenient as planes, including weighting luggage & shitty boarding.
The fact that the train takes 18hrs is a political decision. In Japan, the same train over the same distance, often with even more torturous landscape and crowed infrastructure, takes 3hrs.
Yes there was a time where you could go to the airport, buy a ticket, and just walk on to the plane. You didn't need to spend hours going through ceremonial activity. And on the plane, you had confortable seats, you could get up and walk around, some airplanes even had a lounge in the back where you could get a drink and socialize. 9/11, and the fact that passengers will seemingly sacrifice all comfort to save a dollar on the fare ended all that.
One question I have on this - if rail travel became more ubiquitous, would it become a more enticing target for malevolent actors and/or a higher priority for security screenings, etc? We marvel at how easy it is to walk on a train today, but would that change / how might it change if rail carried a more significant portion of travelers?
Amtrak already does some screening and they increased their security like all others did from rental cars to busses to trains to planes. However the nature of flying has a much higher reach in terms of potential damage which was realized on 9/11 really.
Trains are less of a threat. Attackers can only really cause damage on a train to a section and maybe a derailment.
Plane terrorism is broader. With a plane everyone is at risk and the plane could be used to attack other things.
Train terrorism is limited. A train can't be taken off course. A train can't be all blown up. Even a massive derailment only affects a section. An attack would be a tragedy but it has rails so to speak on the reach of the damage. Maybe if they blew it up over a bridge or by a building in a city it could cause more damage or some other trigger like causing another disaster. You to have the threat of people setting explosives on the track. There was one of those in 1995 in Arizona where 1 died and 78 were injured, supposedly the attackers were avenging the Waco Siege. [1] Looks like that is the only terrorism event on trains in the US. [2] Subways and metros are probably more targeted in the city.
I used to fly twice a month, SF<->DC, before 9/11, the seats in economy were not comfortable, and there were no lounges on domestic flights. Maybe in first class, but domestic first class usually is little more than slightly better seats.
This is no way in comparison to train travel. There's no "dining car" on the train. There's no tables for business meetings. There's no 2 to 4 bathrooms per car. Sleeper rooms are much cheaper and accessible than on planes, but sure, you can pay a multiple of $10k for a room on beyond-first-class international flights.
But even if I granted you that in the old days, you could show up 30 minutes before the flight, walk pretty much straight to the gate, you're still ignoring much more time spent getting to the airport, and time spent waiting for takeoff and baggage loading/unloading.
Major airports are generally located outside cities and near water if possible, train stations are usually located in the heart of the metro area. Sure, there are exceptions like Las Vegas, but in general, most people have to spent 45mins-1hr just getting to the airport in the US.
No one's saying you should use train travel for DC to SF. But come on, NYC to DC, or SF to LA is a no-fucking brainer. When you drive from SF to LA, most of Route-5 is straight land on wild open, flat prairie, and the main difficulty is when you hit the mountain range past Bakersfield, which every advanced country, be it the French, Swiss, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, already deal with, on far more harsh terrain.
There's zero excuse for the opposition to high speed rail for regional intercity, except for a stubborn, weirdly political opposition to trains, which George Will kind of outlined (accidentally) in a piece attacking trains as "socialist" but somehow air travel as "non-socialist" despite the fact that the Feds and States have funded aviation infrastructure to the tune of hundreds of billions over the decades.
Except for the driver. I am petrified of driving in a group at the serious risk of distracting the driver. And driverless car is very far off from reality. Till then trains it is for me.
Second this ... I've been commuting for about 84 km each way each day for five years ... in Germany with the regional trains that took me about 1.5h (and only 40 minutes of that were actual train ride).
In that time I would start to work (on the clock), just "sleep in" or work on hobby projects.
In the same time a friend of mine in the bay area manages to travel 20 km to the office.
As much as I hated commuting ... I'd take commuting by train over commuting by car every day.
> Take the Southwest Chief from Flagstaff to Colorado routes and you'd be amazed at how pretty New Mexico is, the deserts of Arizona and the mountains in Colorado.
I think it leaves Flagstaff really early in the morning - and it's not worth mentioning Flagstaff to LA or LA to Flagstaff because those trips are only scheduled for the middle of the night.
When I took it, it was early morning Flagstaff (6AM) into Trinidad by later that day (5PM). Going through Navajo lands, then New Mexico, then Colorado coal areas and then beautiful mountains was amazing. It gives you lots of perspective.
They could run them more with more routes and funding. On the way back to Flagstaff it was later so maybe they already have some additional times.
It would be nice to see LA sections during the day. But that is another benefit really, you can sleep easier on a train than you can on a plane or car, especially with a private room/car.
Railroads (particularly high speed) need to be long and straight. What happens if people don't want a dozen trains roaring through their neighborhood every day? It's difficult to just go around it.
What happens if people don't want a railroad through their property at all? After all, once a railroad is sitting on your land, it's difficult to repurpose it for much else. The state can try eminent domain, but that takes time and lengthy court cases, and the costs add up quick.
The best routes already have railroads. Their right of ways are in private hands.
To put it in perspective, the only all season transcontinental route is the southern most line on the article’s map. It only exists by virtue of the Gadsden Purchase in 1854. The right of way is controlled by the corporate successors of the Southern Pacific.
The non-existence of viable alternative all season grades across the west is why the Gadsden Purchase happened. The US had assumed surely such routes existed in Alta California following its succession in 1848 via the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
>Because I can't fathom how a 400 miles high-speed rail route can cost $100bn unless you're spending years re-drafting your route because every asshole on the way has to be heard.
That's exactly what happens. Not because of NIMBYism but because it's run by consultants on cost plus, T&M, or percentage contracts. They have no incentive to finish the project. And in fact are financially rewarded for making the project more expensive.
The LGV route is a far more open and "flatter" (relatively speaking) than LA to SF. There's way less for them to tunnel or grade, which gets expensive quickly. HSR requires more gentle changes in direction than traditional rail. Building on flat, open terrain that no one is using is great... but that kind of terrain is already in use or owned by someone. Thus, easements or having to outright purchase the land. If not and you go for cheap land, it's going to come with downsides, like being mountainous.
At that, France sees less than 10 earthquake events over 2 magnitude a year on average. In the past week, there were already 6 events over 2 magnitude between LA and SF alone: https://www.cisn.org/map/index.html An LA to SF line is practically on a fault line. Devastating earthquakes are a real reality for a Cali line, not so much for France. The Cali standards for building rail are going to be higher than France, and for EXTREMELY good reason. Thus, price goes up for construction.
There's a lot more at play to building these things. What I mentioned barely scratches the surface to the complications. Claiming NIMBY is pretty naive if you don't take into consideration the real world problems and needs to achieving something compared to the lofty, idealistic wants of a project.
The portion of the CAHSR system being built right now is flatter and more open than most of France, and isn't on or near any of the major fault lines in California. Its outrageous expense has nothing to do with the geographical challenges of California (which are real, but not for this segment) and everything to do with the incompetence of the construction companies and their governmental overseers, as well as NIMBYs exacerbating these problems to epic degrees.
Sunshine bear, check out the menu on that link. Hit load all from the past week. Next, search the LA to SF proposed HSR route. There were 2 dozen earthquakes along the route between 1-2.5mag and 1 at 2.5mag in the last week. The route was hit by more seismic events in one week than France experiences in a year. Yes, they are planning for earthquakes, as they should. It will be hit one day, in the next decade or so by a large event, and should be well prepared for it. The same way how many states are enacting building codes to reflect 100 year flood statistics instead of treating them as rare events. Long term projects need long term expectations of problems and methods to overcome them. You can't just replace rail like you replace your iPhone. This will inevitably cost them more per mile compared to France. That's actually an very intelligent move to make regarding long term infrastructure.
It's funny how the same complaints tech folks make of the construction industry are in parallel with what construction folks say of the tech industry. Both are based off ignorance. I have the pleasant curse of having a foot in both fields.
Real world construction is far more complex and difficult than what you imagine. Wide sweeping statements like, "incompetence of the construction companies and their governmental overseers" stinks of you having an cartoonish armchair understanding of what it actual takes from visualized computer renders to a real standing structure. Because civil engineering in the modern age has been a total failure, har har har. Honestly, it's people like you that are easily persuaded to vote for abolishing OSHA on the grounds to hasten construction times and lower costs. Because guess what, Cali construction costs are pretty high due to safety regulations. This is where... oh God forgive me for saying this... I agree with a lot of Cali construction code even though it can be excessive at times, it's warranted a lot of time. Especially because some of it is set for their specific region's character of obstacles... almost like local authorities know best and should enact laws how to construct depending on their local area's nuances! They shouldn't base their construction methods on regions from the other side of the planet!
You seem to be quite knowledgeable on the subject, so let me ask you a question: Is LA to SF is less open and flat, and less seismically active than Tokyo-Kanazawa line? I honestly don't know the answer, but the contrast between Japan (has very nice subway and bullet train lines) and California (can't even go to the grocery store without a car) is quite striking to me every time I visit.
>I can't fathom how a 400 miles high-speed rail route can cost $100bn
In the Seattle metro area, about 100 miles of low-speed light rail has cost $75.5 billion so far. Building infrastructure in the US is just inherently more expensive than in other countries. It is a political problem, and unfortunately, only has political solutions.
Amtrak receives well more than $1 billion a year in federal subsidies and still loses millions of dollars per year. It is private only in the broadest sense of the word.
Amtrak doesn't own most of its rails. They have to negotiate with, e. g. BNSF and Union Pacific to use their tracks in most of the country. This often has led to limits on services and schedules, because they don't want to repackage their profitable freight offerings, or upgrade trackage sufficient for 100kph freight trains but not 200kph+ modern passenger ones.
The new TGV are all new right of ways for which they had to buy the lands, except in the suburbs where they go through upgraded original tracks that are shared with suburban trains.
And most of the cost of tunnels is the requirement for emergency access and ventilation; the small demonstration tunnel in Vegas lacks these features, and so was cheaper.
To compare, the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland requires emergency cross connections every 325m and access shafts to the surface. The cross connections are perpendicular to the main tunnel and short in length so they have to be dug out more or less with workers anyways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel#/media/Fi...
From sf to la wouldn’t need stops in between. At most you’d need 1-2 stops in between. I could totally see this as cheaper than dealing with every land owner in between the train’s path
Emergency access isn't necessary for Boring Company tunnels. They're so narrow that no one is getting out of a vehicle in an emergency in the first place.
The cost would actually make sense if it were all tunnels. Japan's newest Shinkansen route will be 90% tunnels, and it's estimated at $90bn for 180 miles. Tunneling is expensive as hell.
I wonder if you could lower cost by switching to narrower tunnel gauge. Also, if it's all tunnel you could evacuate some of the air to lower resistance...
narrower tunnel gauge either means less capacity or comfort, or sometimes both. part of why Concorde was retired was because the seats themselves were not actually comfortable, and it could not compete with more spacious business class on traditional airliners with innovations like lie flat beds.
I'm not sure the timeframes quite line up. Lie-flat seating was coming in when the Concorde was retired (after an accident and in the wake of 9/11) but I'm not sure how widespread it was.
But, yes, I've been in a Concorde (not flown in one) and the seating is, at best, modern domestic--non lie-flat--business class.
I actually think this is something that a lot of modern supersonic travel fans miss. If you're willing to spend the money that supersonic travel will cost you can travel very comfortably. And 12-24 hours of time spent relaxing comfortably is not actually a problem for most people.
BA, one of the two Concorde operators, started using lie flat beds in 1999. Six hours vs three in a Concorde for JFK-LHR is totally a worthwhile trade for a cheaper fare if the six hours are mostly during sleeping hours anyways.
There were definitely other problems (the aircraft was a dinosaur, with parts no longer made and a three-person crew; there was no reasonable replacement program on the horizon; the fuel costs of supersonic were hard to justify with the oil prices of the 2000s) but yeah, at some point Concorde's proposition became less and less appealing.
FWIW the biggest supersonic contender these days, Boom, is specifically targeting room and per-mile costs for a modern business-class cabin of 50 people, which is a lot more workable from a business perspective. That being said, the money is not really in transatlantic (where you can sleep for 6-8 hours anyways) but in transpacific, because 12+ hours in a plane is a slog no matter how comfy the seat is.
The narrow tunnel-gage of Boring Company is designed for cars... presumably it'd be possible to have a train vehicle with a form-factor more like stretch minivan than a bus. Lots of moving parts because many many more doors to open-close than a traditional bus or subway. But still, if stop-to-stop times are under half an hour, is it okay to seal someone in stretch-minivan-like train car without a bathroom for half an hour? I dunno.
It does mean that non-stop from LA to San Jose would be right out though. Being conservative and assuming a 300km/h vehicle, you'd want at least 3 stops along the way if people are completely trapped in the vehicle without even being able to stand up, much less relieve themselves.
Cars, being a mostly private affair, are not subject to the public access regulations of public infrastructure.
The bathroom is an obvious problem, and it also ties into problem # 2; the Americans with Disabilities Act. Cars and even minivans are not compliant with ADA without very expensive modification. Airplanes can afford long dwell times and dedicated personnel for people with disabilities, but as designed Boring Company/Hyperloop stuff can't accommodate this in a reasonable way.
CA fucking up HSR has more to do with CA than HSR. The entire thing is basically a mismanaged contractor/consultant gravy train.
Interestingly enough, rail is competitive in the opposite direction from Portland, namely to Seattle, and Seattle to Vancouver. SeaTac is far enough away from both Tacoma and Seattle to be a slog from many parts of the metro area, and the sole highway corridor gets very congested. And it mostly consists of lots of small investments to the existing route, like a $181M bypass that shaved ten whole minutes off of a 3h30 trip, a 6.7% improvement in travel times.
It's most likely these types of smaller improvements that Amtrak will be seeking, and other bang-for-the-buck improvements like electrification. (Even on the same track and same speed limits, electric trains offer better acceleration than their diesel counterparts, which is similar to what we're now seeing from the electrification of cars.)
Most of the delays and lack of consistency come from the rail lines being controlled by other interests. Amtrak is always lowest on the priority totem pole, and is routinely forced to yield to freight lines for hours at a time arbitrarily and without notice.
Lack of high speed rail is an orthogonal issue, and is constantly conflated with fixing the current state of affairs. we don't even have standard passenger rail yet! We need to build more cheap track to connect areas first.
Rail travel is far more efficient than flying, both environmentally and economically. Flying is heavily subsidized in ways that rail is not, and that tends to hide the externalities.
Rail has also been set up to fail with metrics like direct profitability, which is entirely not the point of public transportation. It's like claiming the entire value of a road is the toll money it generates.
> Amtrak is always lowest on the priority totem pole
It's unfortunate, but this is probably the way it should be.
Economically the repeat customer should probably get the benefits of predictability / stability.
Also, passenger commuter lines do stick closer to schedule than long-distance trains.
When I've traveled amtrak, the first time I was surprised to have such unpredictable times, but after that I just factored it in. Most long-distance amtrak travel is for the scenery and the pace, not for private-jet-efficiency.
I don’t think the “economically” part of this statement is at all obvious. Train sets are cheaper than passenger planes but they have to be tied up a lot longer to provide the same passenger-miles. Acquiring land and laying track costs what it actually costs in the US and not what it would it would theoretically cost under foreign labor, regulatory, and property-rights conditions.
Taxpayer money goes to fund the Airline industry in a wide number of ways, just a few would be that fact that most airports are government run, many operating at net loss when proper accounting is used. We also subsidize security (tsa), traffic control (faa), and do not get me started on the billions and billions in bailouts the airlines get with every economic down turn.
So to say the economic part is not obvious one has to be willfully ignorant of government spending, just listing the obvious source of government subsidy there are many other less obvious one including special tax exemptions, and many other programs that have indirect benefits to the industry
This report [0] suggests significantly higher passenger-mile costs in both fares and subsidies for Amtrak vs. air travel. It looks pretty off the cuff, I’m sure you could dispute the methodology, but... let’s see yours.
I find it amusing that in this thread if I make a statement opposing government funding of trains people point out that Airplanes get government funding, and if make a comment opposing government funding of airplanes people point out that trains get government funding
It seems that the 2 groups are completely unable to fathom that a person could simply oppose government funding of both Planes and Trains....
Neither Amtrak nor Air Travel should get ANY tax payer money, for any purpose or reason..
Do you have this confused with a different subthread perhaps? The argument you made above is that rail is obviously more economically efficient than aviation, and that to doubt this is willfully ignorant.
And rail would literally not exist without way more government intervention (eminent domain), subsidies, and bailouts. On the eve of self driving it is actually obvious that rail is economically inferior by several orders of magnitude.
> Rail has also been set up to fail with metrics like direct profitability, which is entirely not the point of public transportation. It's like claiming the entire value of a road is the toll money it generates.
It's this mentality that is exactly the problem. If a public transportation system can pull a profit that means it's actually creating value for people in excess of the resources that it took to create.
