Amtrak might add more routes, but they won't be faster than a car | Hacker News Reader

Amtrak might add more routes, but they won't be faster than a car

edition.cnn.com

58 pointsValentineC178 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20210902120449/https://edition.cn...

In 1995 China and the U.S. both had essentially zero miles of high speed rail. Today China has tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail and the U.S. still has essentially zero miles of high speed rail. We did invest $6 trillion in 20 years of most less pointless warfare.

People argue about how the demographics of china make this possible, america is too spread out, blah blah blah...

I would rather have a thousand miles of pointless HSR than pointlessly bombing a bunch of taliban who are now back and no worse for wear

China's high speed rail is going to places where they want to increase the Han population.

Like between Beijing and Shanghai?

Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah, the demographic density argument fails to hold up to the fact that spending $6 trillion on high speed rail would have been much more beneficial to society than spending it on Iraq/Afghanistan.

I'm not trying to be a troll with this, but is that true?

I don't mean the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan were failed missions. But I've heard that 90% of the money spent on those wars went to Americans in some way or another, military contractors, suppliers, etc. all the way down the line to people like me in tech who may work on software used by the military.

you could make sure 90% of the money spent on high speed rail went to americans. that’s orthogonal to what the outcome of paying those americans is.

That goes back to the Milton Friedman quote I love: “what’s good for me is good for the country.”

You could spend all that money employing contractors producing weapons and weapons research. Or you could spent that money employing contractors producing high speed rail.

More interestingly, if instead of bombing Afghans you built them a nice high speed rail network along a nice freight network, economically integrating the traditionally independent regions, they may be grateful enough to make the Taliban lose political power.

Or, more interestingly, you could abandon the "contractor" model which is just a way to siphon public money into the hand of private shareholders, and fund self-organized public services. Self-organized, as in not centralized/authoritarian bureaucracies, but actual field workers coming together and deciding on strategies to do their job (turns out they're usually much better than managers at doing that).

Right now, the money went to Americans and the result was we blew up countries the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia. Imagine instead if the money went to Americans anyway, AND we had much better national infrastructure. You could even pitch it as necessary for national defense anyway.

According to this Adam Tooze article the wars cost around 800,000 dead people. Then there is the incalculable emotional cost to survivors and participants. This alone means that spending $6 trillion building trains would have been much better than on war.

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-34-how-we-paid-fo...

Dont forget that the some of the kids who watched their parents being killed by American drones would have the desire to take revenge later when they grow up.

If it’s a choice between paying Americans to dig and fill 2.5 trillion dollars worth of holes and the only deliverable after 20 years is dead Americans and Afghanis, versus paying Americans 1/3 that amount, and the deliverable is a durable high speed rail network and all the economic knock-on effects that would bring in coming decades, what rational person would choose the former?

I like inter-city travel via train more than flying or driving, but even in the Northeast Corridor, which is the most well-serviced rail area in the US and certainly has the demographic density, it's not always worth it in practice.

Boston to Providence is 45 minutes, faster than driving, very happy to take that trip. (For those who don't know, Providence traffic is more ridiculous than Boston traffic, so even my more car-oriented friends tend to like this trip via train)

Boston to NYC is about 3 and a half hours, with the convenient location of Penn Station, the lack of airplane+airport bullshit, it's not bad. I like it more than flying, plus you can just buy a ticket and travel on a whim.

But Boston to DC is 7 hours assuming everything goes smoothly, and much longer if it doesn't. I can't justify the DC trip by train, it's only a 90 minute flight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor

Wikipedia says "Concepts for improvements to achieve "true" high-speed rail on the corridor, which have been estimated by Amtrak to cost $151 billion, envision cutting travel times roughly in half, with trips between New York and Washington that would take 94 minutes."

But I remember something similar being on the Wikipedia page when I was in college, and I graduated a decade ago. We really have no excuse to not have spent that money on our own infrastructure. We could have Boston to DC in 3 hours. Suddenly the train would be a lot more viable for a lot of people.

I think this is the core of it, we have moved most of our resources to foreign wars and let our infrastructure to rot. That this is not even part of the public discourse shows the decay of the US as a country.

It is very much a part of public discourse, the military industrial complex has been discussed since the 70s. The problem is that - well, I don't know what the problem is. Maybe it is that everyone is too busy with the meaningless stuff that they show on cable news to be too concerned with things that affect their lives.

The problem is far too many americans take pride in how big and tough our military is. They equate military spending to might.

You propose "Hey, maybe 700 billion dollars on the military is excessive" and you get "But then china/russia/the terrorists/etc can invade us!"

2.1m service members, over 700k civilians employed by the military directly [0]. Then you have the endless stream of military contractors, and you're looking at almost 1 out of every 50 working age people in America benefits directly from the federal military activity.

So yeah, of course people are taking pride in a big military since it provides so much of their community income.

0: https://www.governing.com/archive/military-civilian-active-d...

That budget could still go to supporting their communities if we employed them doing more meaningful work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, etc.

For some perspective, often this money and manpower DOES go into improving local infrastructure. New Orleans levies were substantially more resilient in the last few weeks as a result of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Often? The Army Corps of Engineers had a budget of less than $8B in 2021. The Army Corps of Engineers has three main missions, one of which is the civil side of things. I'm not sure how it breaks down budget-wise though.

