American trains need more than railfan nostalgia
slowboring.com
slowboring.com
If I could count on the arrival time, I could use the train for business meetings near the train station. Since I can’t, I fly in and Uber over which, even if it takes longer per the published timetable, has less tail-risk of being late.
No one needs hourly rail service between city pairs (as the article implicitly calls for) while the variability is -10 to +150 minutes.
Looking for a Nov 15-19 trip to NYC, Amtrak is $306 on Acela and I could plan to start working around lunch on Monday and work a full day on Friday if I was willing to arrive home around midnight. On Delta, waking up around the same time, I could reliably attend a 9AM meeting on Monday and working the same full day Friday, get home in time to say good night to my kids. That would cost $157 plus two Ubers. That’s with spotting Amtrak the advantage of a meeting walking distance from Penn Station and riding on the crown jewel of the Amtrak network: Northeast corridor Acela.
Flying is very unpleasant, as you still have to deal with getting in and out of airports, the whole stay in the TSA line, remove your shoes and belt thing. You are completely omitting the security crap you have to deal with air travel. Meanwhile the train trip starts and ends in downtown. (I live in manhattan and can just walk to the train station).
Also, just the taxi fare from JFK to Manhattan is about 70+ tips. Sure, you can take the subway ($8), but that will add another 1hr to your trip.
Personally, I use the train vs fly to NY from BOS depending on my objective.
I’m far more concerned where felons are denied the right to vote or to bear arms than I am with them having to stand in the same security line as most people.
That sounds sensible.
There are still enough machines that take cash that this is a practical option in most of Europe. Buying a ticket in advance works, but requires a trip to the station.
I am personally also really uncomfortable with the notion that you have to pay an additional convenience fee just to have a mildly more pleasant travel experience. Coach class should not mean that you are cattle.
Also, FYI there are two price levels for TSA screening. One is the TSA PreCheck, the other is the 9/11 security fee everyone has to pay. A universal PreCheck would probably mean increasing the security fee.
As in there was zero reason for the government to give Clear a cut of the money, other than outright corruption. They already have the department of homeland security.
The cab from my apartment on Upper Market, in SF to SFO was $65 before 'tip'. 13 miles.
The FLIGHT from SFO to LAX was $99. https://i.imgur.com/uXCj3MR.png
After this, I had several Black Cars that I made contacts with the drivers - and would call them for rides to SFO (I flew out every sunday morning at 7am - and it was a nightmare getting cabs (I was banned by several taxi companies in SF because I would call three diff taxi services and 2 out of 3 would never show up... but apparently they shared dispatching info because the dispatchers knew that my number was calling multiple taxis... and the guy told me "your banned for calling multiple cabs!" to which I replied "because you never show up and I need to get to the airport (said in a George Costanza voice))
Then Uber was born...
I'd like to think that Uber/Lyft changed the industry for the better (and in many ways they did: app is easier, upfront pricing, easier/safer payment, more accountability through location tracking and ratings), but I don't think that the underlying economics have changed all that much (other than the period of time where Sand Hill Road was footing half the bill).
in LA, the flyaway is affordable and relatively reliable too, if your destination is near downtown, or on the red or orange lines.
Also, it took 2x the cost and 8 years to build an access bridge to Golden Gate bridge than it did to build the bridge itself (3.5 years in 1930s) accounting for inflation.
Our government is so dysfunctional, it is hard to imagine where my taxes are going. I live in Bay Area - No solution to homelessness here, pot holes everywhere, trash on highways that sometimes make me wonder if I am in a developing nation, new construction is a forgotten concept, complete gridlock in the CA gov for issuing permits of any high rises or building new subway systems, security and crime through the roof, etc.
I am extremely against everything about CA government. It is rotten to the deepest core. Anything it does bites dust. The entrepreneur spirit and its natural beauty is what's keeping it relevant. There is no point in voting any of these people out, because the replacement is exactly the same kind of people. Besides the tech industry, people here have no optimism, they're more pro China than pro US, mostly busy destroying this great state.
So why don't you stand?
I am not an american, so I wonder whether it's realistic? I imagine the US as a 2 party system, so if you're unsatisfied with the performance with one party and unable to vote for the other because of their actual political stance...what are you're left with? In germany we have a spectrum of pasties and therefore i have second choice, a choice to build up pressure against the party I am unsatisfied with even if I feel like I belong to this party. What do you do? Vote for independents? Do they even stand a chance?
That’s obviously a typo but, in this context, it’s hilarious.