If you look at the best public transit systems in the world most of them are either for profit corporations or explicitly chartered to generate revenue (MTR/Comfort Delgro in sg, MRT in hong kong, tokyo subway). I'm aware that MTR recently got nationalized, so we shall see if the quality remains.
Do you have a study as a source that backs that up? I'm personally skeptical, as public transportation is weighted significantly towards ineffective demand.
This also neglects the question of positive externalities attached to public transportation systems that aren't accounted for in a profit / revenue metric, such as lower property prices, more flexible labor markets, and the quality of life improvements of mixed use zoning that high use public transportation facilitate.
Buses make more sense than passenger rail. More flexible routing. More flexible time tables. Utilize existing infrastructure. Dedicated right of way easier to create by reconfiguration of existing roads.
When the Colorado Plateau snows in - as it does about every winter - a bus to LA can simply detour south toward Phoenix.
Also level crossings and equipment breakdowns. Collisions between cars and trains are not uncommon. In my first and last Amtrak trip, I rode from Chicago to Las Vegas and was nearly 24 hours late on arrival, due to delays from freight traffic, hitting a car at a crossing, and having a locomotive break down. And my luggage was delayed for another day after that.
At the scale of the US, passenger rail is disconnected from geography. Look at the map and locate Salt Lake City. It sits in the endorheic watershed known as the Great Basin. It is the only metro area of more than a million people in the Basin. The Great Basin is about the size of France.
From Salt Lake City heading west the first metro of more than one million is Sacramento a thousand kilometers away. In between is nothing but mountain ranges running north south. The little ones only nerds and locals can name. The big one, the Sierra Nevada, which most Americans will vaguely allude to as “the Rockies.” Despite the Rockies being five hundred kilometers to the east of Salt Lake City.
Even further on the other side of the Rockies sits Denver 800 km away. It's the closest million plus metro to the east of Salt Lake. Again across north south mountain ranges.
That’s 1800 km of mountain traversing rail line that only serves Salt Lake City. And it’s still almost that far - 1600 km - to Chicago...and a mere 1200 km to New York City.
The US is vast. Europeans don’t have practical rail from Helsinki to Athens. Or Berlin to Baku. Both significantly shorter than NYC to San Francisco.
This only applies from the Midwest to the West Coast. There's no geographical reason the Northeast (and parts of the South) should not be densely connected with intercity rail.
I agree in theory. In practice, national rail has to pass the Senate where Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Hawaii, and the Dakotas are twelve percent of the votes. Throw in all the places you are leaving out and you're close to half the of it.
National passenger rail isn't politically viable in the US because passenger rail is an absurd approach in most of the US.
Not in terms of population density, which is what matters when it comes to intercity rail. I know this isn't convincing to senators from big western states — but we've gotta draw a line in the sand in allocating decision making power to big empty spaces in this country, it's becoming an existential concern at this point.
Existential for whom? You talk about "this country" so clearly it's not everyone in the world. And you talk about the big western states, so it's not me as I live in California.
So really, it's just your concern that is important to you. There's no "we" in it. Only what benefits you.
If you think intercity rail is a great idea, you don't need the US Senate. Just your own local and state officials to boldly pay for it with your own local and state taxes.
The federal government is the issuer of our currency and is well-positioned to fund intercity rail in a way that states and cities just aren't. It's bad that, as you suggested, the senators from large and sparsely populated western states could shoot the idea down because it doesn't happen to work for their states, even though it could be a great solution for 200+ million people on the coasts (California included) in the South, and in the Great Lakes region. If the United States can't mobilize to build infrastructure because a minority of the country doesn't want to, that's an existential threat to the country.
The existential threat to the US is that war upon the locals is establishing methodology. Your championing it here is symptomatic of its continual underlying appeal as the alternative to self control.
The problem isn’t that some states won’t go along. It’s that you think of Hawaii as owing you fealty. New Mexico as obliged to pay tribute.
The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term. There’s no “Plymouth Rock therefore California.” No “Jamestown therefore Santa Fe.” No “Mount Vernon therefore Maui.”
I dunno if this is really some high modernist plot to assimilate all of these quirky little polities into a single transportation regime. If New Mexico or Montana don't want trains I really couldn't care less. But the actual power dynamic is the inverse of what you're positing: the western states elect senators with frontier mindsets who value austerity and self-reliance (nevermind who is paying for the interstates that crisscross their states) and they exert an outsize influence on policy for the rest of the country. "Santa Fe therefore Jamestown" is actually a fantastic summary of how federal transportation policy has been standardized over the last seventy years, using the sparsest and least geometrically constrained places as a yardstick for what should be built (freeways) and for whom (people making 20+ mile city-suburb or suburb-suburb commutes).
> The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term.
Here we agree, which is why the US should build several dense intercity rail networks within its borders which will eventually serve as skeletons for its balkanized successor states :)
I suppose you consider federalism itself to be "war upon the locals". That ship sailed (or perhaps burned and sank) when the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution.
continual underlying appeal as the alternative to self control
If I could only just control my compulsive, pathological desire for decent-quality intercity rail travel in densely populated regions...
The problem isn’t that some states won’t go along. It’s that you think of Hawaii as owing you fealty. New Mexico as obliged to pay tribute.
By that logic, taxpayers in New York have been paying fealty to Texans in the Fort Worth area (via the Lockheed F-35 construction facility) for years.
The two southern routes don't cross the Rockies. The route through Flagstaff crosses the Colorado Plateau. It skirts south of the Rockies through La Junta following the Santa Fe trail...La Junta is named for the point on the old Spanish maps where the alternative routes of Santa Fe trail came to a junction. La Junta (literally "the junction") is east of Salida Colorado where the Arkansas River provides an exit ("salida" in Spanish) from the Rocky Mountains. It's the route Francis Parkman used and describes in his book The Oregon Trail...he never got very close to Oregon. The opium might have had something to do with that.
The southernmost route traverses the mountains of the Basin and Range physiographic region.
You're right that the proposal is disconnected from reality -- but it's not because Amtrak can't be a competitive option for a significant portion of the population. It's because of how Amtrak is funded.
There are a handful of routes in the US where Amtrak is currently competitive. As others have mentioned, these are mostly in the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak should be investing in improving these, but instead treats them like a cash cow to fund unprofitable routes elsewhere.
There are also a few routes that, with a little bit of investment, could be competitive. LA to San Diego is one example -- they're the #2 and #8 largest cities in the US, only 120 miles apart, and one has notoriously bad traffic. The biggest problem with current service is that some sections of the route share a single track for both directions of travel, which can lead to cascading delays. They're fixing this, but because there's so little funding, it's going to take 30 years just to lay a few dozen miles of track alongside the existing track. It would seem like a no-brainer to prioritize this.
But because Amtrak requires congressional funding, and no member of congress wants to be left out, you end up getting grand plans that touch every state in the country, and you have to add routes that have no chance of being successful just to get enough votes. Eyeballing the map, it looks like the only state in the continental US without a stop is South Dakota.
I wish rail in the US were run more like those in Japan - private companies who derive their profits from real estate in and around stations, not solely from fares. It always astounds me how unproductive the land around Amtrak and other public transit stations are - if you’re building a tube that sends people into land you own, there’s immense opportunity for you, and in a way that’s the whole point - the reason people ride trains is usually not to ride the train, but to go somewhere, so why not operate that “somewhere”?
I wonder if Amtrak is the antipattern here for just that reason. Or even the state. How about county to county? Rail just can't cost this much in actuality. It's gotta be the systematics
> There is simply no future in which passenger rail competes with air travel in the US. Even in circumstances where the distances are not too great, and the political and bureaucratic hurdles are.
This ignores the existence of climate change. Air travel is not sustainable and air travel is least amenable to conversion to hydrogen or electric.
As you mention, the chief barriers to HSR in North America are political and bureaucratic, not practical. What's missing, then, is the political will to do hard things.
Governments used to be able to do things, when the situation demanded it.
But passenger road traffic is only 7%. The rest is freight which requires a completely different solution.
There is no low hanging fruit. We need to address every sector. No individual solution is going to cut more than a few percent of total carbon emissions.
A buddy of mine worked for a startup a few years ago that promised to go into large plants and do some trickery with the harmonic losses with the very large AC motors in a lot of the big equipment. Apparently there is a lot of losses in such things. They would install equipment to improve the situation in exchange for a portion of the energy savings over time, which was considerable.
Yes, because all those plants have big AC motors driving the machinery. Any place where there is a big AC motor can benefit from this. That means most of the applications you can think of.
A society that takes climate change seriously will replace international air travel with passenger ships featuring high-speed satellite internet and spacious work areas. Little-known fact, ocean travel is 3x more energy-efficient than even rail.
People value their time. There is a reason we replaced modes of travel that require days or weeks of travel time with modes of travel that only require hours. Society and culture has been heavily optimized around the fact that it doesn't take weeks to get to where you are trying to go. The world is global and distances are long.
Few people want to be stuck on a passenger ship for weeks at a time, their objective is not to be sitting on a ship. It would make international travel completely infeasible for all but a minority. No one would be able to do simple things like visit family if it required a month or more of round-trip transit time.
Society is organized around individuals and groups working in mutual self interest. If you go against this principle to find your solution you risk backlash to your (perceived or real) tyranny.
Society is not organized around individuals and groups working in mutual self-interest. Society is organized around the interests of the wealthy. Indeed, only people who are quite well-off manage to take international flights. Immigrants I know are happy if they manage to travel back and meet their families once every 3-5 years.
These aren't luxuries, business and society is global now. Unwinding a century of globalization would impoverish many regions of the world. It isn't a mere inconvenience, it would be undoing a vast amount of economic development and progress. People aren't going to be receptive to sacrificing any hope of prosperity for them and theirs.
An argument of "but climate change" is tone deaf and not very compelling when it is you getting thrown under the bus for the Greater Good. Economic realities can't be ignored when they are inconvenient.
Unsurprising that someone who, from their bio, "splits their time between Seattle and London" is against this idea.
The economic effects of climate change will be more catastrophic than making it take longer to move internationally, something that very very few people actually have a need to do.
Nice non sequitur and evasion of an inconvenient point. I travel internationally because it is necessary, not because I particularly want to. Rather more business than you may imagine cannot be done remotely. Nonetheless, my carbon footprint is significantly lower than the average American.
Addressing climate change in anything more than a performative way will require massive increases in global industrialization, not less. Impactful eco-friendly infrastructure isn't going to build itself. Needlessly making this slower and more difficult than necessary just lends credence to the idea that climate change activists aren't serious about addressing the problem.
The promotion of non-serious solutions to climate change make it much more difficult to get by in from average people for supporting credible and substantive solutions. Which isn't helpful if the objective is to constructively address climate change.
It isn't a "non sequitur" to point out you're part of a very small class of people taking multiple international flights a year. That isn't what that term means! Anything you view as "necessary" is very unlikely to be so in the face of existential concerns. But of course, anything that derails your lifestyle just isn't serious.
There's no society on earth taking climate change as seriously as warranted if the worst projections are to be believed.
And there's no precedent for the level of global cooperation -- which would have to transcend nation-level political realities -- required for meaningful change.
I'm long on humanity. But not because I think we're all going to wake up and fix the climate in a coordinated manner.
The trouble with zeppelins is that unloading is difficult. Every lb of weight removed from the Zeppelin is another lb of lift that has to be offset. So you have to do things like pump water into the zeppelin as people or cargo disembark. Ships also face this problem to an extent (unloaded ships are unstable) but they are sitting inside a functionally infinite pool of water they can pump in & out.
Hmmm, running some rough calculations the passenger load probably wouldn't exceed about 50 tons for 500 people. Which is very doable to do with a tether. So maybe you're right! Solar-powered passenger airships could be the future. It's cargo airships I'm thinking of that really have these drawbacks.
And for a cargo zeppelin, swapping out full shipping containers for weighted ballast shipping containers seems pretty easy. Though I seriously doubt cargo zeppelins make any sense at all.
There are also carbon capture and sequestration and closed-loop hydrocarbon fuel production using carbon-neutral energy sources.
It’s completely false, unnecessary, and counterproductive to spread FUD about climate change requiring substantial reductions in quality of life. People are smart and resourceful enough to solve these problems.
> This ignores the existence of climate change. Air travel is not sustainable and air travel is least amenable to conversion to hydrogen or electric.
Which means you’d have to use hydrocarbon fuel. Which can be chemically produced from atmospheric CO2 and water if you have enough carbon-neutral energy. Or you could sequester an offsetting amount of CO2 if that would be more efficient.
In North America geography is the primary impediment to passenger rail of all stripes. High speed rail is even more at the mercy of physical reality.
Look at the article’s map. That empty distance between San Antonio and El Paso is nearly 900km of West Texas emptiness. There’s Del Rio and Van Horne as the biggest towns and Marfa as perhaps the most famous.
When last was San Antonio to El Paso an important trip for someone you know?
Peak oil is “a largely forgotten issue” because it was a largely overblown issue to begin with. Fracking relieved the immediate supply pressure while reductions in demand will help matters even more.
Fuel shortages are unlikely to be a serious risk for centuries. Hydrocarbon reserves are measured in the trillions of barrels (in the US alone) and the different types are largely fungible at <$100 barrel inasmuch as you can convert them all into fuel.
We may greatly reduce hydrocarbon fuel usage but it won't be because we ran out in my lifetime.
PRT is incredibly new technology in an industry that is incredibly slow to innovate. Are you really calling PRT dead after 30 years of ideation and literally 1 medium scale project? Seems pretty premature to call it dead if you ask me.
PRT is short for Personal Rapid Transit, and it's a form of transit that basically combines some sort of fixed-guideway-like system with small-capacity individually-routable pods instead of trains. As a result, it kind of ends up with the worst of both worlds: you have the infrastructure complexity (and cost) of a train with the throughput (or lack thereof) of single-occupant cars.
(Musk's Loop idea is basically another iteration of the PRT concept.)
You do not have the infrastructure complexity and cost of trains. Because vehicles are small (pounds instead of tons), guideways are literally an order of magnitude cheaper. You can build track for $5 million per mile instead of $50 or $100 million per mile. You can build a grid system instead of arterial lines. Guideway is light so can be off the grid and easily avoid dangerous intersections with roads and other ground pathways. A single skytran guideway has capacity of 14,400 per hour - more capacity than 7 lanes of freeway or [3 tracks of at-grade light rail](https://www.liveabout.com/passenger-capacity-of-transit-2798...) and 50% more than grade-separated light rail (which is rare).
Morgantown PRT has 20-person capacity cars. That doesn't seem so inefficient. On the other hand, it only operates as a PRT during off-peak according to the wiki page - during peak hours, it's just a standard scheduled service like a train or bus.
That said, the Musk Loop type plans where the cabs/cars only carry 1-4 people - which seems similar to this SkyTran - is obviously inefficient and not really a realistic alternative to cars or mass transit systems.
You only think that because you haven't done the math. Its frustrating to hear people talk about how something is "obvious" when by "obvious" they just mean "I haven't actually put any thought into it.
A single Skytran track has more capacity than 7 lanes of freeway or 3 tracks of light rail. Does that sound "obviously" inefficient to you?
A lane of freeway can move about 1500-2000 people per hour in single-occupant vehicles. If you're moving 2k people/hour in 4-person cars on a fixed guideway, you need to have about 10 seconds between vehicles. That's about 8 seconds for a car to physically clear the switch, the switch to physically move to an alternative position, and then the trailing car to cross the space needed to come to a complete stop should the switch fail to actually work. If you claim 7× the capacity, you need to do all of that in a little more than a second.
So, yes I have "actually put any thought into it." I've put sufficient thought to recognize standard gadgetbahn claims with standard gadgetbahn levels of evidence backing them up, and thus I can respond with standard gadgetbahn criticisms.
People seem to want inter-regional passenger rail for it’s own sake and search around for a justification to stick on that preference.
From an environmental perspective low speed inter-regional fright rail makes a lot more sense.
Where high(er) speed passenger rail could really shine is intra-regional lines. Granted stops slow things down, but the NYC region commuter lines (LIRR, MMR, NJT) have horrible average speeds.
I understand from friends in greater DC and the Bay Area that the situations there are similar.
The irony is that some parts of the United States had great rail connections in the past, and they were torn up to make way for roads.
The front range of Colorado, for example, had trains everywhere in the late 1800s. It was the way to get between Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Boulder, Golden, and other cities on the front range.
Now they're trying to build a rail link between Denver and Boulder, and it's costing a fortune and running into all kinds of NIMBYism and bureaucracy.
I'd love to see it, but the way it's going I'm skeptical it will ever beat out the RTD buses.
Just to add: Portland to Oakland is only 628mi.. most people have cars, and it's only $60-80 in gas. Even if they gave me a free ticket, I wouldn't trade 10 hours for that.
10 hours of active driving is something completely different than 20 hours being a passenger/sightseer (of which I would spend significant part asleep or reading) In fact I don't think it's safe to drive for 10 hours, you probably need to add several hours of rest, and will still be half zombie after that.
