Amtrak Could Turn a Profit for the First Time
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There's barely a road in the entire country that's turned a profit (gas and vehicle registration taxes don't come close to covering road construction costs, and of course most roads aren't tolled), yet we still rightly consider roads as being worth it. We should treat our rail, transit, and other transportation infrastructure similarly. Expecting a profit is completely missing the point, but doing so is a nice bonus.
I suppose if Intel had been nationalized then they would be loss-making and we would be hearing about how taxpayers should feel good about subsidizing their losses.
It also leads to natural monopolies.
The real issue is how much we’re paying in subsidies compared to how much we’re paying in subsidies for other forms of transportation, and perhaps what other people are paying in subsidies for the same kinds of transport.
Highways get about $75 billion in subsidies (what’s not covered by gas tax). A lot more than Amtrak for sure. But highways carried over 3 trillion passenger miles last year. Amtrak was just 6.3 billion. We spent 50x as much on highways as Amtrak, but got 500x as much mileage out of those highways.
(You can throw in pollution externalities, etc., but even if you use current carbon recapture methods to suck out CO2 from driving, and ignore the fact that Amtrak’s mainly east coast operations are not powered by renewables, driving still comes out ahead.)
That said, I suspect we overinvest in both subsidies because of romantic ideas and status quo bias.
What we really need is far more subsidies in urban and dense suburban areas. The problem is that with our bifurcated political system in the US the people who make up less than 50% of the population outside the cities will block investment in the cities because they will feel like they’re not getting equal investment.
Also, on the side, remember that non-city dwellers get massive subsidies from city dwellers for their cost ineffective lifestyles. One can argue that this is justified to support the people working in critical agriculture and industry that can't be moved to the cities and we want low sticker prices on, but it's a much hard case to make for suburb dwellers.
I would be happy to pay that if the travel time was better, but it's almost 2x longer than driving and not much cheaper than driving (it's actually more expensive if I'm bringing kids along).
Trains were supposed to be more efficient than airlines, so why is taking Amtrak essentially the same price as flying?
Regular, daily train service would revitalize and open up a lot of smaller communities.
Precisely as major cities are grappling with housing and affordability issues.
The solution to the urban housing crisis was, continues to be, and will be until its done the building of more housing. A lot more. Density, at every price. Without mandated parking, without vertical clearance limits, without per-unit size limits, without the ability for NIMBYs to stall out or shut down expansion efforts for their own personal gain. Nothing else will cure the ailment - all else is just treating the wound.
Unfortunately, for the past century the larger cities have been steadily sucking their population and talent away. Hub and spoke rail systems are an excellent way to revitalize these towns and encourage population balancing.
Because not everyone wants to live in a Singaporean econobox.
Traditionally, the limitation on this has been weakness / corruption of local government vs the major freight railroads.
Amtrak, with proper Congressional support, could play an interesting part in reopening existing rail to passenger traffic.
Southern California is very spread out and still organized around private automobiles.
San Diegans tend to have a bit of a defeatist attitude toward transit, and there are plenty of suburban areas where transit is bad, but there are also many places where transit is a reasonable option.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/transportation/sto...
There’s been some serious sprawl since then, yes, but at its heart Los Angeles is a city that is conducive — not contradictory — to public transit. And I think our planning decisions will only get more effective once we, as a region, realize that.
https://usp100la.weebly.com/history-of-transportation.html (scroll down for a map — and note that this doesn’t include the downtown/central LA streetcar system, which essentially covered every other block in downtown LA)
Then again, it's basically legal to use your car to kill cyclists in the states, especially in socal, which is why I gave it up.
Pretty much no one. But Chicago to St. Louis? Or Chicago to Minneapolis? Or Charlotte to Atlanta? Or Dallas to Houston? Or LA to San Francisco? Etc/etc? Lots of people. That's here high-speed rail investment helps. High-speed planes are fine, until it snows in Chicago, or thunderstorms in Atlanta, or high winds in Denver and then the whole national air system gets screwed up. Alternatives are good.
But if you add up all the people who want to travel between Chicago and St Louis in a year, and then multiply by the hour-ish that they might be able to save by catching a high speed train instead of driving, and then divide by the tens of billions that such a railway line would cost to build and maintain, then... is it really a sensible use of funds per man-hour saved?
Also, you make a good high speed railway, and the demand will appear. In my coutry also nobody used the train, untill they were modernized, suddenly the word started to spread that it was nice, and now too many people ride the trains and we need more.
How many hours are spent stuck in traffic? How much loss is that to society.
Perhaps people would start moving closer along the rail lines, now that frees up land from sprawl. Etc. The same rail line could carry goods (fewer trucks on the road). The rail line could be electrified, now pollution will be down and so on.
Billions of dollars is not all that expensive. The US is a rich country. First time realized this when I saw a small town with 30K population easily built a new high school for 150 million USD - compared to that, the "billions" does not sound all that big if it reconfigures the economy at that extent.
If I were a manager I would ban driving and insist on trains (if the work would benefit from the added collaboration)
It's even worse for long-haul. I have family along the Canadian route (Toronto -> Vancouver), and taking the overnight sleeper train out there is about 4x the cost of flying.
I mean, maybe that's just the obvious path given what they're working with in terms of cost structure, but it's still annoying.
It took 10 hours. Could've gone to Chicago, turned around and headed home, and still had time to grab dinner. That was enough to turn me off to long-distance train travel. All these years later I'm curious again, but still very dubious.
Edit: grammar
If Amtrak want to prove it’s the freight traffic causing the slowness they should quantify how many otherwise ontime routes are delayed by freight.
I also arrive and get onto the train in ~5min. getting off in Canada is slow though
What's the boarding process over there? In Europe you just .. enter the train.
"Signaling issues" usually means traffic and sometimes means under-invested infrastructure. There is no question that the slowness of Amtrak is directly related to underinvestment.
Same here. I frequently ride between Boston and New York. In New York, I've seen over 200+ people leave the train and another 200+ board the train, especially on Sunday evenings. The whole process takes < 15 minutes.
And I can't believe no one has talked about how much better the seating is than any other form of long distance travel in the US.
At the end of the return trip, I overheard a group of four other travelers saying that they got so much work done, they should just ride the train back and forth every day.
Seat and ride comfort are totally different as well. To me, it's well worth trading in some time for a much better travel experience. I've had a year where I logged close to 50k air miles in coach and over 10k train miles in coach, so I've seen the good and bad of both modes of travel (on and off the NEC for the trains).
For the long distance trains, I consider the time it takes to travel one of the benefits. In today's highly connected, highly active world, I find having 24 hours to simply look out the window and be alone with my thoughts to be incredibly rejuvenating.
In practicality, I agree with you that freight lines abuse this without consequence.
A 90 minute train ride connecting Texas' largest two cities? Compared to the 4hr trip a car takes or ~2hr for a plane (factoring in security)? At a (tentative) price point of ~two tanks of gas?
I'm optimistic that it won't only be a commercial success, but also that it will convince people (and politicians) that a HSR-network is in the public's best interest, even for routes that don't necessarily make sense from a commercial (private) perspective.
As population grows, train speeds increase, and road traffic worsens, we may need to rethink what we consider a "region."
Alas, that’s a pipe dream, much less bringing New Haven or Philadelphia into the reasonable commuting radius which is what I suspect you are alluding to.
