U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013) | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013)

brookings.edu

57 pointsjsc123122 comments

Having taken Amtrak's rail from Coast to Coast, if you ever want a real vacation (albeit one in a semi-confined area), I highly encourage taking Amtrak to get where you are going. I met several retired couples who basically to get to New Orleans went to New York City, Chicago, California, Texas, and then New Orleans. There are kids on trains but unlike air travel and car travel these kids (and parents alike) understand that they are not trying to get anywhere in a hurry. The general vibe is one of just pondering life. Spending hours in an upper-deck observation car staring at the beautiful or even quite mundane passing landscape can really help you focus. The characters who come to the onboard bar are quite interesting.

If you do decide to do long-haul Amtrak travel, sleeping in the seat is quite difficult - the door opening can wake you, the observation cars so beautiful during the day are absolutely frigid at night. The costs for a sleeper car though are quite expensive (more than air travel for equivalent destination). And yes, freight has priority over commuter on the tracks because freight owns the tracks - so delays in the hours to days are possible.

For some people, it is a bucket list experience. I can honestly say after 5 days on a train - I was in no hurry to get back on (I flew back). I guarantee you will meet interesting people. Two of the most interesting people I met were these two beautiful Latina teenagers who sat for hours working on something hard to figure out. I finally approached them and learned that they were making Sudoku puzzles - by hand...

The wi-fi is so spotty that I don't think you'd have much luck working remote from a train if you required ssh connections.

http://www.trainweb.com/coaststarlight/

I took the Empire Builder from Montana to Chicago when I was in college. It was a 28 or 34 hour ride, depending on which of the two trains you took.

sleeping in the seat is quite difficult Yes, but i ended up learning to sleep anywhere, door opening or not.

But as you say the view from the upper level in the senic car was worth it. I remember the journey through North Dakota next to route US 2. Those days, everyone had one of the mercury-vapor yard lights that would turn on automatically at dark, and you could see them for 10 miles or more. There would be hour-long stretches in which you would see non of these on either side.

Since I got off the train at Shelby, I never went through Glacier Park on the train.

Insofar as a bucket list item, put on there taking a convertible on the Going to the Sun highway. I got to check that one off when going to the Glacier/Waterton international Hamfest with a friend when I was in high school.

Oh, and I didn't worry about wifi, as my travel was done before that was invented.

Yeah bucket list is what I would call any long-distance Amtrak travel. It might be worth doing once just to say you've done it, or to satisfy your curiosity. You'll likely never want to do it again unless you are retired and have zero time pressure to get to your destination. For the average traveler, using precious vacation days from work, it's not a good way to travel unless the travel itself is the point of your vacation.

I traveled from Chicago to Las Vegas on Amtrak. Train was over a full day late arriving, costing me a hotel night that I never got to use, and requiring a replanning of activites once there. There was a certain romanticism to aspects of the trip, but as a practical matter I'll never do it again.

Yeah, I periodically think about taking the California Zephyr or the Empire Builder on the western half-ish of their routes if the stars ever align when I have the time on a route that I would otherwise be flying. And I may someday. But I also strongly suspect that the idea is more romantic than the reality--especially given that I'm far more into hiking and otherwise doing physical activities than sitting and looking at scenery.

Seconded on the meeting interesting people front. I never fail to meet interesting people on long distance Amtrak travel. Friendlier people too. Far more often than on air travel of any sort.

I think a lot of it is that air travel is just a packed can going from point A to point B as fast as possible. Amtrak is not for people in any kind of hurry, it's for people looking for some sort of interesting experience.

I'd have to concur. The "Coast Starlight" route from Oakland to Los Angeles takes you through some stunning scenery, once you're past the Bay Area's industrial zones, winding up very close to the Pacific as you approach Oxnard, where I spotted wild dolphins frolicking.

True, it's not the fastest method - but it's a world more enriching than navigating SFO and LAX!

Better yet, take a train from Shanghai to Urumuqi. It is about a 3 day journey, but incredible. Spring for a hard sleeper at least, though. These are quite economical in China, though still about the same price as flying.

I also took Grey Hound as a kid from the southeast (mississippi) to Seattle...twice. The southern route through Texas, the desert, and up through California, is amazing. So the travelers on the bus are a bit lower class (many were just put on the bus after being released from prison), but they also have many cool stories to tell. Sleeping is a pain though, only do this when you are young. The northern route (through Chicago, then east finally through Montana, which never ends) is less interesting, but still an experience.

Years ago I took Amtrak from Chicago --> Seattle --> SF --> LA --> San Antonio --> Chicago.

It was a great vacation, about 6 weeks long. Awesome scenery.

From this data: almost half of Amtrak's ridership (north of 45%!) occurs on roughly 1000 miles of track, or just 3% of Amtrak's almost 28,000 total miles --- all in the Northeastern US, DC to Boston through NYC and Philly.

Another gigantic bite of Amtrak's ridership comes from short-hop California routes --- particularly LA to San Diego.

The sharp increase in Amtrak ridership that Brookings notice includes the zero riders to 3.3MM riders from the introduction of the Acela service, plus another 2+MM from other Northeast routes, presumably knock-on benefit from the Acela.

Most of Amtrak's route map seems, with this data, to be a pointless waste of money. The "renaissance" is the Acela, and not much more.

I think Amtrak's fans are as big of a problem as its detractors. The romanticism of idyllic long haul routes where nobody is in a hurry is not what Amtrak needs as an organization. The real demand is shuttling people along the northeast corridor, and those travelers don't want idyllic. They want on-time. The money saved by shutting down the long haul routes could go a long way toward the maintenance and repair issues that hold back on-time performance in the northeast corridor.

... or fund a Chicago-MKE-Madison-MSP route, which would actually make sense, unlike Wichita-ABQ and Omaha-Denver.

The money saved by shutting down the long haul routes could go a long way toward the maintenance and repair issues that hold back on-time performance in the northeast corridor.

