Railroads are critical infrastructure and need to be public. They are massively mismanaged, inefficient and that's all on purpose.
The reality is in most of the world, including all the places with the best railway infrastructure the government is managing or tightly controlling the rail road.
When I see cities of millions in the US not even have a railroad you really have to ask yourself if the perceived inefficiency of government can make things better anyway.
If the government ran the Sahara, within five years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Government can be stupid and wasteful, but they cannot even dream of being more wasteful than a competitive market.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
Guess what? It's also the only part of Amtrak that's ever made a profit.
It's also the only part of the US with that amount of population density. Nobody is going to ride passenger rail through an empty desert in northern Nevada regardless of who owns the tracks.
But then because Amtrak nevertheless operates a line there and subsidizes it with fares from places they actually should be operating, they can't even compete in the North East Corridor where they own the tracks. Metro North has more ridership in a subset of the northeast than Amtrak has nationwide, as well as lower prices and more frequent service.
And Amtrak operates in several places where there is very little other options for people, so operating at a loss at time is perfectly reasonable for a public service. US rail is the least subsidized form of transit.
And the point about Metro North, guess what if the freight railroad owned all those tracks then that would be possible either.
Is there though? Here are the cities with at least 500,000 population on the line between Chicago and Sacramento: Denver. That's it. Omaha has just under 500,000 people. It's over 2000 miles of farmland and desert.
> And Amtrak operates in several places where there is very little other options for people, so operating at a loss at time is perfectly reasonable for a public service.
The people who live in western states have cars. Amtrak is useless because it goes to Chicago but not to the grocery store, which is why they have cars, but their cars can go to Chicago too. Or to the airport, because Chicago is a thousand miles from them.
> And the point about Metro North, guess what if the freight railroad owned all those tracks then that would be possible either.
Sure it would, because you could build entirely parallel tracks there exclusively for passenger rail and it would still be profitable because it's a high population density area where passenger rail actually makes sense.
I was speaking as 'in between in terms of population density' not literally in between geographically.
> The people who live in western states have cars.
They have cars because they have to have cars because there is no alternative. That's the whole point, you need public transit so people don't need to own cars.
And guess what, the poor don't actually have to have cars. And guess what, cars still require lots of government infrastructure that's really costly.
A city to city transit system needs to be integrated with a regional and a local transit system.
I live in a city with 70k people and there is regular service to many villages and cities with 30k people or less.
I recommend you read the blog pedestrianobservations.com, he has a lot of knowledge about transport systems and cost. You can read about his recommendations for US travel including high speed rail there:
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai...
> it would still be profitable because it's a high population density area where passenger rail actually makes sense.
Passenger rail even in population dense regions is hard to make profitable, specially if you want to have high frequency and allow service from early morning to late night. If you had to build new infrastructure form the ground up its hard to justify.
Thinking about profitability first is just a generally bad idea when talking about infrastructure.
But that's the problem really. Once you get away from the coasts the population density really does fall off a cliff.
> They have cars because they have to have cars because there is no alternative. That's the whole point, you need public transit so people don't need to own cars.
Nobody is building public transit in a farm town. The people there don't even live in the town, they live on their farms and go into the town in their trucks to buy groceries and supplies.
> And guess what, the poor don't actually have to have cars.
If they live in farm country they do.
> And guess what, cars still require lots of government infrastructure that's really costly.
Roads in rural areas are a sunk cost. You need the roads for trucks and there is no incremental cost to using them for cars because there isn't going to be enough traffic to cause congestion regardless.
> A city to city transit system needs to be integrated with a regional and a local transit system.
A city to city transit system is going to have one or two train stops in each city. The city government knows where they are.
> I live in a city with 70k people and there is regular service to many villages and cities with 30k people or less.
How close together are these cities? 30 miles or 300?
> You can read about his recommendations for US travel including high speed rail there:
That map is kind of silly. If you're going to build high speed rail in the eastern US you build it parallel to I-95 from Boston to Miami and I-80 from New York to Chicago, and then they intersect in New York, the largest metro area in the US. Why does he have a separate line going through Springfield and Buffalo? And he has lines intersect in Albany?
Then he's trying to connect a bunch of mid-sized cities in the midwest with non-functional mass transit systems because they're too spread out, where you would get off the train and have nowhere to go.