But to be viable, it has to be competitive with airline travel, and that means fast trains. It currently costs more to go from SLC <-> SF than by airplane, and it takes a full day (18 hours or so, I forget exactly) to get there vs 2 hours or so by airplane and 10 hours by car. If it was 4-6 hours (120-200mph), it would be competitive with airlines if you take into account security and baggage on both ends. I know I would take Amtrak if that were the case, but for now, I'm only going to take it as a vacation in itself.
There are a lot of companies in CA that have offices in Utah now, so improving the train system between them may make sense if they can get speeds to be reasonable.
So, you're either blasting a giant gap in the Sierras, blasting a giant tunnel under the Sierras, or have some novel HSR technology that'll run over the Sierras.
For a much less useful route, it'll probably be more expensive than the actual full proposed CA HSR system.
For reference, the LA<->SFO train was last estimated about $75-100 billion to complete before it was canceled. Of course, there's almost no way anyone could build such a train tunnel in the USA for the same price as they did in Switzerland.
Cities and metro areas have plenty of taxing authority at their disposal. If they want to institute additional taxes to fund these types of things then they could.
Why should people living in rural areas have to pay for it?
doubt it. regardless, federal government revenue goes disproportionately towards funding rural services and welfare, including many services that city residents don't use at all. federal funding of a city's transport system would still not shift that balance.
regardless, you missed the point of the parent comment.
Assuming you live close to a station and don’t have to carry anything with you. It’s a fools errand to expect a country the size of the US to have stations that connect everything. We also have extensive and ubiquitous air infrastructure as well for long distance travel and airplanes can be rerouted based on demand a lot more easily than fixed rail infrastructure. If there is a big event in some city or town, it’s fairly trivial to add flights, but it’s impossible to add more tracks. Airplanes can better handle seasonal traffic. For commuter traffic, rail can be more efficient, assuming point A to point B. As soon as you need a point C and point D (such as taking kids to karate practice or visiting your aunt Sally, trains become far more painful.
That's only because highways cover the country like a fishermans net. Capacity and connectivity are massive for roads. Locally it might back up, but average the capacity of every road in the U.S., and it can probably handle the population of earth. Imagine if that were the case for high speed trains, it would be borderline idiotic to drive.
It seems like recently transit agencies are finally working to improve options for commuters beyond the road network. Simple fixes, needing only a can of paint and a traffic cop enforcing law and order, like bike lanes and buss lanes can be done practically overnight in many urban areas.
LA metro has studies done for hundreds of transit corridors involving bus lanes, BRT, LRT, and HRT. The only barrier seems to be political will, not the engineering. I'm sure this is the case for most large cities, so if we ever get an administration that would prioritize funding transit projects on a federal level, as was done a century ago, we could see a transit explosion.
On a side note, that would be an interesting PhD dissertation - figuring out the actual cost of America's car-centric lifestyle broken down locally, state and nationally.
The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now. Everyone in the industry says it is only a matter of time before the US will be able to produce all the oil the US needs. Whether that happens next year or 5 years from now depends on pricing and production decisions made by the OPEC producers.
I wouldn't be surprised if in 8 or 10 years the US will be in a position to guarantee a steady supply of oil to one of its strategic partners: the UK or Japan, say.
But this has thread has gotten off track because like grandparent already pointed out, Amtrak run on oil, too. I suppose your reply to that is that it is easier to convert Amtrak to renewables than to convert the highway system to renewables
There's more to it than that.
first, oil is a commodity product traded around the world, so, say, if Indonesian (offshore) oilfields go offline, china will simply buy from the saudis, which will drive up the price of Saudi oil and encourage US producers to export instead. Now rising price encourages local production, but most of it can't be switched on and off in a instant.
And in fact they already both import and export; for example tar sands "oil" from Canada is removed with a shovel, not a pipe. Refining it is very expensive (and energy demanding) so only gets mined when the price of oil is high enough to justify it. Currently the US exports about as much oil as it imports.
Lots of great stats on this topic from the Energy Information Administration (though some of the important statistics stopped being collected last year, alas). Here is the petroleum import & export page: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
But OK, let's talk about price. There's probably a 100 years worth of 'tight' oil just in Texas that can be produced for the price oil currently sells for. In other words, the cost of fracking that oil has decreased a lot. (And that oil is easier to refine than the stuff that comes from Saudi Arabia.)
It's probably the other way around. The highways (ie: cars and trucks) will gradually convert to electric in the coming decades as the vehicle fleet is replaced and old equipment is retired.
On the other hand, electrifying long-distance rail requires a lot of very expensive infrastructure investment. Battery electric technology may mean that cost comes down, however (perhaps you only need wires on intermittent sections of track).
Despite being a huge fan of public transit, I actually think the efficiency numbers would probably still come out in favor of cars, in America, in the near term. Our country has been car focused for a hundred years and the assumption of car travel is baked into the way our cities (and especially suburbs) are designed. There would need to be years of shifting urban planning before mass transit really won everywhere.
But that's part of why he excluded expenditures covered by the gas tax on the road comparison, you'd want to add that back in if you are adding in fares.
Having a cheap enough car and expensive enough transit bill to exceed it is an extreme statistical outlier. I saw this as an owner of a cheap car and an expensive commuter rail pass.
Trains are paid for by riders in the form of fares and taxpayers in the form of subsidies.
The only time your question matters is if/when the transit system is useful enough that someone can actually consider selling a car. I sold my car to ride the bus to work. However the one week my wife's car was in the shop convinced us that we won't be doing without a car anytime soon. (We often take trips that are 5 minutes by car that were 55 minutes by bus! Then there is the annoyance of the one time we missed the bus)
Amtrak is a speck on the federal budget. It’s a worthwhile investment if only to keep the rights of way open for the future
Amtrak doesn't compete with local roads, it competes with interstates.
Personally, I think people should be paying more for using the roads. From what I can tell, most states' use related taxes (gas taxes, registration taxes, etc) account for less than half of total road funding. This makes driving artificially cheap compared to mass transit options, to the point where it's often cheaper to drive than to take a bus or train, which is absolutely ridiculous. For example, my commute is ~10 miles, and the IRS claims this costs me $5 (~$0.50/mile). I did some math and estimate that my costs are closer to $0.30/mile, probably less (insurance, registration, gas, maintenance). A bus ticket is $2.50 each way. The bus takes >40 minutes assuming I ride my bike there, >60 minutes if I walk, and driving takes ~20 minutes.
Assuming my state funds roads ~50% with income taxes, switching this over to purely use-based taxes (gas and registration taxes) would likely double my driving costs, making mass transit make sense financially, as it should. It certainly uses less resources to take the bus than drive, so it should also be cheaper. Yet it doesn't look that way according to my calculations.
Also, taking Amtrak is often more expensive than taking an airplane, even if direct routes exist, and it takes way longer. Amtrak should be way cheaper than flying, yet at best it's a wash, but usually way more expensive. We need faster, cheaper trains, and trips within 800 miles should be competitive with airlines (<6 hours, about the same price or cheaper than flights).
In terms of road maintenance, that might actually not be the case. Road destruction by traffic scales with the fourth power of axle load, for weak pavement surfaces and heavy loads with the sixth (!) power of axle load.
(Of course you are right with respect to traffic congestion, CO2 emissions, particulate pollution and noise pollution.)
