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.
Congress could deregulate passenger rail and allow competition. Amtrak is a government monopoly. There's the chance that passenger rail isn't profitable and that it disappears but I've always thought that would be unlikely
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 publicly owned. I'd personally love to see it privatized, but you phrased that like you think Amtrak is a private company that receives subsidies. It isn't, it's closer to the USPS model than that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
>..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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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]
Electric busses, battery swaps, reserved lanes / streets. At least for cities I wonder why this isn't proposed more. If you look at LA you take major EW and NS roads and take cars off of them. Bikes, busses, pedestrians. It seems we want to make everything better without making any changes to existing infrastructure/thinking.
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?
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.
$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.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
The odds of Amtrak pulling this off are near 0. They earned their poor reputation.
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.
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.
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.
Also used high speed trains in Germany.
I understand the resistance but there is no technical problem that prevents efficient passenger rail services in North America, we just need to do it.
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.
Change leadership, change direction and continually improve.
NEC = northeast corridor
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.
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.
[1]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/12/23/meet-2020s-worst-high...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120202212318/http://www.buses....
Also nice would be SJC to Santa Cruz.
That Reno to Tahoe drive is still a hike and Heavenly/Squaw/Sierra at Tahoe are decently far apart.
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.
Doesn't that also mean its a bad time for people to be driving their own cars all over?
That is because of a "temporary" service suspension in 2004 from damage by hurricane Katrina.[1]
Apparently even Amtrak thinks that by 2035 they won't be capable of restoring service.
[1]: https://www.jacksonville.com/article/20081117/NEWS/801256449
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.
I suppose it would be two hours.
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.
I'm pretty dubious about the demand. There's not even a megabus between Nashville and Atlanta.
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.
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.
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.
Well being that this is the federal government, it doesn't get to use the immigrant labor that the private sector does, so you are right.
At some point we just need to decide that a project is worth building, and will be built, regardless of the opposition.
- 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.
[1] https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-...
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2009/04/16/a-visio...
Obama’s high-speed rail plan went absolutely nowhere, in part because Republican governors flatly refused to participate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/12/no-high...
California has been trying to build a line for 5 decades. Now the price is beyond reasonable.
China built 22,000 miles for under 500 billion?
At this point we’ve got to be near ready for 300 mph maglevs.
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 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.
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.
Transportation By Mode (EU, US, Japan)
Freight: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Modal-Split-of-Freight-T...
Passenger: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Modal-Split-of-Passenger...
…well, OK, but then you say…
California has been trying to build a line for 5 decades. Now the price is beyond reasonable.
So I'm not sure how we get to that reasonably priced point.
Well I'm no expert, but other countries seem to be managing it just fine.
By way of comparison, here is a map of European rail: https://www.eurail.com/content/dam/maps/Eurail-Map-2021.pdf
[0] https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Amtrak-C...
[1] http://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FY19-Year...
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 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.
See last page of the FY 2019 annual report (Amtrak's FY 2019 ended on Sep. 30, 2019; aka pre-pandemic): https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
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.
But both are weekly services, and even Nice–Moscow (yet alone intermediate stops) has more capacity most days by plane than the once-a-week train.
- Rome to Athens
- Paris to Barcelona
- Madrid to Stockholm
Much of Europe is a very far way from having a seamless integrated cross-border train system.
The next direct train takes 6h39m.
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.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-20842836
Eventually, a more direct NY - Chicago high speed rail route could be built that is even faster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Limited
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.)
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.
Train fans vastly overestimate the number of people who will optimize for "sitting in a train and staring out the window for days".
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.
Driving: 18 hours, 1269 miles x $0.56/mile = $710 each way (IRS millage rates as proxy)
Train: 55 hour travel, $209 each way (no refund)
Flying: 2.5 hour flight, $68 each way on a budget flight. Double both time and price for non-budget.
I would love to take a train, its just not practical.
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'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".
[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.
(I always get a sleeper; without that it wouldn't be worthwhile.)
Are you close by?
I'm near Golden.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's kinda weird how very few politicians are talking about this.
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.
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.
That said, the route from NYC to Montreal is really beautiful north of Albany. It just takes about ten hours to get there.
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.
With pretty reasonable high speed rail, that should be no more than a 4 hour trip. At which point it is very competitive with flying in terms of time.
For cost, it looks like a round trip on Amtrak is typically $200, whereas a round trip flight for two weeks from now is around $300.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/20/streaming-high... for a much less exciting map, but one for which u have more confidence Amtrak could actually pull it off.
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.
Name a form of transport that isn't subsidized.
> Where I live, it was all built with tax dollars.
You answered your own question, and, you paid for it too!
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05.4
>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.
https://www.aaprco.com/travel/where-do-i-start/chartering-a-...
Still looks like a lot of fun, but 20k-56k for 8day trip... I can't do that.
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.
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.
It's also an absolute atrocity in the face of climate change.
And it's long overdue that fact is reflected in the ticket price, imo.
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
I know people take the train between Seattle and Portland. I'm sure there are other examples.
* 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.
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.
- own rail tracks,
- own stations and surrounding real estate
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.
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.
Only assuming ticket sales needed to cover all operations, which definitely need not be the case.
Not in any useful way: freight delays passenger trains in the US with impunity.
http://blog.amtrak.com/2019/05/why-are-amtrak-trains-delayed...
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.
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.
Should be "eminent".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eminent_domain
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.)
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
Hard to do when the people who really understand broadband networking are working for ATT, Comcast, and Verizon and not for the government.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
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.
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.
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.
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.
do you drive on roads
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
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.
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
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?
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.)
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.
They also own sections of other lines - including the New Haven-Springfield line[1].
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Line
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.
We should build out more rail with the same logic.
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.
China's high speed rail is more complicated to understand:
- national infra based on rail instead of planes
- quick military access to Xinjiang (aka the genocide camps)
- way to use up extra steel and cement, like BRI (doubling production decreases cost by 20% due to volume)
- orderly peak holiday transportation to villages (Spring Festival.)
Since when? Source? They were always getting preempted when I used it.
[0] - http://blog.amtrak.com/2019/05/why-are-amtrak-trains-delayed...
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.
Long haul rail IMO is really just for cargo.
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.
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.
Now if you can just launch into space and fly over it... well then America has some innovation.
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.
The sleeper car I got for the 2 night trip cost me quite a chunk of change.
I could see a scenario where getting a sleeper car for 10 hours would be cheaper than getting one for 36 hours.
High speed trains are three times as fast.
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.
100+ mph roads aren't unheard of (see autobahn). Neither are 100+ mph trains. The fact that neither is available is frustrating.
kWh/passenger-mile, which, even if you assume both have environmentally-equal power sources, means environmental impact.
Probably also easier to keep other vehicles off your “dedicated” lane with a train.
Train service between the two cities, meanwhile, is much more reliable in how long it's actually going to take.
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.
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]
[1] http://www.gapersblock.com/detour/a_cta_map_for_2055/
[2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-biz-chicago-...
EDIT: here's an example:
Amtrak NY to Florida: $123 to 200 (21h)
Flight NY to Florida: $69 to 97 (3.5h)
Amtrak Iowa to California: $300 (52h)
Flight Iowa to California: $200 - 300 (6h)
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.
Of course a bullet-train in Japan from Tokyo to Kyoto is two hours — not requiring a sleepover on the train.
Japan, to be sure, is a small country compared to the U.S. But with a similar train system, San Francisco to Denver would be an 8 hour train ride.
This makes no sense and will never happen. And this plan will make no significant progress towards this pipe dream.
This is a bald-faced lie to sell a political proposal.