I think the biggest factor was the convenience. We'd just show up at the train station and take the next train, usually within an hour. No planning, no booking, just bought our tickets at the station, minutes before our trip. All of this for less than 1/4 the cost of a last minute plane ticket.
Sure we could have flown, and the farthest places may have been faster to fly. But that only if the tickets were available and security lines in china are just as bad as here. There's also the comfort of a train with a meal coach. And, the thrill of watching the land rush by at lightning speeds. America felt so backwards on my return.
That's kind of already happened. The Moynihan Train Hall just opened up recently. I checked it out recently and it's quite nice, certainly much nicer than the old Penn Station. The next time you're getting off in NYC, walk towards the back of the train you came in on and then go up to the surface, and you'll be exiting in Moynihan instead of Penn.
Hawaii's interisland flights probably most closely resemble this air travel experience. Aside from Sunday & Friday fares that have a $30 premium due to work-week commuters, currently current week tickets are $49 and next week and beyond tickets are $39. And if you want to believe that's just a covid effect, there was a $29 special going last year right before covid.
Pair the process with chill, small-ish airports* and the hassle of flying is about as low as it gets for controlled commercial air travel.
Years ago, it used to be the norm to Judy show up 10 or 15 minutes before the flight.
* Obviously Honolulu is an exception, but it does have a separate interisland terminal.
I think it's kinda weird how very few politicians are talking about this.
The only things Elon Musk does well are incremental improvements over existing technology, that's not a bad thing but he always throws out bullshit promises that he can do it 10x cheaper or fares only cost one dollar.
I suspect in China there is more political incentive to connect these far-flung provinces, though, to try to promote national unity. I'm not sure closing the gap between the PNW and "middle America" is considered quite as important by people in DC.
That said, the route from NYC to Montreal is really beautiful north of Albany. It just takes about ten hours to get there.
This is just always going to be the problem. It's ok for some mild entertainment but it's not viable for regular travel. A flight to Montreal is like an hour and probably half the price.
With pretty reasonable high speed rail, that should be no more than a 4 hour trip. At which point it is very competitive with flying in terms of time.
For cost, it looks like a round trip on Amtrak is typically $200, whereas a round trip flight for two weeks from now is around $300.
I much preferred the relatively relaxed nature of train travel, and it only bit out an extra hour or two of my day. With high speed rail it wouldn't even be a contest.
Two things to keep in mind by rail to Montreal: customs add 1h, and in summer, if the rails are too hot, per Canadian regulations, the train cannot go faster than 50km/hour or something ridiculously slow like that, which adds another hour or two. Onboard wifi only works when in the US, and because of the mountains in upstate NY, the signal can be very flaky and slow.
In all fairness, that's pretty true in a lot of places. It certainly is in the UK in my experience. I'd actually have said at least the Acela isn't particularly onerous in this regard.
However, I think there is another issue in the US: last mile transit.
Even if the US magically have the rail system similar to China today, using it in cities like Houston etc. that has poor public transit would still be a pain in the ass in practice.
Houston is arguably a particularly bad example. But there are a lot of cities where you pretty much need a car if you want to be at all mobile.
My experience living in China is that for high speed rail departing from tier one and tier two cities, you would often need to book a ticket a day in advance, or - if you were winging it - be willing to go to somewhere other than your intended destination. And foreigners cannot get their tickets through the machine like people with Chinese ID card can, so that means waiting 30-45 minutes in the line to get your ticket (even if you booked online), before you even go through security, which is another 15-20 minutes. And if you show up at the main concourse 5 minutes before the train leaves, you will be denied access to the platform due to the airport-like boarding procedure. As such, I always had to calculate arriving at the dedicated high speed train station (usually itself 30+ minutes bus or subway ride out of the center of town) with at least an hour to spare.
It is still far less hassle than taking a flight, but it's not comparable to the real spontaneous opportunities of going by bus/coach or slow train (hard seat). With those forms of travel you really can just show up at a nearby station and go wherever, with little to no pre-planning and less stressful security checks. But then it will take hours to go halfway across the province. Of course, for many Chinese, that is the standard mode of travel, because high speed rail is still fairly expensive by comparison.
All that said... Pretty much everything about traveling by rail in China is better than it is in America. But traveling by rail in Europe is the gold standard, I think. Being able to buy tickets from a machine, not show photo ID anywhere (in the Schengen area at least), just step on and step off, that's real freedom of movement.
See https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/20/streaming-high... for a much less exciting map, but one for which u have more confidence Amtrak could actually pull it off.
I rather they do the crazy fun cross country routes after that. America needs to demonstrate it's serious about urbanism before I take any cross country lines crayoning seriously.
About 15 years ago, I had to spend a little over 3 weeks in Beaumont, Texas, for work, leaving Beaumont just before Thanksgiving. I dislike flying and wasn't paying for the trip and had never taken a train, so asked to take Amtrak.
My train trip was from the Tacoma, Washington Amtrak station to the Beaumont station and back, via the Los Angeles, California, station. It's a 3 day trip each way, and so on the return trip I was traveling on Thanksgiving day.