It's trying to be clever and make it complicated. Two lines parallel to the two highways and you get 90% of the benefit for 30% of the cost.
(It's also adorable that he wants to put high speed rail through Detroit. Come on, guys, think about local culture for a second when you're evaluating prospective adoption.)
And this is kind of my point. You have some sensible kernel of an idea, like hey let's do high speed rail between the biggest cities on the East Coast, and then it turns into this over-complicated boondoggle.
> Passenger rail even in population dense regions is hard to make profitable, specially if you want to have high frequency and allow service from early morning to late night. If you had to build new infrastructure form the ground up its hard to justify.
Offering more frequent service for longer hours makes it easier to build new infrastructure because you have more trains to amortize it over.
You can make something arbitrarily unprofitable by adding unprofitable lines until they consume all of the money from the profitable ones. That's not the same thing as being hard to make profitable.
> Thinking about profitability first is just a generally bad idea when talking about infrastructure.
It's not so much profitability as cost effectiveness. Spending money to build or operate a rail line to the middle of nowhere that nobody is going to use is wasteful and unnecessary. But Amtrak does this.
There are literally many multi million and multi-100k cities away from the coast.
And trains don't need to be connected, its totally reasonable to have train network that mostly covers one area.
> If they live in farm country they do.
But most people don't actually live in 'farm country'. So its completely irrelevant.
I'm gone go with the guy who is a professional transit expert over your opinion.
They're not near each other.
If you draw a 100 mile radius around New York City, inside it you find Yonkers, Stamford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Edison, Woodbridge, Lakewood, Allentown and Philadelphia. Each of which is a city of at least 100k people. Philadelphia is 1.5M.
If you draw a 100 mile radius around St. Louis, which he's got on his map, you've got... Springfield, IL just at the far edge of the radius with just over 100k people, and that's it.
There is one midwestern US city with a population in the multi-millions, it's Chicago, it's the one I suggested as the terminus of the rail line, and it's still on the coast... of the Great Lakes.
> And trains don't need to be connected, its totally reasonable to have train network that mostly covers one area.
Oh sure, high speed rail along the California coast could make sense even if it's only in California. Though then it's only in California and doesn't require any federal involvement.
High speed rail in Indianapolis though?
> But most people don't actually live in 'farm country'. So its completely irrelevant.
Most of the central United States by area is farm country. It's the thing you have to traverse, laying hundreds or thousands of miles of tracks through, if you want to try to connect a handful of medium-sized midwestern cities.
The fact that not a lot of people live there (i.e. it has a low population density) is a big part of the problem.
> I'm gone go with the guy who is a professional transit expert over your opinion.
Your transit expert is a mathematician with a Wordpress site. Math is neat, but it's also the thing that leads to hubris when the equations are missing a variable you were ignoring because it's the same in coastal cities all over but not in midwestern states where the cities are both smaller and farther apart and the largest employers are the automakers whose employees see your transit solution as a threat to their livelihood and are not going to use it.
It's a classic central planning fallacy. You have some numbers in a spreadsheet but haven't gone to the place you're drawing lines over on a map.
Japan, for example, has a similar problem with the bullet train. There are plenty of sleepy towns that would make little sense to stop at between Tokyo and Osaka.
They still have about 15 stops on that line anyway, and you have to take the slowest bullet trains to get there. But the stops have totally changed life in these cities.
Perhaps there's a similar case to be made for Northern Nevada?
There isn't.
Tokyo is ~300 miles from Osaka. If you go 300 miles from Sacramento, you're not in Osaka, population 2.7 million, you're in Winnemucca, population under 9000. The first meaningful destination on the far side of California is Salt Lake City, population ~200,000, 650 miles away in a different time zone. And that is not a big city, it's just the only thing anywhere near there.
To get to a proper metropolitan area you're going to Denver, more than 1100 miles from where you started. It's too far away.
As a result attempts to do such things at the federal level in the US fall to corruption and inefficiency in ways that don't happen to the same extent in smaller countries.
The population of Pennsylvania is larger than the population of Sweden. More people live in Minnesota than Ireland. California has about the same number of people as Canada. The things done by the governments of Sweden and Ireland and Canada were meant to be done by the governments of Pennsylvania and Minnesota and California.
