1. Show up to the train station with your bike.
2. In most places, get turned away because you were supposed to pay extra to reserve a bike spot in advance and now they're out of space because there are only like 4 spots in the whole train.
3. Assuming you planned ahead, remove your front wheel so you can hang the bike in a designated luggage rack, there is nowhere else you're allowed to put it. The train cars have not meaningfully changed in 100 years and are not tall enough to fit a bike with the front wheel attached. Seriously, go to the Smithsonian African American History Museum and look at their train car from the 40s, the interior is almost the same as a modern car.
4. Cringe as the train car sways and your bike's front fork repeatedly slams into the wall.
5. At your stop, the conductor starts letting people on before you've unhooked your bike so now you need to fight your way down the aisle against the current of people while holding your partially disassembled bike and bag so you can get off before the doors close.
That said I take Amtrak over a plane every chance I get, I will pay more for it, and I really really wish we had more trains here. I have taken a 48 hour train from Boston to Denver before instead of flying and I'd do it again, even if I can't convince anyone else to do it with me.
- show up with 5 people and bikes 30 minutes before the train leaves with no reservation. They see that we have more bikes than the standard 4 on the train and hook up a special bike storage car with ~50 bike racks that require nothing more than hanging your bike on it.
- get on train.
- get off at destination and go to bike car where they give you your bikes and off you ride.
Not to say thats every time I’ve ridden a train with a bike but its happened more than once.
Mind blowing considering how bicycle friendly it proclaims itself to be.
The sad reality is that air travel has much lower cost for fixed infrastructure (≈ airports) compared to trains, per passenger km. If we build an airport, an airline can more or less just fly wherever from that airport. If someone wants to fly 2 hours west to a large city, and others would like to fly 2 hours south, they can just do that without really impacting the other (except for taking up slot times).
With trains every single km of track you lay can only be used going in that direction (duh), and needs to be maintained year around. You have expensive tunnels, bridges and "advanced" control systems and infra all along the track. To extend the rail network to another city is an enormous up-front const, and only "unlocks" one new city (or direction). A (large) airport can be used to go both 45 minutes away on domestic flight or half across the globe.
Similarly, airports require a high up front capital cost and form a network that allows you to reach further than the infrastructure at the starting point allows.
On rail having high maintenance cost for the infrastructure: every flight requires expensive and fragile planes + lots of fuel, so the marginal cost of each trip is high.
So it's a little more complicated to compare the costs than you suggest.
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/10/04/spain-short-and-m...
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/articles/spain-free-train-trips
https://nomadguide.eu/spain-free-trains-explained/
https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/free-public-tra...
https://www.traveloffpath.com/you-can-travel-through-spain-f...
Price attracts new customers, quality loyalises them (Its a quote from a local rapper. Not train related, but it applies to any business)
Bus is dirt cheap and ok for some trips. Plane is a bit more expensive.
but I'm still willing to take the train (first class) for the extra convenience, especialy when I cross the country several times over a weekend.
Also, plane is only kinda cheap when you book it a long time ago and for peculiar hours and dates. It gets really expensive last minute or on days when demand increases, while train companies can just scale up the number of seats by using more carriages
The _lowest_ internationally accepted limit for high speed rail is 125mph.
Even if Beightline ever actually upgrades to 110mph that still won’t be real HSR.
They also have a real problem with Florida drivers being Florida drivers. True high speed rail is fully grade separated (no road crossings)
That said, this is their plan for the expansion to Orlando:
> Brightline will terminate at this station once the 170-mile (270 km) Orlando Extension track is built. Trains will run up to 125 mph (201 km/h) with a travel time of approximately three hours from Orlando's airport to Miami.
So even though there already is a sort of high speed rail between DC and Philly, I, as resident in the suburbs, would probably just drive unless work was paying for ubers on both ends. Even if Acela was a true HSP rail, that wouldn't really change my calculus.