But saying money spent on the military often flows into local infrastructure seems laughable.

Just because the military establishment is capable to pool together some skills/resources to polish its public image doesn't mean another non-militaristic public service (in whatever definition of the term) couldn't achieve same or better results.

It’s more than that. Culturally they US has a big population that is anti-large government social benefits, except in the concept of the military.

By joining the military you gain access to federally paid education, health care, social services, housing etc. that has broad political support. If you yanked those funds you’d decimate one of the foundational social safety nets in the States.

Nothing would be decimated if we yanked those funds other than our ability to destroy other nations. We could build a much better social safety system that covers far more people. It’s not as if military spending is the only option as far as this goes.

My point was that the military is a social safety net with broad political approval. Other options are much less popular.

I now understand and agree with your point.

> the military industrial complex has been discussed since the 70s

For...broad definitions of “the 70s”

---quote---

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

---end quote---

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States, Farewell Address, Jan. 17, 1961

Rail is "socialist" (not meant in a political way) in that it is generally a government investment for the people. My sense is the US is generally less apt to do this vs e.g. europe where there has been much more investment. I think this has more to do with it than the money not being available because of wars.

We could have done both. Opponents of rail decry it’s apparent inefficiency and call it wasteful spending. Even assuming it is wasteful spending it’d still have been much better spending $6 trillion on building trains than on the wars. Has so many resources ever been spent for so little gain?

We happily have planes and buses, which are usually superior to passenger trains. Removing the TSA would create more total value in infrastructure than adding more trains, even though some trains are worth it.

Is it much different than the Hoover Dam, or interstate highway system? We praise those accomplishments...

The interstate highway system is actually an interesting example, because US did have a bunch of private rail and trams, before the govt built the highways, subsidized suburbs and made it all much less relevant. Apparently building the cities around driving is now considered to have been the wrong choice. It's good that we know exactly what the right choice is /this/ time around, so we just need tons of taxpayer money to shove it thru ;) (for the record, I do not support either war or transit spending).

> My sense is the US is generally less apt to do this vs e.g. europe where there has been much more investment.

The US government has a lot of investment in infrastructure, however these investments almost always go to private contractors who produce bad results raking in a lot of money (comparatively to any sort of however-inefficient public service). Unfortunately European governments have been following this way for a few decades now and privatizing everything.

Of course, only profit is privatized. The private sector still largely benefits from considerable sums of public money, and States take action quickly to save endangered businesses (eg. banks). Or, to paraphrase some thinkers, "Socialism for the rich, exploitation for the masses."

> the money not being available because of wars

There's two assumptions that irk me in this sentence:

1) Capability has nothing to do with money. The entire value of money is based on public confidence in the monetary system. Whether you have those virtual (or paper) numbers of not, a community or State has considerable infrastructure, skills and resources it can leverage to help improve life for all. There's usually legal provisions to enable "requisition" of private resources/infrastructure in times of needs, but there's also nothing stopping a government from developing a volunteering-based economy without money (like a huge cooperative).

2) The money is pretty much there, and it's spent not just on the military. There's a lot of infrastructure money that's being misspent on contractors doing a poor job and not doing any form of maintenance. There's a lot of bureaucracy money spent on managers making life miserable for field workers and making sure they can't do their job properly: education, health, regulation enforcement... As an outsider to the USA, i found a lot of Last Week Tonight episodes enlightening in this regard. You could also take Medicare for example, which is designed as a scheme to siphon money into private healthcare (insurances and cliniques), where it appears funding a public socialized healthcare infrastructure (as in many other countries) is far less costly overall.

I've found this humorous rap clip from the 2016 elections to summarize the situation pretty well overall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Qv6S_GtLo (to watch with your favorite invidious instance).

To be fair a lot of Chinese rail is extremely wasteful and more of a government run full employment program than a direct economic benefit.

But I'll agree it would have probably been better to spend the Iraq/Afghanistan war money domestically on any number of things.

What's wasteful about that?

What’s wasteful about paying millions of people to shovel dirt? Now take your answer and apply it to your question.

Nothing, if you need dirt shoveled...

Jobs programs make us poorer on net.

Its not black and white some of these jobs might be shitty but atleast someone gets a paycheque, the other alternative is that these people depend on unemployment benefits and then vote for demagogues who promise to bring back jobs and drive out immigrants who stole those jobs.

I can't see how it would be better than if huge swaths of people didn't do anything and lived in squalor. Who cares how much it affects the GDP. Honestly I'd probably find it more rewarding to operate a train for some people than all of the professional programming work I've done.

Wasteful in that rail laid per dollar is not good or wasteful in that the rail in underused?

Nothing wrong with government subsidized rail. The government subsidizes cars too by funding the roads. I assume you're not in favor of turning all interstates into toll roads? Also in the end it's cheaper to get started with laying down rail early than to wait until after people have moved into the area and you have to displace some of them in order to build the rail line.

Public transportation is (almost always) an inferior good. If one country is consuming more of an inferior good than another country, it means that they are poorer than that other country.

"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation." -Gustavo Petro

See London or Paris or even New York City. Just getting everyone a car only creates cities which are contain more parking lots than buildings and green spaces.

