Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak's Northeast Corridor
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
That's a drop in the bucket compared to Amtrak's $38 billion maintenance backlog or the $13 billion Hudson tunnel project.
Out of all the potential effects of climate change, this seems like one of the least worrisome -- we even know how to fix it already!
But yes, that does seem like a low figure.
I'm curious. I've been hearing about the expected effects of climate change for many years. At least since ~2005 or 2006. Are there any predictions of conditions in 2000, or 2020, which have panned out as predicted?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
Who is right?
https://study.com/academy/lesson/attacking-the-motive-fallac...
An alien can look at this "debate" and make a rational decision without even knowing what the debate is about. The world's scientists study X and overwhelmingly agree: X is going to wreak havoc on the world within a few decades. In response, the humans who make extraordinary amounts of money off of X (and won't be alive in a few decades), pay large sums of money to a few people who say: X isn't that bad.
So an alien examines this situation and thinks: "Hmm... should I believe the overwhelming majority of rationalists, or the few people with financial incentives to be contrarians?" The alien concludes: "Since there are two sides to the debate, that means each side is exactly 50% likely to be right. The answer must be unknowable, and therefore they shouldn't make any decision on it and just maintain the status quo (making the contrarians the victors)." Just kidding. The alien says, "Wow, if this species is stumped on this one, I'll just come back later and harvest their newly melted water and filter all their corpses out."
no one is immune to bias and misaligned incentives, especially on contentious political issues, and especially in fields where your entire job depends on government funding. in general, I am quite skeptical of academics.
Scientists and academics indeed have their own biases, but when you look at the big picture of the distribution of peoples' motivations, very clear patterns emerge that scream out: there is a lot of bad-faith, deliberate disinformation out there, and we need to take that into account. As rational people, it's tempting to just take arguments at face value and focus on the information. But this is all taking place in a larger context where psychology and game theory play a role. Impartiality is exploitable - tying up people's judgement is just a victory for the status quo.
If you want to be skeptical of the skeptics, fine. We all should be. But the notion that the bias is one-sided is silly.
Bias isn't a binary proposition: it's not that since both sides have some bias, they should be equally distrusted. It's that one side has 0.02 bias and the other side has 0.6 bias, so weigh accordingly.
Of those scientists who have backgrounds that would qualify them to contribute in this particular area, the consensus is not at all clear. But the ones who seem most concerned about rapid AGW appear to be those with skin in the game.
Really? I think a lot of countries have scientific agencies whose job it is to as accurately as possible monitor and predict the climate because those countries economies (eg especially important for planning in agricultural economies) depend on it. If they had scientists that could show it was a non issue, those governments would be all over that. And after all those scientists would still need to be employed predicting the natural climate cycles anyway.
The world would fall at the feet of scientists that could scientifically refute this. That would be the hugest money making opportunity for any climate scientist, and instant fame. To contend that whatever secret international cabal in favour of promoting climate change can outcompete the fossil fuel industry for resources is frankly nutty. If these academics are as corruptible as you seem to claim, why would they choose the low reward side of the debate?
You seem to be trying to inject some false "balance" to this.
We need to find ways to reduce CO2 emissions that will improve the lives of people instead of making them worse. How about massive R&D into nuclear power to make it safer, education about radiation so that people are not so irrationally afraid of it, fusion power research, a carbon tax and research into how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere so that, if we can get cheaper power, we can use it to fix the problem. The Tesla Roadster and the Model S is how you get people to switch to electric cars, not at huge gas tax (they tried that in Europe, btw).
That's not quite true - there are plenty of non-partisan and even conservative groups that accept climate change. For example, the US military and the Department of Defense: not exactly a progressive think tank. Yet they accept the reality of the situation, since they are pragmatic and actually have to deal directly with the consequences. They study how climate change affects world stability and combat and are actively preparing for it. Many oil companies have finally admitted to the facts and tip toe around the issue for PR safety. Even Trump is building sea walls around his vulnerable properties while milking the political benefits from denialism.
As for your second paragraph, yes, I agree, let's focus on the implementation. There's a lot of imperfect solutions that we need to sort through. I just wish we could already all be at that stage.
The CEI is only one of many places that "distribute" this figure. As you can see from the lower left of the figure, it was actually made by John Christy, a climate scientists who showed it in testimony before the US House of Representatives in 2015. A good discussion of the chart and what it means is given in the Judith Curry article I linked to in another post upthread.
