Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

jacques_chester

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.

> 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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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