Whats the price point? Trains have always had similar prices to flying. Nice thing about flying to SF is that i can fly in the morning and fly back out in the evening.
They shouldn't though, it's absurd that they are that way in the US.
Airplanes are just the most cost-effective, reliable, and fastest method to get around for long-distance travel in the US. Train service is often so bad that people would rather drive their cars and sit in traffic for long periods of time, because train travel is still worse.
Make train travel cheaper, reliable, comfortable, and to places that people actually want to go, and people will take them. Of course some of these problems are much harder to fix than others.
> Make train travel cheaper, reliable, comfortable, and to places that people actually want to go, and people will take them. Of course some of these problems are much harder to fix than others.
How?
The closest city to the Bay Area is Sacramento which is 90mi/150km - which is the maximum distance that a commuter rail system can work between two metropolitan areas while still being cheaper than flying.
San Francisco to Los Angeles is 620-700km - so from Cologne to Prague.
Unlike that route, you'd need to be building through multiple mountain ranges in California AND there are very few cities in between to justify ridership.
There is no similar sized city in between the Bay Area and LA MSA.
This impacts the incentives to build in the US.
Metropolitan Areas in the Western United States are VERY far from each other. And this isn't because of sprawl.
Take a look at a satellite map of the Western US sometime.
Stops (and Population) on Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Kyoto: Yokohama: 3mm+ Odawara: 200k+ Hamamatsu: 700k+ Shizuoka: 600k+ Nagoya: 2mm+
train 1:30hs, €109
flight 1:00hs (+ check in time and baggage pick up), ~$300
driving 3:30hs
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Brussels,+Belgium/Paris,+Fra...
San Francisco - Sacramento (~85 miles):
train: 2:30hs, $33
driving: 1:30hs
Furthermore, the Capitol Corridor doesn't pick you up from SF. You need to commute to the Amtrak station in Richmond.
Bay Area to Sacramento is the farthest distance that can be financial feasible in the Western United States.
A better use of money would be better integrating all of the Bay Area and San Joaquin Valley into a single high frequency system (think ACE on steroids).
It is not so much generically “very intermittent” as optimized for Sacramento to East Bay commuting, with reduced traffic on the extended connection to San Jose, and in the counter-commute direction and off-commute times.
I've literally had to wait for Capitol Corridor trains for an hour because my Bart ride was delayed.
This is why money is better spent integrating the systems at the subregional level instead.
I'm baffled that there are large American airports that have no connectivity to public transport at all. Just improving that would already be significant. That doesn't mean that rail isn't worthwhile to pursue: SF to LA makes sense (mountain ranges are not necessarily relevant, that's the reason it goes the "long way" through the central valley, lack of density in between isn't as relevant because HSR has very infrequent stops in between destinations, having a handful of stops in the central valley would be enough to cater to those low population centers that don't wish to drive the full way), but if when you arrive to LA you have to rent a car to get around, that reduces the benefit or rail.
These are easy. They even both take Clipper.
> money is better spent integrating the systems at the subregional level
Totally agree. Even just making San Francisco better traversed by public transit than car would be a blessing.
Timing is an issue. I'd say 40% of the time I ever took Caltrain, I missed the Bart connection at Millbrae, adding either 25 minutes to the commute, or adding an additional $15-20 dollars.
Also pricing isn't integrated. While they all take Clipper, funds are not coalesced together. I cannot use clipper cash to pay for a caltrain ride and vice versa.
Clipper is like a crappy Oyster knockoff.
You absolutely can use cash on your clipper card to pay for a one way caltrain ride.
Likewise Bart and Muni are integrated in SF. My muni monthly pass includes bart rides in the city.
The Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco to Marin) does, in fact, have sidewalks.
https://www.goldengate.org/bridge/visiting-the-bridge/bikes-...
It’s true there is no pedestrian/bike connection from San Francisco to Oakland, and that seems unlikely to change (the main improvement planned there involves electric ferry service from SF to Treasure Island connecting to the East Span of the Bay Bridge.
https://mtc.ca.gov/planning/transportation/bicycle-pedestria...
> You need a car or to find a bus that will take you to a rail line.
Or you can take a train that takes you to the other rail line (in the East Bay, but then there’s not much rail to connect to in Marin anyway); BART is a thing.
Rail systems work in Europe because European cities have decent local transit/walkability. Rail systems are challenging in the US because the US invested heavily in destroying local transit and walkability for a mixture of reasons (auto industry influence, deliberate attempts at de facto racial segregation, especially in the wake of pressures against de jure segregation, and some other reasons), so once you get somewhere by rail you can’t get anywhere else, unless the train station wastes a whole lot of space – and airports already do, but its less of a burden for them because airports need to be pretty sprawling to start with — having giant parking lots for round trip passengers and rental cars and for access to serve as giant road transport (bus, taxi, rideshare) hubs.