I'm no expert on San Francisco politics, but looking at this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_San_Francisco_mayoral_spe...
suggests the mayor is elected
1) From non partisan choices (Although as it's SF I suspect most will have Democrat leanings)
2) Using an instant runnoff / ranked choice or similar situation
The recent election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_San_Francisco_mayoral_ele...
Shows that people seem happy with the current mayor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_San_Francisco_Board_of_Su...
Shows that the "board of supervisors" is an instant runoff too, OK not brilliant, but far better than FPTP. People don't even bother running in many situations -- district 9 for example. 16,000 votes would have won that election.
Now OK if you aren't eligible to stand for election that can be a problem, but surely you find people with similar views than you and build a campaign (if you can't find them, then your complaints really are fringe).
Complaining about politicians all being the same is easy. Doing something about it isn't terribly hard though - not at a local level, if there's really a problem. Personal 100,000 SF residents to vote for you and you're in as mayor. Persuade 20,000 and you're a council member. Of course once you have pwoer you then need to fix the problems, and that's often far harder than posting a rant online.
In the previous election, she controversially was given the role of acting mayor and held it through the election, giving her a huge boost of energy from people who were willing to just let her stay since she was already there.
> Persuade 20,000 and you're a council member.
Well, it's slightly trickier than that. Supervisor elections are district-based, so you need to capture a specific subset of San Francisco's voters. (And we call them Supervisors rather than council members as they serve as both city and county representatives for the combined city/county structure of San Francisco.)
But it's easier to just say "they're all useless", or maybe there just isn't an appetite for change
But San Francisco is a very unique system, so if you live literally anywhere else the barrier to credibly run is much lower.
This is incomprehensible. Building bridges should be 100x as safe, cost 1/10th, and be done in 1/2 the time, by now.
This seems like the sort of thing that only a software engineer would say. So please, tell me that's not your job.
But, it all starts by not throwing rocks at each other and name calling. It starts with deep introspection of our policies. Try asking your fellow neighbor if they can criticize their own party - you'll be met with blank stares and profound confusion.
Cost 1/10th? Why? The materials haven't become massively more available (or changed significantly). The technology and therefore the labor involved in building large scale civil infrastructure hasn't changed much in at least a century, which you seem to view with alarm rather than the idea that maybe we're pretty good at it. Costs due to regulations represent the growing importance of values other than "get it done as cheaply and quickly as possible".
Take 1/2 the time? Why? The physical world isn't amenable to the same sort of reconceptualization that symbolic computation allows. Although the numbers and materials have changed over time (e.g. the arrival of the iron bridge, or suspension systems), the changes generally involve trading off mass (e.g. compared to stone bridges) versus complexity and precision. Why would anyone expect this to reduce construction time by 50%?
And yes, software has seen incredible strides forward. At the same time, sending someone a file is still an enormous challenge for most computer users, most software has failed to incorporate at least 50% of what we've learned about UX over the last 40 years, and most of it is still riddled with bugs that are not that hard to find. So we have to be a little careful throwing stones at those who build material objects.
Can you openly and honestly criticize the current situation?
Not defend, not provide explanations for, but openly address and describe problems that exist?
There have been some excellent links here on HN over the last year or two (at least) about difficulties in the USA in particular with civil engineering projects. I would defer to their much-more informed authors (and the often great comment threads here) regarding these matters. Clearly, things are "not right" with the time and cost of those projects in the USA relative to elsewhere in the world.
If we were discussing "world best" rather than US-specific, then I'm not so sure if there's the same need for criticism.
Even computing advancements are technically a physical engineering triumph, taking the form of increased precision in chip creation.
we've been building bridges, roads, buildings and more for thousands of years. from time to time, there will be "breakthrough" developments that transform the processes involved in these activities, but at this point they will be rare, certainly compared to novel human activity like near-atomic circuit fabrication.
A bit more expensive than the subway, especially during peak hours, but worth it IMO.
LIRR into Penn. $16 air train + peak direction ticket (you can buy the latter on your phone) and much faster (20 minutes after you catch it at Jamaica). Less annoying going into Penn than going out, at least.
While there's always a risk for delays (I've been stuck at Heathrow for 3 hours before thinking "If I'd have taken the train I'd be there by now"), you should be aiming for a network at 95%+ of services arriving within a few minutes of the arrival time. I understand that US passenger trains don't have priority, and thus this isn't workable.
On that assumption, given the distance and size of Boston/NY/Philly/Washington, I'd expect at least a 30 minute service, taking well under 4 hours (should really be under 3) from Boston to Washington (with stops in NY, and maybe Phillidelphia). It's only 400 miles, that's like Paris-Marseille, and far shorted than a 4 hour 560 mile Tokyo - Hiroshima trip)
This is largely true, but isn't on the NEC. It's one of the few corridors that Amtrak actually owns.