Amtrak agrees and they've been trying to shut down a lot of those routes for some time now. The problem is that Congress won't allow them to.

I think Amtrak could see the most success by building out to support the cash cow that is the Northeast corridor. That would mean improving service on the Northeast corridor, to improve speeds for Acela, and adding additional higher speed service to connecting cities.

Two good targets for this would be Upstate NY, where you could reduce travel time to Buffalo from 8 hours to 5 hours, and make travel to Chicago and Toronto much less painful. Improving the Philadelphia -- Pittsburgh route would also make a lot of sense too.

Philly to Pittsburgh is longer than DC to NYC, or most of the ridership of the Acela put together, wouldn't serve all that many people, and would be at least a 4.5 hour trip even with the unlikely assumption that you'd get Acela's average speed for the whole trip.

I'm also not sure what building out NE service does to make Chicago more accessible. Chicago is prohibitively far from all of the east coast cities to make NE rail meaningful.

I think you may have misread, improving service along the NYC-Buffalo route, which is part of the route to Chicago, would speed up the trip to Chicago. Shaving off 3 hours, means that someone could get on a train in New York at 6PM, and arrive in Chicago at 9AM, which while for most people isn't competitive with flying, it is a reasonable and comfortable way to make the trip.

No, I understood the subtext; I just don't think a 10+ figure capital expenditure that leaves us with a best-case 15 hour trip from NYC to Chicago is a good use of funds. The person who suggested a high-speed post-security rail route from Penn Station to LaGuardia and JFK had a better idea. The person who called Amtrak SF-LA 12 hour service a "tourist attraction" had the right idea, too: under any imaginable scenario, that's what NYC-Chicago rail would be.

Would that it were otherwise! I live in Chicago and have lots of friends and business associates in NYC. :|

Or you shut down the long haul routes and what support Amtrak has vanishes.

Similar to what tptacek said below, why should a taxpayer in Arizona support a DC-NYC shuttle?

They shouldn't. The DC-NY route generates an operational surplus, and the states along the route should shoulder the capital costs by issuing bonds, they way they do for any other infrastructure project.

So all the federal dollars should come out of supporting it? I guess then we'd learn what the subsidies really are.

The northeast corridor has a major capital expenditure backlog due to years of poor financing, about $21 billion. On an ongoing basis, the required capex is probably about a billion a year, about half of which can be paid by operational surpluses. The rest should be borne by a group of states, the same way NY/NJ/CT maintain the commuter and airport infrastructure in those states.

They probably shouldn't, but the DC-NYC route is Amtrak's most lucrative; it is the Amtrak route that requires the least amount of support from the rest of the country.

This tells me that speed increase made a large difference. Most people drive when it's faster than the train. So, when we get our first high-speed rail in this country, in a densely populated region, it should do well.

Cost is a factor too. I'd love to take Amtrak from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, a trip I make a couple times a year.

But the current Amtrak service is incredibly slow and inconvenient in both timing and destination. I just can't justify it, as much as I'd like to.

So I usually drive, occasionally fly. High speed rail (in 2099 or whenever they actually finish it) would be a nice choice. But if it's several times the cost of driving, not including the car I'd have to rent at the other end anyway, it will be a lot less appealing. The drive isn't that long, and even HSR won't be that much shorter.

I'd be a lot more likely to take HSR to Las Vegas, weirdly. There I don't need a car at the other end.

Prior to today I had seen this anecdotally on the Keystone Corridor. I live outside Harrisburg, PA and have seen traffic increase dramatically once they upgraded the track to Philadelphia to dedicated "high speed" rail (110mph max) with free WiFi. Looking at the map both Harrisburg and Lancaster have seen half a million new riders in the past decade, all bound in the direction of Philadelphia. Unfortunately the Pittsburgh leg is shared with freight traffic and turns a 3.5 hour journey by car into an impractical and relatively expensive 6 hour train ride. There's a plaque in Pittsburgh commemorating the first rail line from Philly in the 1860s which shaved travel time from 7 days to 8 hours and all I thought upon seeing it was what a shame it was that so little has changed since then.

There's a bigger gap between the 75MPH that normal Amtrak trains operate with at peak speed and the 130MPH the Acela does than there is between the Acela and a European high-speed train. Also: high-speed rail is going to go where the Acela already is, and the Acela is already fast enough to be viable and competitive. So, I kind of doubt train technology is going to make a huge difference.

This is incorrect on all accounts.

The Acela doesn't run in California and it doesn't run in Texas.

http://texascentral.com/

Trains in Eurpoe are going to 220mph.

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/take-a-look-at-europe-s-faste...

The average speed between NYC and Boston is something like 79mph. Saying you have a top speed 130mph, and doing it only for a small portion of the trip is quite misleading. At any rate, peak has little meaning. I've been on commuter trains that peaked at 90mph for 5 minutes.

That's the point. Peak speed is really irrelevant on the northeast corridor. The bottleneck is track conditions and tunnel capacity.

Huh? Of course it doesn't: neither Texas nor California have routes that would be economical for an Acela-like service. LA-SD is a single point-to-point route; neither LA nor SD connect economically with any other California city.

I also don't understand your "peak versus average" speed thing. You're comparing apples-oranges, not me: I'm comparing peak-to-peak. Normal Amtrak trains also don't average 75MPH!

You really have to look at the sum of Acela and Northeast Corridor but it was still a substantial increase. The speed increase certainly helped ridership; it's probably worth noting that electrifying north of New Haven (required for Acela) also made the regular regional trains faster because they no longer needed to change engines midway from Boston to New York.

What these speed increases did was they made train travel roughly equal (well, probably within an hour or so) in time to plane for popular routes-BOS to NYP and NYP to points south. And given post-9/11 security, that made the train pretty attractive especially going downtown to downtown. I'd argue though that "faster" isn't an automatic win though. It has to be competitive with air.