At some point the train becomes attractive. It's certainly a much less stressful option.
That said I must agree American trains are in poor shape compared to other places.
Well-marked, well-maintained, well-signed, and gradient/curve controlled interstate highways are among the easiest for self-driving vehicles. It's just about possible today (but expensive and in some ways legally unsolved).
It would be shocking if America didn't have popular, reasonably-priced self-driving highway vehicles in 14 years to do that (14 years used to match the timeline of Amtrak's 2035 map).
And an additional amount of maintenance costs, vehicle depreciation, insurance, etc. Driving might still come out less expensive, but ignoring all the extra costs makes it look cheaper than it really is.
I’ve taken the Acela from NYC to DC and back many times, and it is quite nice. But a big advantage it gets is how much of a pain it is to reach area airports in both cities. If intra-regional mass transit was improved that would paradoxically hurt the competitiveness of inter-regional rail.
Even if getting to the airport is convenient, you still need to arrive 1 hour before your flight, and deal with security, boarding procedures, taxi, air traffic control, etc on both sides.
In Japan, I can literally show up for a Shinkansen five minutes before departure and hop right on.
Airports for short range traffic are fscking awful.
* I can’t just show up for the Acela five minutes before departure. It’s not nearly as bad as flying, but there is ceremony involved.
* Security and boarding are a lot better when you are a frequent business traveler. That’s who is going to make the bulk of the DC-NYC trips regardless of modality. We shouldn’t compare the tourist experience between the two.
The door-to-door times will still be worse on DC<->NYC trips. I grew up in Baltimore-Washington area, and lived in NYC for a time, and used to take Acela every weekend down. I could get door-to-door in about 3.5 hrs. No way I could get in-out of NYC airport or Dulles/National in that time, even if I was a frequent biz traveler.
What about Newark? I went through Newark Penn Station a few times and it seems decent. Is it a PITA to go between Newark Penn Station and the airport, or is the airport itself a bigger hassle than most?
Last time I went through LAX there were no good options for getting from there to downtown LA.
Newark is probably the least bad, but you still have to take a slow second train (AirTrain) after getting to Newark Penn. Also, while the NJ Transit trains are better set up for travelers than the LIRR to JFK they aren’t nearly as nice as the dedicated setup they have in London.
Although Heathrow Express is quite pricey compared to the tube and, depending upon where you're going, may not even be more convenient. More often than not, I'm near Trafalgar Square so I just take the Piccadilly Line in. But, yes, Heathrow has good transit options in general (although it's an expensive cab ride).
NYC to Montreal (~370mi) takes ~8 hours by bus and 11 hours by train, though granted, times at Customs is more variable for the bus than for the train. I'm often surprised at how much the train shakes side to side on the occasions it's going "fast".
Contrast that to the TGV in France, which zooms around at 200mph and covered one of my trips between Paris and Avignon (~430mi) in ~2.75hrs about a decade ago. US train infrastructure feels extremely behind in comparison. Perhaps it's because of a greater emphasis on highway travel.
NYC to Montreal is not part of the NEC; the NEC is solely the portion from DC to Boston.
That said, the NYC-Montreal and Boston-Toronto lines are lines that absolutely should be dedicated high-speed passenger rail in addition to the NEC, but they are not even dedicated passenger rail lines at the moment let alone proper 220mph HSR lines.
To be fair, that leg of the TGV happens to be some of the best track in the whole system. It's practically a straight, non-stop shot from Paris to Avignon on double decker cars with panoramic windows.
It's strange to see the contrast between how relatively large a share of transportation Amtrak has in the Northeast Corridor compared to elsewhere in the country. I've heard this ascribed to population density, but it doesn't seem like trains are as popular in places like Texas or Southern California.
Huge advantage of amtrak is that the stations are in prime locations. In the northeast that's a huge advantage as going from train to destination might be a 15 minute walk. Meanwhile airport to destination could be an hour drive. Sunbelt cities have no density, so the trains location isn't as valuable.
Development and land use patterns are way different in the Sunbelt. There are lines that go through most downtowns but most of the people live far from the stations. The passenger trains also share lines with freight and freight is prioritized, a trip from Austin to Dallas by Amtrak takes 6 hours but can be driven in 3 or so.
Lots of people in the Northeast don't live in downtowns either. One big difference if that, if you're taking a trip to one of the big cities, you often don't need or even want a car when you get there. On the other hand, if you can drive somewhere in 4-5 hours, taking a train and then having to rent a car when you arrive seems a lot less attractive.
Much of the Northeast Regionals route is effectively a functioning megapolis. You are not going to find anywhere close to similar conditions anywhere else in the United States.
It functions that way because it has a functioning rail line? Or at least semi-functional. YOu are right you won't find those conditions anywhere else in the US but that is our own fault
I'm not sure how true that is even though Amtrak is one mover of people. One of the reasons I for one tend to take Amtrak is that Boston area into Manhattan is mostly a pretty awful drive and it isn't because there are so few vehicles on the road. Also, pre-Acela business travelers mostly flew (and many still do) on the northern section of the corridor. And, even today, most business travelers aren't going to take the train from Boston to DC.
So it seems pretty probable to me that Acela came about because there was already a huge and increasing demand for such a service.
It could exist without the rest of the network, and probably be cheaper. Why is NJ Transit so much cheaper to go from Philly (via Trenton) to NYC? I think the Northeast Corridor might be subsidizing other parts of Amtrak.
Yes, the Northeast Corridor is the only profitable part of Amtrak, that is why Amtrak tried to cut as much service as possible outside the Northeast Corridor prior to Joe Biden taking office.
Yep. Basically the Northeast Corridor is a pretty profitable route. In part, this is because the Acela is basically priced as high as it can be while remaining competitive with air. Business travelers generally pay it because it's a bit more comfortable, a bit faster, and there are fewer plebes than the non-Acela option. Oh, and it's not their money. (And it is competitive with air depending upon your preferences.)
To be honest, when it's my own money I usually just take the regular regional train. It's about half the price and because it can piggyback off the electrification done for Acela, it takes less than an hour more.
Agree. It's 30 more minutes to read or something and 30 less minutes at my destination.
On other routes being slow is a massive liability though. If people could get from San Francisco to Portland in 10 hours, or even 12 hours, instead of 18 hours, it would be much more practical. At 18 hours it messes up your sleep schedule rather than just giving you more time to read.
It might just not be worth it to spend more on rail travel from Portland to SF though. It's just a reality of geography rather than somebody's mistake that travel from SF to Portland is harder than travel from DC to NYC.
I don't understand why self-driving cars aren't being discussed here. Trains require massively expensive redundant infrastructure, fail completely at last-mile, and you're at the mercy of a rigid departure schedule. We already have an incredible highway network in America - let's put it to better use.
It's so easy to imagine taking a self-driving sleeper taxi overnight between Portland and Oakland in 10 hours - just throw a bed in the damn thing, go to sleep, and wake up at your destination. Give self-driving cars a dedicated lane with a different speed limit, and you could bomb the trip in 7 hours, easy. It'd all utilize existing infrastructure, we'd just be increasing the throughput.
If the car is electric, it'll be multiples cheaper than the fuel costs of driving yourself, a spiffy van with nice spread out reclining seats could have multiple passengers so the cost could be split further, and it'd probably be 1-2 orders of magnitude better for the environment than taking a flight.
Everything you've said there applies to a current mode of transportation called "the bus". Unlike self-driving cars, we already have them.
Ten hours by road. Large enough to have sleeper compartments or reclining seats. (Large enough to have restrooms.) Driven by an NI -- natural intelligence -- whose competence is accredited by the state government in a reasonably fair examination of skills. Give a dedicated lane to the bus, and seven hours might be within reach.
Really, the problem is that I see flights between the two cities at $70 per person and 2.5 hours in the air. Even if it takes an hour on each extra, that's 5.5 hours versus 7 for a fairly reasonable price.
The bus still fails the last mile, it's subject to rigid departure schedules, and doesn't offer the comfort of being in an individual compartment.
All these modes of transportation have pros and cons. How do we get people to take less flights? Busses already exist. Decent fast and cheap trains don't, nor do self-driving cars. Both will help poach people away from shorter flights, but one is (potentially) much cheaper and easier to implement.
Yes! The technology for rail exists today (and is well proven in Europe and Asia). Self driving cars are largely new and unproven with no clear path to widespread use, with both regulatory and sociatal challenges, in addition to the technical shortcomings that remain.
I would hope that Amtrak in the long term also electrifies the rail network so that the dependency on diesel engines can be reduced - for some routes this may not make sense, but where you have frequent services it seems that it would be a worthwhile impovement too.
That whole western north-south corridor is heavily populated by freight trains, and Amtrak trains have to sit on sidings to let the freighters go by. As a result, the train spends a lot of time not moving. It's one of Amtrak's worst lines, IMO. I did Seattle-to-LA once on Amtrak. Never again.
It's unfortunate - the western north-south corridor has the potential to be a very useful transit link. I (pre-covid) took the train from Vancouver, BC to Seattle, WA semi-regularly as my preferred mode of travel, but there was at least one instance I can recall of a multi-hour delay due to freight traffic...
Part of why it ballooned was that Palmdale wanted to be in on the route. So that connection would add more time and money to the project. There were a lot of cities that wanted to be in on this.
From personal experience (family that lives in Fresno), Fresno revamped downtown to get ready for all this. They cleaned up the Fulton Mall route, pumped a ton of money into the area, realtors were banking on Airbnb housing for all the construction jobs coming in from out of town. Fresno even made a concession to allow tiny trailers to be parked and connected on properties with homes on them already. Then the state shut it down.
Another reason from what I’ve pieced together is that California had so many hurdles to jump through. Namely the environmental reports that had to be made.
The the only way to make something "attractive" to the population is to place up on its competition prohibitive taxation then you have already lost.
Further if that is your "dream" to impose prohibitive taxation on the population I would question your ethical foundation as well
Edit: for the record since someone below is using a straw-man to claim I support subsidies, I dont. I prefer the government stay out it completely, neither taxing nor subsidizing (nor bailing out) anything, or any industry. I am not Pro or Anti Rail, nor I am Pro or Anti Air Travel. I am Anti-Government intervention...
There are far better ways to handle Externalities than a carbon tax.
Which BTW under most proposed versions of the Carbon tax is nothing more than a political tool, not a tool to properly account for externalities
Governments do not have a track record for being trust worthily enough to be placed in charge of controlling Externalities, it would inevitably be used to usurp power, and liberty from the people, while unjustly enriching their political allies.
This happens every day, in every government. As the saying goes "Government: if you think you have problems wait until you see our solutions."
In bankruptcy, assets would be sold off (the planes wouldn't be crushed). Businesses restructured and life would go on. It's extremely unlikely no one would be willing to take air travel, even at higher prices than current (I like flying NYC/SF at $150/flight, but I would do it at $600/flight too).
> Going from Portland to Oakland is supposed to take 18 hours but actually took 20 when I rode it.
Seriously? That's the speed of our slowest local regional trains here in Europe. Long distance trains are about twice as fast per km even on a trip one fourth the length and with several stops. If this is a regular state of affairs then it's no wonder that the state of train travel in the US is what it is.
It is about 1000 mountainous kilometers from Portland to Oakland. There are no major metropolitan areas in between. Just places most people have only vaguely heard of surrounded by places only the locals ever go.
And there are very few reasons to travel from Portland to Oakland on a dedicated itinerary. No critical business relationships. No historic ties. No cultural affiliation.
Comparisons of US rail to Europe usually ignore most of Europe. 18 hours reflects a rail speed comparable to what Google returns for a train trip from Zagreb to Tirana. I'm not sure you can even take a train from Berlin to Baku.
> It is about 1000 mountainous kilometers from Portland to Oakland.
If you drive along I-5 from Portland to Oakland, there is one mountain pass (Siskiyou summit[1]). Most of the trip is very flat, as you're traveling through Oregon's Willamette valley and California's central valley.
The question is...why does a major inter-city railroad lead through such a strange route?
> 18 hours reflects a rail speed comparable to what Google returns for a train trip from Zagreb to Tirana
Ehm...I don't believe there's been railway connection from anywhere to Tirana since 2013. Albanian railway infrastructure is largely non-existent at this point. And the only international railway connection to Albania is freight-only. Not quite sure what Google told you there.
The route is determined by plate tectonics. Subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the North American Plate generates substantial orogenic forces. The rail route runs between the coastal ranges to the west and the spine of the Americas that extends from the Arctic to the Patagonia...aka, "the American Cordillera."
Quite simply it runs along the best available route. Down the Willamette Valley to Eugene and then...well it has to make do past Mount Shasta until near Sacramento.
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I'm not going to express faux outrage at the shortcomings of European rail based on the lack of service to Triana. Rather it is to point out that in this sort of discussion of US passenger rail, Europeans tend to ignore a great deal of Europe. More understandable is the misunderstanding of US geography, even in the US people presume similar political geography implies similar physical geography.
Finally, Oakland to Portland is not a major passenger route. Not really even a major rail route since the sea is a viable alternative for freight along the coast and most freight in the US travels east-west.
In that case I don't understand what are those plans for that major high-speed rail on the west coast about. If this is "the best available route" for a major north-south railway along the US west coast, then those high-speed rail plans are a pipe dream, surely?
As for Albania, you know how to pick the one part of Europe where train service is crap - anything from Bosnia southeastwards in http://emptypipes.org/supp/isochrone_zagreb/. Pretty much any other direction is perfectly serviceable and vastly better connected. Apparently you can get sooner to Paris from Zagreb by train that to any of Albania. Is the US west coast due to its geography a similar uniquely bad place?
The sane passenger rail plans in the US West are regional. Connecting Portland, the Puget Sound and Vancouver on the one hand. Serving the cities of California’s Central Valley on the other. The California route makes some sense as a high speed route. Less so as a connection of LA and San Francisco because it is roundabout. The more direct route follows the old Camino Real up the Salinas River Valley and then the San Andreas Rift toward San Jose where the 101 runs today.
The US west is mostly empty. When you look at the article’s map even the named places are tiny. La Junta is tiny. Flagstaff is less than 100,000 as a metro. Reno is about half a million. Cheyenne is in Wyoming. The entire state has fewer than a million people.
In terms of European rail travel, I avoided the low hanging fruit like Dublin to Lisbon, Reykjavík to London, or Oslo to Paris.
I know it sounds absurd, but you can check Google Maps for the possible routes and times.[1] It looks like a Greyhound bus is actually 2 hours faster (16 hours). Also it looks like some parts of the track along the west coast are undergoing maintenance. If you want to take the train down to San Diego you have to get off your train, take a bus, then get on another train.[2]
Its a little short of 1200km and goes through some very rugged terrain (cascade mountains). Yes, it would be nice if it was faster, but comparing it to say Paris - Berlin (about the same distance) isnt quite right for several reasons.
Yep, that should be slightly under 10 hours on my country's terrible railway network (if my country were that long). We have to operate those ETR 470-derived trains ("ČD Class 680") at like 65-70% of their design speed since we don't have any proper rails for them either.
Amtrak is already competitive in certain regions. The northeast is the most obvious, but the train is my preferred mode of travel between Vancouver, BC and Seattle, WA. Whilst a flight is quicker, in the air, door to door is no faster. Driving generally would be quicker but I do try to be concious of the carbon impact of my travel choices.
The primary issue I have is that the hours the service runs, the first departure is a little too late to arrive for a morning meeting, and the latest is a little too early to leave the office after 5 - an earlier and later option would make it very viable for one day business travel.
Whilst the US population is generally much less dense than much of Europe, there are large areas (PNW, the northeast, much of California) that definitely have high enough population density to support an extensive rail network. Yes there must be political will to make these improvements, but surely that is true of all infrastructure spending?
Even on the Northeast Corridor the morning meeting thing is real from Boston to NY. You really need to go down the night before. Which I'm generally fine with. Have a nice meal, etc. But when I can't I'll end up flying (or driving) in the morning.
I agree that east to west and north to south cross-country rail is a novelty. The short haul trains are often useful though. I think the novelty is worth keeping but they should focus on that novelty. I'd like to see them have just one east to west route, say, from SF to NYC, and one route on each coast, and besides that coordinate the short haul trains with the cities/states that are using them, perhaps even letting the cities/states run some of them fully. The short haul trains should be run separately from the novelty trains. The proposal is the opposite, and that's why I think it's not a good one.
For example, I'd like for the train to Miami to skip Orlando and Tampa, and for Brightline to be left to bring service back if it makes economic sense (they're already working on Orlando). If not, there are buses like Megabus and Flixbus. That would shorten the Boston to Miami route quite a bit.
It's been pointed out numerous times elsewhere in the threads, but long-haul routes are short-haul routes, for people in the middle. Very few people drive I-80 from end to end. Lots of people drive it for trips like Iowa City to Omaha.