So while there is a goldilocks zone where cars take too long and its too short for airplanes to be faster, it's probably not very viable.
If my circumstances were different, and that time was mostly recoverable as leisure then it's absolutely great advice, but it doesn't scale to every person.
You'd be much better off spending that money on local commuter rail, which is more or less a prerequisite for HSP to work anyway.
I live in a city with decent buses, 3 street train lines and a commuter rail, and use the street lines frequently. Unless your departure and destination are right on the train line, you're still looking at a 1 hour - 2 hour commute with possible missed connections every step of the way. To canvas the city thoroughly you would need buses or trains running every 10 minutes, on every 3rd or 5th block. They would also need to be preferable to the alternative (a personal vehicle with no disruptive passengers, controlled climate, that is available when and where you need it).
Do I love taking the train into the city center for a night on the town, or out to the airport to avoid parking? Absolutely. Will I sacrifice 3 hours out of my day just so that I can say I'm saving the planet? Probably not.
The only way it would work would be some giant weave pattern of train lines where 1 car continues on, one departs left, and one departs right every stop. The budget and logistics of that would make it prohibitively expensive and prone to failure. There are also loads of reasons why people can't take transit (kids, cargo, late night / early morning schedules) and if they're not 80% solved, it will never catch on in the states.
Such a disconnect.
If it was a 5 minute drive, in city, you could just walk there in 10.
Parent effectively said "not close". So you suggest a 1 hour drive, a 2 hour train, instead of a 90 minute drive?
(You also have to wait for the train to leave, wait for its stops along the way, and be there precisely on time (hence the wait at the start)).
I find so many of the comments boil down to "I live deep in a city, never drive, and am in an entirely different geopolitical environment, but I know what makes sense for you!
Having a system that takes people only from where they live to where they work is much more inconvenient when individual cars allow people to go from work to the kids’ sports game to Costco to a relatives house and then home.
But that model of public transit is not tenable outside of places with density like Manhattan. Even in New York City, all the public transit is mostly focused on getting people into and out of Manhattan, so people in outer boroughs like to have cars.
This is what a public transit map that would compete with the convenience of individual cars would look like:
https://www.tokyometro.jp/en/subwaymap/
Contrast with the best that the USA can do:
Not that Tokyo is perfect, but it still has a far greater radius that link with each other without going to the central district.
And my house is too expensive because I'm only 5 minute from the subway. The vast majority of people have to live further.
If I was going to downtown Philly, might be worth it. But if I wasn't, then driving would absolutely be a lot fast. Since I'd have to navigate the last miles there adding more time.
The ability to just leave whenever I want without having to connect a bunch of train rides is pretty valuable even if it took longer.
EDIT: and to make it clear, I'm not a suburanite who is allergic to public transport. Until a year ago, I lived in the city and didn't have a personal car. And even now, I'd take Acela to NYC rather than fly or drive. It just doesn't make sense for other stops on the way like Philly, Wilmington, Baltimore. And Boston would take too long on Acela, and I'd fly instead.
But... doing so requires driving an hour in basically the wrong direction to the suburban Amtrak station. And then it takes longer than driving directly would. The only reason I do it is that I hate driving into Manhattan and parking there. Whereas when I arrive by train I can just walk to my hotel.
And, yeah, for Boston to DC I'll typically fly. The train is viable and I've done it but it's a full day trip vs. a short flight. And one of the airports is right on the metro vs. the NYC airports which are not.
As of November 2022, the DC silver metro line now includes Dulles International (IAD). So both of the major airports are now directly connected.
https://www.wmata.com/rider-guide/silver-line-extension/Wash...
This is enabled by the fact that train stations have much more limited footprints, and that multiple train stations in a city do not get in each other’s way.
Heck in China many of the "small" cities on HSR lines are larger then Portland OR.
I definitely think that the markets would be far better doing along the coasts rather than connecting them, but I don't think there is zero market either.
If the train is an overnight with a bed, and goes midtown to midtown, I’d take it every time.