In Germany, Berlin to Hannover, 180 miles, multiple trains per hour, under 2 hours. Many similar services out of say Frankfurt or Cologne too.
Italy, Florence-Rome, about 170 miles, 2 trains an hour taking 90 minutes.
For longer trips -- 2 trains per hour from London to Edinburgh (390 miles) taking just over 4 hours, again based on 150 year old railway, reliable clockface services.
Madrid to Barcelona, 400 miles, hourly or better taking 2.5 hours
OK, France, Japan, Korea, China, Italy, Spain have the high speed services, but most of the western world - certainly areas as dense as the US's north east corridor - has this reliability, frequency and speed on the c. 200 mile trips like Boston-New York or New York - Washington.
(There's probably more argument for a 3 train per hour Boston-Washington multiple-stop service taking about 4 hours, rather than a dedicated high speed service which only stops in New York, but the point is that the US is so far detached from the western world it's unbelivable)
But to your point, more than half the time I take that trip there's some delay on the rails, usually in the CT corridor.
Or the time that a woman managed to lock herself in the bathroom without anyone else knowing. And there were no lights on in there. And it was night. So she spent a few hours screaming for help in a stinky bus bathroom, with no help to be found.
Amtrak's various unfunded fantasies for upgrading the corridor have usually included a dedicated pair of tracks for Amtrak for a reason. (I say fantasy because the proposals are always in the $115B+ range and every time I blink the number is probably going up, and that is an order of magnitude more money than Amtrak has ever had in its life.)
To put this in context, by the time suburban development started in earnest in the US, the private railroads were in free-fall after the war. It took until the '70s for Amtrak to put the (passenger) divisions of said railroads out of their misery, and Nixon did not anticipate Amtrak surviving the decade; Amtrak was supposed to decline out of existence. It never quite did that, but it also never quite got back on its feet, and so now the passenger rails are quite lacking.
Is that not the case in the Northeast Corridor?
The particular problem segment being discussed here does have four tracks, but it has commuter, regional, and intercity services. This is causing congestion problems; IIRC UK HS2 is being built because of a similar problem where they need to get the intercity trains out of the way of fast regional services.
With the amount of padding in the schedule required to run this effectively, it's possible that running an all stops service might actually be faster because it wouldn't require as much coordination.
Why are Amtrak tickets so expensive?
Acela is only part of the Amtrak service offering, but it’s the part they tout as being the best Amtrak has to offer. Total Amtrak volume was around 32.5 million trips in 2019 (unclear if a round trip is 1 or 2 trips, but I assume 2).
In any case, that’s slightly under 1 train trip (however they are counting it) per 10 US residents per year.
From quick googling, the German comparables seem to be 151 million long-distance train trips for around 83 million people, or around 5x the total usage and 20x the per-capita usage.
Even at the very high Amtrak prices the trains run full.
23.90 EUR = 27.61 USD
33.90 EUR = 39.16 USD
As an american that's the lowest I've seen any kind of train ticket regardless of distance.
The vast majority of people just drive instead. People doing anything except driving is unusual.
When we were touring Europe (pre-Covid), we never had a city-to-city transition where the trains were significantly cheaper than air travel.
I suspect this is a function of the popularity of the cities being connected.
I took it once in 2016 (Washington-Baltimore) and it was $45 one way, and the conventional, ACS-64 and Amfleet coaches return trip was $15.
If you instead want to tax specific conveniences to help inconvenient services survive despite their inconvenience and lack of improvement, well, let’s just say that I’m significantly less receptive.
The free market is great for many things, but not for core infrastructure. What’s missing in the US is a basic passenger rail infrastructure. Once you’ve built that, fine, let operators work in a free market environment
Everyone emitting ancient carbon is a problem; tax it all.
And how is this CO2 miracle achieved? Public spending on core infrastructure, namely nuclear power plants and high speed rail
We will need to tax CO2 to oblivion, but before we do so we need to make sure that people can still move around, that’s key to a healthy economy. Public transport is the only viable option for cheap mass low-CO2 transport
pollution is a different story, the new amtrak fleet is very clean burning, and doesn’t dump jet fuel into the ocean, so that’s a plus.
I don't keep notes on where I read what, but this BBC article is fairly thorough, and puts electric trains at 40 grams carbon per passenger mile, diesel trains at 90g, long haul flights at 102g, and short flights at 133g. It mentions that occupancy is a factor but doesn't say if those numbers assume full occupancy or are averaged out over actual ridership.