The introduction of Acela also created a huge amount of publicity for taking the train rather than the plane

Not quite true. I'd probably be a bit faster door-to-door from where I live in Massachusetts to Manhattan Midtown. But that's, to my way of thinking, an awful drive. I think that's generally the case for a lot of the Northeast corridor routes that many people take. Train doesn't take much longer and they're not remotely pleasant drives.

What higher speed rail could do in the Northeast is make the New England to the Pennsylvania/DC routes more attractive which don't really work for most cases today. But that's sort of a marginal and it doesn't address the more interesting cases where the economics and travel time math don't really work vs. air (e.g. NYC to Chicago).

And yet the Pacific Surfliner loses as much money as the Texas Eagle. I suspect that's because of multiple trains per day on the Surfliner.

I'm not sure, though, that the fact that a route loses money necessarily means that route is a pointless waste of money.

Is it not possible that running a government funded service has value even if it does not produce a profit?

What I'm getting at is that profit probably isn't the best way to measure the value of these routes.

As far as the renaissance, ridership is up considerably on most routes. Even if they aren't profitable, they're certainly serving a lot more people than they were.

> I suspect that's because of multiple trains per day on the Surfliner.

This is a surprisingly common misconception in the United States. For public transport, the top three determinants of ridership are, in order, frequency, frequency and frequency.

As a simple example, here in the equally long-distance-transport benighted state of Australia, there's a shiny train line that goes from central Sydney to the nation's capital Canberra in a bit over 4 hours, which is quite competitive with driving (~3.5 hours pedal to the metal, realistically 5 with Sydney traffic and breaks etc) and flying (45 min in the air, but several hours of hassle to get to the airport, security, waiting around yadda yadda), and the cost of a return ticket is on the same order as the gas to drive back and forth, and around 3-4x cheaper than flying.

Yet I almost never take the train, opting to drive or fly instead. Why? Because there are three (3) trains a day, leaving at 6 AM (nope), 12 noon (meaning you spend the whole workday on the train) and 6 PM (well, this one's semi-decent, although it's past 10 PM by the time it arrives). And should you miss your train for any reason, you're completely screwed.

If, on the other hand, the trains ran hourly, none of this would be a problem: I could pick a time that suits me, instead of having to fit myself to the trains, and missing one would be an inconvenience, not a catastrophe.

And, about that: why does Brookings list a 611MM deficit "on routes traveling over 400 miles"? That conveniently excludes a number of non-profitable routes, including the Surfliner.

I think that threshold was chosen because every route longer than 400 miles is losing money. The longest route with an operating profit is 381 miles.

Great point. Does maintenance of roads have value if it does not produce a profit?

The roads serve vastly more people than Amtrak does.

They could also be completely user-funded, if politicians weren't so squeamish about the gas tax and other user fee-like schemes. (Albeit somewhat unfairly, because folks using "profitable" Massachusetts interstate highways would be subsidizing vastly less-traveled roads in Montana.)

Amtrak, outside the NE corridor[1], could not possibly be purely user-funded. Increasing fares would decrease ridership significantly enough to offset any added revenue. Whatever fare rates would maximize revenue couldn't pay for the system.

[1] And I'm skeptical about this, too: Gas taxes pay for the lion's share of capital expenditures to build and repair our interstate highways. Reports like this about Amtrak's "profitability" are limited to operating costs, which are all you need so long as your tracks and trains last forever.

That's because relatively no one takes trains because they are too slow. There are clearly major population areas where fast trains would be quite popular.

Sure. It's just that very few of them are between the 10 largest US cities:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8713324

Very few train riders are large-city-to-large-city passengers. The most successful train lines may terminate in a large city, but it is the density of the route that matters, not the termini. There are plenty of very successful routes in the world that are between two small cities, or only with 1 large terminus. The LGV Mediternnanee, from a demographic standpoint, isn't much different than a line from Indianapolis to Chicago line, and the Nagano Shinkansen line not much different from a Seattle to Portland line. And yet both of those lines are extremely profitable.

This is mostly due to simple competition...the existence of passenger airliners, regardless of how competitive the train or airline offerings are, reduces market share. I guarantee you that the most profitable ticket sales on California's HSR fairy tale will be between (LA|SF) and (Fresno|Bakersfield|Modesto). Not between LA and SF.

Much of the route map outside of the Northeast has been designed as much for congressional favor as for actual ridership.

Because it's Amtrak's only proper line.

I mean what's the point of running a train between San Francisco (which is actually on the OTHER side of the Bay) to Los Angeles only once a day, taking over 12 Hours!? That's not a real train service. That's a tourist attraction.

It's mostly because, as I noted, taking a train for short trips has become a better option due to the hoopla and bullshit surrounding flying these days.

For long trips though, you're looking at a day of travel vs days of travel. For most people that's not hard to choose between.

My mental model for flight schedules is:

* Add an hour on each side (getting to/through airport, getting from the airport).

* Assume a 2-hour minimum flight no matter what the route.

* Round up to nearest hour.

For routes with a flying time less than 2 hours, I prefer to drive. Amtrak, though, is never an option. My mental model for Amtrak would need to build in the time to complete the trip on a bus.

I note that the profitable lines are on the East coast.

Your choices for intercity travel are:

1. Drive. I hope you like staring at roads and other cars.

2. Fly. I hope you like spending more time getting to, and going through, the airport than you will spend in the air.

3. Take a train. I hope you like having leg room, a view, the ability to do some reading, going from city centre to city centre without fighting traffic, leaving from a train station you arrived at 15 minutes before departure time.

From NYC, I can get to Philadelphia or DC substantially faster by train than by any other method[^]. I can get to Boston sufficiently quickly that flying isn't worth it.

To travel to Toronto by air takes about 5 hours, once you factor in all the stuff that isn't flying. By train, it's about 10 hours. I am tempted, a lot of the time, to take the damn train.