The richer you are in New York City, the less you spend on public transportation. That's an inferior good.

Look at the "Park & Ride" concept in the Seattle area (I am sure it exists in other cities). I've seen a lot of people that are very comfortable financially take the bus to work. Public transportation only becomes inferior when its infrastructure is horrible, and it is humiliating to take a bus because of the wait time, delays or how packed they get.

If someone in Seattle goes from 200,000 a year in income to 2,000,000 a year in income, do they spend more or less money on Park & Ride?

In San Francisco and New York at least, one important reason public transportation is inferior is you are regularly confronted with mental illness, disgusting sights and smells, and sometimes violence.

I've always wondered why there haven't been more efforts to offer certain benefits (more comfort and privacy) to those who can pay more to ride public transportation. This would provide more funding for these systems and is not too different from what we already see on planes and trains.

And that’s precisely why public transport is an inferior good in NYC.

It depends on how one measures poorer. Economists will look at a society with more cars per person as a good sign. I view it as a bad one if the country is already wealthy. The profligacy of Americans is obscene and makes us poorer in spirit, morality, and we pay for it with unhealthy lives. The accompanying lack of walking by Americans alone leads to a less healthy lifestyle. We also lose out on the mental benefits that walking provides. We gain a higher amount of pollution due to emissions from cars and the increased amount of resource extraction that comes with it.

Widely used public transportation is usually a sign of an efficient and well-developed economy.

When the economy is poorly developed, people have to do many things on their own, because comparable services are not available on the market for a reasonable price. A more developed economy enables a higher level of specialization. When people can buy the services they need from someone else, they can spend their time and money on higher-value activities.

The right comparison is not public transportation vs. private car, but driving your own vehicle vs. buying transportation as a service. The latter can include anything from city buses to chartered jets.

When people get rich they spend more money on private cars and less money on public transportation.

America got rich, people bought cars. That's the way it went down.

Also, the US explicitly designed new development around the idea of people owning cars. Public transportation is kind of a moot point when you just have tracts of housing completely separate from commercial areas.

All you have to do is visit Seoul or Tokyo to see how valuable and useful public transportation is, when it's done correctly and city planning takes it into account. Even if one is rich, actually driving and parking is a complete hassle most of the time in cities. It's so much more convenient to take a bus or train.

When you go from thousandaire to millionaire to billionare, your spending on busses or trains goes down. That's an inferior good.

I don't really understand why you're fixated on this one particular viewpoint. That statement does not look at -context-.

Cities are not designed around the rich or the ultra-rich. Transportation systems are not designed around the rich or the ultra-rich. If all of us had infinite money we would just use private jets or something, but that doesn't mean that jets are strictly superior to cars... this is an apples to oranges comparison.

As someone who's lived in Chicago, Seoul, and South Carolina, I can say that our public transportation systems are wholly inferior to Korea and Japan's public transportation systems. It's not strictly a matter of money or not, it's a multifaceted cultural topic.

The whole idea of ranking transportation systems by what rich people do or don't do makes absolutely zero sense.

"If all of us had infinite money we would just use private jets or something, but that doesn't mean that jets are strictly superior to cars"

That would mean cars were an inferior good over that income range.

Then you need to quantify your statement.

-> _For the ultra-rich_, trains and other public transportation are inferior options.

This is completely different from saying that public transportation is an inferior good overall. It's not that simple.

If your income goes up and you spend less on something, that's an inferior good. That's pretty much the definition of an inferior good.

Yes, in economics this is called an inferior good. This does not make public transportation a bad investment or mean that society wouldn’t be better off overall with it. We are local optimization machines and sometimes our desires are not overall beneficial to us. It is an inferior good as that phrase is used in economics but it is the right choice. Economics primarily deals with desire and ‘utility’ functions. It does not provide insight into what is best for society as a whole. Particularly since in our system negative externalities are not built into price.

>> We are local optimization machines and sometimes our desires are not overall beneficial to us.

Who decides what is beneficial for me in your opinion, me, you or the government?

Sometimes government, sometimes the individual. It’s a balancing act. My neighbor might think it’s in his best interest to dump toxic waste on his property because he needs/wants money. In this case, thankfully, government is there to look out for the benefit of society as a whole.

Classification of a good as inferior in economics is not a judgment about that particular good, it's just a historical observation about a particular income-demand curve. Let's just quote the Wikipedia article:

> Inferiority, in this sense, is an observable fact relating to affordability rather than a statement about the quality of the good. As a rule, these goods are affordable and adequately fulfill their purpose, but as more costly substitutes that offer more pleasure (or at least variety) become available, the use of the inferior goods diminishes. Direct relations can thus be drawn from inferior goods to socio-economic class. Those with constricted incomes tend to prefer inferior goods for the reason of the aforementioned observable inferiority.

Many of these goods are eschewed by the rich due to cultural / status phenomena that are constructed artificially by people trying to sell so-called luxury goods.

In the context of how to plan our cities, this has little bearing on the discussion. Should we use mechanical clocks to keep time because when people get rich they're more likely to buy watches with mechanical movements? Certainly those have emerged as a status symbol, but that's entirely constructed and could be otherwise. It's not based on any inherent superiority.

>> In the context of how to plan our cities, this has little bearing on the discussion.