Which is why you can’t just build long-range passenger rail in the US, you have to also build or significantly upgrade local transit networks at the termini and intermediate stops and also deal with the local development patterns in all those places (you don’t have to do it all at once, but if you don’t, you have to accept that you aren’t getting all the benefits until you do.)
And you are going to be fought the whole way by forces that recognize the connections and oppose any part of it, for any of the reasons the status quo exists as it does.
When I travel from Brussels to Berlin (similar to SF to LA), I can pass through Cologne (pop 3.3m), Frankfurt (pop 770k), Hannover (pop 500k), and Hamburg (pop 5.5m).
When I travel from the Bay Area to Greater Los Angeles, I can only pass through Fresno (pop 700k) and Bakersfield (pop 500k)
This is the issue. There isn't enough population between metros in the Western United States to support the financial burden of managing such a system.
If you go by air, first you need to leave the city to go to the airport, hand off your luggage to a stranger with the promise it will be reunited with you, go through dense security, wait an hour for your plane to arrive, funnel through a single door, sit in a tiny cramped seat, then wait for the whole plane to exit through a single door, go find your luggage, then find ground transportation to the city center.
Any trip that involves air travel instantly adds 3 hours to the process. More if you are planning to go to the airport during rush hour.
I show up 30 minutes before boarding at my small American airport. Add 20 minutes for travel to the airport and 45 for getting out and you’re sitting comfortably at 90 minutes + flight time door to door to anywhere in the world.
In Europe, I agree, it was closed to 90 minutes pre and post flight plus travel time to and from the airport.
I show up to JFK about 45 minutes before boarding in the early weekday AM, or, if I have the misfortune of having to check a bag, about 75 minutes before. (Same for SFO, PHX and IAD.) American airports are far more efficient, for frequent fliers, than European ones are for Europeans.
For good measure. They get it right. If you're rich in Europe, take the train.
[0] American Airlines at my small airport, for two early-morning flights to different destinations, had all checked baggage going through one agent whose intervention was required for every. single. bag. even if checked in with a kiosk. Of course there was no way we could get the bags on, so we were going to miss the flight. But we went through TSA (both Global Entry/Precheck) with obviously too-big bags and liquids, and they said "no way that's a carry-on", and we said we were going to have the gate agent check it for us, and they said good luck.
We made the flight.
Bullshit.
I went to school in Boston. To get a one way like that I'd have to book weeks in advanced and it would be in the middle of the night.
I'm on the Amtrak website right now and if I book a one way trip from South Station (boston) to Penn Station (NYC) for today, it is $250 (tbf, it would be a last minute booking). If I book one for weeks in advance, it's still at $40-100.
May 7, 7:50pm-12:15am
$20
[X] Weeks in advance
[ ] Middle of the nightIt's cheaper, and I take it because it's a better experience in a lot of ways, but it's also regularly not full. I've had entire train cars to myself before.
I commute on along the North East Corridor, and if you want a train that'll get you into NY by around 9am or leaves around 5-6pm, you're definitely not getting that for $15 on a weekday.
There is a finite pool of money that can be spent on infrastructure.
Investing on enhancing and integrating the Capitol Corridor, ACE, Caltrains, BART, Muni, and VTA into a unified system has a better RoI than a 400-500mi rail line that will most likely have a train leaving on an hourly cadence.
It's a similar story for Los Angeles and San Diego.
Flights cost around $100-200 for a round trip and take around 3 hours even factoring in security and commute to and from the airport. It would be the same length of time commuting from a railway station to the other, the railway would take 2 additional hours, and the price would be roughly comparable.
> There is a finite pool of money that can be spent on infrastructure.
Exactly. The metric should be passenger-miles, nothing else. That is the most useful metric.
If spending $100B on SF to LA (400mi) impacts 1M passengers per year, then that's 400M passenger-miles, or 250 dollars per pax-mile.
But if spending $5B on (say) SF to SJ (50mi) impacts 1M passengers per year, which is 50M passenger-miles, then it is 100 dollars per pax-mile, a much better tradeoff.
San Jose to SF (Caltrain) has a yearly ridership of 5.5 Million.
Los Angeles to SF has a yearly ridership of 2.2 Million.
I don't think you've ever been to California, or at least haven't had to commute recently.
I live in California, chief. You know what they say about making ASSumptions?
And I was using round numbers to make the calculations easier and the point easier to understand.