It is worth pointing out that it's unanimously agreed that the worst part of the NEC is the Connecticut segment, especially New Haven-New Rochelle, as Metro North is responsible for the dispatching there and they do not do Amtrak any favors. Every time I'm riding Amtrak on that segment, it feels like the train is stuck behind some pokey local commuter rail rather than expressing around it, and this is not something I ever felt on the MARC, SEPTA, NJT, or MBTA portions of the line.
Amtrak, as the original article points out, is simply not useful in much of the rest of the country.
I took the NE Regional instead of Acela because it was $49 each way and only ~30 minutes longer than Acela. With the exception of blizzards (which wreaked havoc on everything), there were only a handful of times the train didn't arrive within 30 minutes of schedule (a delay of 10-20 minutes was pretty normal - but I just factored that into my schedule).
In that period, I flew the same trip maybe 5 or 6 times, and that was more unpredictable. Once, my flight was delayed by over an hour. Another time, I spent almost two hours in a Lyft getting from JFK into Manhattan due to construction.
Plus, there was the stress of trying to get to the airport on time on both ends. And worrying about whether there'd be a line at security, and trying to figure out what I'd do if I missed my flight. On the other hand getting to South Station and Penn Station was easy, I could walk right onto the train, and if I thought I was going to miss a train, I could just switch my ticket to the next one.
The other side of the coin is that I find I can get a lot of work (or book reading, or movie watching) done with a beer in my hand on the train.
Obviously different people have different preferences, but I wonder sometimes if our preconceived preferences affect our perception of the real events we’ve experienced - that includes my own to be sure.
Depending on market, those two Ubers could nearly double the ticket price. I just checked my app, and a ride to the airport is $53. It won't be any cheaper coming home. Just a reminder that you can't really just write off the cost of the Ubers. nevermind the hassle of just dealing with airports
For some reason, unlike in the old times and despite the advanced technology that we have now, wide variations in the train arrival times have become common in many countries, even if not so extreme as in USA. (Even in Germany, which in the past had a reputation for punctuality.)
Perhaps the train companies have become too greedy and they no longer allocate the appropriate funds for maintenance, like in the old times.
This intensiveness is to transport the largest number of people possible.
There is absolutely no reason anyone should be driving to and from Boston/NYC other than Amtrak being a shit show.
Boston to NYC should be a little more than an hour on real high speed rail. Even assuming you can’t do real high speed rail it should not be more than about 2.5hrs.
And it should be running every hour at most.
Their service has degraded so much in the last 10 years that even I am considering never riding Amtrak again outside the NE corridor; it's just not fun any more.
Off-topic:
In the early 90s I was a happy Chinese boy who travelled between Hefei (the provincial city of Anhui province) and Wuhu (another city in Anhui province) by train frequently. Back then the passenger trains had three categories: 1) Slow (stopped at almost every station); 2) Fast and 3) Passenger-Fast. "Passenger-Fast" was the fastest and other trains including freights gave way to it. But it was also the most expensive one so I generally took "Slow" or "Fast". For a mere 150KM it usually took 5 hours and more with half of the time spent on waiting for other trains to pass. The worst part was that Hefei and Wuhu sit at opposite sides of the Long River so I had to get off the train at the north side and take a passenger ship to reach Wuhu. The whole journey could take as much as 7~8 hours.
But it was also pretty fun. I was able to lift the windows and stick my neck out to look for trains on the other track (very dangerous!). The locomotives were steam engines (steam engines were largely being replaced but some were retained) and I still dreamed of their roaring occasionally when dreaming.
But I'm not so sure where this idea comes from, I've heard it said but not seen actual research. It seems simple, but you can't just take a high speed rail and put a stop in the middle of nowhere and expect a city to pop up. Clearly as in their example for Waterloo thoughtful service might drive demand but useless service not so much.
China has a different model of city economic expansion and here is the basic idea:
- Government identifies new areas to develop (they could be "out of city" but usually just suburbs/rural);
- Public transits were developed to cover those lands before others move (so no malls, no hospitals, no residential buildings, etc.);
- Because it takes a lot of time and money to develop public transit, city sometimes issue bonds;
- Other buildings start to move in, usually starting from residential buildings and malls;
- City expects the revenue and tax from newly developed lands to cover the cost of bonds
This sort of "creates" new cities (actually they are called satellite cities) but I don't think it gets to extend very far.
Driving is 90 minutes, but Google doesn't have rail timetables for China.
Here you go. The first column is the departure time, second column is the total time spent as well as the shift(anything starting with K is passenger-fast and D is high speed railway), third column is arrival time and Last column is price.