I'm not sure where you get that. If public transportation is an inferior good, then to the extent we need people planning our cities those planners need to take into account that the demand for public transportation will decrease as people get wealthier.

Rich people don't ride the bus. Maybe that's OK?

You're confusing absolute and relative wealth. Sure, wealthier people in a particular metro area may be less likely to take transit than less wealthy people in that metro area. Plenty of wealthy people move to dense urban areas from car dependent suburbs and then stop driving as much.

> Rich people don't ride the bus. Maybe that's OK?

It's not practical to have a dense urban environment where everyone drives everywhere, because cars and car infrastructure take up an incredible amount of physical space. So if people want to live in those areas (and clearly many people do - they're willing to pay a premium for it), then a good percentage of people in those areas need to walk, bike, or take mass transit. If they don't, the city will shut down due to gridlock and nobody will get anywhere.

>> Plenty of wealthy people move to dense urban areas from car dependent suburbs and then stop driving as much.

And when they move there, the wealthier they are, the less likelier they are to use public transportation. Because public transportation is an inferior good.

>> (and clearly many people do - they're willing to pay a premium for it)

Not true, high density housing costs more per square foot than single family detached and sells at a discount to it. People are willing to pay a premium for single family detached housing.

You're being deliberately obtuse. People are willing to pay a premium for more space in the same dense metro area. Why are there condos worth $2MM in SF when you can buy a house in central PA for $40,000? It's because people want to live in dense urban areas with other people. Those dense urban areas are simply not workable with everyone driving everywhere. It wouldn't matter if everyone's a billionaire, you can't have a dense urban core with everyone driving. Those dense urban areas are the most expensive real estate markets in the country.

Which goes for more, the condo in SF or the single detached home in SF?

You may be interested to read the analysis of Ivan Illich (and others) on car-oriented infrastructure. Turns out cars, both for individuals and for society, are very arguably an "inferior good".

1995 is an interesting year, because China's GDP overtook Brazil's then.

It is now ~10x larger.

> We did invest $6 trillion in 20 years of most less pointless warfare.

Where does this 6 trillion dollars figure come from? It is my understanding that budget of the military is higher (not accounting for hidden/secret budgets), and that according there's (potentially dozens of) trillions of dollars that are just unaccounted for, as the Pentagon is the only federal service that hasn't passed an audit ever.

I am from Atlanta and went to uni in the Philadelphia area. I was... low-middle class, and we couldn't afford airfare each term for my travels home. (And I still spent Thanksgivings on campus. I know what Matt Damon's character felt like in 'The Martian'...)

I regularly took the Amtrak line to make the route—seventeen hours, including an hour-long stopover in middle of the night for the scheduled locomotion change.

It was one of the best regular experiences of my life and I met some cool and amazing fellow undergraduates from other east coast schools that I kept in touch with for years.

You won't get that driving on the I-95, it goes without saying.

Amtrak can be OK as an occasional experience when you don't really care how long it takes to get somewhere. I did it once, and that was enough. For anyone needing to be somewhere on a schedule it is a disaster.

I take the NYC to Boston all the time, and the experience / service has been good.

I live in NYC and have family in Boston, so Amtrack has been my main mode of transportation. I purposely take the slow train (not the Accela), as it is both cheaper, and easier to work while traveling (restaurant cars).

For people that live in the midwest, I can see how Amtrack is this old rag-tag thing, that serves no purpose, but for the North Eastern Corridor, Amtrack is a life saver.

I wish this country could invest more into rail routes, and make them faster, instead of spending trillion of dollars in sensless wars.

With half of that 2 trillion dollars that we spent on Afghanistan, (and whatever we did in Iraq), we could have had high speed rail in most of the larger cities, at least 10 major routes, making it almost a national high speed rail system.

Right now we have 0.

Hmm. Interesting.

The US has no intercity trains? Is there a reason? I've always seen the NYC subway in movies and just recklessly assumed all major US cities are connected by rail...which is silly of me in hindsight.

The northeast corridor (Boston to DC) is very popular and profitable for Amtrak. They have routes connecting major cities in the rest of the country but they're slow, expensive and unreliable. They're pretty much only ridden by train enthusiasts, people who are very afraid of flying, or banned from flying.

My experiences on Amtrak Boston to NYC (and previously BOS to BWI station) are that it’s slow, expensive, and unreliable in the NE corridor as well. I’m sure it’s profitable for Amtrak, but I’d estimate I arrive within 15 minutes of the published timetable less than half the time.

they exist, but arent really used. the us is much bigger / less dense intercity. going across the coasts is six hour flights but days(4ish i think) by train and significantly more cost, with not many cities in the middle that people stop at. too few people would use so theres no motivation to make it faster. where it works decently well is northeast, because the cities are very close together(dc,philly,nyc,boston). but it's usually much more expensive than driving/bussing and takes roughly the same time.

There are a number of reasons:

* For most of the country, cities are really far apart.

* The US has excellent freight rail network. They lease their lines to Amtrak, but they only have secondary priority. Passenger trains often have to wait behind slow freight, or even allow freight trains to pass them.

* After WW2, the US aggressively built the interstate highway system, which simultaneously caused suburbanization and killed intercity passenger rail.