I'm aware of that. I don't think amtrak is a good alternative to the interstate (I agree with the comnent I'm replying to), so we should stop trying to make it one. A single cross-country route that runs during waking hours and has fewer stops would be cool though.
Hah, I actually lived less than half a mile from the Emeryville station for over a year. I was just thinking in terms of the metro area, but that does tack on some more time!
Rail travel shouldn't compete with air travel. It should be a fast, comfortable alternative to intercity car and bus travel between major destinations.
This model already works well along the Northeast corridor. Even the slow, delay-ridden Empire Service (thank CSX for that) ran full trains between New York and Albany(before Covid). Not to mention the main DC to Boston route.
The failure of intercity rail does not seem all that distinct from the general failure to invest in infrastructure in the US, and the enormous costs when the investment is attempted.
> Rail travel shouldn't compete with air travel ... This model already works well along the Northeast corridor.
Except the NEC is heavily competing against existing air travel between its common destinations. Or are you generally referring to longer distance air travel? (i.e., 2+ hours by plane?)
Tbh, AMTRAK needs to find its target audience. Right now, work transportation has been a huge thorn for everyone involved. It would be such a boon to commute living from LA to sf for work.
Back in 2019 Governor Newsom put most of the CA HSR plan on hold indefinitely.[1] Now the official plan is to build a 171-mile high speed rail link from Bakersfield (population 524,000) through Fresno (population 542,000) to Merced (population 83,000), though that might be cancelled since it'll cost over $20 billion.[2]
> Second, hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't get you much train in the US. California tried to build a high speed rail route between SF and LA.
It does, just not in hyper regressive California.
You could build a full high-speed rail network between Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio for $100-$150 billion.
You just can't build much of anything in California, period, that's the issue. It's a collapsing state in most metrics that matter for quality of life (and has been for a long time), even the venture capitalists can't abandon the state fast enough. As their capital flees, so goes what remains of California (tech). As taxes go far higher this decade, the flight will get worse, Texas and Florida will keep extracting immense value out of California and New York.
You could, but really, what would HSR in Texas get you? None of those has especially good local transit networks to connect to. Houston and Dallas are famously huge sprawls. If you're talking about downtown to downtown, there's already luxury bus service (Vonlane).
And is Amtrack even the right organization to lead this effort?
The inaugural run of the NW corridor high speed line resulted in derailment with 3 deaths in 2017. Positive train control could have prevented the crash bit they didn't spend on that even though it was mandated by congress. The train was going 80mph in a 30mph zone with a tight curve.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derail...
It sounds warm and fuzzy and I would welcome high speed national rail, but the numbers and timeline don't add up.
> Seattle area is spending $54 billion just on a regional expansion of light rail and the cost had gone up considerably since then because of inflation and real estate pressure. https://www.constructiondive.com/news/seattle-area-light-rai...
TBF light rail, and urban construction in general, is extremely expensive (due to right of way, real-estate, complicated works, …) and it doesn't really "scale out" as every urban project is its own little nugget of crap.
When you're building thousands of miles of track, after a while you'll have a lot of experience which can get leveraged pretty much as-is.
One to enable punctuality and one to commercialize to fund operations. And, it all needs to be provided using government funds. No passenger train transport has succeeded without government funding and subsidy.
There shouldn’t be any more funding for freight rail tracks owned by private companies.
Amtrak leases all tracks they use with the highest priority. Nobody could afford a ticket of they had to lay their own tracks.
Private companies are the only ones willing to make these investments in infrastructure so they can leverage the data it provides, i.e. BNSF and Buffet.
> Private companies are the only ones willing to make these investments in infrastructure
...because there's an anti-government cult that occupies a disproportionate number of government offices in the country.
"Bad" investments is exactly what government is for: things we'll all benefit from (including but not limited to broad economic contributions) but which market incentives don't align to produce.
Are you referring to the anti-government cult in CA that couldn't build a train from SF to LA for $100 billion, so they decided to instead build a massive train that nobody will ride from Sacramento to Bakersfield? Because that cult really is destroying the government's reputation.
I used to be a general contractor. I kinda know how government building contracts are handed out.
In order to bid on a project, the government needs three bids from three from three different companies.
In my county, we have continual road, sewer, communications work. It's almost like it's never ending work that doesn't get completed?
I live in the lovely liberal enclave of Marin County.
I noticed, in my county, there is one company that gets All the work. (A very old company. If you live here you know it's Italian name.)
A few years back I started looking at the competing three bids. I looked up the heads of the companies that were bidding.
What I found was surprising.
In many cases the three companies that bid on a government job had a family member, related to the company that gets all our county work, on their contractor's licenses.
It looks like the Italian family sent their kids/grandkids to Sacramento to pass a very easy test, and had them set up "separate" companies.
Why--so at bidding time the three companies would be eesntially bidding against themselfs.
The winner of the "rigged" bid gets the contract essentially for the Italian family that gets all the jobs, and keeps the never ending road infrastructure jobs going.
The companies must share equipment, and employees? I guess it's all legal?
So---if you ever wonder why one company seems to get all the contracts, it might now be that it's the best company.
I do understand it takes millions in machines to build projects, and not every company has the equipment.
I just feel like the system is rigged, and not more efficient than many government run projects.
When there no real competition, and politicians who are way out of their expertise, granting the OK for a huge job; the private company can pretty much do whatever it wants, and blame the slowdown on the, "infarculator of the ground water table rod of thelvin, and that's why it's taking so long Chief?"
(Some projects have Performance Bonds. Many do not require them. Those ongoing projects where they seem to did up a road, and repair it, then dig it up again; most likely don't have Performance Bonds.)
I'm paraphrasing Adam Carolla here, but he's not the only one who has made this observation: the average business owner is way smarter than the average politician. They will run rings around any regulations that hurt their profitability, and if they can't, they will leave and take the economic contributions of their business with them.
I don't think it's necessarily smarter. Businesses just have a lot of advantages the government doesn't have. They can be nimble. They are not beholden to voters. They can take existential risks.
I have worked in the Central Valley. Frankly anything that ties the SF Bay Area and LA Basin to the Central Valley is a good thing.
This does not defend the appalling incompetence in "managing" the HSR project, I'm just defending the choice of running the train up the Central Valley which I had not understood at the time the project was initially approved.
Running the train up the central valley was always part of the plan and is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The problem is that California is currently building a train from one end of the valley to the other that _doesn't_ actually connect to either major metro area.
CAHSR essentially consists of 6 separate pieces: Bay Area-to-Central Valley; the SF Peninsula run; Sacramento-to-Central Valley; LA-to-Central Valley; LA-to-San Diego; and the Central Valley itself. San Diego, San Francisco, and Sacramento were all planned to be later phases anyways, which means the initial operating segment choices are either the Central Valley itself or crossing into it in the Bay Area or LA.
The Central Valley was chosen as the first construction package area because a lot of the initial money CAHSR got from the federal government had to be spent quickly, and flat ground means that the construction would be the cheapest and quickest construction portion. That the result has neither been cheap nor quick is a pretty severe indictment of the epic mismanagement involved.
It's also politically astute to do the first major public spending in the reddest part of the state, and then connect to the endpoints who are less likely to change their minds.
> Are you referring to the anti-government cult in CA that couldn't build a train from SF to LA for $100 billion...
Not sure if I'm misinterpreting your comment, or you're being satirical or what.
I was under the impression that it was the government in CA that massively misspent the tax payer billions they were given. As far as I know, there is still no usable "high speed" rail between LA and SF, which is exactly the type of project the left claims they could build, if we just gave the benevolent government more cash.
But maybe I'm in my own bubble, and have not heard the truth.
I'm more familiar with the "great" government infrastructure we've got in my own area. Let's just say the DC metro is garbage, and should've been seized from the corrupt local politicians who've used it as a crony jobs program for the last few decades. But instead, they'll be gifted with tens of billions of more tax payer dollars as part of the various stimulus bills.
Forgive me if I've absolutely no faith in anything the government touches anymore.
Here in the DC area, we have the subjectively WORST traffic in the country now (DC, Boston, etc. might argue otherwise). Regardless, they've built almost 0 new capacity in the last decade EXCEPT for toll roads.
Yep, the main road I use in the DC's "tech corridor" in NOVA is a privately owned (by a foreign company, to boot) toll road whose prices have at least doubled in the last 5-7 years. Before Covid, I was getting alerts for $40 top-ups on my EZPass weekly, it seemed.
They used to have incentives for hybrids and EV cars to use the multi-user lanes (much less traffic during rush hour), but I believe they let those expire and now they use price-by-demand algorithms for the costs to use express lanes. They are almost insulting how high the prices will be at peak times - e.g. $20 to use express lanes for 1.5 miles.
As for residential roads - well those are already paid for with gas and local taxes. Interestingly, my state's sales tax is 30% higher than when I was a kid. Prop taxes go up every year due to exploding house prices, but I see absolutely no new services they're providing with all this extra cash. Do you, in your city?
I mean don’t get me wrong, the infrastructure in this country is awful but it isn’t because it is done by a government. The state is the only institution that can really do infrastructure projects is my point, how and whether it does them is a political decision
Yes, and I have to have a truck because if I drove a normal car it would be int eh shop every week due to all the damage the government roads would cause to the suspension
The "who will build the roads" trope is common statement for people that support government largess, is ironically poor example of "good government" and completely ignores reality that in most area's the government does a VERY VERY VERY poor job at road maintenance while charging the citizens an obscene amount of money for that poor service.
If a private home owner assocation paid the amount of money most governments do per mile of private road they would be in the civil courts suing that contractor.
BTW many communities in the US do have private roads in them, maintained by the owners of the homes in those communities
The thing governments keep building despite their contribution to climate change, air pollution, destroyed neighborhoods, and inefficient land use? The thing funded by the poor at the same rate as the rich? You know... I think I've heard of them. My government is building another 6 lane overpass over a neighborhood (and its a toll!). Hope this one works out!
I am disagreeing with the parent . People don’t think that the government should build trains, but that it should build roads, which have all the problems you mentioned.
Fortunately, such an idea is so ludicrous and self-destructive that it would benefit no one, not even those with wealth and power, so I don't have to worry about it too much. Capitalism (a terrible system which I am against) requires state coordination in order to function. Libertarians (which you seem to be one) are pro-capitalist, but don't support the institution (the state) that allows capitalism to even function, it's an incoherent ideology. Capitalism without a strong state is impossible, if you are really against the state, you'd necessarily have to get rid of capitalism too.
What economic system do you support then? Socialism. it would be laughable if you believe capitalism requires a strong state (it does not) but believes socialism does not when in reality Socialism requires a Totalitarian state as has been proved every time it has been tried
Free market Capitalism (one form of capitalism) is the only economic system that is compatible with individual liberty, since you oppose that I assume then you also oppose individualism, and individual liberty instead support Authoritarianism and collectivism
> Free market Capitalism (one form of capitalism) is the only economic system that is compatible with individual liberty
Have you heard of the call on the left to “abolish the police”? I have never heard this from libertarians. Do you support abolishing police and prisons? Because that seems to me a far more oppressive institution than, say, income tax. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, I cannot imagine anything worse for individual liberty than that. Also, what about people’s freedom to do what they want with their time? Americans work the longest hours in the western world and have some of the worst labor protections. Libertarians are obsessed with freedom to consume but have little interest in protecting people’s freedoms at work. If the government monitored how long you were in the bathroom, that would be insane, but when an Amazon warehouse in a small town in Alabama does, it’s “the free market”. Libertarians hate when the government takes your money, but love when your boss takes your money, libertarians hate lazy people who don’t work, but have no problem with people who in inherit wealth and live off their investments. They love free speech and free association, but hate unions: which is a freely chosen organization of workers representing their interests. I could go on, but I fully support individual liberty and freedom, which is why I’m a socialist.
No. The fact the government can and frequently does make failed investments and wasted capital expenditures is precisely why people don't trust the government. California set out to make a single high speed rail line between San Francisco and LA 12 years ago and it's still not complete and it's run over what, $70B so far? And it's still going to be a slow rail not much faster than a trip by car after it's complete? This is what happens when you let inept bureaucracies spend money for which they never have to feel the effects of cost/benefit trade-offs and for which the opportunity costs are completely dismissed.
Kind of like how U.S. telecom providers were given something like a hundred billion to deliver broadband around the country but didn’t hit the promised performance or coverage? The private sector includes Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, not just Apple or Amazon, and you have about as much choice not to pay for them as you do the local government.
The key thing is not the sector but whether there’s an effective oversight mechanism. It’s a lot more productive to focus on those feedback loops than trying to assume any sector comes in exactly one universal quality level.
Problem with local telecoms is that too often, there is a local monopoly. The problem with the government is its always in a de facto monopoly position. It has little incentive to change except during a voting cycle turnover, and at most voters can focus on a handful of issues at a time.
Funny enough, it seems like SpaceX has the solution for this and it's rolling out as we speak: https://www.starlink.com/ . Space-based internet that actually works and is actually fast is a game-changer.
Let's see how the telecoms respond to competitive pressure. If anyone can get 100Mbps within a year, I'm willing to bet Gigabit fiber/cable will be available nearly everywhere soon.
The US telecom companies were not given something like a hundred billion dollars. They were never paid those sums and they were also not given tax breaks in that amount either. That's one of the great forever repeating myths on HN (it's useful as a propaganda item, thus the repeating). There is even an HN member that has been repeatedly correcting the myth for years, here you go:
I don’t understand anti-government zealots any more than I understand anti-capitalism zealots. Both try to cherry-pick facts in support of an obviously flawed theory: that one is the pinnacle of civilization while the other is an evil to root out.
This kind of purist thinking is dangerous because it prevents you from observing the facts as they are. For example whatever the root cause of California’s high speed rail problems, it’s probably more complex than “public government is bad”. But you will never find out because you have ideological blinders on.
>..because there's an anti-government cult that occupies a disproportionate number of government offices in the country.
Yeah, all those evil libertarians that run the west coast /s
NE corridor has decent passenger rail. CA has laughable passenger rail. Both are as blue and pro-"fix problems with government" as can be. I know sample size is only 2 but this does point to the cause of the discrepancy being elsewhere.
I agree that "picking up the shit nobody else will" is the kind of investment government should be making but clearly just "removing the anti-government cult" isn't enough to make passenger rail succeed.
My understanding is that's a somewhat deceptive description, but would appreciate clarification. Amtrak has priority in that when they lease the line, they select the time their train runs, and freight schedules around. But if Amtrak is delayed, the freight train doesn't have to jump off the tracks to clear space.
My experience (Norfolk Southern and CSX operate the tracks in my area) is that I am learning that amtrak is supposed to have priority right here. My personal experience has been almost the opposite.
Knock on wood, in my recollection I've never experienced any other significant delay except freight traffic interference.
But like, on separate occasions, I've had a 4+ hour delay from Chicago to Buffalo (~8 hour drive), couple hours through NY State, had a 20 minute stop in Syracuse turn into 1.5 hours, all due to freight traffic.
I assume the train is going to arrive where I'm going like an hour late at least.
The only significant thing that wasn't freight related, is they split the train in Albany when you are going to NYC or Boston. The second train had some issues, so it took a bit to get a different one, so we were sitting there without power in like, July for an hour or so.
That would seem rather circular, since Amtrak delays are almost always caused by freight trains. (Unless it's horrible snow blizzard weather or something.)
My personal experience is that having taken Amtrak from NYC a huge number of times, it's never been meaningfully delayed leaving Penn Station. But that it will get delayed en route, as the train comes to a halt and the conductor announces we're waiting for a freight train. We wait for 10 or 15 minutes, the freight train takes a couple minutes to whiz by, and then we start moving again.
So I don't know what priority Amtrak has on paper, but in reality Amtrak trains that leave on time are delayed by freight.
So much so that for my return trip where I catch a train that's already been en route for 8+ hours, it's virtually always 30-90 minutes late.
I want to corroborate this. I have ridden between NYC, Boston, and Chicago dozens of times, a very nice trip. Heading west, we generally to Albany-Renssalear on time, make the connection, and proceed on time. Even in winter snow.
The number of times it has not been delayed by freight after that, crossing upstate New York, numbers in the single digits.
For some reason eastbound seems to fare better, but still no guarantees.
The bigger issue is that the freight companies control line maintenance. The upshot is that there’s no incentive to straighten the tracks to run them at higher than freight train speeds.
For example, on the San Jose <-> Oakland commuter line (which has existed for decades!), Amtrak runs trains with top speeds of 120mph (or was it 85?) at something closer to a top speed of 45mph.
Edit: Also, the freight line routes no longer make sense. For instance, they run through a pedestrian plaza in Jack London square to an ecological restoration area in south bay, where most factories have been shut down. (There are still salt ponds, but that salt evaporation plant is slowly being shut down in an ecologically responsible way, as I understand it).
I think they should give the freight company imminent domain rights to run a line due east (to sparsely populated areas), allowing the freight lines to run unimpeded by Bay Area rush hour and pedestrians. In exchange, the freight lines would give their existing right of way to commuter rail systems.