TL;DR: it is using every trick in the book to mislead.
https://climateaudit.org/2016/04/19/gavin-schmidt-and-refere...
Who is right?
We have no way of knowing because no predictions were made for periods of time prior to now, so we have nothing to compare with the data.
The dire predictions of rapid rise in the future are based on the future predictions of climate models being correct, but the models are already known to over-predict future warming.
https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/27/special-report-on-sea-lev...
> temperature "hindcasts" hold up pretty well
But temperature forecasts don't. Hindcasts aren't predictions.
https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli...
> Climate scientists criticize her uncertainty-focused spiel for containing elementary mistakes and inflammatory assertions unsupported by evidence. Curry is a regular at Anthony Watts' denier blog, as well as Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit, another denier site. She has further embarrassed herself (and her university) by using refuted denier talking points and defending the Wegman Report, eventually admitting she hadn't even read it in the first place.[1] Curry has agreed with Trump's description of climate change as a "hoax", writing in 2016 that the UN's definition of manmade climate change "qualifies as a hoax".
As for Climate Audit, the Wegman Report, and Judith Curry: Maybe try reading one of them sometime. I think you'll find that they are nothing like their detractors try to portray them to be.
> Subsequent to the 2013 IPCC AR5, there has been a focus on the possible worst-case scenario for global sea level rise. Estimates of the maximum possible global sea level rise by the end of the 21st century range from 1.6 to 3 meters [5-10 feet], and even higher. These extreme values of possible sea level rise are regarded as extremely unlikely or so unlikely that we cannot even assign a probability. Nevertheless, these extreme, barely possible values of sea level rise are now becoming anchored as outcomes that are driving local adaptation plans
PS: It’s all’s up 18 cm from 1897 but recent rise has been much more obvious.
The Independent finally deleted the article but here’s a summary of it:
http://www.globalwarming.org/2010/12/27/headline-2000-snowfa...
The biggest struggle with climate change (in the US at least) is trying to convince businesses that they're going to be impacted financially. If anything we need more industry-specific reporting to try to show companies how ignoring climate change will impact their bottom line.
If there is no impact or very little for the person/people currently running the business, then there is no reason to make a move to prevent/mitigate the problem.
What is the difference between having the government- the totality of citizens- pay for climate change mitigation; and adopting extremely expensive global measures that will make everyone poorer for a number of decades? I'm asking seriously. It seems very similar to me: in both cases the whole collectivity will pay (which is fair, since it's the whole collectivity that is enjoying the benefits of freely polluting the environment now).
Industries that see ever more profit in fields with high externalities won't have direct a motivation to address those externalities even if they're aware of them - assuming they're unaware in any way.
(aside, coal isn't actually that terrible in terms of contribution to climate change, but reliance on it is definitely contributing, there may be bigger fish but this one has a good bit of meat on it)
You may be thinking of the entity that used to be known as Conrail. Amtrak is passenger only.
GP may also be thinking of the U.S. House of Representatives. Amtrak has no power to levy taxes.
The word tax has multiple meanings, and my usage above was indeed correctly utilizing one of those meanings.
Using climate change as a club to push ideological policies did not work and now has us in a real pickle. The other side did not fight back by advocating for better solutions to the CO2 pollution problem but instead just decided to ignore reality as an easier short-term tactic.
Amtrak is passenger only. They share track with CSX and many others.
Hmm. And how do you measure this? Yes, Company X ships the coal, but everybody uses the steel that is produced with that coal. Tax the coal, and the steel will be more expensive. Same for the cement. Or electricity. Companies that don't profit from coal transportation still enjoyed a good price for the steel and concrete of their headquarters and warehouses; for the steel structures of the bridges and the hulls of the ships that move their goods; for the machinery that produce all this stuff. The value of the salary they pay to their employees is measured in relation to what can be bought with it: make stuff more expensive, and the people will be poorer. Everybody is profiting from cheap stuff. Everybody should, and will, pay.
It'd honestly be easier to just shut down Amtrak and do without rail service. As a nation, we simply are not willing to do what it takes to have a decent passenger rail service, and that isn't going to change.
Yes and no. My take is this: there's too much time and energy being put into why and who does or doesn't believe (it's human-made), and not enough focus is on "solutions" (to the higher waters). Often this distraction seems to be generated by politicians.