Like the other commenter says, the Northeast Corridor between DC and Boston is an exception, as the cities are closer, and there isn't as much freight traffic, and the highways have a lot of car and truck traffic.

> The US has excellent freight rail network. They lease their lines to Amtrak, but they only have secondary priority. Passenger trains often have to wait behind slow freight, or even allow freight trains to pass them.

This is only partially true, as I understand it. Amtrak has highest priority, as long as it stays within its schedule windows. When two trains pass as scheduled, Amtrak always gets the main line, and the freight has to wait in a siding. However, if Amtrak is delayed, and misses its window, then it has to wait, as freight does not have to give up its spot and be delayed to let amtrak make up time.

I’ve taken the Acela train between NYC and BOS quite a few times. You can go straight from penn sta to south station or back bay, which is pretty convenient when compared to the airports.

As for speed: they don’t call it “Acela” for nothing: it can cruise at a blistering 80 MPH!! For up to 15 minutes! Actually in all my trips only once did it go that fast. And on that trip any gains were nullified by an unexplained 40 minute pause in the middle of nowhere (not near any station).

When I compare it to the experience of Thalys, TGV, ICE, Shinkansen (all of which at various times I have used for regular work trips) et al: what a joke. The US does as well at building infrastructure as it does at winning wars.

It really depends on the line. I used the cascades line that connects cities in the pacific NW weekly for over a year and my experience is it was much more consistent than driving as the traffic bottlenecks are far less predictable than the Amtrak schedule.

Additionally wifi and beer means I can do a variety of other things I can’t while driving.

When did you go to college? By the time I went to college, a train ticket (chicago-dc) was more expensive than a plane ticket.

Train fans will always still take the train, and for good reason (they are a better experience in some ways), but the fundamental issue of whether we can address car traffic and congestion is about whether other forms of transit can be faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1G0Lyh3uik are great overviews

Did you go to college in the 1970s? Airfare has been cheaper than the Amtrak ticket for a while now.

It does not matter. The experience of riding AmTrak and just being left alone and getting your own space to work on whatever you want - especially in the quiet car - is fantastic. Every time the trip is over I find myself wishing it was just 30 minutes longer.

Having commuted to work via Amtrak before, the train car shakes far too much and mobile data is far too unreliable (even with 5G) to be able to work without interruption.

I suppose this would largely depend on how reliant you are on a connection. If you're writing code, you should totally be able to do that, but maybe constant emailing or whatever would need more consistent connection

Email really should be OK with intermittent connectivity. We used to dial up, send and receive mail and drop the connection. Yes, there'd be some delays here and there, but that's how email works. However, good luck with modern email solutions, seems like most have forgotten how to work well without good connectivity.

But if you need to poke at interactive things, it doesn't work well when the connection is spotty.

My experience on Amtrak is that the lines in the north US are nice, and the ones in the south are awful.

What route?

I've done NYC->BOS dozens of time and always get a lot of work done. Mobile data works for most of the route, the train is smooth, and the seats are roomie so you don't feel cramped like on a plane.

Bay Area commuter route, East Bay -> San Jose. Not only is the train restricted from going faster than 35mph in half of the East Bay due to NIMBYism, it also goes through a lot of marshy environmental preservation areas and hilly areas with no signal or weak signal.

The seats were nice, I'll give it that. Would still rather be in a car driving at 2x the speed by myself.

My experience on Amtrak is that the train makes good time, until a freight train comes along, and the passengers have to wait, and wait, and wait...

This is presumably a policy/lobbying/political problem, not one of physical infrastructure.

I think people have said that the US rail system exists for freight, and without the will to change that, passengers are second class.

The tracks are owned by freight, and rented for passenger. Changing that would be expensive.

We just need Amtrak to own their own rails. Or whoever runs the passenger lines. It’s ridiculous they share it.

Agreed. Nationalize the rails, invest in and enforce PTC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control), and make passenger traffic a peer to freight.

We could allow for a "market economy" of the rails where you could have differentiated passenger services with Amtrak being the the fundamental offering and allow third parties to participate as well.

The British model, where the state owns the rails but the train services are private, seems to work a lot better than the US model which is the opposite.

It's a public commons, like the roads, air space, and radio frequencies. I think the downvoters see the word "nationalize" and panic over unfounded fears of communism.

I think that would only work if the freight trains were not allowed on the Amtrak owned rails. even now, amtrak has legal right of way, but the freight companies ignore it because there is no recourse.

amtrak has right of way over the freight trains, but that does not seem to matter to the freight companies, as they never get fined over it.

see http://blog.amtrak.com/2019/05/why-are-amtrak-trains-delayed... for more context.

From riding the train cross country a few times and researching, my understanding is that the big delays come about due to the train getting to be a little late, and then losing subsequent reservations down the line. One of the biggest delays I experienced was outside of ABQ, which I believe was because the train lost its timeslot and had to fit in between local commuter trains. Which indicates that freight trains do get rescheduled a bit, just not nearly enough.

I don't know if there is a straightforward solution, as it's death by a thousand cuts right now. The schedules need a little more slack, the fines for freight trains that don't yield need to have serious teeth (perhaps even reimbursing freight traffic that is subsequently delayed down the line), and areas under contention need more tracks.

Without a serious infrastructure buildout, the train is never going to be competitive with car speeds (we'd need to get rid of all level crossings, for starters). But it could at least be predicable.