Also, while I’m dreaming, Bart would be converted to standard track width, and they’d restore the Palo Alto to Santa Cruz commuter rail lines. Then, all the systems would be put under a single authority, and all the transfers between the existing systems would be timed transfers.
It's amazing to see the trains running at-grade right through a busy downtown street in Oakland; I feel like I've never seen that anywhere else! (Except in Inception as part of a nightmare, maybe.)
> I think they should give the freight company imminent domain rights to run a line due east
Due east from where? San Jose?
Having just driven that way last week over Hwy 130 - it is rugged mountainous terrain that would be quite expensive to develop with rail. Pretty though, and worth the drive in the spring for those who live in the south bay if you have a reason to take the long way out to the valley.
While that is true, there are a few freight companies that don't particularly care about the priority situation, so that they don't care about causing the initial delay that causes the loss of priority.
Delays can have cascading effects. And if a freight train is delayed, or breaks down on a crossing track at 5:00pm, it's not like it can get out of the way just because Amtrak is scheduled to go through at 5:15.
Amtrak owns most of the Northeast Corridor[0] - except the section from New Haven to New Rochelle, which is owned by the State of CT and Metro North. Incidentally, there are the sections where the Acela slows to a crawl. This is also the most viable corridor for Amtrak.
They also own sections of other lines - including the New Haven-Springfield line[1].
> Nobody could afford a ticket of they had to lay their own tracks.
I'm under the impression that China subsidizes the cost of train tickets because it's viewed as an economic multiplier and sociatal benefit. As an American, it'd be pretty cool if America could do this. It'd also be helpful for tourists to visit smaller train connected cities rather than flying from 1 hub to the next.
The US highway system did pay for itself out of gas taxes. The highway trust fund was set up for this purpose. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund . In recent years the highway trust fund has not been adequate, for two reasons: one, Congress diverted money from the highway trust fund to fund things that were not highways, and two, the value of the tax didn't keep pace with inflation and it hasn't been increased recently.
That plus the clear difference that funding trains would basically mean subsidizing the operations of a few large companies, while anyone can drive on publicly funded roads
Amtrak is the brand name for the service provided by National Railroad Passenger Corporation, a weird quasi-public, ostensibly for-profit corporation. Its stock is all owned by the government, but it's not supposed to be dependent on subsidies to operate.
"it's not supposed to be dependent on subsidies to operate."
I don't think this reflects the current thinking in Washington about Amtrak. I wasn't able to find its P/L history, but has it ever made a profit? I can't remember hearing that it did.
This is quite similar to Deutsche Bahn, the main German railway operator. It’s a private company but all shares are owned by the federal government. They get subsidies (mostly infrastructure cost) but any profit they make goes back into the federal budget.
Most of the transcontinentals[rail lines] were heavily subsidized by all levels of government via sub-market-rate loans, land grants, and special local privileges on the frontier.
- Conservative Enterprise Institute
Especially the land grants. The US government gave ten percent of its territory to the railroads to get them built. The experience proves the opposite of "only private industry will invest".
I don’t understand why this piece of the thread isn’t more highly upvoted. The rails weren’t able to do what they did without massive government assistance.
I don't get the point of all those cross-country routes, isn't air travel both faster and cheaper once you are going long distance? I mean I would love to cross the country by rail for entertainment, but as a common method of travel it doesn't seem to make much sense. It works well in Europe because it is both much denser than the US, and also subsidized.
I lived in China for 2 years. Americans have no idea how liberating it is to be able be able to hop on a 200 mph train and arrive at totally different climate in hours. Over lunch, my coworkers would talk about a weekend of drinking tea in mountains in Hunan, visiting Mao' home in Wuhan, or exploring the beaches of Hainan. These are all things we did and were possible because of China's high speed rail system.
I think the biggest factor was the convenience. We'd just show up at the train station and take the next train, usually within an hour. No planning, no booking, just bought our tickets at the station, minutes before our trip. All of this for less than 1/4 the cost of a last minute plane ticket.
Sure we could have flown, and the farthest places may have been faster to fly. But that only if the tickets were available and security lines in china are just as bad as here. There's also the comfort of a train with a meal coach. And, the thrill of watching the land rush by at lightning speeds. America felt so backwards on my return.
Flying used to be like this. I'm from Long Island and I went to college in the Boston area. I remember you could buy a book of delta shuttle tickets (~$100 / fight, book of 5) and show up and use them whenever you'd like, last minute, with no security hassle or whatever. You could also use the same tickets to go to DC if you wanted. Just stay on the plane for the next leg.
Nod. Pre-9/11 peak deregulation had $40 flights BOS-NYC. I'd run from Boston subway, to a quick direct shuttle bus, then through the doors, across the small lobby, with staff yelling at me... "Run faster!" they'd shout, mostly with a smile. Down the ramp without stopping, sliding through the closing aircraft door. Flight attendants later walking the rows, collecting two twenties from everyone. Here in a multiply dystopian future... sigh.
Pre-Acela and the electrification of the line north of New Haven that came with it, the only real reason you'd take the train from Boston to NY (much less points south) was to save money. When I was in school in the Boston area, when I went home to the Philadelphia area, I'd take the train for longer vacations but would fly for 4-day weekends.
Arriving at Penn Station has benefits if you're traveling for business. Hailing a ride to get to an office within 15 minutes beats the long ride to get downtown from one of the NYC airports.
Yeah, none of the NYC airports are particularly convenient. And I'm actually usually in midtown, often on the west side, so I can just walk from Penn to my hotel. (And Penn may actually stop being its dingy self one of these days.)
> (And Penn may actually stop being its dingy self one of these days.)
That's kind of already happened. The Moynihan Train Hall just opened up recently. I checked it out recently and it's quite nice, certainly much nicer than the old Penn Station. The next time you're getting off in NYC, walk towards the back of the train you came in on and then go up to the surface, and you'll be exiting in Moynihan instead of Penn.
I haven't been in NYC for close to a couple years at this point. Some of the renovation work around the LIRR entrances was done but not anything else. I'll definitely check out next time I'm there. The drawings for the continuing renovation look quite nice too.
I kind of wish I wasn't contributing to the topic tangent/hijack, but whatever...
Hawaii's interisland flights probably most closely resemble this air travel experience. Aside from Sunday & Friday fares that have a $30 premium due to work-week commuters, currently current week tickets are $49 and next week and beyond tickets are $39. And if you want to believe that's just a covid effect, there was a $29 special going last year right before covid.
Pair the process with chill, small-ish airports* and the hassle of flying is about as low as it gets for controlled commercial air travel.
Years ago, it used to be the norm to Judy show up 10 or 15 minutes before the flight.
* Obviously Honolulu is an exception, but it does have a separate interisland terminal.
Now that we're finally pulling out of Afghanistan and done with the War on Terror, it's time to disband DHS / TSA and put things back to how they used to be.
I think it's kinda weird how very few politicians are talking about this.
If you were living in a place in China where you could just show up and catch a high speed train, you were very lucky!
My experience living in China is that for high speed rail departing from tier one and tier two cities, you would often need to book a ticket a day in advance, or - if you were winging it - be willing to go to somewhere other than your intended destination. And foreigners cannot get their tickets through the machine like people with Chinese ID card can, so that means waiting 30-45 minutes in the line to get your ticket (even if you booked online), before you even go through security, which is another 15-20 minutes. And if you show up at the main concourse 5 minutes before the train leaves, you will be denied access to the platform due to the airport-like boarding procedure. As such, I always had to calculate arriving at the dedicated high speed train station (usually itself 30+ minutes bus or subway ride out of the center of town) with at least an hour to spare.
It is still far less hassle than taking a flight, but it's not comparable to the real spontaneous opportunities of going by bus/coach or slow train (hard seat). With those forms of travel you really can just show up at a nearby station and go wherever, with little to no pre-planning and less stressful security checks. But then it will take hours to go halfway across the province. Of course, for many Chinese, that is the standard mode of travel, because high speed rail is still fairly expensive by comparison.
All that said... Pretty much everything about traveling by rail in China is better than it is in America. But traveling by rail in Europe is the gold standard, I think. Being able to buy tickets from a machine, not show photo ID anywhere (in the Schengen area at least), just step on and step off, that's real freedom of movement.
One of the (many) problems with Amtrak is that they pretend they're an airline. Booking well in advance is the only way to get a good rate, "walk up" prices are pretty high. I mostly have experience with the Northeast Corridor, and this is the baseline level of service that we need nationwide. I've been on some of the other routes, and the quality of the service on those lines pales in comparison.
That said, the route from NYC to Montreal is really beautiful north of Albany. It just takes about ten hours to get there.
Rule #1 of travel pricing is you can’t risk charging too little for business travel because they subsidize the price conscious travellers.
Leaving on an earlier train because a meeting ends early is exactly the kind of thing business travellers pay good money for. But that’s also indiatinguishable from this kind of random walk in travel that leisure travellers would love to see - so it can’t happen. If you want business travellers to pay 3x for that convenience you can’t give it to everyone for less than that.
This is just always going to be the problem. It's ok for some mild entertainment but it's not viable for regular travel. A flight to Montreal is like an hour and probably half the price.
Even now it really depends on where your priorities lie. Going from Rhode Island to Maryland or back, I had to arrive at least an hour and a half (more like 2 hours) before takeoff to get through parking and security. That meant leaving the house 2-3 hours before takeoff. Then, a 2-hour flight, and another hour and a half dealing with baggage and transport home. That two-hour flight was more like 6 hours of my day, a majority of it spent in uncomfortable settings (driving, in the security line, in a cramped plane seat). Compare to Amtrak: 30 minutes to the closest station, and I can arrive immediately before boarding; 7 hours on the train, but in fairly spacious seats, with free WiFi, and then 20 minutes home from the station.
I much preferred the relatively relaxed nature of train travel, and it only bit out an extra hour or two of my day. With high speed rail it wouldn't even be a contest.
It's an international flight, so the price is more expensive relative to a flight between two US cities. Usually it's 300 USD to fly compared to 140 USD by rail.
Two things to keep in mind by rail to Montreal: customs add 1h, and in summer, if the rails are too hot, per Canadian regulations, the train cannot go faster than 50km/hour or something ridiculously slow like that, which adds another hour or two. Onboard wifi only works when in the US, and because of the mountains in upstate NY, the signal can be very flaky and slow.
>Booking well in advance is the only way to get a good rate, "walk up" prices are pretty high
In all fairness, that's pretty true in a lot of places. It certainly is in the UK in my experience. I'd actually have said at least the Acela isn't particularly onerous in this regard.
This was true in Denmark last I was there. You could buy an "orange" ticket online, well in advance, for a significant discount, which I used for a planned trip into Copenhagen from Jutland.
I completely agree with you in the abstract, and would happily never fly cross country again, but I'm worried Amtrak's map is a sign that want to do middling incremental improvements everywhere that don't reach that inflection point.
I rather they do the crazy fun cross country routes after that. America needs to demonstrate it's serious about urbanism before I take any cross country lines crayoning seriously.
I think that for shorter distances, like LA to SF to Seattle that would be great. But I don't think any of the rail lines in China are comparable to going from Chicago to Seattle - that is a huge distance to build a high speed rail line on, and there is almost nothing in between that people would want to stop at.
There are several "trains to nowhere" in China. High speed rail is already active between Lanzhou (Gansu) and Ürümqi (Xinjiang), which is 1500km of pretty empty countryside. They're talking about linking in Lhasa (Tibet) too. I can't imagine any of those routes will be profitable, but perhaps the income from the coastal provinces makes up the difference.
I suspect in China there is more political incentive to connect these far-flung provinces, though, to try to promote national unity. I'm not sure closing the gap between the PNW and "middle America" is considered quite as important by people in DC.
Elon musk promised 155mph for the LA tunnel. In reality you are down to 40mph. Off by 4x. If Elon Musk promises 800mph in the Hyperloop expect to cut off 75% off that so its back to 200mph. Why even bother? It's not like he has any special insight, the only thing he has is the ability to throw money at random projects.
The only things Elon Musk does well are incremental improvements over existing technology, that's not a bad thing but he always throws out bullshit promises that he can do it 10x cheaper or fares only cost one dollar.
And the fast trains are made even better because of the complementary system of slow trains, which because they have many stops at smaller places along the way, eliminate the need for fast trains to have too-frequent stops.
Hainan is an island and while a tunnel is planned, the current solution is to ship the rail cars across in a ferry, which creates a bottleneck and makes the line not that fast overall. But it's still pretty convenient, especially if you consider that for most people the alternative wouldn't be a plane but a car, which has the same difficulty crossing the strait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong%E2%80%93Hainan_railw...
However, I think there is another issue in the US: last mile transit.
Even if the US magically have the rail system similar to China today, using it in cities like Houston etc. that has poor public transit would still be a pain in the ass in practice.
It's another reason (besides density) why the Northeast Corridor works pretty well for rail. The biggest cities (Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, DC) have pretty good transit systems and the train dumps you downtown which will often be where you want to be.
Houston is arguably a particularly bad example. But there are a lot of cities where you pretty much need a car if you want to be at all mobile.
About 15 years ago, I had to spend a little over 3 weeks in Beaumont, Texas, for work, leaving Beaumont just before Thanksgiving. I dislike flying and wasn't paying for the trip and had never taken a train, so asked to take Amtrak.
My train trip was from the Tacoma, Washington Amtrak station to the Beaumont station and back, via the Los Angeles, California, station. It's a 3 day trip each way, and so on the return trip I was traveling on Thanksgiving day.
Pretty much every stop that day had a ton of people getting on and a ton of people getting off, often whole families. They were all just taking the train to the town a few stops down the line to get together with family from the neighboring towns for the holiday, and then return the next time a train going the other direction came through (trains came through each way three days a week on that segment).
So yeah, it may not make sense to have a cross-country route if you just consider people who are traveling from one of the route to the other, just like an elevator does not make sense in many buildings when you just consider the volume of passengers traveling between the penthouse and the bottom of a five level underground parking garage.
But just like an elevator between that deep garage and the penthouse is also an elevator between every other pair of floors, a cross-country train route is also a route between every pair of stops between the ends.
Cross country - perhaps not. But, living in Europe, I see many people chhosing a train for 4-5h over 1-1.5h flight.
For 1,5h flight you end up wasting 3-4h anyway because you need to get to the airport etc, and out of those 3-4h most of the time you can’t do anything productive or relaxing either. With 5h train you can either relax or work and it’s much more productive. Also less co2 produced ofc.
And that’s with “slow” trains going 100mph. With faster trains as in France or Japan even more airplane rides are unnecessary
Did that a couple of years ago to go from Glasgow to London. Almost exactly the journey times you mention. Bought a ticket the same day as I travelled. It wasn't cheap, but was cheaper than same-day flight tickets. No airport stress, and ended up back in the middle of London, not at some ex-urban or suburban airport with another 35-60 minute journey into town.
I think most of this demand is already covered by the popular Northeast Corridor. It should absolutely be upgraded, but outside of it, I think everything's either too small or too far to effectively compete with air travel.
There definitely are city pairs or maybe triplets here and there. North Carolina was mentioned somewhere upthread. I've actually taken Amtrak from Raleigh to Charlotte. Could just walk to the station from downtown Raleigh. Did need a cab at the other end to get to downtown Charlotte but it was closer than the airport.
I know people take the train between Seattle and Portland. I'm sure there are other examples.
There are four main regions that have viable HSR outside of the NEC. These are:
* The CA region (SF/Bay Area/Sacramento/LA/Las Vegas/Phoenix).
* Texas triangle
* France TGV-like lines in the Midwest, centered on Chicago, connecting to Minneapolis (via Milwaukee), St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, maybe Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati
* New England/New York outside of the NEC--that is, Toronto-Boston and Montreal-New York with timed transfers at Albany.
I would probably add Vancouver, BC -> Seattle -> Portland to that list, but I think that's probably right. The thing is, if we actually added viable rail to all of those cities mentioned, it would be a huge swath of the country, without needing to build a 200mph train through Wyoming.
Right now there are ~40 flights a day that go from PDX-SEA or SEA-PDX. Those are a waste of airport capacity and carbon emission. Both cities have the transit network to easily get people to the airport from wherever the HSR ends up for people who are using those flights to make connections, and could promote growth in the aggregate area in a way that doesn't exist now.
Not everyone optimizes for fast or cheap. Some prioritize comfort, or scenery, or not-being-in-an-airplane for whatever reason.
Some really enjoy getting off at one stop for a while, and getting on the next train and continuing the journey. Or just deciding that this place looks nice, and getting off here. Try that in an airplane...
There's a growing niche of transoceanic travel by container-ship and bulk freighter, too. It's neither cheap nor fast, and that's the point. It's truly unplugged, where the journey is part of the destination.