With respect to the rights of way, an asset unused goes away. That is a big reason why car companies bought out streetcar lines to kill them. I live in an area (Albany, NY) which was a big transit driven place until the postwar era. The New York Central, Delaware & Hudson and various streetcar/trolley lines had all sorts of rights of way connecting various communities in a relatively small area.
That stuff is all gone, converted to roads, parks and subdivisions.
For an entity like Amtrak, the rights they have in major cities are worth billions, but in reality are priceless. Without operating service, that value would diminish to near zero very quickly.
This has total vehicle miles at 1.4 trillion in 2017, having around 2 occupants per vehicle on average sounds about right: https://www.statista.com/statistics/193007/vehicle-miles-tra...
For some very very specific routes, train miles may be more valuable, but generally speaking they are less valuable.
Bwahahaha. _Someone_ on this thread is clearly not driving in enough rush-hour traffic. ;-)
Imagine how many people would be biking, riding electric scooters and walking if US cities were actually designed with these modes of transportation in mind.
I ride in LA and if you can get a bike lane at all, it's gonna be a faded strip painted 2 feet from the parked cars/along the sewer grates. There needs to be more separation from the batshit drivers here who wouldn't shrug at a hit and run too. Not very inviting, but I can bike all year at least.
Long ago, when I was working in western Tennessee, I noticed that, in that area, the painted bike lanes were almost always on arterial roads. I even found one that was on a stretch of controlled access highway. Asked a colleague who worked for TDOT about that, and it turns out that you could get extra federal money for roads with bike lanes. So of course, the counties would put the bike lanes on the roads that cost the most to maintain, not the ones that made sense for bicycles.
Outside of a few major cities, I suspect that's invariably how bike lanes are going to end up working in the US.
What you could get people on board behind, though, is traffic calming measures. Bill it as fighting back against the hordes of Waze drivers blasting through your neighborhood as a shortcut, and you might be able to get some political momentum behind it. That would then get you to roads that could support mixed traffic without half-assing it by painting cyclists into a thin ghetto full of potholes and broken glass.
And then pair it with movements to get some questions about how to share the road with bicyclists onto the written driving test, so that drivers at least know how to share the road with cyclists. Right now, nobody's telling them, so they genuinely don't know. Even here in Chicago, I've had surprisingly many water cooler conversations where I had to correct a complaining car commuter who thought that it was illegal for all these bikes to be in the road and that they're supposed to stay on the sidewalk.
That's one of the reasons why the "Share the road" sign is being phased out in favor of the "bikes may use full lane sign".
The proper way to share a lane is in serial fashion, not parallel. This is because lanes are rarely wide enough for a car or truck to pass a cyclist with sufficient distance between the two while both remain within the lane itself.
In fact, many state laws that specify that cyclists must ride as far right as practicable actually have the substandard width lane exception (described above) to that requirement.
One day when I had reduced ride height due to a tire issue, a "traffic calming" device cracked my oil pan. That was just great for the environment. I leaked carcinogenic used oil all along the way, and then had to get the oil pan replaced. The creation of that new oil pan involved industrial activity that surely was not good for the environment.
I don't like to bike because it rains 9+ months out of the year here.
I'm very pro-motorcycle but bicycles have a much lower barrier to entry.
I'll grant you that a car is more convenient for carrying cargo. But with a bike trailer, a bicycle can pretty easily handle most people's cargo requirements—anything from groceries to large appliances like refrigerators. Check out some of these bicycle trailer plans: https://bikecart.pedalpeople.coop
Which may be true, but they encourage cyclists to ride at the edge instead of the middle of the general traffic lane. A motorist not paying attention is going to notice an edge riding cyclist later than they would if they were in the center of the general traffic lane.
> People don't like to bike because it's (rightly) perceived as dangerous.
Not really. Assuming one is riding a bicycle in traffic that's not moving at more than 40 mph, it's not that dangerous at all.
> There needs to be more separation from the batshit drivers here who wouldn't shrug at a hit and run too.
That's a problem with law enforcement, not a problem with the road design. Also, separation doesn't work when there are frequent intersections. It makes more sense to build bike lanes along side arterial roads where traffic is moving in excess of 40 mph and intersections are no more frequent than once every mile or so. On city streets with traffic moving at 0 to 30 mph, it makes far more sense to ride in the center of the general traffic lane while following the rules of the road.
There's nothing about affluence that requires single family detached homes, that's just a fantasy that's been marketed to us for the past hundred years, and at a huge cost in terms of walkability, time/money/land wasted on traffic and parking, traffic fatalities, etc.
This idea have been marketed and for a good reason, it was good way to save U.S. population from Soviet nuclear threat - in a way Coomies could neither counter, nor replicate on their side - when Commies launch their nukes, it's much better if most people find themselves in separate houses with large tracts of land and little combustible materials, and good basements to protect from fallout, and in a few days, can emerge from there and drive their cars in whichever direction civil defense points as safer.
Mass transit is cool, but evacuating an entire modern city on busses isnt viable. (Inter-city rail connections cannot be scaled up in such times.)
In the evacuation model those buses drive out a day full, and then need to drive a day to get back before they can pick up more people. It just doesn't work. No transit system has enough buses.
That is before we point out that if you have anywhere near that many people served you probably have some rail systems that cannot operate outside their lines (third rail power or overhead electric)
Cars have the advantage of there are enough of them. Note that in most evacuation situations the cars are full. (the roads don't have the capacity, but the cars do)
We shouldn't use bus when they are available for evacuation? Why? If we can get all the bus to be used + add bus from other cities nearby, why should we prevent people from using them? This is scaling much better and people with cars are free to leave with their own cars.
"Cars have the advantage of there are enough of them." --Surely not the case in many urban cities.
See the recent evac of fort mcmurray canada. That was all cars for hundreds of miles. No hope for busses there.
So the assumption that "90% of people won't need government help" clearly failed to hold true for this relatively small evacuation of 88k people.
The fact remains, most people who are told to evacuate by car will pack their suitcases and enough spending cash so that they can live on their own once they get out. The majority will end up sleeping on the floor of friends/relatives, so once you get them out of danger you don't think about them again. All that is required is enough warning that they can pack (if you don't have this much warning nothing can work anyway), and enough fuel (accounting for gridlock!) along the way.
Government needs to deal with the small number of people who cannot care for themselves, but the vast majority of people can be self sufficient, and having their personal car makes them more self sufficient.
More 25% is not a small number. A car only helps if people can actually get out. A mass evacuation by car of LA, San Francisco, Seattle or NY would fail utterly. Any place that already has significant traffic issues during rush hour (the sorts of places where buses are needed) would face massive drops in the evacuation rate due to gridlock and the areas that they would be evacuating through would rapidly run out of supplies (as happened with Fort McMurray with only 88k people being evacuated).
New Orleans had huge numbers of school buses. They went unused and were destroyed by flooding.
You might demand that the government not be incompetent, but the reality is that government will screw up badly. Individuals with cars can screw up, but the effects are limited to the people screwing up.
No public infrastructure will work for that - bus drivers will quickly die of radiation sickness or just refuse to do their work, but for one, one-way trip to save your own ass it's okay.
Essentially, this is why suburbanisation come to being: war planners realized exactly the thing you are pointing out: that evacuating people in a crisis - while the Soviet bombers will be flying (it was before ICBMs) was an impractical idea, it will kill more people than it will save; but what works instead, is to evacuate people in advance: just make them live far from city centers which can be attacked. And redline the city centers: let only people you don't care about surviving, live there.
