Amtrak no longer living hand to mouth after being funding-starved for decades | Hacker News Reader

Amtrak no longer living hand to mouth after being funding-starved for decades

fortune.com

31 pointsbovermyer17 comments

Amtrak will never be successful until they can control their scheduling. During my last (and perhaps final) attempt to take the train from Saint Paul, MN to Madison, WI - the train was six hour late arriving in Saint Paul. I could have driven the same distance and arrived at my destination before I even stepped foot on the train to depart.

A lot of it isn't the fault of Amtrak -- freight companies are legally required to pull off and let Amtrak through, unless the train size exceeds the length of the pull off

As a result, the freight companies just make the typical train longer than any pull off on the route, and they no longer have to yield to passenger rail. The downside is passenger rail becomes fantastically late because they always are the ones to pull off

I think longer trains have more to do with operational costs than not wanting to pull onto a siding. That's just a nice bonus for them. Really surprised this wasn't anticipated when they implemented those rules though.

Amtrak just added a new train from Minneapolis to Chicago to fix this exact issue as delays on the Empire Builder tend to be worst in the plains/mountains, so hopefully you can give them another chance: https://www.amtrak.com/borealis-train

Amtrak owns the tracks from DC to New York (and mostly from New York to Boston too). There’s no freight rail anywhere on that corridor, and Amtrak takes priority over most of the passenger rail on those lines. Service on that route still sucks. My wife and I commuted daily on Amtrak from Baltimore to DC/Wilmington and it was horrible. Barely above a developing country in terms of timeliness and reliability.

We traveled on Amtrak for vacation recently, partially as an experiment because neither of us had traveled by train before.

It was a very good experience and we will absolutely use it again. Probably will for our next vacation.

The cars obviously needed some love, and the routes / schedules are limited to the point that it wouldn't really make sense to use for business travel. It was clearly a situation of 'this is a good thing that could be great with some funding'.

Anyway, as a recreational Amtrak user I'm thrilled to see money go their way.

What makes it a good experience? When I look at Amtrak is more expensive than flying, slower than renting a car and driving for the same money.

Ditto. Enjoy traveling and often looking for the best deal, as we care much more about the destination that getting somewhere in luxury. When close enough driving always seems best, after a certain distance flying is cheaper and of course much faster. Every once in a while look at train options to see how the time and cost compare but in my limited lookups, the train was more expensive and often total time longer. The idea of always sounds relaxing.

I don’t know what’s relaxing about a slow commute, unless the trip is getting in a train. Perhaps I come from a place where the train is a utility and not something “weird” one fetishizes as a vacation. I don’t mean this in any negative way whatsoever and I don’t intend this to sound like I’m gate keeping train usage (but I know it may sound like I that).

All this to say, I want to get on the train to get somewhere, not to “experience the train”. Until the train operates as such, regular passengers are not going to choose it.

Amtrak can be fun but service can be highly variable.

A few years ago my wife and I took an Amtrak from Oakland to Chicago with a brief stop in Colorado to visit a hot spring. We weren't impressed with the menu on the first leg of the trip so we bought take-out meals in town before boarding. Boy were we lucky we did - the train didn't get restocked properly and ran out of food a day early. Many onboard got to enjoy some intermittent fasting...

Now I tell people to by all means enjoy Amtrak but always make contingency plans.

Amtrak has not been “funding-starved for decades.” https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=1502. Amtrak is publicly subsidized about the same as the average for Western European rail systems.

“The report estimated operating subsidies over a nine-year period between 1995 and 2003. A report from the European Union, Panorama of European Transport, lists total rail passenger kilometers for 1995, 2000, and 2004. I averaged those and divided them into the average annual subsidies. Converting to miles results in subsidies ranging from 14 cents a passenger mile in the U.K. to 32 cents in Austria. France was 20 cents and the subsidy for nine western European nations as a whole averaged 22 cents. By comparison, Amtrak subsidies, figured the same way, averaged 21 cents per passenger mile.”

Is there a reason the US needs Amtrak at such great cost for the amount of service delivered? Buses seem like a cheaper, faster, and much more flexible option.

Have you tried traveling long distances by both approaches? I have. By train is so much nicer.

Some years back I took the train from San Diego to Santa Fe. First class from San Diego included a glass of wine. On the sleeper from L.A. to Albuquerque I had both a private bed and dining service. Try that in a bus.

I rode RTP to Philadelphia by Amtrak, and Atlanta to Tallahassee by bus. The train has more legroom, better toilets, no need for seat belts, and I could get up to stretch.

For those who get motion sick, a train is much better than a bus.

Intercity bus terminals are increasingly being replaced by roadside stops, making them significantly harder to use. ("The closure of central locations is fueled by high operating costs, government underfunding and a hedge fund buying up and reselling Greyhound's real estate." - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/greyhound-bus-network-in-c... ).

Train stations are much harder to move, or get sold off by hedge funds.

No doubt that current train service is better than bus, but that is including hundreds(?) of dollars of subsidy per ticket. A bus with that type of subsidy would be a luxury coach.

Please remember that car and bus traffic are also already highly subsidized.

Only a small fraction of those roads are toll roads, gas taxes are nowhere near enough to pay for maintenance, the US spends of lot of money keeping the oil supply flowing, the focus on direct subsidies ignore the indirect costs of pollution, or the impact of forcing people out of their houses through eminent domain - roads require more land than rails for the same carrying capacity.

I didn't see any luxury coach service offering a private bed, only lie-flat seats. No showers or family suite either. They seem to compare themselves to first-class airline seats than a train cabin. (To be fair, most people on the Southwest Chief are not in a cabin but in a seat.)

The Southwest Chief carries about an order of magnitude more people than a luxury bus. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Chief ) mentions a 2022 incident with 12 crew and 275 passengers. That's almost 23 passengers per crew member.

Looking at a few sites, a luxury bus has a driver and an attendant for ~25 passengers, so twice the staff, and with 10 bus engines to maintain instead of one locomotive engine.

Amtrak is more subsidized than those other modes: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=18116

“Americans spent an average of 25.0 cents per passenger-mile driving their cars, light trucks, and motorcycles, while highway subsidies averaged 1.1 cents per passenger-mile. Subsidies to highway trucking, incidentally, averaged 0.8 cents per ton-mile. These highway subsidies compare to subsidies of 1.1 cents per passenger-mile to air travelers, 36 cents to Amtrak passengers, and $1.09 to transit riders. Amazingly, air travel is by far the least-expensive mode of travel, costing passengers just 13.8 cents per passenger-mile, while Amtrak fares average 38 cents and transit fares 30 cents per passenger-mile.”

And as I wrote, focusing on transportation cost subsidies like this means leaving out environmental impacts, social impacts, subsidizes for maintaining the flow of oil, and other indirect costs.

Overshadowing all that is a century of deliberate planning decisions to promote car transit over all other forms - something an "antiplanner" should certainly be aware of and against - resulting in a system of land use and transportation policy which is locally optimized for vehicles, and which cannot be easily changed without substantial cost, even if there is a better option.

Do I know the answers? No. What I can say is I much prefer taking the train to taking the bus.

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