Pretty much every stop that day had a ton of people getting on and a ton of people getting off, often whole families. They were all just taking the train to the town a few stops down the line to get together with family from the neighboring towns for the holiday, and then return the next time a train going the other direction came through (trains came through each way three days a week on that segment).
So yeah, it may not make sense to have a cross-country route if you just consider people who are traveling from one of the route to the other, just like an elevator does not make sense in many buildings when you just consider the volume of passengers traveling between the penthouse and the bottom of a five level underground parking garage.
But just like an elevator between that deep garage and the penthouse is also an elevator between every other pair of floors, a cross-country train route is also a route between every pair of stops between the ends.
For 1,5h flight you end up wasting 3-4h anyway because you need to get to the airport etc, and out of those 3-4h most of the time you can’t do anything productive or relaxing either. With 5h train you can either relax or work and it’s much more productive. Also less co2 produced ofc.
And that’s with “slow” trains going 100mph. With faster trains as in France or Japan even more airplane rides are unnecessary
I know people take the train between Seattle and Portland. I'm sure there are other examples.
* The CA region (SF/Bay Area/Sacramento/LA/Las Vegas/Phoenix).
* Texas triangle
* France TGV-like lines in the Midwest, centered on Chicago, connecting to Minneapolis (via Milwaukee), St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, maybe Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati
* New England/New York outside of the NEC--that is, Toronto-Boston and Montreal-New York with timed transfers at Albany.
Right now there are ~40 flights a day that go from PDX-SEA or SEA-PDX. Those are a waste of airport capacity and carbon emission. Both cities have the transit network to easily get people to the airport from wherever the HSR ends up for people who are using those flights to make connections, and could promote growth in the aggregate area in a way that doesn't exist now.
Some really enjoy getting off at one stop for a while, and getting on the next train and continuing the journey. Or just deciding that this place looks nice, and getting off here. Try that in an airplane...
There's a growing niche of transoceanic travel by container-ship and bulk freighter, too. It's neither cheap nor fast, and that's the point. It's truly unplugged, where the journey is part of the destination.
Throughout the entirety of human history except the last hundred years or so, long distance travel has been a borderline-boring activity. Maybe that's not such a bad thing -- our brains need some downtime to reflect and defrag. We're just starting to appreciate en masse that "monotonous" can be kissing-close to "meditative". Rail is part of that, and as people catch onto that, it's making a comeback.
A couple years my wife and I went Birmingham to New Orleans for $150 round trip on Amtrak. Airfare on the same route was $600, and I would have paid $150 in parking alone in downtown New Orleans. Moreover, the time difference between train, driving or flying was not all that different. The train was scheduled at seven hours, about the same as driving time with stops. And air travel would have been about the same once you factor in getting to the airport early, two flights with a layover in Atlanta, and getting from the airport to downtown.
It’s also a whole heck of a lot more pleasant than flying. 50” of seat pitch, width of a first class seat, hot food, alcohol, plenty of room to walk around, interesting people to talk to, no needless security theater, no need to get to the station 30 minutes early, no need to worry about baggage fees or weights.
Before the pandemic hit, we were planning on doing the Empire Builder from Chicago to Portland. For the three of us (me, wife, daughter) in a bedroom was $1100. Expensive, but factoring in transportation, room and food for 2.5 days for 3, it’s not a bad deal. And you get to sit back, watch the scenery, read, nap, etc.
I mean yeah, if I need to travel across the country quickly, an airplane will always win. But airlines have seemingly gone out of their way over the last 20 years to make flying as miserable as possible to squeeze every cent out of customers. If I can afford to take some time and the train is an option, I will always choose the train based solely on it being less miserable than flying has become.
My friend never did say what it cost him. I suspect it was the price of a low-end car, but given that he had the car for over a week, and it came with dining and sleeping arrangements for 9 people (him, his family, in his laws, the chef and conductor) he doesn't regret it.
>Typical pricing for a trip is along the lines of a high-end cruise. On average, the all-inclusive costs typically can run between $2,500 and $7,000 or more per car per day. But remember, a rail car may accommodate 6, 8, 10, 20 people or more.
https://www.aaprco.com/travel/where-do-i-start/chartering-a-...
Still looks like a lot of fun, but 20k-56k for 8day trip... I can't do that.
Same. I10 is pointless - no-one drives from Santa Monica to Jacksonville - flying is much faster once you’re going long distance. I mean I would love to cross the country by car for entertainment, but as a common method of travel it doesn’t seem to make much sense.
/sarcasm (for those who need it pointing out...)
Cross country rail lines are just like cross-country interstates: mostly used by people for specific regional connectivity.
But both are weekly services, and even Nice–Moscow (yet alone intermediate stops) has more capacity most days by plane than the once-a-week train.
- Rome to Athens
- Paris to Barcelona
- Madrid to Stockholm
Much of Europe is a very far way from having a seamless integrated cross-border train system.
The next direct train takes 6h39m.