In 1950s Soviet Union, "workers and peasants" lived in villages and suburbs, these were replaceable anyway and killing them had little benefit. Difficult to replace cadres - engineers, most qualified workers, high ranking military, Party officials and such - lived in posh Stalinist apartments in city centers, and would perish inevitably. In 1950s U.S., it was already other way around. Soviet Union could do nothing about that: they simply couldn't afford an individual house, and thus inevitably, individual car, for everyone - they still can't. It was a clear win and moved a balance in the Cold War a great lot in U.S. favor.
One thing to realize here, it will best of all work if U.S. attacked first - then they choose the timing and attack in late evening in the U.S. when everyone is at home already, are warned, and don't leave their houses in the morning to avoid being caught in road panic, and have some hours to prepare for the Commie attack such as letting go of any combustibles, covering car so it doesn't suck fallout particles in, and stocking water and if possible, food.
Hurricane evacuations even a week in advance are horrible by car. Highway infrastructure simply cannot cope with large movements of people in one direction.
I vastly prefer living in my apartment in Europe than living in a house, especially a US house.
Also, putting every family in a separate free-standing house is ridiculous: there is physically no way to achieve that.
Just the economic and yeah, transportation infrastructure we have in Europe won't support that. It's not even the population density really.
Until we invent teleportation, putting everyone in their own separate house is unsustainable.
Having lived in a European city I was appalled of how bad the air quality was, how noisy the streets were, how annoying trash collection at 5am was, I had to use a wet mop on the hardwood floor almost on a daily basis to and it was black every day. I had to walk a half a mile to a tiny parklet, always packed with kids as it was the only location in the play. Every morning on the packed subway and street buses. It was awful, I couldn't wait to get back home.
Back home I live in a green environment, trees everywhere, I got my lawn, there are no fences, I forget to close my garage door at night no problem, nothing is ever missing ... I use a wet mop every other week and it is never dirty.
Do you know what generates the CO2 emissions? All that useless junk we buy shipped from all corners of the world. The fix is buying less junk not blaming on someone that happens to want to live in a green environment.
I know it's hard to be criticized for your lifestyle, but please do your research, suburbans lifestyle is nowhere near sustainable. That's not anecdata, that's data.
I don't actually live in the suburbs, just a small town that looks like a suburb, and I also lived in European style cities hence I understand the attractiveness of a suburb. It is a different lifestyle and you can't "fix" the suburbs with the wrong kind of arguments - "you my friend suck for wanting to live there" Find a suburb looking place in Europe and check the prices ... now think about it, do Europeans assign value to that?
The vast majority of cities do not even remotely look like some of the elite and lucky European cities that are built on the many advantages they got from (not looking for a flamewar here) but exploiting other nations (the behavior is in the past, but the advantages remain and accumulate), all I am saying is that it cannot be a model for <insert eastern european city here>.
If anything the clean, quiet, well kept European city is non-sustainable and non-replicate-able as a global model. We need to fix the problems of the suburbs but not by imposing a model that cannot work.
The global city model is a far less livable.
For most people, the ideal life is having your yard and be able to drive everywhere with enough lanes on the street to be sure you never hit traffic. Except that ideal situation rarely exists, all the roads are clogged (induced demand!) and having a large house for every person means a big desirable city to work can't scale. Even LA has understood they couldn't keep building highways and needed to densify, it just doesn't scale.
Denmark is a small country and the efforts are huge, yet even there people prefer the car.
The issue is that you can't just build a solid infrastructure for everyone, it's impossibly expensive the further out you get.
If you both have to go to work and pick up your kid at school or in kindergarden and go shopping or take them to practice etc.
That's where the car is convenient. I can't send my kids with public transportation before they are 12 in NY.
So yes it's ver flexible, convenient and practical with a car.
Outside of the Eastern Seaboard, has anyone ever attempted to book a rail trip? It's insane. You have to really work at it and you are losing a ton of time, have overnight "connections" and other odd problems. Furthermore, nearly all the train stations of any size are in the ghetto. The whole system has not kept up with the times. And while there is still some romantic notion of "riding the rails" it quickly gets subsumed by the price, which is also ridiculous.
From what? Riding horses cross country?
> reconfigured from streetcars and buses and trolleys and trains in cities
That isn't to say you are wrong, just that you are changing the subject.
This is how I and many other commuters use Amtrak. They even provide "last mile" bus tickets with your fare.
This is how every city in Europe works. There are only a handful of cities in the US with a well-developed rail network -- and most of those are crumbling due to half a century of under-investment.
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/streetcars.html
https://vintageportland.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/trolley-...
Glad you mentioned the externalities of pollution that people are allowed to create without penalty, but are you also considering that CO2 is hardly the only thing to worry about. Air pollution is a major cause of neurological illnesses, since auto exhaust is neurotoxic, as is non-exhaust pollution from brake pads and tires.
But many of those miles were necessitated by the astoundingly large footprint cities and towns have when they're built to accommodate highways.
When the answer necessitates completely redesigning every major city in the country, I'm not sure the question is valid in the first place.
And we already redesigned every city in the country, so clearly it's an option.
When you do that, suddenly the tables flip and driving is way behind.
What is the total spent per person-mile of travel?
One problem with a private road system is that roads take up space and prevent people from using that space for something else. I think that property tax on road surface area would be prohibitively expensive if a private entity were to own it.
Another problem is that building or expanding a road through an already populated area basically requires eminent domain.
We should never privatize profits deriving from public investment.
What happens when a company buys both routes between town A and town B? What free market forces are going to drive down prices?
According to wikipedia, for each dollar collected by the 407, $0.21 goes to maintenance, and $0.79 to profits ($0.66 are paid out in dividends). The 407 collects $1.3 billion dollars annually with double-digit annual growth.
Private roads are economically unsustainable and serve only to leech wealth from society.
The iPhone revolutionized mobile phones and greatly expanded the interconnectivity of the world. And yet nobody is demanding that the general public should subsidize Apple.
The only way Amtrak gets to raise rates is if it drastically improves service.
It's also worth pointing out that transportation systems that do turn a profit are generally healthy and run well. It is difficult to turn a profit on a poorly run system.
> Expecting a profit is completely missing the point
On the contrary, expecting a profit is expecting excellence, which we should absolutely do. There is no reason not to have high standards and high expectations.
More recently, China have managed to build more high speed rail network than the rest of the world, and served it at loss. As I understand and having personally rode it, the effect of such transportation option to both the economy and personal convenience can be said to rival that of the interstate.
If you listen to some activists and look at the budget, you'd think that the intent of AmTrak is to lose as much money as possible without arousing suspicion.
There's a big difference between not turning a consistent profit and losing more money than it could possibly save us. If the point was really to serve as transportation that can compete with the automobile at the point of sale (so that it would actually take cars off the road), or in terms of speed (increasing the economic output of passengers), most AmTrak lines and railcar-miles fail that test.
Film, television, publishing, and music are classic examples of this. A huge and often unrecognised role that the gatekeepers play (studios, distribution companies, broadcast and cable networks, presses, recording labels) is to assume risk on the part of individual ventures. VC operates on a similar logic, where of ten efforts, 1 hit and 2-3 merely profitable ones account for another 6-7 failures. (I suspect the actual success rate is much lower, with increasingly decadal megahits seeming prevalent.)
Those are time-based bets.