Throughout the entirety of human history except the last hundred years or so, long distance travel has been a borderline-boring activity. Maybe that's not such a bad thing -- our brains need some downtime to reflect and defrag. We're just starting to appreciate en masse that "monotonous" can be kissing-close to "meditative". Rail is part of that, and as people catch onto that, it's making a comeback.
Frankly, even as poor as our rail infrastructure is, there's still a lot to be said for train travel.
A couple years my wife and I went Birmingham to New Orleans for $150 round trip on Amtrak. Airfare on the same route was $600, and I would have paid $150 in parking alone in downtown New Orleans. Moreover, the time difference between train, driving or flying was not all that different. The train was scheduled at seven hours, about the same as driving time with stops. And air travel would have been about the same once you factor in getting to the airport early, two flights with a layover in Atlanta, and getting from the airport to downtown.
It’s also a whole heck of a lot more pleasant than flying. 50” of seat pitch, width of a first class seat, hot food, alcohol, plenty of room to walk around, interesting people to talk to, no needless security theater, no need to get to the station 30 minutes early, no need to worry about baggage fees or weights.
Before the pandemic hit, we were planning on doing the Empire Builder from Chicago to Portland. For the three of us (me, wife, daughter) in a bedroom was $1100. Expensive, but factoring in transportation, room and food for 2.5 days for 3, it’s not a bad deal. And you get to sit back, watch the scenery, read, nap, etc.
I mean yeah, if I need to travel across the country quickly, an airplane will always win. But airlines have seemingly gone out of their way over the last 20 years to make flying as miserable as possible to squeeze every cent out of customers. If I can afford to take some time and the train is an option, I will always choose the train based solely on it being less miserable than flying has become.
Six years ago, a friend of mine vacationed in a private rail car with his family. I got to ride in it for three hours [1], and just that trip spoiled me for all further travel.
My friend never did say what it cost him. I suspect it was the price of a low-end car, but given that he had the car for over a week, and it came with dining and sleeping arrangements for 9 people (him, his family, in his laws, the chef and conductor) he doesn't regret it.
>Typical pricing for a trip is along the lines of a high-end cruise. On average, the all-inclusive costs typically can run between $2,500 and $7,000 or more per car per day. But remember, a rail car may accommodate 6, 8, 10, 20 people or more.
Was also researching a sleeper car for a family of 3 before the Pandemic. I've only been on a train once before besides work trips in DC (use the metro a bit), so it's a little out of the blue for me, but perhaps it could be making a comeback
> I don't get the point of all those cross-country routes,
Same. I10 is pointless - no-one drives from Santa Monica to Jacksonville - flying is much faster once you’re going long distance. I mean I would love to cross the country by car for entertainment, but as a common method of travel it doesn’t seem to make much sense.
/sarcasm (for those who need it pointing out...)
Cross country rail lines are just like cross-country interstates: mostly used by people for specific regional connectivity.
These long distance routes should be left intact because they are an important anchor for eventually expanding to high speed rail.
China kept their unprofitable rural slow passenger routes into the distant corners of their country, and now they are converting them to high speed routes.
The Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed line is 2,298km long, and used to be 22 hours but now runs in 8[1]
Being able to go from Penn Station in Manhattan to Union Station in Chicago in 8 hours in a comfortable train would be a serious alternative to air travel, and once the track is upgraded, it would probably be cheaper than existing service. And this is completely doable with decades old technology. Other countries have done comparable things with less.
I don't think we should abandon "legacy" routes just because they are not profitable right now. And even if they are never profitable that alone is not a good enough reason to abandon infrastructure.
Note that New York to Chicago by Amtrak is so slow largely because there's no direct route. You either take the Great Lakes route going through Albany, Buffalo, and Cleveland, or the northeast corridor route to Washington DC and then another line to Chicago. The more direct Keystone line through Pennsylvania only goes as far as Harrisburg.
And the other part of the problem is that you're going through a continental divide. Prior to air travel, I assume NY to Chicago was a major route so there may be good reasons for why the routing is as it is.
100 years ago there were many routes! I hate that the rails have failed, taking a train between Philly, Reading, Allentown, and Scranton makes so much sense!
Yes, but the 20th Century Limited flagship of the New York Central Railroad [1] actually did follow the current Lake Shore Limited route. I suspect that there are geographic factors that limit a more direct route.
I think the absolute time and distance is what matters, and it would still substantially benefit from being high speed, even if it is meandering through upstate NY and along the great lakes.
Eventually, a more direct NY - Chicago high speed rail route could be built that is even faster.
You’ll notice that there is a Detroit to Toronto line on that map. It’s not an accident. Chicago to Detroit has been running at 110mph for 80+% of the distance for almost 10 years now. The rail tunnel under the Detroit River already exists.
You just need a fast NYC to Buffalo with a little extension on to Hamilton, ON and you’ve got a very direct NYC to Chicago route.
They'd need to do something about the hour-long stop at the border for CBP and its Canadian equivalent to go through the train checking everyone's passports. Decades ago I ran into it on the now-defunct Chicago-Toronto line and I'm pretty sure it's why they don't run those trains anymore. The New York-Toronto and New York-Montreal trains still do it.
Seattle-Vancouver avoids it by not making any stops between Vancouver and the border, so the immigration checks take place at the station. This might be feasible for Montreal, probably not for Toronto, and a train that runs from Buffalo to Detroit without stopping in Canada at all seems implausible.
Could probably set it up to do checks on departure. End up in the wrong country without your passport? Just take the next train back to the last destination in the other country.
Would likely need a special treaty in place so Americans traveling from Chicago to NY can travel through without a passport (just ID). Alternatively if we’re talking diplomatic solutions, the US and Canada could move towards a Schengen-style free transit zone without cross country border checks.
> Could probably set it up to do checks on departure
There's a seaplane from Victoria-Seattle. It's been a few years since I took it but I believe this is what happened. There's a custom agent at each side. I can't remember if there were any checks before departure though. I would imagine they would do some preliminary check because they don't want to be on the hook for taking you back.
Shortest custom wait ever BTW since the plane only holds 10-15 people.
> US and Canada could move towards a Schengen-style free transit zone without cross country border checks
This would be a dream. I'm curious why I've never really heard any proposal about this. As a Canadian (currently living in the US), I think that Canada would be more opposed to this. We always seem to have a fear of the US amalgamating us. I think it'd be politically tricky on both sides though. Even though it was proven to be false, there's still this myth that the 9/11 hijackers entered the US through Canada.
> As a Canadian (currently living in the US), I think that Canada would be more opposed to this. We always seem to have a fear of the US amalgamating us.
If it helps, Switzerland joined the Schengen area while maintaining its own customs controls (with reasonably consistent enforcement) and autonomy on immigration policy (outside of temporary tourist travel which is mostly harmonized). Major policy unification isn't necessary, although the minimum feasible level is likely still unprecedented for the US and Canada.
Of course, there is a Paris to Moscow train. The thing about the coast to coast train routes in the US and the Paris to Moscow train is that you're not in any way required to take the entire trip - there are stations along the way.
I guess I picked a bad example in that, to my surprise, there is a direct train for that route--although it still takes about a day and a half. But I could certainly pick a lot of city pairs in Europe that are 1-2K miles apart that would be anything but efficient to travel by rail.
Well, let's hear some. You're probably gonna want to limit yourself to city pairs that have multiple direct daily flights though, as anything less won't have enough demand to merit a direct convenient train route either.
> That's further than the distance from Paris to Moscow.
Which has, in regular times, a weekly service by the Russian railways. And it passes through Belarus, and ends in Russia, countries for which you need visas and aren't necessarily the friendliest. If that service makes sense, Chicago-Seattle certainly could ( as an experience, cheap travel, etc.)
I started looking at the map in the article and realized I had just booked a flight where there was an existing rail line ! So I checked out the Amtrak site, and what's 1h20m by plane is 14h40m by train -- and 8h by car. Maybe by getting a sleeper cabin I could have had an enjoyable trip by train, but as the trip scales things get dramatically worse.
Of course, maybe this is exactly what the future of transportation should look like: more localized travel on modes that can be powered by renewable sources or nuclear.
Compare the journey from my small village in New Mexico to Chicago, about 1200 miles. We just happen to have an Amtrak station 5 miles away. The drive time is about 18-20 hours without stops, which is long enough that an overnight stop is going to be likely. The flight time is only about 3 hours, but that requires first driving 40-70 minutes to the airport, spending time waiting in the airport, and then arriving at O'Hare, and then the 50 min metro journey back into the city.
The Southwest Chief, however, arrives here around lunch time, and arrives in Chicago about 24 hours later.
If you were optimizing for minimum travel time, you'd probably fly. If you were optimizing for cost, you'd probably drive. But if you want a nice journey, the train is fantastic and faster than driving if you're going to stop.
So, there are variations on the theme, and sometimes the train wins, sometimes the train loses.
> If you were optimizing for minimum travel time, you'd probably fly. If you were optimizing for cost, you'd probably drive. But if you want a nice journey, the train is fantastic and faster than driving if you're going to stop.
Train fans vastly overestimate the number of people who will optimize for "sitting in a train and staring out the window for days".
> optimize for "sitting in a train and staring out the window for days".
I'm acknowledging that it's not for everyone, but that's not really a fair depiction. I get a lot of work done on a train -- the atmosphere is similar to a coffee shop in some ways. Other people enjoy going to the common car and chatting and playing cards with strangers. Or reading. Or just watching Netflix on their devices, like they'd probably be doing at home anyways. We were also talking about an overnight trip, not "days".
I work in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The home office is in Seattle, Washington. I've made it clear at work that I'm not about to fly to the Seattle office [1] (not that I've ever needed to, but others in my office have). On a lark, I decided to see what it would cost to travel by train. On the plus side, there is train service between Ft. Lauderdale and Seattle. On the down side, it cost about $2,000 one-way. No way my company would spring for a ticket than costs more than first class air line ticket, but I wouldn't have mined the week travel one-way, as long as there was decent Internet connectivity (so I could continue to work).
[1] I don't have a fear of flying. I don't fly because of the security theater and the "presumed guilty" attitude. Also because of the declining comfort and service because people are prioritize the bottom line. It sucks.
Especially given that, if it's business travel, I expect a lot of companies aren't that big on you adding a couple days of travel time because you feel like taking the train.
In the case of the parent's scenario, it seems pretty reasonable in that you're really only talking about maybe an additional half day of travel. But that's probably about the upper limit.
This seems like a demonstration of routing issues, more than anything else. I have no idea how many changes that journey would involve, but there's no way that 55 hours to cover 1269 miles is representative of the time a train (even a clunky Amtrak train) would take to cover that distance. So this would seem to be an argument for increasing routes/services, rather than an argument that the train can't ever work.
OTOH, the flight is hard to compete with in that instance, so I suspect even with a better route, you'd likely still fly between those two places. Others might not, and the new service/route would benefit people making shorter journeys along the way.
I love the Lamy-to-Chicago train. I've taken it several times. You get to sleep through Kansas (where there's nothing to see anyway; no offense to Kansans!) and you wake up crossing the Mississippi River. There's 110v power and cell service for most of the trip.
(I always get a sleeper; without that it wouldn't be worthwhile.)
I travel form Chicago to Detroit pretty regularly. The train takes 4.5 hours, driving takes 4, and flying takes 1.5. Flying ends up being the slowest though because you have to spend 1.5 getting too and from the airport plus waiting at the airport. The train costs $25 which is cheaper than driving and I get to get work done. It's by far the best option imo.
I don't pay to walk or bike anywhere where I live, it was all built with tax dollars. Where are you that walkers and bikers pay for their infrastructure?
This is a very “political” map. Many of these routes are only in there so that every state is included. (Except South Dakota who complained about being left out!) A lot of parts, like the route from Minnesota west to Washington, only really make sense in that light. If this were closer to being a real proposal for what to build, I think the map would look a lot different. This is more like a symbol to hopefully kick off a discussion.
This is almost certainly built on existing rail corridors though too. I think priority of upgrades will follow your thinking, but these lines weren’t drawn entirely randomly.
The laws of physics are clear that trying to push a vehicle through standard atmosphere is always going to be less efficient than one operating in a low-friction or near-vacuum environment. Scrap inefficient airport security for higher tech solutions, and start building hydrogen-powered supersonic aircraft and high speed rail is toast.
It's a commonplace to believe that train travel makes sense for medium trips where the cost of getting to/from the airport (plus boarding bullshit) dominates time in the air -- 2-3 hour flights.
But the pandemic has shown an additional possibility by increasing the acceptability of working remotely. It may become more attractive to have a slightly longer but less-hassle trip (board in city centers or at least locations closer than an airport) if you are continuously net-connected and able to have quiet video conferences and do other work.
In the 90s I spent a lot of time on Shinkansen and TGV and had good phone service and networking (even at GPRS speeds) which meant it wasn't really "lost" time. And certainly I was not alone. (It helped that there was a culture of having actual phone conversations away from the cabin).
That can be a feature. It can also be a bug for all the people who don't live in the city. If I had to board Amtrak in downtown Boston (rather than the suburban station I use), that would probably tip the scales against me using the train.
My commuter rail doesn't even come into the same train station as Amtrak headed south does.
Amtrak to NYC is already a bit marginal for me because I drive an hour in basically the wrong direction to a suburban stop. If I had to go into Boston which is even further in the wrong direction, I just wouldn't do it.
Paris's different rail stations are well inter-connected by the Paris Metro. Said network doesn't have to be made up of just one form of transit; again, the Swiss network does an absolutely phenomenal job of matching up train, bus, etc. schedules into one unified transit network.
And Boston's (and New York's) rail stations are connected by subway as well. But (like in Paris or London) I need to build in some generous buffer to catch a long distance train. I have no doubt Swiss trains do an unusually good job of aligning schedules but AFAIK that's not true of most places in Europe or Japan for that matter.
I wonder what the difference is in potentially likely riders? The only time I’ve used Amtrak in the last 5 years was to get to Boston, and I wanted to be in the city. I used Acela Express and it worked great.
Faster trains for major city to major city, but slower trains to reach the suburbs?
The primary problem in Boston (from my perspective and I expert alot of other people) is the schedule of the commuter rails is terrible. They just make zero sense. You can take a train into Boston between 6-10am and a train out of Boston between 4 and 7pm, otherwise, you have to wait hours for a train.
Hours is a bit of an exaggeration (probably more like 90 minutes on my line) but that's basically true. And you have to tack on buffer if you need to take the subway to the train station.
I'll take commuter rail by preference to go into the city but only if I'm basically going in and out at normal commuting hours. I won't take it if I'm going in for an evening event or even, generally, if I have an evening event following something in the daytime. But they're basically designed for commuters (hence the name) and, in my experience, are pretty empty the rest of the time.
To your basic point, I don't think I've ever used commuter rail to connect to another mode of transportation whether train or plane. Just too much overhead.
Route 128 Station is very popular and much more convenient than South Station for anyone from at least the western or southern suburbs. Anecdotally, it feels like about the same number of people get on there as get on in Boston.
There is a commuter rail network into Boston. But many of the lines go to a different train station. It definitely wouldn't make sense for me. At that point I might as well just drive to Manhattan (which would actually be faster anyway) or maybe New Haven, where I could pick up a MetroNorth commuter rail. (Have been thinking of trying the latter anyway next time.)
It’s a good map, but it would be better if there were more dotted lines. Amtrak needs to be relieved of its obligation to run coast-to-coast money pit lines and focus on building up successful regional networks that can make money. Perhaps if it were allowed to do that for a generation, it would be able to gradually make some of the ends of healthy and profitable regional networks connect again.
Consider that most regional airline routes to rural parts of the country are subsidized as well (and far more is spent on it). Most of Alaska would lose air service. Large chunks of Texas, Arizona, and Alabama would be cut off.
I think we need to have a concept of essential rail service, like we have with road and air.
These routes should have have any obligation to make money, because they provide a benefit to tax payers. Most infrastructure is just accepted as something that should be funded.
Another reason these long distance routes should be left intact is because they are an important anchor for eventually expanding to high speed rail.
China kept their unprofitable rural slow passenger routes into the distant corners of their country, and now they are converting them to high speed.
China is an authoritarian state, so they can do any number of things that are strategic without worrying about popularity.
In the US, at the federal level at least, rail has a serious popularity problem which makes it politically difficult to sustain. That problem is largely driven by the fact that outside of the northeast our rail service is a joke.
If we want to have good quality rail across the country — which I would like to have, fwiw — I think we’d get there faster by focusing on serving just a few places with very high quality rail that everyone else would actually want. Then we could gradually expand the system with concentrated investments that hit that quality bar. After a generation of that, we could have broadly popular rail with a high quality of service. Perhaps that could even include highly subsidized service to rural areas, in the same way we have intensely subsidized highway and postal services to such places today.
But I think if we want to get there we need to start with a smaller goal of regional networks that are GOOD, so that people’s perception of rail changes.
I think you are 100% correct. Before I consider a train ride from coast to coast I need to see my large metropolis area implement local/regional lines that are good and useful. Optimize for my 80% use case, not my 20% use case!