I wish I had $10 for every time I've seen an article misuse the phrase "climate-change deniers" My sense those people are very few. That is, flat out deniers are few. Most everyone else sees it coming. The debate is why it's happening (human vs natural).
Even if we settle on why (which we won't), it seems to me Amtrak, etc. are still going to be impacted. At some point we need to focus on the ends, and let the means go.
Note: I realize that __if__ we settle on human-made there is, at least in theory, opportunity to slow the change. I understand that. My faith breaks down on ever being able to agree on why. It's as if the building is on fire and we're so busy debating why the fire started that we've forgotten we still need to do something about the fire.
There is no debate. When people say "climate-change deniers" they mean "rapid anthropogenic caused climate-change deniers"
They're getting rarer, though. As the evidence piles up, more and more of them are switching to "global warming is real but it's nobody's fault and there's definitely nothing we can or should do about it."
Whatever actual argument is stated (geologic, sun cycles, not happening, no big deal), the end objective is the same: we shouldn't do anything about it.
Doesn't really matter what I think though. I'm one person, not in a position of influence, and my beliefs and behavior on the matter are inconsequential.
I don't think that moving away from coal and petroleum is bad though. Those are dirty, polluting energy sources. I think we should be developing nuclear and electrically powred transportation and battery technology. So either way, I support moving away from burning fossil fuels.
That is fundamentally wrong. At the worst you would have to run an experiment with many earth-replicas and individual changed variables. Quite impractical but not relevant for determining falsifiability of a theory.
But more importantly models don't just have to fit data of the past, they also make predictions of the future which will automatically be tested as time advances. And pretty much all climate models do not make a singular prediction they map some input domain to an output domain. Decrease factor A by x% and the global averages of effect M will stay within some confidence interval with the mean y% lower etc.
Of course it is complex, but complexity is no excuse to throw up your arms and claim we can't possibly know anything when it's inconvenient.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/CIR.000000000000...
Now if they actually took people, and replaced saturated fat in their diet with polyunsaturated fat, holding other variables constant, then measured whether they lived longer, they'd have something. But they haven't done that.
Their reasoning is that this measure of blood lipids is associated with CVD, so if we do something that lowers that measure of blood lipids, it will also lower the incidence of CVD. That's just bad science, and they should know better.
How else could it work? This is a system that's vastly too complicated to actually model from fundamental principles. Or at least, in any simple way. As I understand it, the components are all based on fundamental principles. But they're tweaked as needed to fit historical data.
This isn't done, particularly in climate science, because it's slow and difficult, but "model validation is slow and difficult" doesn't add validity to invalid models.
But yes, models fit to the full historical record can only be validated in real time.
This doesn't work in an adversarial context; there's no guarantee that the modeler didn't cheat.
I would therefore say that the debate is on what action that both individually and as a society that needs to be done. Abolishing coal mining vs replacing coal power plants with nuclear power plants, car ownership vs vegetarianism, carbon tax vs bans, and so on. We are collectively so divided that even if we all mostly agree that climate-change exists and is directly caused by us humans we can still not agree on what to do next.
The President of the United States thinks it's a hoax (from snopes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-global-warmin...):
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012
Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2013
NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2014
Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2014
Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air – not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2014
So far all decisions he's taken are in-line with someone that thinks that, which is far more important than divining what he truly believes.
There's a saying about the risks of underestimating adversaries. And a clever adversary always acts weaker and crazier than they actually are.
And now you are standing up for them.
Our problems cannot be summarized as “higher waters”. We are talking about not just sea-level rise displacing hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people, but also lethal heat waves every summer in many parts of the world, permanent severe drought in some places, raging wildfires, severe storms, collapse of many ecosystems, collapse of agriculture in many places, etc.
But we're all running around with flamethrowers. And we can't imagine life without them. That's the hard part.
Now we're telling them to stop building flamethrowers while we keep insisting that we keep our own.
Um. That's not what I said. Not at all. Please re-read the Note: at the end and my (lack of) faith in human nature. I'm not defending anyone. But by the time we get done running around in circles and settle on what punched a whole on the bottom of the boat, we're going to be water-above-head. Is that not what we're seeing? Still?
As for "higher waters", the original article was about water levels and Amtrak. I stuck to that. If you want you make the problem bigger and even more overwhelming, sure, we can go your route. But from what I've seen that kitchen-sink approach - again see the Note: - isn't working out well. At some point we have to come to terms with what isn't working, and try another approach.