But people keep trying to do them at the level of the United States Federal Government, which has grown into the world's largest bureaucracy by several metrics and regularly demonstrates its inability to operate with competence or efficiency. Comparisons to what happens in some individual EU member state do not apply, and you all are invited to not make the same mistake by attempting to do such things at the level of the EU.
Factually speaking the US federal spending is comparable to that of other nations. Its larger then that of Switzerland for example.
You can't seriously argue that the federal government can't control the overall rail network, when they control the medical sector.
And then the whole point falls flat on it face, when you realize that both China and India are improving their rail sector very quickly. India a democracy even more decentralized then the US have moved to almost 100% electric freight transport and have massively upgraded their network in recent years.
The simple reality is, the way US history has played out, simply saying 'the federal government' shouldn't do X makes no sense when the reality is Minnesota will never act like Ireland in things like transportation policy. The federal government has long ago taken power, at point the federal government paid 80% of the cost of building new highways.
Even if you want more control by the states, do actually push railways forward, you need central government leadership to bring states together and start to change the approach. The states would be willing to do more if it was aligned with a federal program.
It's not that they can't attempt to do it, it's that they can't do it efficiently. The US has some of the highest healthcare costs in the world.
> And then the whole point falls flat on it face, when you realize that both China and India are improving their rail sector very quickly.
India's population density is 1200% that of the US. To make a rail network unprofitable with that much population density would require actual malice. It's the same reason Amtrak turns a profit in the northeast.
> Even if you want more control by the states, do actually push railways forward, you need central government leadership to bring states together and start to change the approach. The states would be willing to do more if it was aligned with a federal program.
The real problem here is the attempt to treat it like a single country, as if masses of people are going to want to take a train from Miami to San Francisco. It's too much distance, people who want to go there are going to fly.
Where trains work are mostly in the places they already are. High density metro areas like New York and DC, which already have them.
There are some that don't. Houston could use a functioning subway system. But that doesn't require federal involvement. It's even more of a matter for the city than the state. The people there apparently don't want it -- oil country and they like their cars. But they're the ones who have to sit in traffic.
You’re right, the fact that America’s government-run single-payer healthcare system is so expensive is proof that the US government can’t do things efficiently. If only we let efficient private companies handle health insurance instead.
Oh wait…
> The real problem here is the attempt to treat it like a single country, as if masses of people are going to want to take a train from Miami to San Francisco. It's too much distance, people who want to go there are going to fly.
No serious person things Miami-SF is a viable high speed rail route. But the thing is, cities in the US are not evenly distributed—they are regionally clustered. Thus there are substantial regional HSR networks that do pencil out, even if the fantasy coast-to-coast ones do not.[0] The math behind this is pretty straightforward and has a lot to do with network effects which many here should be familiar with.[1][2]
[0] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai...
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/02/13/metcalfes-law-...
[2] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/12/20/metcalfes-law-...
The claim was that the federal government does a competent job of regulating US healthcare. But US healthcare costs more than both public and private systems in any other country, so clearly they've messed it up pretty bad. And the high costs have quite a lot to do with the FDA, the tax code, the patent system, medical licensing boards and malpractice lawsuits, none of which is a private company.
> But the thing is, cities in the US are not evenly distributed—they are regionally clustered. Thus there are substantial regional HSR networks that do pencil out, even if the fantasy coast-to-coast ones do not.
Rail networks make sense in the North East Corridor or the coastal areas generally.
But meanwhile Amtrak is operating passenger rail through deserts and farmland, and overcharging passengers in other areas to do it.
This one's under construction right now, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica
They are very profitable doing a small number of things. But an increase amount of actual transport needs has been moving to trucks (on federal subsided highways).
Given that those railroads have almost no competition from personal transit and that the US as a country is perfect for railroading, the overall market share the railroads have is astonishing small.
And the borders between the 4 monopolies causes lots of problems.
If a central authority took control and stopped with the attitude of cut everything out that isn't highly profitable, the US could leverage its rail road infrastructure far better. And would save money from fewer truck on the road (and the inherent green house effect).
The railroads profits alone could finance a nation wide rail electrification program.