I don't think there's enough confidence that trains will retain popularity over that long of a horizon. Climate change regulation might threaten it, another form of transportation might threaten it (i.e. flying, or underground super speedways), or remote work take off and cut demand for travel. Who knows, but I don't think anyone wants to stake billions of dollars on it.
Then there's the fact that we've passed a lot of regulations since the last time we built a lot of railways. The environmental ones are a real killer for anything that traverses a lot of terrain, because you'll inevitably end up buried in a sea of lawsuits requiring surveys.
The latest high-speed passenger rail I've seen is California's, which is up to an $80 billion budget for ~800 miles of track. I'm sure people will argue it's a bad example, but that's a massive investment, and it won't make returns until it's built. There aren't a lot of people that are willing to put $80 billion on the line in a flailing business sector, where they don't expect to see returns for at least a decade.
I live in a small city, and the return bus trip takes 45-60m. The morning trip takes about 20. I pay about $80/mo to park at work, and my commute is 6-10m each way.
The Swiss town of Chur, which has the same population as Menlo Park, California, and which is a good distance from Zurich, as Menlo Park is from San Francisco, has five S-Bahn trains every hour, all day long, plus 9 other regional, interregional, and intercity trains per hour.
There's nothing fundamental about trains that says you have to have insulting levels of service. It's a choice.
I don't think you can hold any American state to that level of expectation when they are 70 years late in their railroad infrastructure. Not even California would be able to match a 1/10 of your rail service before 2050.
Eh, you can't compare a local area GDP to a national GDP like this. Yes, tons of software licensing and ad revenue are funneled to the SF region giving us a local area GDP of 591 Billion dollars[1] which is comparable to Switzerland's $750 Billion, but if you try to convert that regional income into infrastructure spending, you'll find that
1) the ability of the bay area to tax that 591 Billion is much less than the ability of Switzerland to tax it's economic activity, as Switzerland captures ~32% of it's national income, while the bay area captures something like 10% of its regional income, so a ballpark 1/3 deflator.
2) once revenue is obtained from taxing, the efficiency with which the distributed bay area governments can make use of the tax revenue is much, much lower than the efficiency with which the Swiss government can spend the money. I'd estimate a 1/10 deflator. This is because we will waste tons of money doing various studies, funnelling side payments to local machine politics, battling environment impact reports in courts, funding various diversity and equity initiatives, and set up a dozen committees to oversee the spending plans.
3) once a dollar is actually spent on the production of infrastructure in the bay area, you'll find that the we will get much, much less for that dollar in infrastructure spending then the same dollar spent in Switzerland on infrastructure. I'd say another factor of 1/3 as per https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...
So when you multiply all those deflators, you'll find that our 591 Billion can be usefully channelled to 1/90 * 591/750 ~= 1% of the useful infrastructure that Switzerland has.
Which seems about right.
Remember it cost San Francisco $3 Billion for the DTX[2] which is 2 kilometers of transit. We are not Switzerland, we are a dysfunctional, corrupt, patchwork of local governments that doesn't really understand much of anything when it comes to infrastructure or efficient government.
[1] https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=70&step=1&acrdn...
[2] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...
Not so fast! It's easy to blame your government for all the things broken in your region, but they really are a mirror of your society. Switzerland has a nice rail system despite being located on the highest mountain chain in Europe, because their people don't turn on each other's at the first occasion. They don't even speak the same language in half of the country ! Yet, the rails don't stop between cantons.
If you want a functioning government and infrastructure, start by changing your individualistic culture, start trusting one another (by not wearing guns, for example), stop thinking you're the best at everything and keep being a place that inspires the rest of the world. You used to be a great country, spearheaded technologies, cured diseases and acted as a role model. Today, it's not the case anymore. Recognize that and you will be able to fix something.
It’s also a safe bet that, for example, nobody reading this wears a gun regularly.
If it were that simple, no country would have any problems, and everywhere would look like Wakanda.
I think I have seen this once in my life living in the US since birth. It was a super disturbing weird thing for me.
It seems like you’re going off a bunch of tropes and seeing the US as homogenous.
But we also can't divert the overspending on rail to just building more buses, so don't worry. :) Choice would be nice.
It's just that US-style development -- more or less mandated by the government -- makes public transit in general infeasible. For example, in Munich where I lived, there are suburbs nearby surrounded completely by farmland, where the whole town is still a handful of minutes by bike to the train station. That means that even in these sleepy little towns, it's dense enough to where a car is unnecessary. In the US, that kind of development is a rarity, because the local zoning makes it literally illegal, and the roads have been designed to be hostile to anything that's not a car.