[^] With one whoopee cushion: US rail systems prioritise freight over passenger traffic. You can easily be stuck for 10-30 minutes while several thousand tons of clanking steel crawls past a high speed train. Mind you, they close the airports any time somebody brings in a water bottle or if it's slightly chilly. So.

The situation with flying is a bit more nuanced than you make it out to be. I fly to NYC and DC from Boston pretty regularly for business. With TSA precheck and dedicated security lines for the regional shuttles, it usually takes me 2.5 hours total to make the trip. Of course, that requires driving to the airport and taking a cab once you land at your destination.

These legs are serious business for the airlines that run them, as compared to Amtrak who isn't going to be able to do anything for you if you get stopped due to freight. For example, the flights to these destinations run once an hour. If you show up at the airport before your flight and there is a seat available an earlier flight, the ticketing machine will automatically prompt you to re-book for free. That flexibility is not something you're going to get on a train.

All of that said, for personal travel I usually take Amtrak. Most people can't risk the multi-hour delays that can result from train travel when they are on the clock. But when I'm on vacation, it doesn't matter to me either way and the train is a much more relaxing experience.

This is true in the Boston/NYC/Philly region, but not outside it. I prefer the Acela to a Jetblue NYC-IAD(DC), but the flight is the better call for that route.

It's also only true of the Acela routes. Intercity travel on normal Amtrak trains is awful.

Meh, I regularly take the Adirondack line NYC/Montreal and it's a regular old Amtrak that creaks its way through upstate NY. It's a lovely trip and it beats the hell out of having to trudge through customs. It's 10 hours, but it's also only $190 (or so), and it's far more conducive to working than being in the air.

A plane trip is only three hours in the air, but all said it's probably six to seven hours out of the day given airport time and horsing about at customs. Tack on another $200 in cab fare for round trip rides to airports and I'm paying an extra $300 or more for a far worse experience.

I'm thinking of taking one of those upstate trains for a short holiday next year, simply to watch the countryside roll by.

NYC-Montreal is a 1.5 hour flight.

Which is the least of it. There is anywhere from 1.5 to two hours on either side. And the additional $200 each way, given the distance of the airports from the city center.

I fly to Montreal once a year from Boston and 1.5-2 hours on either side is a gross exaggeration. The Air Canada flights to Montreal have a dedicated security line at BOS and it takes roughly 7 minutes to get through it. I've also never waited more than 45 minutes for customs in Canada. On the way back, US customs take about 20 minutes thanks to automated terminals they have installed.

You don't get to the airport an hour early? It doesn't take you a half hour to drive to the airport and park? No idea, I've never flown out of Boston, maybe Logan's closer to town than JFK is in NY. I'm just saying, because from my place in Manhattan getting to Penn is literally a five minute shot up 6th Ave.

From the equivalent location in Boston (Beacon Hill) your a 15 minute or less Uber ride away from the gate at BOS. For flights that have dedicated security lines or if I get pre-check I'd leave downtown Boston 1 hour and 15 minutes before takeoff. I've only been bitten by this once in the last few years, in which case you can find an airline employee to get you through the security line ASAP.

However, even if you want to get to the airport early, it's not like that time is wasted. These days I would say relaxing in the airport is just as nice as relaxing in a train car: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/nyregion/improving-ground-.... The last time I was at LGA early I had a huge table to myself and the person I was with, and the table had an iPad I could use to order food and drinks.

Uh, it does not cost $200 to get from Manhattan to LGA. It doesn't cost $100 to get from Manhattan to LGA, there and back. It's even cheaper if you fly from EWR; you can just take the train from Penn Station.

$50 each way to JFK or LGA.

$50 each way from YUL to wherever.

The Northeast regional between DC and NYC is only marginally slower than Acela (3.5 hours). Schlepping out to JFK or La Guardia from Manhattan is so traumatic it's no contest even on the slower regional train.

> This is true in the Boston/NYC/Philly region, but not outside it.

Yep. Large, closely-spaced cities, relatively fast trains, less stressful than flying. Under those conditions trains come out looking pretty good.

That's why I think it's profitable on those lines and not elsewhere.

Careful. It's not "large, closely-spaced cities"; it's the Acela. There are Amtrak routes between large, nearby cities you don't want to take.

For example, Chicago <-> St. Louis, which I know from painful personal experience during undergrad. Ask me about the time we were 14 hours late on a 6 hour train ride. After two or three roundtrips I switched to flying.

Illinois is upgrading that route to 110mph, and is supposed to be making some signal and bypass improvements that will increase on-time performance as well. Will be interesting to see if it does. http://www.idothsr.org/

Is this the patio11 who lives in Japan with the Shinkansen complaining about about how slow the trains are in the US? I think the point of the conversation is that we already know that it's bad, but no one seems to want to fix the problem.

The USA is not Japan.

Others have already pointed out that our geography is different. But that might not even be the real problem.

I am a fan of trains, but I live in Arlington, Massachusetts, which is not on Boston's rail-transit network, even though the Red Line subway terminates within half a mile of our town line, with a conspicuously available right-of-way leading straight from there to our town center. Isn't that odd?

I was sad to learn that Arlington used to have streetcars. They went through town and extended at least three towns further out. They were torn out in 1955.

I was even sadder to learn that a Red Line train station in Arlington was explicitly planned back in the 1980s, but...

That plan had been supported by the Town of Lexington, but was scuttled by fierce anti-urban sentiment in parts of Arlington.

This quote from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(MBTA) ) matches what I've heard from local residents, though it's a bit more diplomatically phrased.

So I've got a hypothesis: The USA's once-excellent rail network was deliberately taken apart in response to (ahem) "fierce anti-urban sentiment", a political force that remains strong. Consider this article from last week:

http://www.newgeography.com/content/004788-voting-with-your-...