Functionally, the vast majority of the Amtrak network is already the rail equivalent of Essential Air Service (EAS, gov-subsidized passenger air routes). Including government subsidies on a large percentage on routes. The NEC is the only Amtrak route that makes any meaningful amount of profit.
Exactly what financial benefit could there be in isolating those networks from each other? Probably 2% of people taking a long line are taking it from end to end. In the case of the route that goes from Chicago to Los Angeles, via New Orleans, I'd be surprised if the number weren't more like 0.02%.
The odds of this ever happening are probably slightly lower than the odds that China takes over and uses their high-speed rail expertise to get the job done.
China's secret sauce in building their rail lines:
Ignore environmental mitigation.
Extremely low labor costs.
Little or no cost for the land over which the line ran.
Probably pretty extreme control over every supply vertical. I very much doubt it's a matter of 'expertise'
Better to compare to France then. They build high speed lines for between 1/5th and 1/20th of the cost of the one the UK is building. Just to prempt the France is flat and land is cheap arguments. 1/5th is the cost of the section of line between Lyon and Marseille that crosses the Massif Central with 50 tunnels and bridges and plenty of earthworks. The cost of land acquisition is only £8bn of the £100bn+ cost of HS2.
- Effective cost benefit analysis that realizes rail is a net win environmentally
- Ability to control costs & graft on large projects to keep labor costs reasonable
- Effective government that understands it's worthwhile to allow some private loss for the net public good
At the end of the day, I believe we'd all be better off with more highspeed rail in the US. There's is no fundamental lack of resources preventing us from doing it; the problem is a lack of competence and political organization.
Europe is a much better indicator then. Tunnels are a good example, but you could do the same analysis for other types of infrastructure. For whatever reason, tunnel costs are significantly cheaper in other countries compared the USA [1]. There has to be a good reason!
Realistically you can’t get big infrastructure projects built without angering some group of people. People here in the US love the highway system, but there’s absolutely no way anything like it could be built today.
At some point we just need to decide that a project is worth building, and will be built, regardless of the opposition.
You’re not going to get much argument from me about how private industry exploits under-the-table labor. Doesn’t mean it’s a good thing when done under government aegis
I recently read that China is expanding their rail network extra-fast now because the labour costs are still low; they expect them to rise soon. The other things are a factor as well, of course, and their expertise must definitely be growing by leaps and bounds as well.
Exactly. You can be sure that when China wants to build a new rail line, there are no environmental impact studies, or objections from NIMBYs. They just do it.
The town of Vulcan, West Virginia only got funding for a much-needed bridge in 1977 from state officials after appealing to the Soviet and East German governments for aid, receiving much publicity over their plight from the USSR.
The damn map from Amtrak goes to a 404. I wish we would just get some other company than Amtrak to implement the rail. I love the idea of rail, it’s a shame that Amtrak is somehow incredibly more expensive than flying every time I check the prices.
As nice as expanded rail travel would be between cities, there are a lot of cities that are set up for cars and I was disappointed there doesn't seem to be much if any money in Biden's plan for creation and expansion of subway lines.
Even cities that have subway systems, they're in desperate need of new lines. Washington DC and Chicago spring to mind, since their systems could benefit greatly from simply adding an outer loop line. They both suffer from many lines where you have to go into the center to get back out again. The dream for the silver line was to connect the spokes in DC but I know of no real projects in Chicago. It would be a dream to have a map like this in Chicago[1]
I'm glad that Musk's proposed line was chased out the state. The Blue line needed expansion to allow for express lines to the airport, importantly with a few stops in between like a better planned purple line. Chicago did NOT need a 20 dollar a trip vanity project train that only went from O'Hare to the loop so that tourists and the wealthy could have a convenient private line to avoid all the poors. [2]
I'm not sure how a train is any better than a bus with a dedicated lane for travel for less than 100 miles. I really don't see how light rail is better than buses. Buses have so many more advantages. 1. easy rerouting to more busy lines 2. not blocked if one in front breaks down, 3. resale to other bus lines. 4. less up front cost. I think we could reinvent the bus to make it more comfortable and appealing.
Crossing the midwest diagonally, you're rarely going to be able to drive faster than 65 mph (legally). Even slow US trains can do 80 mph (though they do stop, too, and frequently get delayed by freight). If you could run trains at even 100mph, which is far from a "modern high speed train", driving would never be faster.
That's crossing the west, or even the west of the west. Trains are slower through that section.
A 100mph train (again, not a modern high speed train) with limited stops would beat the car. Not sure the track could be built for this in this geography, however.
Yes, though the speed limit along the same stretch across Nevada is 80 mph, with the general flow of traffic between 85-90mph. Legality aside, the roads are very high quality and you can cruise along at 100 mph without much difficulty in a car.
100+ mph roads aren't unheard of (see autobahn). Neither are 100+ mph trains. The fact that neither is available is frustrating.
None of the existing routes are built for high speed trains and the infrastructure investment proposed ($80B) is far too small to even begin any sort of meaningful high speed rail service.
Trains are more energy-efficient than buses, have lower operating costs (especially if electric), more comfortable.
In terms of light rail vs bus however
>easy rerouting to more busy lines
... you can just increase frequency
>not blocked if one in front breaks down
This is a risk, but generally the idea is to do enough preventative maintenance so that this doesn't happen and to have sufficient crossover switches to work around this
>Resale to other bus lines
It's best to just use your vehicles until EOL, Toronto used their last generation LRVs for decades- far longer than a bus would last.
>Less upfront cost
That's REALLY not a benefit. This is why American infrastructure is failing: a failure to consider maintenance cost or have any long-term thinking.
The bus can not really get more comfortable. Drive on a smooth road and have a great suspension system: it'll still be less comfortable than a smooth ride on a train.
This whole "one mode to rule them all" attitude- common in American news media- is toxic. Cars, trains, buses, planes, and more all have their place.
I think there's a bit of complimentary too.. like you say, buses are easier to build up, which helps grow the market for shared transport between population centers. That's the market that needs to be big to justify rail investment. Also eg in Europe, they live together nicely with FlixBus providing frequent, fast and cheap service between cities but seemingly not killing the rail. Maybe this is an example of the Jevons Paradox.. it's actually the greater efficiency of each (over cars or air) that creates the greater demand
You're forgetting about traffic. I've taken the NYC to DC bus quite a few times, and have had anything from 4 to 7 hours in travel time depending on how bad traffic is on the road and whether there's any accidents. Now if they'd put a dedicated bus lane on the highway that'd be much better, but sadly it doesn't exist.
Train service between the two cities, meanwhile, is much more reliable in how long it's actually going to take.
This is one of the big arguments for light rail over buses. Once it's built, development can take place along the route with fairly high confidence that it will run, albeit perhaps on a reduced schedule, even if ridership doesn't meet projections.
Roads that can handle heavy driving are much more expensive than train tracks, especially per capacity. Adding passenger train capacity is therefore the cheapest way to reduce load on your roads.
I think some of it is unavoidable. E.g., I tend to get carsick on busses if I try to read or use a computer, but not on trains -- something about the nature of the motion.
Not to be a Debbie downer but I was an elected city councilman in an Illinois city for 8 years (4 elections). In 2012 during Obama years we were told a new Amtrak rail line from Iowa City to Chicago with a large new station in the quad cities had been approved. (first pitched in 2009/2010 from Obama admin)
We were told that funding was already approved and project would be completed by 2018.
In 2018 we were told project and money were allocated and the project would now start in 2019 but had been delayed.
Fast forward to 2021 ... nothing ever happened. Some people inspected the rail lines.. they improved a couple of crossings. That’s it.
Honestly it’s been a bit disheartening to see how slow and difficult things seem to move at the federal and state level :(
How is it that in the year 2021, visionary infrastructure project is investing in an old and slow rail network? Why can Dubai work on hyper loop and for us Amtrak is the best we can come up with?
Maybe our politicians are a bit too old for the job of visionaries?
Hyperloop would be nice but it's not a proven technology. Amtrak already exists and could use improvement and maintenance. If Hyperloop is proven out in a more innovative place, I'm sure Americans will eventually get on board.
This european map is only showing stops in somewhat big cities, there are certainly thousands not pictured (I am inferring this from the french map at least, it make sense for readability though).
Same for the U.K., Germany, The Netherlands, and Switzerland based on my experience in each; however this is the opposite of my concern, as I’m saying the American map that Amtrack are trying to show off with looks worryingly blank.
A better map would omit that entire line from Spokane to Fargo. That’s an incredible span with next to no population along it. Such lines are a big drain on Amtrak’s ability to turn a profit, which - sadly - it must do because subsidizing rail is a political albatross.
I like rail service and wish we had better. But right now there’s this political albatross in the US that rail is a slow, inefficient, money pit. That argument has some weight when you look at those super long distance lines. But when you exclude them and focus on the northeast corridor where Amtrak has good quality of service, the argument falls apart.
To me, the long game for the US to have better rail service means focusing on delivering excellent service quality in the places where they can to get some wins. Then expand service as they can while maintaining quality.
Sprinkling “a little rail” broadly across the country costs a lot more money and delivers far lower quality service. We only do it because of the need to get the senators from rural states to support our federal rail program.
I'm actually surprised that those long distance ridership numbers are as high as they are relative to something like the Northeast Corridor. I assume that must include some moderately popular but much shorter segments.
Some of the new additions would have a ton of ridership, even if the trains weren’t particularly high speed. Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Nashville to Atlanta are the two that jump out to me.
For Nashville to Atlanta driving is going to be cheaper and way more convenient. Plus you're likely to need a car anyways at your destination. Few people are going to choose the train.
This inexplicable fascination with trains is frustrating to watch. They're expensive to build and aren't comprehensive solutions. The first thing that needs to be done is to get people off of cars. The easiest way to do that is dump a bunch of money into on demand ad hoc shuttle bus size transport. Make public transport convenient and people will use it. If people use it then they will support it and cities will naturally build to depend on it.
Edit:To illustrate the problem, I live about a mile from the center of downtown Atlanta. To get to the Amtrak station would require a bus, transfer to the subway, and transfer to another bus. It would take an hour to get to the station 6 miles away.
> Plus you're likely to need a car anyways at your destination. Few people are going to choose the train.
Yep, this is a key problem in the USA. Even if you build an amazing regional rail system, the nature of what's at each end of most journeys will still push people toward cars far too much of the time.
While I agree with what you said can’t these things be done in tandem? There is a lot of working being done in almost every major city to make them more public transit and pedestrian friendly. That work needs to be done by the city and county governments. Amtrak is federal. Amtrak should def work with local governments on station location and design to make sure they’re convenient and accessible with local transit.
Nashville <-> Atlanta is 4 hours and a lot of people (including me) just hate driving for long distances like that. It’s dangerous and boring. While yes you might need a car to fill your last mile obligations if you’re not going too far outside city limits ride shares like Uber and Lyft can fill that hole.
Because money, political capital, organizational resources, etc. is mostly a zero sum game. Effort spent on rail is effort not being spent on solving the most pressing problem. And at least in my locality the money and focus is on rail.
I'm pretty dubious about the demand. There's not even a megabus between Nashville and Atlanta.
Hmm I gotta disagree with that. While yes they are 0sum they are totally different organizations operating these things. If Atlanta DOT isn’t improving their local transit networks it’s not because they’re focusing on Nashville rail connections.
I’ll give you the demand aspect sure, but a 2.5 hour link between dense downtown Atlanta and Nashville business districts can also become a catalyst for increased demand. Depends how much cost goes into the project. Maybe it’s worth pursuing maybe not. I think the biggest obstacle is how much state and local governments cooperate. State and local governments that are supportive are going to reap the benefits while hostile ones will suffer in the long term. Nashville recently voted down a comprehensive light rail plan so not sure how much support there is on that end.
I said the focus on rail in general, not just Amtrak. MARTA and local transport activist in general have focused their efforts on rail expansion. It's consuming a large majority of capital improvement resources available.
The "if you build it they will come" is an argument I've seen a lot. But it's hard to square that with the decline in usage of exiting rail. I know in Atlanta ridership is down 15% despite a 40% increase in population.
I am a big proponent of walking to get around, but 6 miles in 80 minutes is closer to a jog than "a comfortable walking pace". Typical walking speed is 16-20 minutes/mile, and that's without carrying anything.
It’s not a matter of capability, they just decided not to. They don’t own the rails, so they don’t have to maintain or repair them. I believe that CSX owns that line, and they repaired it in 2004. Amtrack could have restarted that service any time they wanted to.
They show one going from SF to Reno. There is some kind of station at Truckee. I’ve never taken an Amtrack to Reno/Truckee. I would think if they promoted this more, you could have more skiers go the weekend to Truckee/Tahoe/Reno/Mt Rose a lot more to avoid getting stuck on I-80 during storms as well as avoiding 4-hr drives. I’m guessing it sucks.
I’m guessing the problem is last mile. There is a train from Denver that takes you directly to one mountain (Winter Park) but getting a train to any other mountain adds a ton of time and expense because you need shuttles from the train stop. The ski resorts are necessarily far apart (because they’re huge) and the time most people want to go is in the worst weather to be driving shuttles all over.
That Reno to Tahoe drive is still a hike and Heavenly/Squaw/Sierra at Tahoe are decently far apart.
I've actually taken this on existing infrastructure (Amtrak has a bus from Sacramento to South Lake Tahoe). The train to Sacramento from San Jose takes at least 3 hours and the bus takes another 3 (in winter weather). It's not terrible if you want to go to Heavenly but would be completely useless if you wanted to go anywhere else.
Also, last mile transportation in San Jose/SV, especially if you were carrying around skis would be a pain. Add in the fact that it costs $60 each way and it just isn't worth it. There used to be ski busses that did the route (and presumably would take you right to the slopes) but I have no idea if they still run. Those seem like a much better option.
This is why we have successful train service only in the northeast where the trips are medium length, and cars advantages are mitigated by the awful traffic on 95.
Basically the Acela corridor only works because Boston, New York, and Washington DC actually have working subway systems, so when you get dumped off at the train station, you can get somewhere within the city without paying a bajillion dollars in taxis or Ubers.
People also like to point at the German train system, which is very good, but mostly people have the experience of coming into Berlin on it, and again, Berlin has one of the best public transit systems in the world.
Agreed about Berlin, but to me that says that as part of a commitment to HSR, we also have a commitment to local transport. Fortunately, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit here.
For example, I live in Seattle. We regularly vote to tax ourselves to build and operate transit service. In 2019, just before the pandemic hit, we had a 10-minute citywide bus network with fast, easy transfers across about 85% of the city. People used the heck out of it, especially in combination with the two light rail stations that opened in 2016.
When my spouse and I took a three-week trip across Germany to see where parts of our family are from[0], we didn't touch the wheel of a car once. Big city like Frankfurt, small town like Lutherstadt Wittenberg, in-between like Leipzig, they all worked. They were some combination of walkable, understandable bus service, and local rail.
There's infrastructure and there's culture. Americans don't have the idea that cities and towns can be accessible on foot and by transport, so we don't hold ourselves to that standard. But we could, with no loss of convenience for many of us.
A friend is living in the Japanese sticks but on a Shinkansen line. He commutes via Shinkansen directly to Shinagawa station, almost next to his office. Zero changes, a 1hour train ride with reserved seating in a quiet environment. He almost always clocks in for the ride and does quiet work, but it's also a great way to relax. The expensive train fare is essentially what he saves on Tokyo rent in exchange for being able to afford a great house with a large yard.
If I'm going into Boston from the ex-urb where I live, I'll take the commuter rail if I go in "9-5" because the commute at rush hour is awful and parking is expensive. But it doesn't work if I'm going in for an evening event, say, because the drive isn't as bad, parking tends to be cheaper, and the schedules outside of rush hour are not frequent.
In general, train on the Northeast Corridor is pretty good especially if you're not going the whole route. But I actually would be faster to drive to Manhattan than taking the Acela. However, it's a lousy drive and I hate driving into Manhattan.
The problem is that you have to get to the station and then from the other station to your destination. This really only works in 2 situations. Dense urban centers where it makes sense to have stations at walking distance intervals, or cases where the city is so hard to drive/park in that it makes sense to drive to the rail station and then catch a train in (e.g. NY). Other than that it is fairly impossible to match the convenience of a car.
> Dense urban centers where it makes sense to have stations at walking distance intervals, or cases where the city is so hard to drive/park in that it makes sense to drive to the rail station and then catch a train
Yes! This is exactly what cities should be aiming for.
Local infrastructure should optimize for bicycles (and walking too). Then you can have your stations at decent distances both from living districts and from each other.
This might work in northern locales, but given the climate it's not practicable here in the American South. Nobody wants to walk or ride a bike through sweltering heat (i.e. ~85-90°F with high humidity) from May through September.
