What it’s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin’s sleep pod bus
techcrunch.com
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Not exactly the ritz, but does the job: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sleeping+train
Amtrak's sleeper cars are also quite expensive when I last looked at it as an option for getting from Colorado to San Francisco. The price compared to a seat on the train was 2..3x or more (but it includes food).
Since that would be wasteful, Amtrak doesn't do it; instead they stop in San Jose (where you can switch to Caltrain to run up the peninsula into SF) and Oakland (where you can hop on BART or a ferry to cross the Bay into SF).
Just to be clear: not knocking Amtrak here. They're virtually budget-less, for the most part disallowed from owning or even maintaining their own infrastructure, so building new infrastructure would be completely beyond the Pale. Not knocking Amtrak at all -- it's America's collective ability to get its infrastructure act together that is just sad.
> Because it is a suspension bridge and has similar coloring, it is often compared to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, US. It was built by the American Bridge Company which constructed the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, but not the Golden Gate.
It's super annoying. I hate to fly - well, that's not true; I hate the pervasive unpleasantness and inconvenience of US commercial air travel - and find trains much more congenial, but e.g. two days to get from where I live to where I grew up, plus two more days to get back, is more travel time than I can afford.
Unfortunately, while we have an activist billionaire interested in trying to improve this situation, he appears to prefer vacuum-tube moonshots, starting in the country's best-served and most infrastructurally complex transit market, to doing anything useful right now. So it goes.
There are a couple of routes across the country, stopping roughly once per state if that. As you mentioned, it's freight with a few passenger trains sharing the tracks.
In addition to the northeast region (DC, Philly, NYC, Boston) you can do pretty well in Chicago. It's the hub of all of those routes except for the one on the US/Mexico border.
Here's a good overview why.
First the Cumberland Valley Railroad in 1839, then George Pullman's more luxurious version in 1865 that was very successful (and from there, it spread to Europe).
Sure, they weren't quite as fancy, but it really doesn't matter if you're sleeping, you're asleep. I guess that's the SV markup on everything that's been common in the rest of the world for a long time.
They are super convenient though, pick up and drop off in the middle of the city, and accommodation included. Go to sleep, and you wake up at your destination.
The route-through method means that you'll stop about once every hour for 15~20 minutes for on-off and snacks/restroom. If you're still somewhat wakeful these stops are just at the twilight phase and you don't get truly restful sleep.
Properly sleeping on a flight, on the other hand, feels like luxury.
(If the weight is a great concern, and it is, and capsules are too heavy — hammocks can also be an option).
Hammocks with seatbelts!?
Going to the restroom might prove to be somewhat challenging, though...
In order to stack hammocks or racks three-high, transversely to the fuselage axis, as I suspect you intend, you need both a large amount of vertical space - eight or nine feet, minimum - and roughly a second row's worth of space between racks, in order for people to get into and out of them. The former requirement can be reduced at the cost of squeezing people unpleasantly together and potentially dismaying claustrophobes; the latter requirement can be eliminated at the same cost, plus that of exclusively end-on entry to and exit from the rack, two-thirds of the time via a ladder.
At this point the only customers you've got left are those fit enough to be physically able to use your service, and also unconcerned about being cheek by jowl with at least two strangers - or, if the racks have sidewalls, unconcerned about spending however many hours in a box too small to sit up in. A lounge might alleviate that concern, but what about the others? And where will people put their shoes? (Do you wear yours into bed?)
The alternative is to compromise space efficiency for comfort, and a lot of airlines already do substantially that with A380s and individual sleeper pods.
1) The aisle has to be a set width, so you cant stack cabins across the plane.
2) Passengers need to seated and have a seat belt on upon take off and landing.
I think theres another about being able to be belted in if turbulence happens, and be inspectable by attendants. In short, its not as easy as one may think, and its these regulations which complicate things.
The way I picture it is replacing seats as they are currently laid out in e.g. a 747 - 3 seats become stacked capsules -> aisle -> 3/4 seats become stacked capsules -> aisle -> 3 seats become stacked capsule. I don't deny that getting into these capsules would be awkward for people with limited mobility, but I do imagine it is within the realms of possibility while meeting safety regulations.
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² last time I flew with them was awful, worst legroom I've ever encountered.
If you are flying there is a need to book a hotel to deliver the same experience of being in LA/SF at 7am refreshed.
That is the "free money" in the model, people can exchange sleep in a hotel for a sleep on a bus with pretty much the same outcome.
Let's say you're in San Francisco and want to be in Santa Monica the whole of the next day. Your options are:
1. Wake up at 3:30am, leave the house at 4, arrive SFO by 5, flight at 6:30, at LAX at 8, get to Santa Monica at 9. You are now completely shattered for the day.
2. Fly at a reasonable hour he night before, and rent a hotel in Santa Monica. You have now spent more money than Cabin.
3. Go to sleep on a bus at a reasonable hour in San Francisco; wake up at a reasonable hour in Santa Monica. You've used less of your waking-time to travel, and have spent less money than getting a hotel.
The alternative is broken travel, lines, TSA harassment, and arriving at your destination a hollow shell of your former self having had the live and soul sucked out of you by incompetence, harmful lighting design and oppressive neon tubes and the brown noise of an aircraft engine sapping your very will to exist.