The most recent “solution” was for the city of Lancaster to propose shutting down its MetroLink rail station in order to prevent lower income people from traveling in from other parts of Los Angeles County.

If you want to "fix the problem" of connecting US cities and towns via rail, your first challenge is to convince the cities and towns to stop openly sabotaging your "fix".

(Corollary to my hypothesis: In the USA, rail proposals of the last twenty years have focused on long-distance, high-speed express intercity travel because such routes don't stop in the suburbs, and therefore don't disturb suburban voters in their splendid isolation. Of course, by focusing on long-distance point-to-point travel, rail throws away most of its advantages relative to flying.)

Nobody wants to fix the problem because the problem is so expensive to fix that it does not appear to make sense to bother.

You've lost me.

By Australian standards, the US Eastern seaboard is absolutely stuffed to the gills with major cities which are basically next to each other.

The point is that Amtrak is not really viable on the non-Acela routes. You could build viable train service (for many billions of dollars), but it does not exist today. When people talk about how great Amtrak is on the east coast, they mean that the Acela is really great.

FYI

Spain has the second biggest high speed train network of the world, with over 3.000 km (many more kilometers being built), just after China.

This 2014, 28M people will have traveled by train, compared to 31.2M in USA in 2012. The goal is to reach 56M in a few years. After many years where the prices were expensive, we have started to liberalize it and prices have go down. Now it's reasonable cheap. You can buy one-way tickets for 30€ for a 1h30 route (like 4h by car). Madrid-Barcelona is one of the most demanding routes and flights can't compete with the high speed train. In just a few years, people have moved from using flights to most of them using the train. It's way way more comfortable.

Of course, the key question is geography. Trains works best for a distance less than 1.000km. In Spain that's the distance from east to west or south to north. In USA there are some areas that make a lot of sense like Boston-NY-Philly-Washington; and California.

In the UK, we tend to look enviously at our continental neighbours such as Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands who we pereceive to have fast, modern, reliable and cheap rail travel. All things that we tend not to have in the UK (especially the cheap bit).

One interesting fact I discovered a while ago that greatly surprised me: the percentage of public transport usage (as the main mode of travel) is higher in the UK than in Germany, France and the Netherlands. This finding came from a survey funded by the European Commission in 2010/2011.

  Country and % whose main mode of travel is public transport
  Czech Republic 37%
  Spain 30%
  UK 22%
  France 20%
  Germany 15%
  Ireland 14%
  Finland 13%
  Denmark 12%
  Netherlands 11%

The full list of countries is in the report (see page 8): http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_312_en.pdf

The UK has a higher share for public transport than the Netherlands in large part because the Netherlands has a higher share of people who use no mechanized transport at all: 34% of Dutch either bike or walk as their main mode of travel, compared to about half as large a proportion of Britons (16%), according to the source you linked.

Here's the ordering (same countries, same source) if you take transit+walking+biking together:

    Czech Republic 60%
    Spain          46%
    Netherlands    45%
    UK             37%
    Denmark        35%
    Germany        35%
    Finland        35%
    France         32%
    Ireland        30%

The UK still does pretty well, admittedly. I think the reputation for bad trains in the UK is mostly intercity trains, whereas these "main mode of travel" statistics are more about commuting, which is a different set of concerns; the London Underground alone accounts for a very large number of commuters.

(Denmark, by contrast, doesn't look anywhere near as good as its reputation in these kinds of figures. In large part because its reputation is built specifically on Copenhagen, the most visible city by a good margin. Jutland, which has about half of the Danish population, is a sprawling, car-centric collection of towns and suburbs.)

I really don't think the Spanish AVE is something to be proud of. The only purpose of building most of the lines was political. And well, because with big projects many politicians can get rich.

The total cost of the AVE has been estimated in over 50 trillion euro, and in some lines they don't even get 100 passengers a day.

Probably, public transportation doesn't need to be build taking only into account the short-term economic profit, but in Spain they just burnt a massive amount of taxpayers' money in a useless infrastructure. And Spaniards will struggle for decades to pay the dept... if they manage to pay it at all.

To bring an outsider's perspective to this discussion, I'm kind of shocked by how low all those numbers are, even with 200% growth and whatnot. Amtrak is offering service on lines that get under 40k passengers a year. By comparison, the Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka has 391k passengers a day, meaning it also racks up the entire Acela corridor's yearly numbers in a week.

I just looked at one of those routes under 40k passengers, the Hoosier State.

Wikipedia has an interesting fact, that there's a 2008 law that requires intercity routes under 750 miles to have their costs covered by the affected states by 2013.

1. That changes almost every discussion in this thread, and really the economics of Amtrak as a whole.

2. The route brings in about $850k a year but costs $3M.

Obviously at this point I need to read up on this law that changed the short route train funding. (Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act)

Edit - It looks like it's more about "cost-sharing" of various types. Still, that does change things.

Amtrak's budget justification for 2014 is interesting. Particularly the graph showing the decrease in operational defecits. http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/851/32/AmtrakFY14-Budget-Request...

It's interesting we're talking about so much money between questionably useful routes. In areas not well-served by rail, it might make more sense to put spend that money on express subway lines to the airport and more efficient security processes.

I'd never come across the term "ridership" before. What a wonderful word!

I note that Google says it's a North American term (in Australia and England this would probably be termed "patronage") but I may start using it. It has a Samuel Clemensy feel to it, although dictionary.reference.com dates it to 1962.[1]

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ridership

Train travel is for the most part impractical because it's so slow -- passenger traffic takes a back seat to freight.

I've had a notion that we should nationalize the rail lines and invest in having it handle more passenger (and freight) traffic safely. The lines could be opened to other passenger service (hello, Virgin) and some competition could be had in that space.

Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route, simply because of the distances involved, even assuming the train runs the top operational speed of the Shanghai Maglev for the entire route.

(Chicago isn't what's important; substitute Minneapolis, St. Louis, or Indianapolis; the point is: trains can't efficiently get you from any coast to or from the midwest, or for that matter from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California).

