Except that Amtrack is consistently late on the NEC and other regional lines that they have priority on. Really annoying when you are on a train waiting to pull out of a station and can't go because a late Amtrack has priority.
I know Penn is a major bottleneck (we have Christie to thank for that after killing ARC), and there's the added problem of delays conflicting with Metro North/NJT schedules.
We need infrastructure investment in dense corridors if we're to get anywhere remotely near European or Asian standards.
This is true at multiple levels of scale. Compare Ulm, Germany to Richmond, VA. Both are about 100-200k people. Aside from a few appendages, you hit farms 2-3 miles outside Ulm in most directions. Richmond, by contrast, is surrounded for 8-10 miles in all directions by suburbs, which have another million people. When it comes to voting for things like transit or train service, the people in the city that might benefit from it are totally outnumbered by all the people in the suburbs who can't.
Europe is 33% larger than the USA (contiguous 48).
[added] Note sure why this fact would be down-voted. We don't include Greenland or e.g. French Polynesian dependencies in the European total. Sweden is slightly larger than California, with 1/4 the population. Et caetera. Really, you should look at maps, population facts, as well as the extent and quality of railroads.
And quit pretending that there is no rail connection across Europe. [1] America is failing when it comes to 21st century pubic transportation. Angrily lagging behind European, Japanese [2], or Chinese [3] railroads is not a healthy path.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe
The Port Authority of NY and NJ is just such a agency.
Not true.
Chicago to Detroit: 282 miles (4.5h via car) 5hours via train TODAY. (It should really be 2 hours with a train going ~180mph)
Chicago to St. Louis 311 miles (5h via car) 5.5 hours via train (With proper investment: 2.2 hours via HSR train)
Sure end to end may be long; but even then not as long as most people realize.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/26/china-opens-worlds-longe...
> China launched services Wednesday on the world’s longest high-speed rail route, linking the nation’s capital in Beijing all the way to the country’s southeastern hub of Guangzhou.
> Averaging speeds of up to 186 m.p.h. (300 km/h), the 1,425-mile (2,293 km) route now takes eight hours to complete;
New York to Los Angeles : 2775 miles. Or double the above line. 16 HOURS via High-Speed train. 16 HOURS.
As a point of reference flight time is 6 hours. (Not counting being at the airport 2 hours early, etc.) - so lets just say ~9 hours for a plane. So a plane is twice as fast; but with significantly less capacity.
In fact, high speed rail could also be transformative for international travel; airlines could bundle a high speed rail ticket with a much cheaper transatlantic flight from Philly, as opposed to paying out the nose for a flight out of EWR or JFK.
Does Europe have more and better trains because it has denser cities or does it have denser cities because it has more and better trains?
Probably a little bit of both.
This is probably a major factor that makes Amtrak less preferable than driving even when it’s available - once you get to almost any place in the US, you’d prefer to have your car. Amtrak stations also don’t generally have convenient car rental locations with extended hours like airports do, so that’s not even an option to deal with it.
I don’t see why we need to subsidise passenger rail. Autonomous helis and passenger planes seem like a better bet.
From the (admittedly not great) source of CAHSR:
> Providing the equivalent new capacity on the state’s highways and airports would cost more than double the investment required to develop a high-speed rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles. If it was even possible, that would mean building 4,300 new highway lane miles, 115 additional airport gates, and four new airport runways at an estimated cost of $158 billion. [...] Caltrans estimates operations and maintenance costs on those new highway lanes at $132.8 billion for over 50 years.