In geographic networks -- canals, railroads, highways, air travel, telegraph (often co-tenant with railroad rights of way -- 19th century maps of each are fascinating), telephone, electricity, even water, oil, gas, and other pipeline networks -- a few major success/concentration points support numerous others. Transit systems in particular seem to go through an evolution of private venture to public-subsidy, to wholly-publicly-owned.
Though it's more complex than even that.
Postal subsidies played a massive role in supporting rail and early air transport. Through the mid-1960s, the US Post Office ran mail-sorting cars on trains where mail was sorted en route. The introduction of Zone Instant Postal Codes, better known as ZIP Codes, as well as pre-sorted mail, allowed for routing at origin (or regional) postal hubs, rather than in transit. The loss of this subsidy proved fatal to trains.
Many city transit systems -- bus and streetcar -- were cooperative ventures serving factory and office employers, retailers, and real estate developers, more than the actual daily riders of the systems. It was the creation of a viable transport link between locations that induced the resultant value of those locations.
In the Chicago region, a network of electric-powered commuter rail systems emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not only the above dynamic came into play, but these transit links created new linear bands of viable "bedroom community" suburbs surrounding the urban core. Transit times from 30 miles out were less than an hour, shorter than today's commutes.
Construction of highways (notably the Eisenhower Expressway) lead to a sudden collapse in 1956.
https://www.american-rails.com/aurora.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Aurora_and_Elgin_Railr...
Rural electric and telephone service have long been at best marginally profitable, and development of infrastructure (as well as considerable generating and mainline distribution) were enabled through rural electric and telephone cooperatives, supported by surcharges on urban/suburban service.
Private enterprise enjoys cherry-picking profitable areas/regions for operation. Reality is that a functional country and economy require some level of subsidy.
The gyrations of PG&E over the past two decades may be preamble to a transfer to public (state) control of electricity services in California, possibly elsewhere. This may be a more general trend in such services: originating as private operators, shifting to government services over time.
You correctly point out a double standard, but perhaps it’s worth a bit of thought before choosing which way we want to resolve the double standard.
Why can't the same logic be applied to power and telecommunication?
Healthcare fundamentally, aside from its intrinsic value, additionally, is perhaps the most ‘potent multiplier for economic gains’ in the wider economy.
Shame it’s often treated as a burden.
Good jobs lead to surplus income, which leads to higher quality food, which leads to better health, which is a.. multiplier!
More product distribution centres leads to shorter commute times, which leads to less traffic and lower consumer prices, which are both multipliers!
If infrastructure is really such a multiplier, people should be able pay for it from the multiples they earn, and the infrastructure owners will turn a profit. This means that more infrastructure gets built, and higher multipliers achieved, until the multiplier is not so big, and they stop. (This is a state where owners earn an accounting profit, but not what the economists call an "economic" profit, that is, it's not any more money than you could make investing anywhere else.)
This is how the price mechanism works, and how the pursuit of profit in a market works, and why capitalism is actually good at making things happen. The alternatives to using the pricing mechanism generally leave you underprovisioning infrastructure (leaving these potential profits on the table), or overprovisioning infrastructure (wasting money), or in a state where people overuse infrastructure in wasteful ways (see the nation's road system, which is very good at connecting things -- but socializing its construction and access has led to ridiculous traffic jams in many cities, and many segments that are heavily accessed by trucks charge extra for the wear and tear through the use of tolls.)
Are there obstacles to realizing this capitalist utopia of efficiency in practice? Yes. Definitely, lots of them, and especially for network-y infrastructure like railroads. Is state intervention warranted sometimes? Yes. Is abandoning the pricing mechanism entirely, because multipliers exist, the only thing to do? No. And even when it is, it is a fraught endeavor. Among other things, the people who benefit are not the same as the people who pay, and the transfers involved can be unfair.
Let's say a good quality rail link from Town X to some big center of employment has the following effects:
* Raises attorney Alice's salary from $150,000 to $175,000
* Raises barista Bob's salary from $23,000 to $28,000
* Raises retiree Clive's home price from $300,000 to $400,000 although he'll never set foot on a train himself.
* Allows business-owner Doris to fill a specialist job that previously she hadn't been able to fill, indirectly leading to a better product and improved sales in ways that are hard to quantify, but are probably several times that employee's salary.
Which of those should the rail link owners capture, and how would you propose they do so?
The challenge of for-profit infrastructure is, even if you choose ticket prices to capture 50% of Bob's benefit, you only capture 10% of Alice's benefit, and ~0% of Clive and Doris's benefits.
The only reason we provide transportation through public funding is that it enables us to overcome the problems that arise from private capture of natural monopolies.
If you're not going between D.C. and Boston then maybe it'll be different, but if you're riding on the one line Amtrak has to keep operational or it'll die completely, I think it should be fine.
You show up in the middle of one city and wind up in the middle of another city
Big contrast from airports.
But Amtrak is too expensive and slow compared to other developed nations high speed trains, especially in Northeast corridor. Everything I said earlier applies to Japan, and western Europe.
Even when I was going DC > NYC years back it was barely worth the trouble, and still more than flying, only benefit being you land right in the middle of NYC and don't have the nightmare transit from NYC area airports.
DC->Boston full trip would obviously be insane - it's 6 1/2 hours even on Acela. But, probably preferable to driving.
It is a nicer trip though, I'll give you that. But not nice enough to mean an extra day away from home.
You're absolutely correct about the comfort points, but price should be just as strongly in the train's favor and it isn't.
The regular travelers have voted in numbers for Amtrak between DC and NYC over air travel, preferring it for the last decade[0]. They have been growing the number of trips and have even been able to go further up market with the new Acela nonstop this year. The truth is, passengers are voting with their dollars for the train between NYC and DC.
[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/11/why-more-nort...
I now live in Maine and wouldn't consider for a second taking the train to NYC. I'll fly out of PWM or, if I want flexibility, drive there. There is a non-stop bus that I'd prefer, too.
wait, what? Why? Here as long as I'm there before it departs it's fine.
If you’re flying, Dulles and BWI are 45 minutes from downtown DC (or more); ditto for the NYC end, and you need to factor in another hour+ for security. I think air travel might end up slower—-and it’s certainly less pleasant.
Agree with you on the other points, though.
Just an anecdote, but with TSA Pre, I haven’t needed more than 15 minutes for security, flying domestically and internationally several times per year for the past few years.
Same. With Clear, that goes down to 5 minutes tops. Add in airport lounges, and showing up a bit early goes from being a nuisance to a pleasure (or opportunity to be productive).
I’m a huge fan of trains, but they’re only marginally competitive for passengers in the Northeast.
Even if it seemed true for me, I’m not sure I’d bet the price of a ticket (and my schedule) on it always working out.
(Ok on the last point, I believe some high speed trains have light security checks.)
But I think the OP was comparing a train to flying, you don't pay for baggage on a train but you would if taking a flight.
> “Our biggest challenge is I go testify in Congress and all we talk about is French toast on dining cars or food,” he says. “We aren't talking about the really big infrastructure issues and transportation congestion issues that all the people in this country want a solution for.”
Of course! It's a waste of time talking to these people. Please keep the subject on french toast, because if they're going to screw something up, let it be a breakfast dish. And lets extrapolate this out to all other subjects and consider how they would do with all the policies the progressive left are dreaming up.
It is a very high quality service.