The problem is geography, not freight traffic.

Don't be too sure of those long-distance travel routes.

Air travel is reliant on cheap and abundant petroleum. And in the U.S., peak aviation fuel has come and gone. Departures and total passenger miles are both above that level, as more efficient aircraft and higher load factors are rolled out, but peak aviation fuel was reached in 2000 -- that's nearly 15 years ago. The 2000 FAA RITA estimate for 2012 fuel use was 52% higher than actual consumption.

http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecast...

Petroleum supplies past 2020 are going to be increasingly volatile (US EIA projects fracked oil extraction to peak by then). The airline industry is scared, and doesn't seem to have a good plan going forward (Boeing's "biggest breakthrough there is" is quite disapointing).

Rail travel can be electrified, which liberates it from dependence on any specific fuel source.

At 120 mph average speed (allowing for station stops), the 2,000 mile trip from Chicago to the West Coast would be 16 hours 40 minutes. A 4pm departure would have you arriving at about 7am the next morning for east-west travel, 11 am for west-east. Higher speeds are possible, though stops and dwell tend to reduce this. I see high-speed long-distance rail as viable.

The question is how long the present energy/fuel economy can sustain itself.

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_...

Why are you providing trips that are 1000 miles rather than ones that are less than 500 or 600 miles? Everyone already knows that jets are better for 1000 mile trips.

los angeles to san francisco 400 miles

los angeles to san diego 150 miles

NYC to Philadelphia 92 miles

NYC to Boston 220 miles

NYC to Washington DC 226 miles

chicago to St Louis 260 miles

dallas to houston 240 miles

dallas to austin 200 miles

austin to houston 170 miles

tampa to orlando 85 miles

miami to orlando 235 miles

Because most of the economically important trips in the US are more than 600 miles apart, except for the part of the country that is already well-served by rail?

To which trips are you referring? Do you have any data to support your statement? I created a quick list of cities where high-speed rail should fit the distance metric.

Why, yes. I do have data. Thank you for asking.

The top 10 cities in the US by GDP are, in order:

* New York

* Los Angeles

* Chicago

* Washington D.C.

* Houston

* Dallas

* Philadelphia

* San Francisco

* Boston

* Atlanta

Here, for your reading pleasure, are the ground travel distances between all of those cities:

    New York
     	Los Angeles		2475
     	Chicago			790
     	Washington D.C.		226 **
     	Houston			1416
     	Dallas			1389
     	Philadelphia		94 **
     	San Francisco		2907
     	Boston			215 **
     	Atlanta			750
    Los Angeles
     	Chicago			1745
     	Washington D.C.		2288
     	Houston			1379
     	Dallas			1235
     	Philadelphia		2401
     	San Francisco		380
     	Boston			2611
     	Atlanta			1947
    Chicago
     	Washington D.C.		696
     	Houston			1083
     	Dallas			924
     	Philadelphia		759
     	San Francisco		2130
     	Boston			983
     	Atlanta			716
    Washington D.C.
     	Houston			1400
     	Dallas			1328
     	Philadelphia		136 **
     	San Francisco		2816
     	Boston			437 **
     	Atlanta			639
    Houston
     	Dallas			239 
     	Philadelphia		1544
     	San Francisco		1927
     	Boston			1848	
     	Atlanta			792
    Dallas
     	Philadelphia		1464
     	San Francisco		1726
     	Boston			1791
     	Atlanta			781
    Philadelphia
     	San Francisco		2876
     	Boston			307 **
     	Atlanta			783 
    San Francisco
     	Boston			3099
     	Atlanta			2472
    Boston
     	Atlanta			1099

I have, I hope helpfully, starred the sub-700-mile routes that are already served by the Acela.

The average ground distance between these cities is (wait for it) 1,356 miles.

Later

You edited your comment upthread to include specific routes.

My response --- apart from wondering why taxpayers in Arizona should fund a rail linkage to Orlando, the 30th biggest economy in the country, to Tampa, the 27th --- is to suggest that adding Florida to this graph would not improve the average cost of the edges.

what does the average distance have to do with anything? Build between the cities where the distance makes sense. looks like there are several options. What about other population centers? Why is the gdp your criteria? Tampa and Orlando and Miami wouldn't make your list.

I said:

most of the economically important trips in the US are more than 600 miles apart, except for the part of the country that is already well-served by rail

You disputed this and asked for data.

I provided data.

If you would like to change the argument to "most of the important theme parks in the US are poorly connected to second-tier Florida cities by rail", I will happily concede that point. :)

In the graph of the 45 trips between top-10 US cities, only two --- LA to SF, and Houston to Dallas --- fall under your "less than 700 mile" criteria. Just 4% of the most economically important trips not already served by the Acela are amenable to rail transit.

Once again: most of the economically important trips in the US are more than 600 miles apart, except for the part of the country that is already well-served by rail.

Incidentally: if you think "top 10" is unfair as a threshold, consider that the 11th city would be Seattle, and the 12th Miami. The average would go up if we included them.

The average distance is irrelevant. Do the distance and population warrant the high-speed train service? Are there lots of flights between any two of these cities?

The population of Spain is 50 million, for example. They've made high-speed rail work effectively.

That's why my data is based on the top US cities by GDP. You can also find the busiest domestic airport pairs to back the analysis up. Oddly, the busiest air route in the US is NYC-Miami --- which is not amenable to rail travel.

I'm simply trying to identify the markets where HSR would work. For some reason, you identify as the critical factor. Then you identify NYC to Miami as the busiest air route, and Miami isn't on your gdp list. So, perhaps we only need one city from the list to another highly populated city?

At any rate, we've both identified a handful of US cities that meet both our criteria. Shouldn't we agree that's where to start building?

So, look: you've lost the context of the thread a little. Skim from the top:

* Someone commented that freight right of ways were impeding passenger rail in the US.