I agree with you (sans the "standing up for them" bit). But I'm far less naive, far less trusting of human nature.
You also need to convince them that any local mitigation action (maintenance, waters management, etc.) will impact them financially more than a global concerted effort to stop co2 emissions. Which seems a very difficult argument to make.
The life span of the average business is about 10 years. The median employment tenure (years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer) in 4.2 years. It's awefully tough to get anyone today to care about the bottom line in Q3 2068.
Change needs to happen at the government level and be imposed on businesses in spite of what they think. It needs to happen at the alliance level (UN) because governments don't want to act against their economic interests unless they have to, even if their economic foresight is short (a presidential term, maximum).
That they (people with short term economic advantage) have succeeded in making climate change an optional belief is the biggest worry of all. Now we have sheeple (half the general population) blindly running to the precipice while loudly proclaiming anyone that can see it coming as stupid/liar/hands in ears/la la la.
It’s going to be a positive thing for many companies. Defences need to be engineered, built and maintained. It isnt bad for everyone.
2 feet is the median!? And things continue to accelerate?
I thought I followed climate change issues but somehow did not know that in most people's lifetimes sea levels will rise multiple feet. I would've thought folks would be more... concerned? The maps of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut look like they are going to cost us billions to trillions to mitigate between now and 2100.
A shallow bay in the tropics that is right in the way of ocean currents, for example, can see an order of magnitude more change in high tide than the global sea level, let alone during surges and swells.
According to Sir David King (head U.K. climate scientist) in 2004, all continents other than Antarctica will be uninhabitable by 2100 due to manmade global warming.[1]
I wouldn't be worried about New York. I'd be on the next ship down to Antarctica to go stake my land claim right now before it all gets gobbled up.
I mean, if this manmade global warming stuff is real, and it's as bad as they say it is.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100817023019/http://www.indepen...
> Sir David warned that if the world did not curb its burning of fossil fuels "we will reach that level by 2100"."
[Emphasis mine]
He literally did say that, unless you think "would not sustain human life" is compatible with "habitable". That quote was an asinine statement to make and only serves to provide ammunition to those who want to convince people that climate change is not a real problem.
No scientist believes that climate change will cause such sire circumstances.
The experts on the matter believe that sea levels will rise by a meter or so over the next hundred years.
If you believe that this will end the world, then you should know that the experts disagree with you, and that you should go read some more science.
So yes, it is true that "the last time C02 levels were at this level, the world could not sustain life". But it is also misleading as it implies causation.
The scienctists do not believe that these levels would cause mass extinction of human life. The badness is closer in scale to another Iraq war.
Now, there's a lag to warming, so it might only reach the full temperatures by 2150 or so, but King did explicitly seem to be saying we're likely to make the world uninhabitable. Or at least that the last time co2 was that high, the world was uninhabitable.
I haven't figured out why people don't take this more seriously. A child born today can expect to live past 2100. People have children and grandchildren, and yet....
He is implying causation, but no scientist actually believes that the world will be uninhabitable by 2100. That is the opinion of the experts.
Anyone with a child born this year can expect that child to live past 2100. A future grandchild will live well past 2100. Even most people reading this can probably expect to live past 2050.
It's not an abstract issue that will affect future generations. It will affect us and our direct descendants.
Overall life expectancy at birth is not greater than 81 in the US, though it is at 81 for females.
I should have said "anyone university educated". In the US that adds ten years to life expectancy vs those without a high school degree:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4435622/#!po=0....
The science says that sea levels will rise by a meter or so over the next hundred years. That won't end the world.
The science says that climate change will cause trillions of dollars of damages, over the next hundred years.
Trillions of dollars in damages is bad. But it is on the same scale of "badness" as another iraq war.
I'd want to prevent a third Iraq war, but I am not going to pretend that it would put billions of lives in danger.
That's also not the right way to look at Iraq war costs. A lot of the war cost is just "shuffling".
Eg pay $1,000,000 in soldier salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to soldiers. Then the soldiers spend the money. What was lost?
The real cost is the alternative work the soldiers could have done. The private sector could presumably have put them to better use. This would be more acute if the economy had full employment.
Bombs and munitions are worse, as there is real destruction of material. But much of the money is still recycled back into the domestic economy.
By contrast, a trillion simply lost from a catastrophe is just lost. It's a loss of real infrastructure. It's a loss of whole cities such as Miami, etc
To speak of "science" in this context is to misuse the term.