I grew up in several of those towns. I don't think I lived more than a 15 minute bike ride from the railroad tracks until I was in my 20s. If Wikipedia can be trusted, upon construction over 80% of the farms in the Midwest Corn Belt were within 5 miles of a railroad (which is an area roughly 5 times the size of Germany). I never lived close to a passenger train station until I moved to a big city.
There are lots of small towns where there's a semi-dense urban core with a grocery store or two, a couple bars, a few restaurants, apartments and some shops. A lot of them even exist within a fairly small radius of major cities. Nobody builds rail anyways. My personal guess is that the major city doesn't want to pay for the rail, and the sleepy towns can't afford to pay for the rail. That's why most of what we see is major cities connecting, because they get enough economic activity out of those rails to justify the connection.
I suppose that rail has theoretically the advantage in being more reliable. But I do wonder if you could carry the same quantity (outside the subway cities) of passengers on a double lane bus road as a train.
Also, per kilometer probably isn't the best metric, unless you're building into a low-density area. It would be better to compare the cost per kilometer, divided by the throughput (people/hour).
Build a dedicated bus lane across the country and everyone will want to use it for their cars, and either do so or bitch to the politicians that they can't.
I wonder what the cost of tarmac vs rails is, I suppose it's a question for an expert.
It's worked out pretty well. It seems to attract people who wouldn't ride metro buses, for one thing.
Busses are slow, uncomfortable, and less reliable, even if cheaper to operate. They can be a decent connector or last mile option.
Post-COVID travelling patterns in the UK seem to suggest that the peaks are being ironed out. Whereas previously rolling stock procurement was dictated by the number of bums on seats for the morning and evening peak, now there's much more consistent demand across the day, and at weekends too - on some lines, weekend usage is now reportedly exceeding weekdays. No doubt it'll vary from place to place, but it looks like the days of buying enough rolling stock for the peaks, then having it sit empty for the rest of the day, might be over.
* Weather is bad enough to pay the (very large) time penalty vs. walking or cycling.
* You have moderate cargo hauling needs, no car, and delivery is impractical.
* The train is broken, your trip is too long for active transport, and you don't have a car.
* You are too elderly, infirm, or handicapped to walk or bike.
* You can't afford a bike.
* You can't afford to be anywhere else that's heated and enclosed.
There are enough of these edge cases, and you're sufficiently likely to meet one of them at some point, that I think we should all be in favor of bus coverage. Backups and resilience are important! But we should take it as a positive sign when ridership is minimal. If we want people out of cars and can't afford trains, the answer is active modes.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-18/the-secre...
>That's the most of any private railway in Japan, as of 2006, according to Calimente. That year Tokyu generated $2.63 billion in revenue en route to $587 million in profits. Rail fares brought in about a third of that figure, real estate holdings reap another third, and retail about a fifth.
Even in a highly managed economy, private or semi-private rail may be able to compete under the right circumstances.
This is predicated on foot traffic though. And American transit systems are, let’s say, not the most appealing. I do hope that it changes.
Whilst some are, there are also a lot that are right next to "downtown areas" with restaurants/bars/coffeeshops. Sunnyvale, Mt View, Palo Alto, Redwood City for examples.
Are you thinking just of the San Francisco terminus or the current "pre-Google development" San Jose Diridon terminus?
I used to take the train very often from sacramento to the bay area... It was clean, has wifi, quiet, power, drinks, food...
It was a great commute - but the prices are still too high...
The only problem that I have with Amtrak is their disconnect with modern pricing for value of service.
Case in point being a train ride from say SF to Seattle is WAY more expensive than a flight, many times longer and other than no plane crash risks... what value is it for that price?
I find it akin to the guy on a slow sunday morning drive on an impassable two-lane highway where his old restored 1938 ford only goes 45 mph and the speed limit is 65 and there are mad waitresses trying to make it to clock-in time and the old guy is oblivious to other's need to be to work on time...
(this is a true story based on a close friend of mine who works at the French Laundry and is constantly thwarted by oblivious slow drivers)
1) No TSA (at least when I last used it)
2) You can show up with a bicycle. They will provide a box and you pack it yourself. Your bicycle will not be molested.
3) You can get a private compartment and drink your own liquor
4) You like trains
So they weren't always so disconnected from modern pricing, but I don't think the effects of COVID have fully played out across all the transportation options yet to know what 2021+ prices should look like.
What you need to know to argue is, say, they're not losing all of the berths on a vehicle transport car if you want to move one car. They're having you pay the upkeep for that one trip which is not the same as the fully loaded vehicle car.