The reality is, intercity trains are not an efficient way to travel in the United States. Most of the important cities are far apart, because it's a very large country with a lot of empty space. If you need to be somewhere, book a flight. It's less expensive and if you give yourself a day of leeway you will probably never be late to your thing, barring some sort of natural disaster.
I am a huge railfan but I have accepted that the geography of the US doesn't make train travel as viable as say, Japan. Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka are the three largest cities and are comparable in distance between each other like Chicago, Springfield, and St. Louis. If New York was where Chicago is, Chicago was where Springfield is, and LA was where St. Louis is, high speed rail would be enormously popular in the US. But New York and LA are 2500 miles apart, 10% around the world from each other.
I even question California High Speed Rail. San Francisco / Silicon Valley and LA are both big metro areas with a lot of money, but SF/LA are 41% farther apart than Tokyo and Osaka. Japan got very lucky that its two largest cities are actually very close to each other. Building the Shinkansen was an enormous engineering challenge, but one that was very clearly profitable. It's so profitable they're building another Shinkansen between the two cities, taking a shorter route and using faster trains. In the US... such a city pair does not exist.
OK this is going very off-topic from your exact comment... but it's something I wanted to talk about. Sorry.
E.g. Shanghai - Kunming is more than 2200 km and takes between 10-12 hours[1]. At that speed LA-SF would take around 3 hours. For context the flight time is an hour and a half, so when you account for airport overhead, taxiing etc. the train would take around around the same time, and be a more pleasant mode of transport.
The density argument also goes both ways. A country like Japan is going to find it much harder to find empty space to place rail than somewhere like the US.
There's a lot of reasons for why the US isn't doing what China's doing with high-speed rail, but those reasons are mainly political, not geographical.
1. https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/shanghai-kunmi...
Note that it could be even faster without the ~50 stops in the middle.
Europe is a better example because it least the government must be somewhat accountable for its guns versus butter trade offs. And if you look at things like Macron trying to privatize SNCF (with its massive unsustainable debt levels), that should give us pause about the long term viability of rail even in dense places like France.
Also from a security perspective, you can't hijack a train and crash it into some building (it has to stay on the tracks), so that's a plus for trains.
Finally a domestic train causes about 41 g/km of CO2 emissions, while a domestic flight causes about 254 g/km (accounting for altitude) [0]
You can fit most of China's population in a box about 1300×1100 mi, with the most distant route being about 1700 mi. In the US, the equivalent box is about 800×2500 mi, with the most distant route being about 2700 mi. (All numbers as the crow flies).
The US's geographical issue is that its major population centers--California and the Northeast--are separated by ~1200 mi of empty land, and ~700 mi of rural land. The only other countries to have that sort of major gap between population distributions are Canada, Australia, and Russia, although in each of those cases, the population distribution is more "there's one major city far away from everybody else" (that said, the Trans-Siberian Railroad cities of Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk are pretty big cities that are relatively distant, although only 2200mi at the long axis rather than the 2700mi of the US).
Nobody takes passenger trains across the continent — any continent.
California is trickier for two reasons. First, the layout of cities is somewhat unfortunate. In terms of a linear service, Sacramento, the Bay Area, LA, and San Diego are all more or less in a line, but scheduling a linear service requires detouring over the mountains twice to reach the Bay Area and boring an underwater tunnel to head north from SF. And SF being one of the two first-tier cities in CA means that you don't want to service it on a spur.
The second issue is the geography. Going from LA to the Bay Area requires crossing at least two sets of mountain ranges. River valleys don't really help you here, and the minimum viable HSR pretty much requires connecting LA to the Bay Area. This means there's strong political pressure to kill the project as too expensive before it can show any benefits whatsoever.
You’re really making the case for defunding at least everything outside the NEC. We shouldn’t be spending public money on something that’s only good for leisure travel.
We also heavily subsidize air travel (Essential Air Service, ATC, etc.) and highways. Moving people around, even if for leisure, is a valuable activity for the government to participate in. People need something to do on their downtime.
The train from SLC <-> SF is 18 hours and about the price of flying, while driving takes ~10 hours. That's stupid, it should take less time by train than car, and flying should cost more since it uses more resources (or at least it seems like it should...).
Any leisurely lines should be separate from regular travel. A train doesn't have to run 120mph+, it just needs to be able to for commuters. I think making "cruise" trains makes a ton of sense, but that's not the only thing that makes sense for trains.
First leg was 15 minutes early to Philadelphia
Second leg was maybe 5 min late. Not bad for a 3 day, 2 night trip.
https://e-skateboarder.com/can-you-take-electric-skateboards...
Biggest issue I had was occasionally, they would look at it funny going through security and give it extra screening.
Fits pretty well in the overhead too, especially laying upside down, so bags can be stowed above it.
That's some unconventional accounting. Most GAAP accountants would tell you that capital investments should be amortized over their expected lifetime, with the first depreciation hit in the year they're made. That would of course mean an additional expense to cover before calling yourself profitable.
So, one could argue that Amtrak's rail infrastructure _should_ be entirely off-budget, because really it shouldn't be part of Amtrak at all, to make a comparison to bus companies more valid.
And I have looked into using them even more - but their is a litany of reasons why its impractical:
THeir ticket prices, staffing, schedules, lack of full-through-connection services, and delays all but make it hard to use as a service for all but one specific type of commuter.
Lets look at staffing.
They will know that its the commute hour; yet they will schedule ONE ticket agent at the counter in a major station - who has no incentive to be efficient with their tasks, and have made myself and MANY others miss the trains they were trying to get to. When you complain to the staff, they immediately take an attitude. Once when I asked why they only had one ticket teller during the major rush hour, the ticket teller didnt answer me, but called the Amtrak police to come question me. (I was being polite - and asked matter-of-fact why they would make such an oversight.)
Pricing: The tickets are way over priced for the service. Also, lets look at the "rewards" benefit - and the "10-pass" packets.
1) The rewards - it costs $19 to go from Sac to Martinez. You get (2) reward points per dollar you spend. For that same $19 leg to redeem points for a "free" ticket costs 900 points. -- That means you have to spend $450 to get ONE $19 reward.
2) A 10 pack ticket expires after 45 days. No matter what. Last holiday season - with validations, office shutdowns, holidays etc - there was no way to use the tickets I had until after the new year - yet they would "expire" on 12/31 - no matter what.
Their rewards points often fail to show up on your account - and its a tedious process to rectify - and even when you do rectify, it take more than 3-weeks for them to hit your account.
The pricing to go any distance, is just absolutely too high.
Now, the good things about Amtrak:
They have power, wifi and a snack car. The cars are clean (generally), and the ride is smooth - and actually faster than driving (more relaxing at least) along 80.
---
I really want Amtrak to succeed - but I wish they would address the problems they do have.
I can see why you’re to obtuse to understand.
That’s why you do in Norway, and I guess large parts of the developed world
Amtrak has always been a company with two halves, and Congress really should just split it to stop this Jekyll and Hyde tug of war about what exactly the company is supposed to do.
edit: My mistake, Milwaukee.
https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
A nice statistic would be some kind of report about travel times, densities and total populations. Looking at the map, there's some people that live at lower density that have a nearby station and then most people that live in metros have a nearby station.
If that's true, it seems like those communities would be better served by subsidized long distance bus travel instead.
I understand that doesn't make a whit of difference to congress, though.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-RCED-95-138/h...