Eg pay $1,000,000 in construction worker salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to workers. Then the workers spend the money. What was lost?
The comment about alternative work still applies, but much of the money is still recycled back into the domestic economy.
So it's not a trillion simply lost.
All in all, I think the comparison to war is very apt.
Whereas, soldiers probably weren't doing much economically productive in the first place. And as long as there is spare capacity in the labour force, moving people from "unemployed" to "soldier" isn't a massive misallocation of resources.
It's not nothing - taxpayers could habe spent the money better had they kept it. But it's not the same as if you levelled a city.
Further, the vast bulk of costs associated with the iraq war are interest on debt. That is really just shuffling money around. Especially if the debt is held by americans.
Money is just a unit of exchange. It isn't synonymous with wealth itself. Climate change will actually directly destroy wealth: it will level capital stock, it will lower crop yields, etc.
This is very different from movements of money back and forth that leave the physical economy untouched.
Iraq suffered destruction of capital during the Iraq war. Not sure if a dollar figure was attached to it, but that would be a more comparable situation.
Iraq's economy is $200 billion per year. I'm guessing the dollar loss to them was much less than 2.4 trillion. And yet I'm sure the real hardship caused by capital loss is greater than americans feel from their financial loss - even if you account for population size differences.
Yes, hundreds of thousands died. But not billions. Not even close. That's the only point I am making.
I very much doubt the Federal government will be providing (or will have the funds to provide) much of the assistance required to mitigate this kind of rise, and it will come down to cities / states handling it themselves for a lot of this.
As for the lives in danger - I was considering this in terms of economic damage to the NE United States, but I'd imagine globally it could be on the scale of millions having to migrate / move.
I would not personally equate the impacts of climate change to the Iraq war because of the overall scale and global impact, but I understand how it compares in terms of order of magnitude for a mental model.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-sd-del-mar-bluf...
And SD will still have the trolley from TJ at least.
It's a few pages before it becomes California-specific.
I found this article, which talks about a slightly different effect: If Antarctic ice melts more quickly than arctic ice, then the Antarctic land rebound will shove southern-hemisphere water north, raising sea levels in the northern hemisphere. The opposite effect happens if arctic ice melts before Antarctic ice.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/01/cities...
https://www.whoi.edu/news-release/why-is-sea-level-rising-hi...
This other article in The Guardian does mention it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/...
When part of the Greenland ice sheet melts the global mean sea level rises, but it is likely to cause sea level drops in some places around the northern Atlantic. How and where is going to be almost impossible to model and we will just have to wait and see how it plays out. Journal articles here [1,2]
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-010-9935-... [2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
So, _not_ a private company.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/2015/03/0...
(From 2015 – Supreme Court says Amtrak is more like a public entity than a private firm)
"" All the justices agreed to overturn the lower-court ruling in which the Association of American Railroads had prevailed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit: that Amtrak was a strictly private entity and as such Congress was wrong in 2008 to set up a system that allowed it to issue regulations.
The lower court had based the decision on Congress’s command that Amtrak “is not a department, agency or instrumentality of the United States Government.”
But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said saying so does not necessarily make it so.
The government puts all sorts of demands on Amtrak — maintaining service between Louisiana and Florida, for instance, or offering reduced fares for elderly or disabled passengers — not to mention giving it subsidies of about $1 billion a year, Kennedy said.
“Amtrak was created by the Government, is controlled by the Government, and operates for the Government’s benefit,” Kennedy wrote. Thus, in working with the Federal Railroad Administration to issue the “metrics and standards” for performance, “Amtrak acted as a governmental entity for purposes of the Constitution’s separation of powers provisions.” ""
In Ireland we call entities like this semi-state companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_bodies_of_the_...
Could be a global warming thing, could be a seasonal thing, could be anything really.
I'm not saying it's anything one way or the other since this is a hyper-empirical piece of data to be working off of. Based on context I'm assuming OP meant to imply that this is a sign of rising water levels, but I was just posting some alternate theories.
While we’re at it, make the elevated passenger trackage be serious high-speed rail, instead of the max. 125mph (~200kph) it is now.
I say "did", because politicians from eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island were understandably not thrilled about losing their existing high-ish speed services.