The auto trains that go across Europe are much narrower and take a lot longer to load and unload. They are pretty expensive and only used for very long distances. Most of the time it makes more sense to rent a car at your destination.
Normal bridgdes where? They fit perfectly fine on the French loading gauge (max train dimensions), but the British one is much smaller on most lines.
From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superliner_(railcar)
> Pullman-Standard built 102 Superliner I coaches and 48 coach-baggage combine cars. Bombardier built 38 Superliner II coaches.[57] As built, Superliner coaches could carry 62 passengers in the upper level and 15 passengers on the lower level. The lower level's capacity would later be reduced to 12. The coach-baggage cars had a baggage compartment in lieu of the lower-level seating area,[58] and squeezed 78 seats into the upper level.[59] The total capacity of 75 to 78 represented a small increase over the 68 to 72 seats on the Hi-Level coaches, which lacked seating on the lower level.
An A321, the biggest single-aisle airliner, can have up to 220 passengers in a high density configuration.
So, a train can both have more passengers and transport them more comfortably with more luggage.
In contrast, air costs nothing.
In my youth I took trains a fair bit in the midwest for journeys of a few hours. But I hadn't done a long trip until the summer of 2019, where we did SF -> Chicago. I truly loved it; there's a kind of enforced serenity to it that is a rare commodity these days.
Admittedly the whole experience felt a bit retro; the the passenger cars could use a modern update. Or at least an attempt to seek parity with Europe. And there are long stretches with no internet access, which I have mixed feelings about. But overall, it was a joy.
And of course it gave me an idea for an app to build. The number one question I had was, "What the hell is that out the window?" It was also a frequent question Amtrak employees get. So I taught myself Flutter and a little ML and built an app that was basically a dynamic, POV-specific rail travel guide. Whenever you opened it it would show you a map of your surroundings and nearby Wikipedia points of interest, with the ability to tap for details and photos.
Happily, a friend did a long trail trip in early 2020, so I even had a beta tester. Result: positive! My other market data suggested that what I was doing was dicey as far as a sustainable business went, but it seemed worth a go. And then the pandemic came along, killing the recreational travel market. Oops!
Anyhow, I also had joined the Rail Passengers Association, a pro-train lobby group, and went to one of their semiannual meetings. The audience wouldn't have been out of place in an Iowan retirement home. There was a modest sprinkling of middle aged people, and even a few representatives of the Numtot contingent. [1] That "railfan nostalgia" was a major driver of attendance.
The people in charge were motivated by more, of course. They made sharp, analytical cases for the value of trains and were keenly aware of the pernicious underinvestment in rail and the difficulty of competing with (subsidized) car and air travel. I left convinced that a) especially as we decarbonize, there was a good case for rail, b) getting anything done versus vested interests, legislator cluelessness, and American business culture was very much an uphill slog, and c) the geriatric nature of the market meant the market for any sort of app was much smaller than I was hoping.
I wish them all the best, though.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/05/meet-the-numt...
(One thing these companies all have in common is that they have competitors and need to cater to their customers and shareholders. If they were poorly run, their customers would go somewhere else. Amtrak gets federal funding whether they're well run or not. This is probably a factor, though probably not the only factor.)
For better or worse, we have a country that is in its middle age of infrastructure and people. We are a rich country with established interests and property rights where land for railroads can no longer be just appropriated or bought cheaply to reconfigure a rail system. We have people who can pay to have individual transportation and not have to put up with the minor inconveniences of public transport. We have all the debt of a middle aged country, plus we need to think of our other healthcare expenses in middle age, and don't have the appetite to pay for another muscle car from our youth.
All these reasons make investing in rail a relatively expensive proposition compared to alternatives, and not only that, but it's especially expensive because of our high wages, standards of construction, environmental reviews, etc. So we stop investing in it.
By the way, what happens along with this? When you get into this phase of a country, your engineering capabilities change, and specifically, your ability to even build these systems even starts to degrade and fall out of practice.
Take rail, or any heavy construction/engineering industry. People working in such a field join it to have exciting careers, see growth, etc. Generally few people join just to maintain a static system. Unfortunately, there's much less excitement in being "maintenance" although some people are quite innovative even in such fields.
So where you used to have a cohort of thousands of people trained and skilled at all aspects of rail building (engineering, operations, finance, project management, etc), now those people have either consolidated to the few projects remaining in the US (traveling around, moving cities to where the work is), work for Parsons or others who can aggregate enough work to keep a team together, or aged out, attrited away, gone to where the actual business is booming: Asia.
