Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

Most people don't want trains. Most places where people want trains have them (high density places).

Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities. They benefit everyone, even people with cars.

You have a business trip and need to go from A to B by yourself? Take a train, it frees your brain and the highway for people traveling in groups or with lots of luggage.

Incidentally it also avoids moving 2 tonnes of material for no reason.

>Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities.

If the cities are closer than 600 km. Trains are good for movement inside a typical state, but rarely between states.

You're preaching to the choir but the average person doesn't care.

A passenger train in the USA weighs about 1000 tons, plus another 150 or so tons of locomotive, before we add the passengers (seating 80 per car and about 11 cars for 880 passengers).

That’s about a ton per passenger.

To be fair an EV would be at least two tons per passenger. I guess a 1990s honda civic is still one if the most efficient means of vehicular travel.

It's pretty hard to beat those 90s cars - you could fit five adults in them, and they didn't even weigh 2 tons.

One of the most recent inter-city routes to open, the Borealis service between Chicago and St. Paul, far surpassed expected ridership levels in its first year servicing 212K passengers over a projected 155K [1]. This comes despite the fact the trip would be faster not only by air but also by car. I doubt we'd see this sort of overperformance if "most people don't want trains".

[1]: https://www.news8000.com/news/amtraks-borealis-line-celebrat...

Most people don't want trains.

Care to flesh this out?

I can only find data that contradicts this:

https://railpassengers.org/happening-now/news/releases/new-p...

https://media.amtrak.com/2023/08/data-finds-overwhelming-sup...

Most places where people want trains have them (high density places).

This doesn't address OP's comments. To remind you, they mentioned "cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country". I would grant Amtrak is easy. It's not the other things though...

It’s a chicken or egg problem. Unfortunately, because train travel is slow and expensive, it’s simply less expensive and faster to fly.

If the rail infrastructure was upgraded to allow for faster travel and the costs were lowered, Americans would find them more desirable—-guaranteed.

I'll take the Acela over flying any day. It's cheaper and less of a hassle. Time-to-commute is a wash when you do the airport security theater dance + delayed flights on the tarmac.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com