If Amtrack pauses its service segment-by-segment so they get to focus on re-building infrastructure then I believe It will not have that much of a negative impact on travelers, at least. People can always resort to other traveling alternatives(buses, cars, planes). Heck, it is economical to travel from NYC to DC by bus vs train. Train gets you in 3 hours for $200 and bus gets you in 4 hours for $19. For me, $200 is worth paying if I get to DC in an hour!
Yes there will be job displacements while the overhaul is underway. But for numbers sake, more job will be created as part of the overhaul.
By politics I assume you meant unions. It is a rabbit-hole debate but I will say this that unions have done more damage to the infrastructure progress than any other political entity in northeast USA.
Although if climate inaction generally prevails, eventually the area won't be viable for that many people to live, work and commute. Problem solved.
Why?
I agree, but as someone who hates flying, and is very bothered by TSA's production, I would hands-down take the train over the plane in almost every circumstance.
Baggage? Taking one or two bags up to 50lbs each on Amtrak looks to be always included.
Then there's the bit about arriving at the airport 2 hours before, in order to pass through security. Yeah, you can probably cheat on the two hours, depending on how long security lines tend to be at Sea-Tac. Still, it's a chunk of time you don't have to spend when you take the train.
Roll all that together, and I'm not sure that the train is much slower. And it costs less, and the scenery is better. So from where I sit, it doesn't look like a no-brainer at all.
Have I missed something?
That said the comfort between train and air travel is night and day, you get much more space, plenty of outlets, room to get up and move around, purchase food and drinks, even if the food is worse than airline food.
It was a burger in a plastic wrap, which was microwaved to heat it.
I've had bad airline food, like British Airways ten years back, and food from British trains, but Amtrak's offering was easily the worst. Hopefully they've improved by now.
The best meal was on a Swiss train (in Germany). That was also the cheapest Swiss food I've ever had.
Yes. Sitting for hours at the Amtrak station waiting for a delayed train to arrive.
Day before yesterday was better. The 501 was only 22 minutes late, but arrived 44 minutes late. The 517 left 10 minutes late and arrived 34 minutes late. The 507 left 10 minutes late and arrived 28 minutes late.
But Monday was worse again. The 501 left 26 minutes late, arriving 21 minutes late. The 11 Coast Starlight left 58 minutes late, arriving an hour and 20 minutes late. And the 517 Cascades left 39 minutes late, arriving 56 minutes late.
I can't remember the last time I had a routine flight between nearby cities delayed.
My brother-in-law had a flight from Chicago to Cincinnati (1h and 15min flight time) cancelled on Friday. Shorter flights don't gain as much altitude and tend to use smaller planes so they are more impacted by weather.
More broadly, through November, flights have been on-time 78.7% of the time in 2018 [1]. Keep in mind that on-time can still be as much as 15 minutes late.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/reso...
That really depends on where you are. You could do a lot worse than waiting for a train in Chicago [1] [2]. Amtrak sold development rights to a parking structure across the street from Union Station and got a boatload of money, which they are spending on upgrades and restoration, including a 400-room luxury hotel on the roof of Union Station that will give them a nice continuous revenue stream to continue developing rail projects.
[1] https://chicago.curbed.com/2016/6/24/12024162/chicago-transp... [2] https://chicago.curbed.com/2016/11/28/13764122/chicago-archi...
For me, living in Boston, going to NYC on the NEC a lot, I still prefer the train, even though it's expensive (I just went to NYC for thanksgiving), sometimes more than flying.
Some benefits to me (especially because I live 10 minutes from Back Bay Station): 1) Not paying expensive cab fees from La Guardia/JFK airport into city 2) Not sitting in car for the hour it takes to get from the airport, even worse in times of traffic 3) Transport to the airport outbound, waiting in security, checking bags, boarding via sections, fighting to place bag in overhead, waiting while plane loads, waiting to taxi on runway, etc.
And then, once on the train, it's really relaxing. And I love the costal views. Try to sit on the coast side to/from NYC. Trains are clean, too.
It's true, they aren't as NICE or speedy as the Asian trains (I was in Shanghai recently and totally blown away by their train systems there -- most of which was built in last 20 years), but over all trip simplicity, effeciency, etc. are still better than flying for these short trips, IMHO.
As for the view, the California Zephyr is indeed breathtaking between Denver and Reno, but prepare to spend a night sleeping in your seat or on the floor of a rattling traincar (sleeper cabins exist, sure... for ten times the price of flying).
On the NE Regional, I'm delayed 1/3 trips at least.