You think about how in the US, if you had to get together the expert team to build a new rail connecting 2 cities, you would have to search far and wide to find the people qualified, and pay them huge contractor sums. Not only that, they would be out of practice of how to pitch such a deal to the cities and the people along the route. Everything would have to be done custom.
In China, just to take an example, there are (up until just recently) 10,000 rail engineers who stamp out such a rail every goddamn month. How can you compete with a country that's in such a growth phase, unless somehow your country has an active strategy about how to renew itself in middle age?
It's a problem. A very hard to solve problem, deeper than just rail schedules or simple subsidies.
There's definitely a cost disease at play, and that makes it vastly harder to build and maintain the infrastructure we need. Unfortunately, neither major party seems to care in the least: the Republicans just want to cut government spending in general rather than make it more efficient, and the Democrats are happy to intentionally balloon the cost of new buildings and infrastructure to satisfy allies in the labor movement*. Hardly anyone talks seriously about efficiency.
* It's common to have requirements to pay the 'prevailing union wage', which means no price pressure from the government, no negotiation to get a better deal is possible. Nothing against unions, but intentionally going, "we're going to ban ourselves from negotiating a good price when we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars" is ludicrous.
At prices like that, of course we'll never see a mile of new track ever laid again. We've decided that the whole thing is a grift, thrown our hands up and given up. Somehow the French can dig under central Paris for the same price that we can lay some rail on a plot of land that we already own.
Actually, no. That proposal included entirely new tunnels and city-center stations in Baltimore and Philadelphia, and an entirely new ROW that went from NYC out Long Island, a Long Island Sound crossing to New Haven, new ROW up to Springfield, and then east into Boston, rather than reusing any of the BOS-NYC right-of-way. All of which are expensive and relatively low value (although the CT corridor does need entirely new ROW suitable for HSR, the cost of building such a ROW largely parallel to the existing one--including the taking of expensive property in CT--is likely cheaper than building the Long Island Sound crossing by itself).
In a way, I think this is an example of where a large part of American cost disease comes from--projects are designed on the basis of large, flashy megaprojects rather than looking for how to make multiple small, incremental improvements that can be done on the cheap. For example, you could probably squeeze a half an hour or so out of BOS-NYC train time simply by fixing dispatching issues on the New Rochelle-New Haven stretch, which would require very little construction (turning Rye into a flying junction would be the biggest piece I could imagine)--$10s of millions at worst.
Air travel is public transport and Americans use it all the time. High speed rail has worked fabolous on 1-2h flight distances for decades in many parts of the world.
It is preferable in every way to flights: total time, comfort, leg space, security & check in hassle, window sizes & scenery, luggage space and so on.
In many areas there are good arguments for why US infrastructure can't be retrofitted into European, but for intercity travel (eg SF-LA-SD or Boston - NYC) all the prerequisites are there.
Obviously, I'm under no illusions that it would actually happen due to attitudes, culture, politics and so on.
a. Suburban-to-city center commuter trains stopping every two miles or so, vacuuming up all the people from the suburbia that want to get to the city without the hassle of endless traffic jams. These need a certain density of the suburbs, so that the stops make sense and the train is "just full", but not absurdly crammed.
b. High speed connections between metropolitan areas, like Madrid-Barcelona, Tokyo-Kyoto, Köln-Frankfurt etc. Usually, at least a million people must live on either end of the connection.
One of the problems is that these two services need separate tracks. Suburban commuter trains are much slower on average than high speed trains and they cannot share the same track, unless you want to risk chaos every day.
Unfortunately, few densely inhabited places in the U.S. have space left for so many tracks, especially in the wider city centers. A potential renaissance of rail travel in the U.S. would likely require underground tunnels. Which is possible (see London's Crosslink project), but not exactly cheap.
What the US needs is political will and I think the political will in the US has been eroded (by bribes) by the petrol, car and flying lobbies.
UHMmmmmm
Cal train from south SF to say - moutain view on a bike was the worst...
They would only pull a couple cars and only one of them would be a bike car.
Many times had the bike car been full and I had been physically stopped from boarding the train with a bike... when there was clearly more room on the train's bike car - it was that the bike-hangers were full...
I was late to a number of meetings because of this.
Also - Rail is so poorly integrated that BART and Amtrak and Caltrain all have less than optimal intersecting stations.
I don't think I'd consider it for a long distance trip however, unless I needed to pack some extra large cargo like a mountain bike.
We desperately need true high speed rail on that route.
Takeaway from our conversations: highest pain point is floodplains. Like Jakarta, which is sinking. Like Houston, after Harvey.