I'm in NZ but would gladly take a train (no passenger rail on my island), time spent driving is time I usually can't charge for (eg general sales), and even where I can it's still hours that I can't design. It'd be worthwhile even if it was 10 % slower than driving.

In the US it takes 5 hours to drive from San Francisco to LA. It takes 11 hours to take the train.

If we could reduce that to 6-7 hours I would take the train every single time. Driving is an active process vs taking the train where I can work/read. Current 11 hours is just too long.

I’ve taken the train to LA. It just totally sucks time wise (it’s been hours late every time I’ve taken it.) The worst part is it will be decades before HSR is even completed.

There are buses that do the trip in that time. For what California is spending on HSR they could make the bus free and give passengers $50 for their trouble and come out ahead.

> It takes 11 hours to take the train.

How's that even possible? Looking at GMaps, there's roughly 650km of tracks between the two, so that's an average of 60km/h.

Even regular speed trains in Europe easily average 100 to 120km/h.

Are the tracks in terrible shape? Or are they stuck behind freight trains?

They probably have to stop 100 times.

Multiple stops and possible transfers.

Amtrak has some 11 hour routes where they stop at a bazillion towns but most routes are 7-8 hours.

I took Amtrak from Chicago to Las Vegas once and it took about 36 hours, after breakdowns, accidents, random delays, etc.

My guess? Prioritize freight over people. That's what happens in Canada. Greyhound bus when it was a thing here was considerably faster to go cross country than the train.

Its this. The route from the Bay Area to LA actually starts in Seattle. The route is largely on shared freight tracks. Due to the nature of rail travel, delays compound - if you are delayed at the beginning of the route, you will likely be delayed at many additional points along the route due to missing your scheduled time.

And soloing that's $50-ish in gas in a Prius, maybe $80-ish for a conventional sedan. 80 is competitive to the train fare; when you take into account last mile costs (Muni and bart, la metro); plus in a car you can carpool, cut it half, thirds, or quarters, but public transportation costs scale linearly by passenger.

I always feel the need to point out that "5 hours" is an idealized drive time only happens when you get incredibly lucky with traffic and drive way too fast. You're also not going from city center to city center (which is where passenger rail hubs tend to be located).

if you're doing SF-LA city center to city center in 5 hours, you're averaging ~75mph, which means you'd likely need to do 90+ through the central valley to make up for slower traffic at each end. it usually takes me ~6 hours with one ~10min stop, averaging ~65mph, timing it to miss rush hour on both sides.

I'm probably different from most people, but I really wish there were more rail options in the US (I'm in Texas). It's a 4 hour drive from where I live to my hometown. I really don't enjoy driving, and would happily take a train even if it took twice as long as driving. I'd visit home a lot more too.

If it's a high speed rail line at some distance it becomes faster to go by rail. Even slow rail. I once took the train from Glasgow to London and it was about 5 hours. Same drive I think is 7 hours.

Personally I like to remind myself when I'm driving that every one taking mass transit isn't on the road with me.

Three West Coast Main Line operates speeds up to 125mph/200kmph, so very much high speed rail in US terms - faster than the Acela if I recall correctly.

I’ve seen 155 mph on the Acela, but it only cruises at those speeds for a few minutes on the NY to Boston leg. On these routes it’s not so much freight priority as track quality, segment grading, turn radius, etc. The old Metroliner trains could run nearly this fast. It’s disappointing.

Price is also a factor.

In the UK it is often faster take the train on some routes than driving it, but the price is often absurd. For the cost of a tank/half a tank of petrol (£20-50) Vs potentially hundreds for a train ticket.

E.g. London to Newcastle is about 280miles. By train I just got quotes for £320 return tickets. I could get there and back in perhaps 1.5 tanks of petrol (approx £60-70) in my hybrid, but will take about an 30mins longer by car (4 hours Vs 4.5 hours)

Thanks but no thanks.

From my experience (not recent), Amtrak is barely competitive with flying.

Comparing it now, it looks like it's only competitive if your time is completely worthless. A nonstop flight from Seattle to SFO or SJC is $50, and is ~2 hours plus whatever time it takes to go through security. Via Amtrak, it looks like the best case scenario is $57 for a ride that takes longer than 24 hours?!

$50 is a depressed rate.

Isn’t parking in London going to be really expensive though (I could be wrong, I’ve never driven in London)?

What tickets were you looking at?

I've had a look and booking a train for 14th Sept 18:00 (Kings X - Newcastle) with a return the next day at the same time, costs £112.60 (£74.25 with a railcard).

That brings it a lot closer to the petrol price, but also gives you the advantage of not having to bother concentrating on the road and finding a place to park.

11:27 Mon 6th £316.50 return.

You shouldn't be paying that. The highest price flexible tickets in standard class (£169 each way) are only needed if you're traveling in the peak, which in the morning leaving London stops at 9:06am. So you should be paying the super offpeak fare for that journey (£76.20 each way). There are also sometimes fixed-time Advance single tickets from £20 or so upwards, though nothing on Monday.

That having been said, the British railway ticketing system is crazily complicated, and getting a ticket at a sane price is not at all straightforward. Fares can be restricted by route, by operating company, by class, by flexibility, by validity length, and by departure or arrival time. There are 113 different fares listed from London to Newcastle, most of which will not be available for any given departure[0].