* I said geography had more to do with rail's status in the US than freight.

* You asked, "why are you talking about trips of 1000 miles or more"?

* I said "because those are the most economically important trips in the US".

* You said "no".

* I said, voluminously and conclusively, "yes".

Now you seem to think I'm opposed to SF-LA high speed rail. I am not, nor have I said that I am.

Where rail makes sense, it makes sense. If there's a cost effective way to get passenger rail rights of way from SF to LA, we should do that. We should get 200mph service from Chicago to MSP and to STL. We should get 200mph service from Houston to Dallas.

But even after we do that, rail is going to be a second-tier mode in the US, far surpassed by air, which will through economies of scale also be cost-competitive with HSR even in places where HSR is viable. The tactical routes we're talking about, the under-700-mile routes, will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to deploy, and will probably never recoup their costs or meaningfully change patterns of transportation in the US. HSR between SF and LA isn't going to make SF-NYC any less economically important, and SWA alone is going to remain more important to the economy than Amtrak.

Shit, I think I talked myself out of Chicago-MSP a little there.

Miami is popular as an air route because it's the hub to South and Central America.

I think it's safe to say it wouldn't be a rail hub to those regions. :-)

It's also irrelevant. NYC-Miami is a popular air route. Tampa-Miami is not. The inclusion of Miami in the list I gave upthread would, as I said, make the numbers worse for his argument.

Under your hypothetical, I'd certainly take the train on some of those routes. The Shanghai Maglev's top operational speed is 268 mph. Chicago–Houston is a little over 1000 miles, so that'd make the trip 4 hours, pretty competitive with a plane (the flight is a little under 3 hours, or about 5 if you want city center to city center).

Of course that hypothetical is exceedingly unlikely. But TGV-style speeds would be fine on the route, too; I'd take it if it were a 6- or 7-hour trip, if the cost were reasonable. I think the reasonable-cost part is a bigger barrier than any technical feasibility, since the economics are unlikely to work out.

A plane would crush a 6-7-hour train ride, both in travel time and in cost.

Most Rail stations are in downtown areas. Most large airports are outside of cities. If you're going downtown to downtown you get the driving, parking, security and waiting time back.

Air travel may still be better in a pure $ and time basis, but for people like myself looking for a more comfortable travel experience than air, I would still take rail for a few $ more and a little extra time.

Hey, I'd rather spend the time I spend in airports and airplanes in the Acela. I'll probably never fly between two Acela-connected cities. I have a strong preference for trains.

That doesn't mean a massive investment in rail is a good plan for the US, or, for that matter, that Brookings is right that we're in the middle of a rail renaissance.

I think the authors of the study are in agreement with you. They've specifically structured their analysis to point out that despite the growing passenger traffic, it is only a small handful of short routes that don't lose money.

I think the best use of taxpayer money would be improving the airport experience.

The high speed rail initiatives suggested cost many billions of dollars per city served. Suppose that, instead, we spent those billions to remake our airports.

For instance, imagine moving the "terminal" to the city center, with a high speed rail line (inside security) that takes you directly to the runway. There must be some way to use a billion dollars for significantly faster baggage service, and another billion for faster security.

Hopefully this would cut a lot of time from the average flight. Airports would get much smaller because people wouldn't be waiting around in them.

It wouldn't crush it in travel time, but yes likely so in cost. Travel time is realistically 5 hours right now by plane, if everything goes well, often 6+ when it doesn't (which is about half the time, because IAH-ORD on-time performance sucks). I'd definitely take a high-speed train if it existed and somehow managed to not be a bazillion dollars, which admittedly means I never will.

If planes have to account for delays, so do trains: the on-time performance of the Acela is comparable.

Yeah, even with dedicated lines, there's no way Amtrak could ever compete on a time basis with air travel over long distances. Just a matter of distance and speed.

Where the freight is a problem is on the predictability of Amtrak schedules. Delays for freight can throw off long distance Amtrak by many hours, which can make it hard to plan for your arrival.

Freight makes better use of rail infrastructure than passenger transit does. Freight should monopolize the rails; that's the allocation that does the most good for the most people.

I disagree with this assessment.

The distance from Chicago to Houston is roughly 1100 miles. Non-stop flights from O'Hare to Houston Hobby are listed on Kayak.com at 2 hours and 45 minutes. Add approx. 1 hour for pre-flight check-in, security and an average delay factor (it's O'Hare after all). That's a 3 hour and 45 minute trip time. We could add post-flight transportation from the airport to where you actually want to be and probably add another hour, but let's ignore that detail.

In 2007, the French TGV set a speed record on conventional track of 357 mph. The unconventional track (maglev) record belongs to the Japanese SCMaglev and is 368 mph [0]. These were set under very experimental conditions, but if it were possible to realize equivalent speeds in a practical setting (perhaps via underground tunnels), the train trip from Chicago to Houston would require only 3 hours(!).

But let's assume the above is impossible in real operating conditions. French TGV passenger routes regularly attain speeds of 200mph. This makes our Houston trip a little under 5 1/2 hours. That strikes me as quite efficient.

I'm not an expert, but given the deplorable state of American infrastructure, especially rail, implementation of a system like this would most likely require starting from scratch. As such, equivalence of the French TGV seems very attainable.

More likely, new innovation would lead to performance improvements over their system, which was conceived in the 1970s. Is 300mph attainable? I don't know, but it seems like a reasonable goal. That brings our Houston trip to roughly the equivalent of a flight, when including pre-flight check-in procedures. Of course, trains are safer, less energy and infrastructure intensive and a lot more pleasant.

All of this without mentioning the fact that SCNF, the operator of the French TGV, achieved a $1.75 billion operating profit in 2007.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehi...

Amtrak issued a report saying that SNCF and other European rail companies only report "profits" because they have higher public subsidies which are unaccounted for.

http://www.amtrakoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/E-08-02...