For as slow as such a train ride would be, it still seems implausibly fast. For example, flying from Seattle to Miami today takes less than 6 hours. If you laid a perfectly straight rail line all the way from Seattle to Miami, and ran a TGV along it at its top speed with no stops, it'd take more than 13 hours. And once you make the train case even slightly more realistic instead of using all of those best-case assumptions that are impossible in practice, you easily exceed 15 hours too.
As far as the ancillary logistics, less secondary infrastructure is needed meaning you don't have to go to a designated chunk of land the size of a midsized town that literally cannot be conveniently located, and you avoid the hassle associated with onboarding (read: the TSA). Luggage also doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a hassle for whatever reason. I'm not sure if this would carry over to true high-volume long distance trains, but at the very least the baggage problem is conceptually simpler than at an airport.
There are definitely downsides for the passenger, mostly the added time in transit, but in my experience this only matters is when you require quick turnaround and spontaneity in your travel — in which case you'd just take a plane. For a trip that is planned in advance, even a cross-country train trip can make sense, especially if you work on your computer/phone.
The main downside is that long-distance train travel requires a sleeper car and a roomette to be really viable in the general case, and this is hard to scale. This may be an unsolvable problem since it's just so much less space-efficient than row seats, but if it isn't I see no reason why long distance rail couldn't carve out a significant chunk of the cross-country market.
Is every track maintained every night? No. But:
* it is incredibly dangerous for a high speed train to collide with anything low speed (track maintenance vehicles, supplies, or workers). The rights of way are so constrained that there is no safe way to have them maintain only one track out of two, so they insist on total separation as a policy: https://international-railway-safety-council.com/wp-content/...
* the Shinkansen are a two track network without parallel lines of the same gauge, so any maintenance reroute would require changing to either a normal train or to a bus, making sleepers impossible to operate normally. Even if you could though, trains need regular schedules for both riders and employees, and using different reroutes every night would be a scheduling nightmare
LAS-LAX Las Vegas - Los Angeles 286,262 - Take a damn train
HNL-OGG Honolulu - Kahului 281,548 - Maybe don't take a train for that one unless you want to dig a tunnel.
JFK-LAX New York JFK - Los Angeles 274,909 - Alright, plane is useful
LGA-ORD New York La Guardia - Chicago O'Hare 263,499 - Take a damn train
DEN-LAS Denver - Las Vegas 253,959 - Take a damn train
LAX-SFO Los Angeles - San Francisco 247,571 - Take a damn train
ATL-MCO Atlanta - Orlando 239,281 - Take a damn train
LAX-ORD Los Angeles - Chicago O'Hare 231,252 - Flight
DEN-PHX Denver - Phoenix 226,666 - Take a damn train
JFK-SFO New York JFK - San Francisco 215,323 - Flight
Most of your busiest routes could easily be done by train, and even land right in the city instead of being in the middle of nowhere when you land. And that's the busiest routes! Most lesser used flights will be for cities close to one another. Being in a train also lets you work, use your laptop, have internet, get up and walk, grab (overpriced) food in a bar wagon, have a wagon for children to play in, etc. Trains are just better.
So, no, you can't use the "but the US is big" argument every time, sorry.
For example, practically everything involving LAS is connecting to something else which goes further. Orlando is probably the terminus thanks to Disney, but ATL is likely not the originator.
Probably the only route which definitely isn't a hub connector is LAX-SFO as both LAX and SFO are already hubs in and unto themselves. Maybe, LGA-ORD also falls into a similar category.
Bullet trains (which we don't even have in the US) are around 100-200mph at best.
That's still a huge difference unfortunately, especially going 2500+ miles across the entire country.
Meanwhile, the fastest train in India averages under 60 mph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatimaan_Express
Train stations are often conveniently located in crowded downtowns. Airports are located some distance away.
Security is a lot more of a problem on planes because hijacking planes is a problem. Hijacking trains is pointless.