China kept their unprofitable rural slow passenger routes into the distant corners of their country, and now they are converting them to high speed routes.
The Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed line is 2,298km long, and used to be 22 hours but now runs in 8[1]
Being able to go from Penn Station in Manhattan to Union Station in Chicago in 8 hours in a comfortable train would be a serious alternative to air travel, and once the track is upgraded, it would probably be cheaper than existing service. And this is completely doable with decades old technology. Other countries have done comparable things with less.
I don't think we should abandon "legacy" routes just because they are not profitable right now. And even if they are never profitable that alone is not a good enough reason to abandon infrastructure.
Eventually, a more direct NY - Chicago high speed rail route could be built that is even faster.
You just need a fast NYC to Buffalo with a little extension on to Hamilton, ON and you’ve got a very direct NYC to Chicago route.
Seattle-Vancouver avoids it by not making any stops between Vancouver and the border, so the immigration checks take place at the station. This might be feasible for Montreal, probably not for Toronto, and a train that runs from Buffalo to Detroit without stopping in Canada at all seems implausible.
Would likely need a special treaty in place so Americans traveling from Chicago to NY can travel through without a passport (just ID). Alternatively if we’re talking diplomatic solutions, the US and Canada could move towards a Schengen-style free transit zone without cross country border checks.
There's a seaplane from Victoria-Seattle. It's been a few years since I took it but I believe this is what happened. There's a custom agent at each side. I can't remember if there were any checks before departure though. I would imagine they would do some preliminary check because they don't want to be on the hook for taking you back.
Shortest custom wait ever BTW since the plane only holds 10-15 people.
> US and Canada could move towards a Schengen-style free transit zone without cross country border checks
This would be a dream. I'm curious why I've never really heard any proposal about this. As a Canadian (currently living in the US), I think that Canada would be more opposed to this. We always seem to have a fear of the US amalgamating us. I think it'd be politically tricky on both sides though. Even though it was proven to be false, there's still this myth that the 9/11 hijackers entered the US through Canada.
If it helps, Switzerland joined the Schengen area while maintaining its own customs controls (with reasonably consistent enforcement) and autonomy on immigration policy (outside of temporary tourist travel which is mostly harmonized). Major policy unification isn't necessary, although the minimum feasible level is likely still unprecedented for the US and Canada.
Which has, in regular times, a weekly service by the Russian railways. And it passes through Belarus, and ends in Russia, countries for which you need visas and aren't necessarily the friendliest. If that service makes sense, Chicago-Seattle certainly could ( as an experience, cheap travel, etc.)
Of course, maybe this is exactly what the future of transportation should look like: more localized travel on modes that can be powered by renewable sources or nuclear.
Compare the journey from my small village in New Mexico to Chicago, about 1200 miles. We just happen to have an Amtrak station 5 miles away. The drive time is about 18-20 hours without stops, which is long enough that an overnight stop is going to be likely. The flight time is only about 3 hours, but that requires first driving 40-70 minutes to the airport, spending time waiting in the airport, and then arriving at O'Hare, and then the 50 min metro journey back into the city.
The Southwest Chief, however, arrives here around lunch time, and arrives in Chicago about 24 hours later.
If you were optimizing for minimum travel time, you'd probably fly. If you were optimizing for cost, you'd probably drive. But if you want a nice journey, the train is fantastic and faster than driving if you're going to stop.
So, there are variations on the theme, and sometimes the train wins, sometimes the train loses.
Train fans vastly overestimate the number of people who will optimize for "sitting in a train and staring out the window for days".
In the case of the parent's scenario, it seems pretty reasonable in that you're really only talking about maybe an additional half day of travel. But that's probably about the upper limit.
Driving: 18 hours, 1269 miles x $0.56/mile = $710 each way (IRS millage rates as proxy)
Train: 55 hour travel, $209 each way (no refund)
Flying: 2.5 hour flight, $68 each way on a budget flight. Double both time and price for non-budget.
I would love to take a train, its just not practical.
OTOH, the flight is hard to compete with in that instance, so I suspect even with a better route, you'd likely still fly between those two places. Others might not, and the new service/route would benefit people making shorter journeys along the way.
I'm acknowledging that it's not for everyone, but that's not really a fair depiction. I get a lot of work done on a train -- the atmosphere is similar to a coffee shop in some ways. Other people enjoy going to the common car and chatting and playing cards with strangers. Or reading. Or just watching Netflix on their devices, like they'd probably be doing at home anyways. We were also talking about an overnight trip, not "days".
[1] I don't have a fear of flying. I don't fly because of the security theater and the "presumed guilty" attitude. Also because of the declining comfort and service because people are prioritize the bottom line. It sucks.
(I always get a sleeper; without that it wouldn't be worthwhile.)
Are you close by?
I'm near Golden.
Name a form of transport that isn't subsidized.
> Where I live, it was all built with tax dollars.
You answered your own question, and, you paid for it too!
It's also an absolute atrocity in the face of climate change.
And it's long overdue that fact is reflected in the ticket price, imo.