Personally for Boston to NYC, I prefer the bus. It’s $15, faster than the train, more reliable and plenty comfortable for a few hours. Boston to DC I’d probably fly.
Trains by contrast are actually a pleasure to be on; I'd rather be on a train than my own couch at home. Compared to buses, Amtrak trains have less shaking, less unexpected accelerations, more space to walk around, better scenery, and fresher air. In my opinion the only form of transit better than train is a ferry.
For my commute, there is a bus, an regional rail and Amtrak. (And driving.)
The bus is potentially the fastest, about 2 hours door to door, but for about half the trip I'm unable to do anything but stare straight ahead and focus on keeping my stomach settled, and about 1 in 10 trips there is a traffic delay that makes it take 3+ hours.
The regional train varies between 2.5 and 3 hours, depending on how many stops that particular train makes, but it leaves me on the wrong side of town and the last fast train is at 7am.
Amtrak is best for me, more coincidentally, because it happens to stop near my workplace, and because it makes few stops it's as fast as the fastest regional trains, for an average door to door of 2.2 hours.
Both the regional and Amtrak trains tend to have delays about 1 in 50 rides or so, usually about 30-60 minutes.
(Driving is about 2.5 hours door to door, parking under my workplace, and costs as much as a bus or train just in tolls and parking.)
Can you not get a ticket for $5 anymore? In the post-FungWa vacuum it seemed like everybody and their brother was running a bus line that charged $5 for a 1-way to NYC.
Those early morning / early evening trips are packed with other business people doing the same thing you're doing. Full train of people quietly working/reading, maybe talking to a colleague. Very civilized.
The few times I had to travel mid-day on the same routes? Shit shows of confused tourists, kids who don't want to sit still for 3 hours (don't blame 'em), and all manner of "what can go wrong will" (delays, issues with the heat/ac, issues with passengers, etc).
Its like there's two parallel dimensions of Amtrak out there.
I'd choose Amtrak 100% of the time for business travel if its an option, 0% of the time for pleasure.
Same reason people in rural or suburban communities subsidize city buses?
What about police services and ambulance services for a poor versus rich person visiting that neighborhood?
This already happens in some places, but I don’t think it’s practical or fair.
Why should anyone in the society give a fuck about anyone else in society? Maybe the answer is because people think it's better for the society, as a whole, when various things are supported by all.
I’m not advocating “everyone for themselves.” But I don’t see why the national government needs to subsidize a service that overwhelmingly benefits just a single region. It’s not like Medicare or social security that can be used by anyone. Trains only go to a well defined set of places. We could have an interstate compact approach instead, like we do for things like WMATA.
I also don't have kids so let's get rid of all the schools.
Rayiner clarified and meant there should be geographical considerations to some subsidies:
> "It’s not like Medicare or social security that can be used by anyone"
Schools and federal court would fall under that categories of medicare and social security.
I think my basic point stands up pretty well though.
The entire class of arguments along the lines of “why should we do X when only some of the people need/want X” just has no value at all.
There’s no coast guard in Iowa either. Or avalanche prevention.
Why is geography the privileged metric here? It only matters if things are segregated by location, but not if they are segregated by age? Medicare is a subset of Americans too. So are people of school age.
You can argue the programs on the merits of course, and say that it’s too niche, or panders to special interests in a way that’s harmful.
But to just make the facile point that a government program contains an element of some people subsidizing something that benefits other people adds literally zero to any discussion. That’s a characteristic of literally all government actions.
Because there are 50 different sovereign states cooperating within a federation. Also, because we shouldn’t let the NYC-DC corridor become Trantor.
We’re talking about interstate transportation here. If you envision even the absolutely shortest list of things for a federal government to be involved in that’s going to be on it.
Almost everybody agrees in funding the court system because it's an essential function of government that's required for society to function, even if you're not using it now, you want it to be there for you if you're assaulted, defrauded, your kid gets kidnapped, your spouse gets murdered, etc.
The same cannot be said about having a good train system. That's surely nice to have but society can get along fine without it (as it does today). Thus it's not obvious that the government and its monopoly on violence need to get involved at all. Opinions other than yours are perfectly legitimate on this issue.
The question we ask should be something like “should we subsidize these trains” or similar. You’re making merits based arguments in your reply. I strongly disagree with you, as interstate transportation is a core government function in my opinion, but those are differing opinions.
The commenter I’m replying to says the question we should ask is “why should people in Iowa pay for this”
I think that question is meaningless, because literally all government functions involve all people paying for something that only benefits some of the people.
As such, pointing out that fact adds nothing to the conversation, because it fails to distinguish between valid and invalid ideas for government programs.
Less than half of college students say they want kids, and yet something like 80% of Americans end up reproducing at some point in their lives.
Personally I try to assume that I'm not magic and different because of my generation. It's lazy thinking. Yes, Millennials might be unicorns. But it's also possible that humans just find kids more attractive as they get older.
Since the latter seems to have been the case in American society up until now, I think the policy of making people fund schools even when they claim they're not interested in kids is reasonable.
Thanks for the downvote and the one liner though, I didn't feel like I was getting enough Twitter in my diet today.
It’s not like we are federally funding a rail between Nowhere and Whocares. It’s the business and academic districts of Boston, NYC, Philly, DC.
And those gains are ultimately, you know ... taxed.
Considering net tax spending heavily goes from the eastern corridor to places like Iowa, though, they’re welcome to cut off their contributions as soon as they cut off their acceptances as well.
I went to visit my friend in Virginia. I took the AmTrak from Minneapolis out to the East Coast. It was basically hell until we got into Philly. Then it was just commuter rides and few switch overs until I was in DC. Then my friend picked me up and promptly got lost and dropped us into one of the worst neighborhoods in DC, but that's a story for another day.
Basically the long haul was horrendous. Bumpy and loud and people constantly bothering me for one thing or another. I didn't get a wink of sleep until we hit Philly. The commuter trains I took were like a library. Quiet, smooth and nobody bothered me at all. I figured if I lived on the East Coast, I would probably use the train to commute, but those long rides across the country were painful - I'll never do that again.
People in America are diverse, with diverse preferences and needs.
I love taking Amtrak, and happen to live on one of the cross-country routes. I prefer it to airline travel in all ways. Clearly, the routes are sparse, so it does not always work out for me. But as a remote software engineer, I can work from the train, I can relax and read a book, and watch the scenery go by. The extra time it takes is not a problem. It is a great change of pace to sitting in my home office.
There certainly are people who disagree, but generalizing that the whole country refuses to use the service is simply incorrect.
This is infuriating.
Counting subsidies from eighteen states as revenue does not make you profitable and Amtrak does exactly that. Plus they have such a huge backlog of repairs and maintenance so any "profit" claims are meaningless when you keep putting off maintaining your system and cars. However they make sure where the most noise is where the most investment goes.
Plus fleet age is a real problem[0] and requires billions of investment to bring that up to date
I love trains as much as the next person but Amtrak isn't profitable and they don't strive for actual profits because they know they are protected.
[0]https://www.bts.gov/content/age-and-availability-amtrak-loco...
AmTrak was created when the private passenger rail operators were failing, and they were failing for a good reason: demand for long-haul passenger rail service declined sharply when better alternatives entered the market.
The one thing that rail can do better than these other forms is comfort and service, but for the vast majority of people, they would rather be able to afford to make it to their destination.