Yes the seats are obviously more comfy than plane (although one should compare with business class because it costs similar), but turbulence is not fair comparison.
The only real credible threat is mass violence against the passengers. That could just as easily occur in any crowed public space.
Not coincidentally, these are historically the most commonly used methods.
Boarding a passenger car from which it is hard to get to the engine where the engineer is driving the train is far less likely to be effective.
And security is not just about hijackings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_...
No matter how many want to avoided crowded places, they are crowded because a lot of people are already there, and a lot of others would like to grow. And this is only possible if there actually are good ways to get there.
To serve a geographically spread out group, it is reasonable to build a a hub and spoke system. And the geographically convenient place to put the hub generally already has a city built there exactly because it is geographically convenient.
If I--and almost certainly many other people who don't live in the city--had to drive into and park in downtown Boston to take Amtrak it wouldn't remotely be a consideration. And, yes, there's commuter rail but now you're adding hours to traveling.
At that point I'm just driving into NY or maybe driving to a NY commuter rail station.
Okay, let's look at that bullet train. At best that's 200 mph. A trip from SF to NY is then going to be 12.85 hrs. Assuming we go in a perfectly straight line (trains can't do this) and no stops. We'll say 13 for ease. A nonstop flight (not hard to find) is about 5.5 hrs.
In both situations we're only considering the travel time of the vehicle and not including anything like layovers/stops or boarding and unboarding. These are not one or two hour differences in travel time and thus security would make the difference, there are over 7hrs difference! You could fly all the way back to SFO before that bullet train rider gets to NYC (you're already through security). (We're also assuming that as trains get more popular that similar security theater isn't also introduced)
Now I do think people would still take the train fwiw because even with a 7hr travel time takes up all your day and flying sucks. Plenty of people will make this trade as long as trains don't sardine pack like airlines do. But let's also not fool ourselves into thinking the times are roughly the same and that that train also isn't going to take closer to 16hrs to go across country. Which even means doubling the speed (400mph) still makes it slower than a plane with security check-ins.
Surely a US train could aim to be up there with the fastest?
Even with that boost though, your point remains.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/travel/article/worlds-fastest-trains...
Transcontinental bullet trains across North America are a total pipe dream just based on simple geography. But bullet trains should play a role in our regional transportation infrastructure.
Also note that while the Shanghai Maglev does have a maximum speed of 268mph it has an average speed of 139/155mph (different schedules = different speeds). We need to consider average when calculating travel times. You'll also note that on that CNN page that several of those trains have test runs that reach near 400mph! This is good for considering where we might be able to get with high levels of optimization but they do not reflect the reality of speeds that a passenger will actually experience. Considering the extrapolations we'd realistically need trains that could have max speeds above 600mph and sustained speeds (through quite windy areas and mountains mind you) of 400+mph.
I do think cross continental passenger trains can still have a market but I think more coastal focused lines will have substantially better markets and we shouldn't expect trans-continental train alternatives to planes being popular for quite some time. The coastal lines mostly make sense because the total times are still relatively short and we consider the convenience tradeoff more influential. I'm pretty sure that this trade-off is highly non-linear with respect to travel time (convenience weakly dominates in short transit but time strongly dominates on long hauls).
I looked it up out of curiosity. To travel the length of Japan's bullet train network, which goes most of the length of the country, it takes 3 trains and 31 stops, for a total of just under 12 hours. A flight between the same locations is just over 3 and a half hours.
For those who want to look it up, these figures are for Kagoshima-Chuo Station to Shin-Hakodate Hokuto Station.
I can see how the train would be come out ahead for shorter distances, but I think this kind of trip is more reasonable of a comparison with the distance of flights that many Americans are taking.
Extrapolating from there your train would take 36hours.
How do you figure that? I'm thinking out loud here: If we use some real examples: I'm lucky in that most of my family lives near major travel hubs, so I can fly direct most of the time. However, they all live in various places along the east coast of the US whereas I'm on the west coast. My trip last summer to see one group of them represented a 3100 mile / 5000 kilometer journey.
