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Flying used to be like this. I'm from Long Island and I went to college in the Boston area. I remember you could buy a book of delta shuttle tickets (~$100 / fight, book of 5) and show up and use them whenever you'd like, last minute, with no security hassle or whatever. You could also use the same tickets to go to DC if you wanted. Just stay on the plane for the next leg.

Pre-Acela and the electrification of the line north of New Haven that came with it, the only real reason you'd take the train from Boston to NY (much less points south) was to save money. When I was in school in the Boston area, when I went home to the Philadelphia area, I'd take the train for longer vacations but would fly for 4-day weekends.

Arriving at Penn Station has benefits if you're traveling for business. Hailing a ride to get to an office within 15 minutes beats the long ride to get downtown from one of the NYC airports.

Yeah, none of the NYC airports are particularly convenient. And I'm actually usually in midtown, often on the west side, so I can just walk from Penn to my hotel. (And Penn may actually stop being its dingy self one of these days.)

> (And Penn may actually stop being its dingy self one of these days.)

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.

I haven't been in NYC for close to a couple years at this point. Some of the renovation work around the LIRR entrances was done but not anything else. I'll definitely check out next time I'm there. The drawings for the continuing renovation look quite nice too.

Nod. Pre-9/11 peak deregulation had $40 flights BOS-NYC. I'd run from Boston subway, to a quick direct shuttle bus, then through the doors, across the small lobby, with staff yelling at me... "Run faster!" they'd shout, mostly with a smile. Down the ramp without stopping, sliding through the closing aircraft door. Flight attendants later walking the rows, collecting two twenties from everyone. Here in a multiply dystopian future... sigh.

A belated caveat: I find myself now uncertain - it might have been three twenties, $60? Wasn't four.

I kind of wish I wasn't contributing to the topic tangent/hijack, but whatever...

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.

Now that we're finally pulling out of Afghanistan and done with the War on Terror, it's time to disband DHS / TSA and put things back to how they used to be.

I think it's kinda weird how very few politicians are talking about this.

If you were living in a place in China where you could just show up and catch a high speed train, you were very lucky!

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.

One of the (many) problems with Amtrak is that they pretend they're an airline. Booking well in advance is the only way to get a good rate, "walk up" prices are pretty high. I mostly have experience with the Northeast Corridor, and this is the baseline level of service that we need nationwide. I've been on some of the other routes, and the quality of the service on those lines pales in comparison.

That said, the route from NYC to Montreal is really beautiful north of Albany. It just takes about ten hours to get there.

> 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.

It’s a little absurd that a trip of less than 400 miles takes 11 hours on a train. That’s a terrible average speed.

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.

Even now it really depends on where your priorities lie. Going from Rhode Island to Maryland or back, I had to arrive at least an hour and a half (more like 2 hours) before takeoff to get through parking and security. That meant leaving the house 2-3 hours before takeoff. Then, a 2-hour flight, and another hour and a half dealing with baggage and transport home. That two-hour flight was more like 6 hours of my day, a majority of it spent in uncomfortable settings (driving, in the security line, in a cramped plane seat). Compare to Amtrak: 30 minutes to the closest station, and I can arrive immediately before boarding; 7 hours on the train, but in fairly spacious seats, with free WiFi, and then 20 minutes home from the station.

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.

It's an international flight, so the price is more expensive relative to a flight between two US cities. Usually it's 300 USD to fly compared to 140 USD by rail.

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.

>Booking well in advance is the only way to get a good rate, "walk up" prices are pretty high

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.

This was true in Denmark last I was there. You could buy an "orange" ticket online, well in advance, for a significant discount, which I used for a planned trip into Copenhagen from Jutland.

Rule #1 of travel pricing is you can’t risk charging too little for business travel because they subsidize the price conscious travellers. Leaving on an earlier train because a meeting ends early is exactly the kind of thing business travellers pay good money for. But that’s also indiatinguishable from this kind of random walk in travel that leisure travellers would love to see - so it can’t happen. If you want business travellers to pay 3x for that convenience you can’t give it to everyone for less than that.

I completely agree with you in the abstract, and would happily never fly cross country again, but I'm worried Amtrak's map is a sign that want to do middling incremental improvements everywhere that don't reach that inflection point.

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.

I think that for shorter distances, like LA to SF to Seattle that would be great. But I don't think any of the rail lines in China are comparable to going from Chicago to Seattle - that is a huge distance to build a high speed rail line on, and there is almost nothing in between that people would want to stop at.

California has been trying and failing to build a high speed rail system. So far it’s only good at making a lot of people rich and being worthless.

There are several "trains to nowhere" in China. High speed rail is already active between Lanzhou (Gansu) and Ürümqi (Xinjiang), which is 1500km of pretty empty countryside. They're talking about linking in Lhasa (Tibet) too. I can't imagine any of those routes will be profitable, but perhaps the income from the coastal provinces makes up the difference.

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.

We wouldn't be getting 200mph trains though

It might be instructive to imagine what would have to change about USA to allow 200mph trains. (real ones, not hypothetical BS like Elon's tubes)

Elon musk promised 155mph for the LA tunnel. In reality you are down to 40mph. Off by 4x. If Elon Musk promises 800mph in the Hyperloop expect to cut off 75% off that so its back to 200mph. Why even bother? It's not like he has any special insight, the only thing he has is the ability to throw money at random projects.

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.

And the fast trains are made even better because of the complementary system of slow trains, which because they have many stops at smaller places along the way, eliminate the need for fast trains to have too-frequent stops.

Hainan is an island and while a tunnel is planned, the current solution is to ship the rail cars across in a ferry, which creates a bottleneck and makes the line not that fast overall. But it's still pretty convenient, especially if you consider that for most people the alternative wouldn't be a plane but a car, which has the same difficulty crossing the strait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong%E2%80%93Hainan_railw...

Agreed.

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.

It's another reason (besides density) why the Northeast Corridor works pretty well for rail. The biggest cities (Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, DC) have pretty good transit systems and the train dumps you downtown which will often be where you want to be.

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.