You can also do fun(?) things by using a combination of tickets to and from intermediate stations[1], which on some journeys can save guineas.

[0]: https://www.brfares.com/!fares?orig=KGX&dest=NCL [1]: https://split.traintimes.org.uk

Whether you're alone or with a family has big impact on train/car price comparisons.

What I figured was Amtrak travelers were train enthusiasts or looking for a nostalgic scenic route. There are also some benefits such as less stress than an airport, being able to have a sleeper car, a dining car, more space, and panoramic cars as you go over mountains and through deserts (Western US).

Amtrak and trains in general are great if you can work remote. Being able to start working as soon as you get on the train if you have nothing better to do is amazing.

why not fly and get to your destination much faster and work remote from there?

So I can spend an extra 2h at the airport? No thanks. The best of both worlds is obviously high speed rail.

>What I figured was Amtrak travelers were train enthusiasts or looking for a nostalgic scenic route.

I was genuinely surprised at all the comments here from people stating they like Amtrak, but that makes a lot of sense. After a dozen or so trips on trains around Europe I now loathe Amtrak and don't see myself ever taking another ride with them outside of extraordinary circumstances.

I think most of the Amtrak likers here are comparing it to the plane travel experience, with all the hellish nonsense associated with that. It wins that comparison, even if it's mediocre for what the modern railway experience could be (not all of which is Amtrak's fault, as they don't own the rails.)

>I think most of the Amtrak likers here are comparing it to the plane travel experience, with all the hellish nonsense associated with that. It wins that comparison

I disagree, Amtrak is worse in my opinion. It has all the downsides of air travel except for TSA, but takes 2x-3x as long for most trips and cross country turns into days of travel.

It seems illogical to cite being able to have a sleeper car as a reason to take a train instead of a plane, when the plane would have you to your destination the same day before bedtime.

It's also about saving a night's worth of hotel/accommodation money, especially if you happen to be a broke college student traveling across the country on a budget (like I was not too long ago).

I absolutely love overnight 'sleeper car' train journeys.

> It's also about saving a night's worth of hotel/accommodation money

How so? By flying, you can leave home a day or more later, and still get to your destination the same time.

Train case: Monday morning, leave your house and get on a train. Monday night, sleep on the train. Tuesday evening, get off the train at your destination and check into a hotel.

Plane case: Tuesday morning, leave your house and get on a plane. Tuesday evening, get off the plane at your destination and check into a hotel.

Either way, the first night you're paying for a hotel is Tuesday night. And it's not like you save on rent money by leaving home a day early.

Sometimes it's about the journey not the destination. Not everyone's in a rush.

Didn't Amtrak effectively do away with dining cars? Unless we want to call microwaving "dining".

> Didn't Amtrak effectively do away with dining cars?

No, though it suspended traditional dining for a while due to COVID; it was restored in June.

Neat! I was disappointed it'd been axed, as being less sensitive to amenity weight seemed a huge advantage of trains.

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/amtrak-pla...

It looks like it's back on West long haul routes since June, scheduled to be reintroduced to East TBD.

When you factor in the value of a person's attention, a slower train can still be a solid win. If you have work that can be done locally on a laptop, a trip that would otherwise burn a day driving can be converted into a productive workday. That can mean saving a vacation day etc

Doesn't need to be faster if you can sleep on the train. And comfort is also a factor.

Sure, but Amtrak doesn’t run enough frequency to make the night train use case work. Even on routes that support it, it’s going to be a day train on the opposite trip.

I don't mind it not being faster than car.

The problem though is, in most American cities, you still need a car to get around once you get there.

Uber has made things better.

(and why doesn't CNN have separate volume control for videos? They almost always play too loud)

Why does it need to be faster? You can get things done on a train. You're not personally liable for the maintenance. You don't have to park it when you get there. You don't need a security checkpoint.

Good train service relies on other public transport but it's very different beast to either driving or air travel. Trying to compare solely on rolling time does the conversation a disservice.

Once again comparisons ignore the time associated with owning and maintaining a car.

Next time you’re standing on line at the DMV, ask yourself “Self, right now would I rather be sitting in a comfy seat on a train sipping an adult beverage and looking out at the spectacularly beautiful Pacific coastline?”

>Once again comparisons ignore the time associated with owning and maintaining a car.

Amtrak isn't exactly cheap. A 300 mile trip with Amtrak is the equivalent of 3 months of full coverage auto insurance for me, or 3-4 oil changes, or a brake job. I can drive a lot further than 300 miles with those services performed on my car.

>Next time you’re standing on line at the DMV, ask yourself “Self, right now would I rather be sitting in a comfy seat on a train sipping an adult beverage and looking out at the spectacularly beautiful Pacific coastline?”

I'm a huge car enthusiast, so definitely no. For me, driving a fast car on a road trip is just as much fun as the destination itself.

I've owned a lot of cars and driven over a million miles. After all of that, for me, the full-in the $ and time costs associated with owning a car tips me into the "I'm done with it" camp. I'm glad you still enjoy it, if you ever need a freeloading passenger, I'm your guy! :)

Most Americans already have a license and many already have a car. If I’m considering going to NYC on this long weekend, that time is already sunk and the car is ready.