The flight was 5 hours and 30 minutes. Let's add 2 hours of airport shenanigans to cover showing up ahead of boarding, handling bags, picking up luggage on the far side, etc. So 7 hours 30 minutes of travel (not counting commute to or from airport, but you'd have to get to your high speed rail station as well)
(as an addendum, I was able to take public transit on both sides - busses & BART on the bay area side, and a local commuter rail on the far side. I had to get picked up by car from the train station though, no busses in that town)
The fastest Japanese and European high speed trains go 300 km/hr. That's 16 and a half hours of rolling at top speed - no stops, slowdowns, sharing slower track, etc. If you stop at major cities along the way (say one stop per US state), you're probably looking at 20 hours of time on the train - each stop meaning you have to stop for 5-10 minutes, slow down and speed up, generally not be able to hit top speed in the confines of the city, etc.
The transit time would be nearly triple in the best case scenario for a coast to coast flight in the US.
The only thing I can think that would mitigate this is, as you said, sleeper cars. West coast to east coast is generally considered a lost day between the travel time and the timezone shift. I guess if you start your train journey in the early morning and sleep on the train that evening, arriving in the early morning next day, it could make up for the "get to the family's place and immediately go to sleep" pattern. You're just sleeping enroute rather than at your destination.
For "mid range" journeys, take a bullet train trip I did in Japan: Sendai -> Hiroshima. I spent 6 hours on the train, the flight would've been about and hour and a half plus the extra 2 hours of airport fun. Because it was a vacation I wasn't going to meaningfully fill the "saved" 2 to 3 hours and the train was way more comfortable. But, for business travel, this wouldn't have been good. In the US it's not an uncommon pattern to take a flight to the next major city for same-day business to avoid hotel costs.
For flights so short the airport time exceeds or matches the train difference, obviously this doesn't matter (e.g. SF <-> LA travel if California high speed rail manages to survive until completion).
But you may be sent from SF to Chicago and be expected to attend meetings upon arrival. Can't do that with high speed rail. Even if they went 50% faster, it'll take 7-8 hours to reach Chicago from California.
For the record, I love high speed trains. I've enjoyed using them in the countries that have them. But the longest journey I've ever taken on one is that Sendai to Hiroshima trip, and the second longest is Munich to Berlin (I originated in Innsbruck, Austria but the leg to Munich was not on a high speed train).
It'd be great if we could replace "intra-state" or "neighboring-state" flights with trains, places where they really are faster or at comparable travel times. Obviously none of this is looking at the fact that all of these high speed trains are electric, so they could be powered from zero-carbon or carbon-neutral sources, whereas air travel is a significant source of emissions. But that's a separate argument.
Japan is the size of California.
> You factor that into your plan and travel comfortably and peacefully.
If train travel became as popular as air travel in the US, the TSA would pay just as much attention to making it as miserable as air travel.
So I took train since land borders were much more permissive. Instead of 1.5h flight + a bit of time extra around, it took me full 2 days with extra sleep in Barcelona of fastest bullet trains Europe has (TGV + Spanish equivalent, 300kmh was frequent speed) to get home.
That's not even through-Europe crossing, rather a relatively small hop within south-western part of Europe. It was more expensive as flights too (but not that much, but then there was hotel). Any destination we went through for holidays in past few years are completely unreachable by trains, and the amount of hops (stress, delays, missed connections) is massive. Train networks have much more massive cascade issues with delays propagating like tsunami far and wide. Trains simply don't cover much apart from few very narrow cases in best possible situation globally. Everywhere else, train networks are much worse.
If we could train more of those the airlines might be able to run their continental flights more successfully.
Here's a video from Wendover Productions about the laws surrounding ownership vs control:
Everything happens on my own schedule without having to deal with people when I drive.
Traffic is like riding the train but everyone's got a gun pointed at each other