Of course Amtrak would issue such a report...

Did you read the report, or is that innuendo? The report makes actual arguments about the structure of the public financing that European trains get. Refute one of them.

The top operating speed of the TGV is in the neighborhood of 230MPH, isn't it?

If you can cost-effectively deploy rail that averages 300MPH, rail becomes more attractive. But the average speed of the Shanghai Maglev is 155MPH. It's nothing close to 300MPH.

It is extraordinarily unlikely that any train using current technology is going to average 200MPH between Chicago and Houston. Even with TGV-comparable trains, the trip from Chicago to Houston will take 8+ (heh) hours --- and that presumes an expenditure of public resources unparalleled in the last 50 years... all to get to a place where it would still be still be irrational not to take one of the many tens of airliner trips between those two cities every day.

Unattributed, but per Wikipedia: "In mid-2011, scheduled TGV trains operated at the highest speeds in conventional train service in the world,[citation needed] regularly reaching 320 km/h (200 mph) on the LGV Est, LGV Rhin-Rhône and the LGV Méditerranée." [0] You're right, though, that this is different than average speed.

Still, 300 mph would be a stretch goal for sure, but it doesn't seem ridiculous if you're starting from scratch today. The Shanghai system was built over a decade ago. At minimum, automated computer controls should be significantly improved.

I'm also operating with the assumption that the budget for such a project would be unlimited, since it's just a thought exercise.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV

Again: average speed. Peak doesn't matter. Your stretch goal doubles the average speed of one of the fastest trains in the world, running on a route built from scratch to accommodate it.

I'm thinking boldly here. The French are able to peak at 200-230mph on operating trains running on conventional track. The Japanese and Chinese can push Maglevs up to 360+ mph. As a "disruptive" technology, 300 mph seems like it's attainable or at least worth considering.

It may require new approaches. It would be a monumental engineering effort. It would probably ensure full employment for a decade or more. But I don't think it's any more ridiculous than, say, sending a manned mission to Mars.

What you're describing is a Hyperloop, not a high speed rail.

Fair enough.

It's pretty silly to compare the average speed of the Shanghai Maglev. It's like a 7 minute trip with 1 minute at top speed. There's several, traditional HSR, routes in china with faster average speeds.

The Paris-Lyon TGV averages 140MPH. Wuhan-Guangzhou managed to average 195, but was reduced to 186. Beijing-Tianjin 146. Japan has 130-145MPH. So:

* None of these average speeds would make Chicago-Houston competitive with air. Even if you add the hour on both ends for the air trip, the fastest train in China operating above the Chinese speed limit still loses to Southwest Airlines.

* None of these average speeds make a 300MPH average speed train any more realistic.

You're a funny guy. An hour ago you were quoting peak speeds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8712943

Once again: I was comparing the peak speed of one rail line to that of another. Read in context. This snark doesn't even make sense on this part of the thread.

>Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route

When the weather is good.

In the post-winter-break rush the last few years, air traffic on the East Coast went down for a few days and was backed up for several more. The only New Yorkers who made it back to school in time were the ones who got seats on the Lake Shore Limited.

When air traffic is functioning smoothly, it's faster, but in a serious winter storm/holiday travel fiasco, ~24 hours on a train beats ~1 week of delays for a flight.

Come on. Like nobody has a horror story about an Amtrak train stopping in the middle of a route, having to disembark from the train, and wait half a day for the bus that comes to finish the trip?

It's shame. In the West (Denver) where I live service is terrible. There are always huge delays due to freight priority, as you mention, and other issues.

My wife and I are considering visiting her family with our infant son in the Bay Area for Christmas. We don't want to drive and don't really want to fly either.

From Denver to Martinez is $526 for coach and $787 for a sleeper, which is a totally reasonable price. But it's 32+ hours, which is insane. And that's before factoring in the massive delays.

It they could get this down to under 20 hours I would purchase this in a heartbeat. 1200 miles + 80 mph (no idea how fast the train goes but this seems reasonable for 2014) + 3 hours of stops (seems realistic) = 18 hours.

Before the lines are opened to competition I think Amtrak should be given a chance to operate with dedicated passenger lines. If it cannot succeed at that, then open it up to competitors, or break them up and sell the routes to new companies.

We did the Martinez to Denver route about 10 years ago. I really really want to love the train and for it to be successful but we were 22 hours late arriving. Some of it was weather but we had a train car lose it's suspension near Truckee, then due to that delay the crew went "dead" due to their hours and we literally had to stop for a couple of hours in the middle of Nevada while the next crew came to us. After that we got moving and made some decent time but then a freight train had issues ahead of us so we sat somewhere in Colorado for a few hours waiting. To top it all off, the woman in the sleeper next to us ran out of extra oxygen because she wasn't expecting to be at higher elevation that long and without access to more oxygen supplies and so we had to wait for an ambulance to come.

We flew back.

Some of this was Amtrak's fault, some of this was not. If the food were better and the trains a little more modern we wouldn't have minded as much but even then spending 22 hours extra on that route is just not going to work for much of anyone. But with all the moving parts it takes to get right for a train to come in on some semblance of a schedule I just don't see how it will ever be anything but a niche product for long haul routes.

> But with all the moving parts it takes to get right for a train to come in on some semblance of a schedule I just don't see how it will ever be anything but a niche product for long haul routes.

I think this is mostly an American problem. In some other countries, trains run in schedule just fine.

I was only talking about Amtrak and the US in my comment. I'm not sure why you felt I thought it applied to anywhere else.

Standard high speed trains in the UK run at 125mph, but that’s pretty slow compared to countries with shinkansen type trains (e.g. Japan, Germany’s ICE, France’s TGV etc) that regularly hit 200+mph.

From what I remember talking to the METRA conductors in the Chicago area, max speed on standard tracks in the USA is 78 mph under the best of conditions. This is often lower due to traffic, or condition of the track or road bed.

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