This can't be real. They're connecting Denver to Pueblo but not La Junta which is 60 more miles across flat prairie with 700' difference in elevation. With the connection one could reasonably travel from Denver to Kansas City or Dallas. Without it the closest routes are through Chicago or Los Angeles. I do appreciate the idea that St Louis could get "enhanced services" to Chicago, however. Right now taking the bus is more convenient.
Is taking the bus between St. Louis and Chicago really more convenient now than the train (Lincoln Service)? Google maps seems to show Greyhound taking over an hour longer, by a less direct route (through Champaign). I've taken the Lincoln Service several times, though only Chicago to/from Normal or Springfield, and it was very convenient. Wish it were faster (and IIRC long-delayed upgrades aren't going to shave much time), but I'm glad it exists.
My impressions could be out of date, but when I was making that trip on a semi-regular basis it didn't seem that the train was ever scheduled conveniently. Presumably a faster train could be run more often?
I love via rail in canada and I used it both to travel between Toronto and Montreal and to travel all the way west to Edmonton. From my many travels I learned that while commuter rail (read go trains) can do well, long distance rail just doesn't make sense anymore. Neither financially nor practically. It's a two day trip from Toronto to Edmonton.
The trip from Toronto to Montreal is a full day and is worth it if you hate flying and want to avoid security. However as it gets used more and more they are adding more airport style security features taking away that benefit as well.
Now, when I travelled to Japan and rode the shinkansen I really enjoyed it and was amazed by how quickly I could get around. But I also saw how absurdly expensive it was and how without government support on top it fundamentally would be impossible except in the highest density corridors of Canada and the US.
I love trains. Absolutely adore them. But I cannot see how in the low density areas of North America they can remotely compete with cars or airlines.
I'm a fan of overnight rail. If high speed rail were available, Toronto to Edmonton would be about 11 hours. Grab a 10pm train and arrive at 7am (with time change). I'd take that over a 5 hour flight.
It was 20 years ago (maybe more) I heard about a bullet train, or some fast train system which can benefit the community. Votes are in. Yet I have not yet seen a bullet train. I hate to see another 20-25 years go by and nothing made of it by that time again.
I would like to see something finished and not half-completed or half-started and not find out after another 25 years go by. I also wonder if it becomes some near obsolete transportation method by this time. Hopefully it can also support and be future compatible to support future transportation engines of some sort or thought through to allow for such compatible iterations.
I'm authentically curious whether it is feasible engineering and infrastructural-wise to have something ready in just a couple of years? Is it possible to have proper planning/design done fast including any bureaucratic politics? Or is this all really an impossible mission?
I write this because I once heard it also took years to just extend a simple bus stop route.
(BTW can anyone tell me how to use markdown in HN?)
I read through part of the discussion but can someone enlightens me does it make sense to build high speed railway in the States? Every piece of reply tells me that cost is going to be prohibitive and it's not going to be faster than taking airplanes.
Back in China it does make a lot more sense to have trains connecting each city, because:
- Each city, even the 3rd and 4th tier ones have a lot of people and they move around to get jobs and others.
- Average car owned by family is still low even for first tier cities.
- It's common for airplanes to be late
But I don't really see these kinds of things for the States.
This would be awesome! These lines go through most states so does this require the cooperation of each state’s government or does the federal government have the final say? If it’s the latter, then it seems feasible.
Federal government could intervene by stipulating that postal and police trains have priority, because postal service and enforcement of federal law are federal powers in USA.
How many of these lines (particularly out west) involve laying new track? The article merely refers vaguely to "new rail corridors" which could equally be satisfied by using existing right of way.
If there's new track, the paths chosen could be laid out to support subsequent high speed upgrades (or be high speed out the door, though I'm not sure enough money has been allocated).
The denser network in the more densely settled east coast may not permit HSR at all (though Europe managed even in more densely populated areas).
Regardless of the feasibility of rail in the US, I cannot think of anything less forward-looking then continuing to sink public money into the particular company Amtrak.
For some perspective, the federal government regularly funds highways to nowhere that nobody asked for or wants[1]
Most regional airfields are bigger money sinks than Amtrak. The federal government subsidizeds up to $800 per passenger in some of the more rural air routes in Alaska.[2]
Rail travel subsidies are a fraction of what the United States taxpayers spend on transportation. We have a concept of "essential" air and road travel subsidies, why not essential rail subsidies?
Think of how great this arm of our transportation infrastructure could be if we shifted 10% of what we spend on regional airlines to rail transport.
Other countries have clearly demonstrated that high speed rail works. And they don't spend nearly as much on infrastructure.
And what is wrong with just having subsidized slow passenger service across the continent either? I assure you it is not too expensive compared to what we already spend, and I think it is very beneficial. I think that we should continue to maintain a fleet of long distance passenger trains and stations. Passenger trains can be an essential safety where other forms of travel are unavailable. We just take it for granted that the government should spend as much as it wants building roads everywhere, but we count every penny when it comes to passenger rail.
Why single out Amtrak? It was set up to fail by the Nixon administration, it has never received the funding it needed to address the poor state of the equipment, stations, and ROW (i.e. NEC) it received at its inception, and most of its operations are on other railroads' ROW where there is little hope of upgrading lines for high-speed service (or even electrification). Either we should nationalize our railroads or we need to accept that Amtrak (or whatever company) is providing a public service that requires adequate public funding.
I did not single out Amtrak. The topic of the article is Amtrak. It is a dysfunctional organization, and that does become less true if it's Nixon's fault.
I feel like this deserves an explanation. Amtrak are underfunded, a political football, and have to run like a second class citizen on a large chunk of the US rail network, hardly issues of their own creation.
This very article points out routes that rival all the airlines combined in terms of passenger volume.
The article also points out that Amtrak purposefully invests as little as possible into the unprofitable long distance network, which seems to be exactly what you’re asking for: to stop investing in Amtrak’s archaic routes.
The article also details a plan that focuses on profitable and popular intercity service. Routes like Cleveland - Columbus - Cincinnati that are a part of this plan are no-brainer expansions that will easily yield regional economic benefits.
As you’re aware, Amtrak is the government. Any economic benefit they bring to a region goes right back to the government in the form of tax revenue. It should be obvious then that Amtrak itself doesn’t need to be profitable for it to be a net positive investment.
We don’t expect our roads to be profitable and yet nobody questions whether highways are a “feasible” mode of transport.
Oh, I'd love to see it. If we could accomplish a Shinkansen...!
But again, with Amtrak's record, where does the confidence come from that they could pull it off? As is pointed out above, it has never really succeeded, and has been propped-up by the government its entire life.
Amtrak is perfectly fine. I’ve used it on overnight trips on the crummiest long distance services. Yeah, I mean, it’s no European or Japanese or Chinese rail. But the idea that Amtrak can’t do something just because they’re Amtrak is ridiculous. They’re a part of the federal government, the only thing that the federal
government needs to do things is political will.
This rail plan is 100% realistic because it appropriately de-emphasizes long distance rail that Amtrak is so infamous for.
It targets expansion in very obviously lacking intercity regions. These new routes will be profitable for the government either directly or in lasting economic benefits.
Amtrak is not technically part of the federal government. It was set up as a private, for-profit corporation that is jointly owned by the government and the railroads whose passenger operations were turned over to Amtrak. The federal government's control over Amtrak is meant to end once Amtrak is able to operate independently, but Amtrak has never really been on a path to independent/profitable operations and will probably never get there.
Amtrak's biggest challenge is that its service is inconvenient in most of the cities/towns it serves. For example, in Syracuse, NY, where Amtrak has 8 trains per day (four in each direction) that arrive at reasonably convenient times, the station is located on the outskirts of the city, far from the city center. Cleveland has the opposite problem: the station is near the downtown area, but all of the scheduled trains (4 per day, two in each direction) arrive between 1 am and 6 am. Where Amtrak is convenient to use (e.g. the NEC) it works reasonably well and is actually competitive with driving or flying.
Yeah, the Northeast Corridor is fine. Would it be nice if Boston to DC wasn't an all-day trip? Sure. But the two halves of the route are very competitive with air travel and I'll take them over flying unless I'm connecting to another flight.
I've also rarely taken other city pairs.
What isn't practical except mostly as a one-off tourist thing for someone with lots of time is going Chicago to Seattle and similar routes or fantasies of drilling a tunnel through the Appalachians for a fast NY to Chicago run.
Just hire the Chinese and they'll get it done. on time and under budget. The US is ideal for high speed rail- long distances - plenty of land - almost all the objections are mostly bogus, political, etc,. Nothing significant ever was achieved without giving up something. https://youtu.be/aXo7wi488Eo
The train line shown going through Cleveland is already in operation. I would love to be able to take the train to Chicago or Boston or NYC. However,
- It is not cheap
- it is not reliable (time wise)
- it is not fast
- it requires leaving in the middle of the night or before the crack of dawn
Make it so that the cost is effective, the trip arrives on time, it is not significantly slower than driving and let me leave at a sane hour and then they will have something useful.
The southern route is some sort of joke. I've taken the train twice from Santa Fe, NM to Sanford, FL. Both times it went through Chicago, IL. Talk about indirect! I later read that due to some sort of federal shinanigans all routes crossing the Mississippi go via Chicago. Does the southern route ever get used?
$80B isn't enough to overhaul US train infrastructure and all the related challenges, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it ends up going to high-bid/low-result vendors. Other countries have had high speed rail for 10-50 years already.
With long distance train, sleepers are usually much more than flying. (This is true in Europe as well for the most part.) And even regular seats may be significantly more expensive.
A few years back I casually looked into taking an overnight train to Chicago from the East Coast and it was going to be something like 4x the cost of flying.
No way. I'm looking at taking a train from Southern Oregon to Southern California in a couple of months (mostly because I can and I just don't feel like flying or driving). The price for a sleeper one way is $350. The return trip is $450.
The idea that $160 billion will build that, much less by 2035, is comical. Maryland’s purple line will end up costing half a billion per mile to build non-grade separated light rail trolly through suburbs.
The cost per mile is completely different between light rail and regular / high-speed rail, tho.
The french LGV Est cost about 10k€ / mile (4bn for 252 miles), and it was not considered cheap. And that's including 800 millions worth of rolling stock too.
If we exclude the rolling stock from Est's cost and assume those 160bn will be purely infrastructure, it should get you about 12500 miles of track (stations included).
Why don’t we invest in new bleeding edge transportation infra like Hyperloop? This plan they are proposing is something we should have done in the 1920s.
Most high speed rail lines are just upgrades to existing lines.
We already have these rights of way settled. That is all the more reason that should not be abandoned.
It is typical to run minimal service to maintain the route, until service can be improved. China's passenger rail in rural areas looked downright dysfunctional 25 years ago, until it was upgraded, now it is the best in the world.
I think it is perfectly fine to run empty trains to the middle of nowhere.
NYC runs excessive service to neighborhoods that don't need it. There are four different lines to Coney Island that are nearly empty by the time they reach their destination, even during rush hour. They should not be abandoned though, because those neighborhoods have the capacity to grow. Neighborhoods that were lower traffic 20 years ago have only improved because of subway access, and are now reaching capacity limits. If we keep pruning parts of the network that are under-performing, we will be left with nothing.
I don't think that characterizing mass transit networks as unidirectional money sinks is correct. Cost goes in the other direction as well; if you invest more, then they expand and more people use them, and then they become more efficient to operate.
Eventually, populations align themselves around well developed public transit, but that can take decades. We just spent decades re-aligning the population around government subsidized highways and air travel, that's all.
>Most high speed rail lines are just upgrades to existing lines.
We already have these rights of way settled. That is all the more reason that should not be abandoned.
Most of that is used for freight as well. You can't realistically use the same rails for freight and high speed rail. So if we want high speed rail it will have to be entirely new tracks in a new right of way.
> You can't realistically use the same rails for freight and high speed rail.
Exactly. When Europe decided to upgrade their passenger rail system last century they cannibalized their century-old existing freight network. Now 75% of their freight (by weight-distance) is by diesel truck and only 19% by rail (mostly in Eastern Europe). Similar thing happened in Japan. Obviously these are huge trade offs: costs, efficiency, quality, pollution, etc.
Transportation systems are extremely complex. High speed passenger rail is just one small part of this huge picture.
Higher speed trains require a larger turn radius. The NE corridor is so built up that buying the land to widen all the curves would be a huge expense. Buying up people’s houses and businesses and tearing them down to build a faster train line might not pay off in the long term.
A lot of commuter rail is like that. When I take commuter rail into Boston, it's almost empty when I get on or off near the end of the line while it's often standing room only during peak times by the time it gets near the city.
I know people dispute self-driving cars actual feasibility, but with some convergent infrastructure they are an inevitability for long-haul transport.
Realistically how fast could america get its trains? 150 mph? And with long stops, how fast is that?
Meanwhile we can probably automate 100mph highway self driving, leave when you want, costs less, carry more luggage, can stop to see things along the way, can go more places and directions, and you have a car when you get there.
Yes, that's the entire problem. The congestion, parking issues, public cost, and pedestrian hostility of cars doesn't go away just because they get automated.
Even if you imagine cities with great mass transit, a ton of places that people go to are not cities and pretty much require personal transportation and this is hardly limited to the US.
> Realistically how fast could america get its trains? 150 mph?
Ah, yes. The height of American ambition is to aspire to a future train eventually reaching speeds 70% of what is considered normal elsewhere in the world.
Right evtol also seems to be ramping up. For the individuals direct transport is always going to be preferable. The cost for evtol is much lower than for rail or highways, however currently they require pilots which is a stumbling block.
Trains are 200 year old technology that has hardly improved. What we need is skytran, which is 1/50th of the cost of trains for the same capacity: https://www.skytran.com/
Trains have improved dramatically, but Americans haven't been paying attention and haven't changed anything about them in 100 years (in fact, they reverted by removing formerly electrified lines).
Trains are a proven technology- highly energy-efficient and more pleasant to ride than a car or a bus.
Yes, a good train system is better than cars or busses, I agree. But SkyTran is better in nearly every way than trains. Higher capacity, lower cost, faster speeds, easier to clean, lower energy use. Trains are outdated. We need something better.
It would be nice if this got built, but I will be shocked if it does. The only way it will happen is if we take a battering ram to a massive amount of red tape, NIMBY resistance, and car and airline industry lobbying.
The biggest hindrance is the environmental red tape and then the corruption. China has high speed trains from Shanghai to Beijing and that is roughly the distance of Chicago to NYC.
States aren’t capable of building big infrastructure like this. Federal cash with federal strings attached is incredibly effective.
Look at interstate highways as an example. Fairly standard overpass bridge replacements cost $50M. Project quality varies but stuff gets built mostly on time and with minimal corruption.
As evidenced by COVID, America is too dysfunctional to achieve this. China's advantage in this arena is that they are a mostly functioning autocracy and can ram through (literally) paths for a train where needed.
You mean NIMBY resistance like using eminent domain to take a lot of people's property? It's certainly sometimes appropriate but there should rightly be a high bar.
And that statement is true for > 100 million Chinese. But that doesn't mean the Chinese high speed rail system is not an immense success that benefits a huge percentage of the population!
The population density has shown that this is a use less endeavor, and post COVID this makes little sense. We should be discouraging any commute for work. The idea of funneling people from the suburbs into the city daily is an idea whose time has past. Spend the money to upgrade internet infra and start deconstructing the cities. There should be an immense tax on any commuting into a center city to massively discourage that wasteful and environmentally harmful activity
Amtrak hasn't worked out. The USPS no longer needs mail sorting cars, and air travel has been deregulated and is highly cost competitive.
The Amtrak system should just be abolished, except in the North East corridor where they own much of the tracks.
Remove the prohibition from mixing freight and passenger cars, and in fact partially subsidize freight carriers having an Amtrak car at the back of most every freigt train... partially subsidized to ensure they will making stops in the small remote cities without other transit options. Modernize the systems to allow bypassing stops with no-one waiting to get on or off, and use more cameras and intercoms with fewer on-train employees to keep costs down while still supervising and assisting passengers.
Technology is marching on, and if Amtrak doesn't make these sorts of changes soon, it'll become entirely redundant. Passenger trains are faster and more efficient than automobiles right now, but a near-future with self-driving, fully electric vehicles on non-pneumatic tires could be faster, cheaper, and less polluting than passenger rail.
Right now, the best jobs in the state are divided between Charlotte-area, and Triangle area (Raleigh and Durham). House prices are going up like crazy in those areas, meanwhile the more affordable cities that are outside the range of a comfortable commute to those cities (High Point -> Triangle), (Winston -> Charlotte) can't quite compete with the network effects around banking, healthcare, and tech that are driving the growth in the big areas. Those cities wouldn't actually be a terrible a commute away from Charlotte or The Triangle (45min-1hour in ideal conditions), but traffic during peak hours and constant road construction along those routes would make it miserable.
If there was fast, reliable train service, I could definitely see commuters giving those areas a closer look. Especially since so many jobs these days seem to be less stringent about office time (ie, only go into the office 2x a week).
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_Crescent