China has a similar geography to the US, and similar sizes and run lengths of their high speed space. The US has decided to build roads and highways instead of investing in other transit options. It's not that it makes "more sense", it's that the US has intentionally built things this way, for a variety of corporate and historical reasons.
> many rail lines went from necessary to obsolete with the natural progression of technology.
What? You mean, except for literally every other developed country has well developed rail lines that transport billions of people with levels of unmatched efficiency?
> when better alternatives entered the market.
Only because the market was intentionally weighted against that form of transit.
China has extreme restrictions on domestic flights, and a great deal more population; and on top of that, so much is different about the way things are done in China, the state will just bulldoze things for looking too "towny".
> What? You mean, except for literally every other developed country has well developed rail lines that transport billions of people
Britain is a developed country with well developed rail lines, but probably few there would tell you that it's great right now. Some of the failure there can be attributed to their poorly-designed pseudo-privatization of the trains and crews themselves (but not the rails or facilities, which remain national), but a big part of the reason that was politically viable was that the rail services weren't all that great when they were national either. France's TGV is really cool, when the operators aren't on strike.
Up here in Ontario, we have one relatively useful rail corridor, but the further you get from Toronto, the less the passenger load. On my morning train from Hamilton, there are (charitably) a couple dozen passengers on the whole train for several stations. As for national rail in Canada, it is rare to hear that anyone has used Via. I've used it once in my life, but I found out later that a bus on the same route would have been faster and dramatically cheaper.
Long-haul rail networks are attractive to politicians because of what they represent, but to transport consumers, the reality of long haul passenger rail is that it is rarely the best option. When passengers bear the cost, long-haul passenger rail is, by natural means, rarely the best option in the U.S.
> with levels of unmatched efficiency?
"unmatched" by what? High speed rail is extremely capital intensive, and expensive at the point of sale, and that's when you don't have any trouble clearing land for it. In the U.S, most of the viable places for passenger rail already have rail lines, but they are not appropriate for high speed rail. Conventional passenger rail is too slow to attract fares, and is still very expensive.
Dude it's alright to like trains, trains are cool; but none of what you said justifies the subsidies that would be required in order to make a comprehensive U.S. long-haul passenger rail network that's worth using, and no policy would make it worth the cost.
If you have some brilliant business practice, policy, or idea that will change this, I implore you to develop it! :- )
So you’re just saying give up on the dream, its too Late. Commercial rail is expensive, too slow.
Several big cities can be interconnected in a profitable way if NIMBYism changes. Why argue about an extensive rail network if even big cities like Houston and Dallas don’t have rail?
Because the topic at hand is Amtrak, the U.S's national long-haul rail network, not the local mass transit operators of Houston and Dallas. This is why I contrasted the relatively useful short rail lines in Ontario, and in particularly their most useful legs, with long-haul rail networks like Amtrak and Via.
It's not even NIMBYism. Consider the utter hate that California's high speed rail gets on HN despite very much no one being negatively effected by it. Then consider what a freeway does when it's run through a city.
I’ve taken hundreds of trips, anywhere between 2 and 8 hours, on TGV, ICE, and Eurostar trains in Europe. I loved it every time and came out refreshed even after longer trips. At times when I wanted to get work done (probably 60-75% of total time spent on trains) I was as productive - likely more productive, due to lack of distractions - as at the office. In contrast, I don’t think I can remember any road trip lasting more than 2 hours when I could say I enjoyed it; many times I was so exhausted that I needed rest upon arriving to destination.
So, if we are going to try to fit this into some sort of economic model let’s not forget about countless billions of hours of productivity loss due to people stuck behind the wheel staring at traffic.
Not to mention both emotional and physical strain associated with driving (nope, can not stand up when you like, or walk over to the buffet car for a coffee), respective health care costs, and more productivity losses. Once we do that, the picture will be very different. It’s sad we in the US haven’t realized this yet.
The estimated cost of an additional two tracks in the Northeast is over $100B.
> The host railroads have been obligated to give the company preference over freight trains so Amtrak can run on time, but that statute has not been enforced, he says.
Anyone know the details on this? It’s something I’ve experienced to a degree and a complaint I’ve heard from other riders.
Toll highways cover a fraction of operating costs. In most cities, your bus fair pays for 50% or less of the cost to run the bus. States use transport to build commerce, and it's difficult to measure what revenue that generates.
Funding needs to be pumped into AmTrak to help expand some of the very limited high speed rail we're just starting to see in the USA, including Florida's Brightline (now Virgin Trains) and the half-canceled California project.
Yes I have and your statement is correct. Amtrak is almost entirely dysfunctional but rail as a concept is not dysfunctional and actually works in many other countries.
It's like healthcare, which is an absolute shitshow in the US, however in the rest of the developed world it's not a shitshow.
Likewise with the military.
What is it about the US that makes so many fundamental services needed for the functioning of society into shitshows?
The sweet spot for rail seems to be journeys of 100-300 miles... lots of even major US cities don't have another major city in that radius.
I've got Denver, SLC... where else?
Healthcare might be the same thing. US residents pay a lot for healthcare, and that's used to fund healthcare research. Then the products of that research are given to other countries without them having to pay much.
Ukraine has proved that's not true for US-friendly countries facing US-hostile foes, which is essentially the optimal scenario short of actual formal alliance, so I don't think that actually is a plausoble explanation except possibly for formal US allies.
And the US did provide substantial aid to the Ukraine. The US has provided over $1.5 billion to Ukraine. How much did Germany provide?
Philippines have already kicked USA military out of all the various bases they had built there. (No one who knows a bit of history was surprised by that.) RoK will eventually spend more resources supporting DPRK than menacing it, and they might very well kick USA out in the next decade. Korea fairly exemplifies the situation of nations who might consider USA military "assistance". Their current situation is far from what they would consider ideal, even if worse could be imagined. They could keep militarizing more and more, running to stand still, but that won't be tenable forever. We're told to fear change, but the change that the militarists really fear is more peace.
Source: https://www.csis.org/analysis/not-contributing-enough-summar...
> In a speech to French ambassadors in Paris, Macron said “Europe cannot rely on the United States only for its security. It’s up to us to meet our responsibilities and guarantee our security, and therefore European sovereignty.”
Nobody has decided that "human life can ... be more peaceful" without military superiority. Now that Trump has given Europeans reason to be skeptical about America's commitment, there is already a push to build up Europe's military forces. Macron will increase defense spending by 35% over six years, reversing a decade of decline: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-defence/france-com...
https://www.euronews.com/2019/04/29/eu-countries-increase-mi...
Ukraine is not a particularly good counter-example of that theory. First, Trump is the first U.S. President to exhibit some isolationist tendencies since Carter. But European disinvestment in defense has been going on since the USSR collapsed. Second, Ukraine is a former USSR country with a complicated history with Russia. It's not indicative of whether the U.S. would come to the defense of a real U.S. ally.
I'd really like to see a source for that, because that's far from obvious to me. I could see that being true for pharmaceuticals, but then there's a lot more to health care than just drugs.
In the US, health care seems more like the Parkinson's law of the economy: health care costs expand to suck up much (most?) of the economic surplus that results from any improvements in overall productivity.
The US's major cities are not close to each other, with the exception of the North-East Corridor, and the distances involved are far larger than most corresponding distances in Europe--you have to be talking about trips between Spain and very deep into Russia to start to compare against the NYC/LA pairing.