Compared to taking the train, if you drive, when you arrive you have a car to get around with. You also get to leave when you want and not have to rely on the train schedules. Combine that with the car being significantly cheaper for that incremental trip and I find it difficult to ever justify taking the train.

When they discontinued some of these routes it was cheaper to buy each passenger a first class airline ticket than have them take the train.

I love trains and there are places where cities are close together and if the train went 150 mph or faster where it might make sense. I'd love to see a Cleveland to Detroit to Chicago train for example. But I'm not taking the train if travelling by car was faster, that makes no sense.

We're not more than 5-10 years away from a time where travelling by car could mean sleeping (or working on a laptop) in the back seat until the end of the trip is possible.

> We're not more than 5-10 years away from a time where travelling by car could mean sleeping (or working on a laptop) in the back seat until the end of the trip is possible.

There is no reason to think that this is true beyond marketing and sheer optimism.

It's easy to think it if you take Elon at his word (5 years away in 5 years).

it's amusing that Tesla announced a battery codenamed cold fusion, which is also perpetually 5 years away

*Hot* fusion is perpetually on the horizon. *Cold* fusion most likely doesn't exist.

> We're not more than 5-10 years away from a time where travelling by car could mean sleeping (or working on a laptop)

I have a feeling that we might be 5-10 years away for several decades.

> But I'm not taking the train if travelling by car was faster, that makes no sense.

If you are going purely for minimizing time, all forms of shared transport will be slower than going it alone. A plane trip on a commercial route is slower than getting a private jet, for example.

The difference is in how much additional time the shared option takes, and how the experience varies, especially relative to cost. For an Amtrak cross-country trip measured in days, I agree with you; I won't ride that (outside of the trip being the reason for the trip) either.

But Amtrak Cascades between Seattle and BC or Portland? I'll definitely take the train for that. I go from downtown to downtown in a bit longer than the time to drive, I don't have to deal with the TSA, I don't have to concentrate on driving myself, I can get food and use the restroom without stopping my trip, and I get a much better seat than on a plane.

If the time comparison is within about 50% extra train versus plane or car, I'm taking the train every time.

To your point (I guess the downvotes are representing people's thoughts on Tesla),

Self-driving could still have a major impact like this without being the "fully-autonomous" version. Virtual routes can be developed with negligible infrastructure(sensors) compared to a trains requirements.

However, Amtrak has historically been a socialism that blue-collar towns are OK with participating in, so my guess is that this has more to do with giving government money to those people than solving any real transportation issue.

Plus you have to get TO the Amtrack and Back

It's bizarre how U.S. makes driving at 70mph "faster" when the rest of the world has 200mph trains.

It really is a tough problem I think.

If you put in high speed rail from my small town in the Sierras down to a nice beach, I'd be all over it. As you probably know, there's really not much in the way of point to point mass transit needed. Vacations are well served by air and car, commutes are everywhere to everywhere within urban and suburban areas.

In addition, there's the personal security angle. The US ain't Japan.

I figure if people wanted mass transit to be a thing, they'd start by heavily subsidizing comfortable buses. Super scalable, pretty quick, relatively cheap.

Noooo, buses are awful. Why would you want to travel even slower in even more cramped space? 8 hours on a bus when it could have been 2 hours on a train with a restaurant?

Train carriages are wider, taller, and can be much much longer, so you can have plenty of space. It's like a business class flight, but for economy price and arriving in the city center.

Even "slow" trains can travel at speeds exceeding highway speed limits.

In many European countries rail networks are better built than highway networks, so you can take a train from some Shitshire village to a nice beach.

Luxury buses are a thing. Vonlane in Texas is a great example. Downtown to downtown, reasonably fast, and more space than a business-class air seat. The whole coach only has 22 seats, and charter rates - to the extent that I can find information on them - are very reasonable. I found one Houston Chronicle article saying that a charter from Houston to Rosemary Beach, Florida - just over 600 miles/1000 km each way - was $6600 round trip. That includes driver and attendant. For $300 per person, very reasonable. Or for group outings for sporting events.

This will probably be good for elderly people that don't want to drive/fly.

But you don't have to drive and you can drink.

Virtual routes can/should be developed to enable self-driving. Anything that can be reliably followed as a "track" by "computer vision" would work. Compared to a trains, the infrastructure investment would be negligible to install on major interstates. Cars that currently have cruise control with emergency stopping capabilities could utilize the "tracks" with minimal modifications. Confidence in your safety while being distracted and commuting is the value-add to transportation of Amtrak, and that could be replaced.

However, Amtrak has historically been a socialism that blue-collar towns are OK with participating in, so my guess is that this initiative has more to do with giving government money to those people than solving any real transportation issue.

Once again the comparison ignores the time associated with owning and maintaining a car. Next time you’re standing on line at the DMV, ask yourself “Self, would I rather be sitting in a comfy seat on a train looking out at the Pacific coastline?”

amtrak isn't exactly cheap. I choose it over car/plane whenever it's practical, but I consider that more of a luxury than anything. a single DC<->NYC roundtrip is already more than my monthly car insurance.

This is not a problem inherent to rail systems or travel. This is a symptom of the poor state of the US rail system.

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