Why can't America have great trains?
nationaljournal.com
nationaljournal.com
Here, privatisation has led to massive cost inefficiencies and logistical nightmares caused by trains and track being operated by independent organisations. It also gives us the more insidious long-term issue that there is no longer a railway working culture, where someone could start as a footplateman and ascend to upper management in the warm embrace of a single national rail company, bringing their invaluable working experience up with them. Nowadays the people at senior levels are more likely to have moved sideways from Sainsbury's and will know sod-all about how to run a railway.
In Silicon Valley, the high-tech capital of the world, a pedestrian suicide (which happens depressingly often, and therefore cannot be considered an unusual event by the transit planners) brings the entire Caltrain network to a halt for two hours. And by "network," I mean the only line the network has.
Maybe there's a difference between local and long distance lines, but the last time I was in England and that happened, they just rounded up everybody who missed their connection and put them a couple of min cabs.
However, if that is – for some reason, e.g. last train late at night or somesuch – not possible, you can well get a voucher for a taxi ride to your destination a few hundred kilometres away.
The original plan was to switch trains once and sleep during the rest of the ride. In the end I was re-routed four times, awake the whole night coordinating said re-routes with the train operators (and getting all the paperwork necessary to get free tickets for the alternate trains). Could've just used the bloody car instead.
I've been to Japan and been a passenger on the Shinkansen, and as the article says, I wept. I'm also well aware of the disconcerting contrast with the totally dysfunctional Amtrak—I've taken the Silver Star from NY to DC many times.
I tell my foreign friends the reason why the most technologically advanced country in the world has a third-world, Soviet-era train system is because Amtrak labour is expensive and incompetent, our government is so deeply in debt that they haven't invested enough in infrastructure for us to have a modern train system, and public transportation is a political football in the US Congress. After all, $117 billion USD isn't chump change. And if we weren't spending $664.84 billion per year on the DOD and military, we'd easily have enough for up to date trains. [1]
Also not helping trains is the fact that more than any other country on Earth, Americans love cars. Not a little. A lot.
This doesn't mean we won't have great trains someday. I hope that day is coming soon, but currently trains don't scale well in the USA.
[1] US military budget for the 2011 fiscal year.
Here's a classic and recent example from someone who commutes on Amtrak out of NYC, the most dense metro region in the USA: https://twitter.com/greg_thornbury/status/610132981571801089
Germany -> Car loving country with a highly efficient railway system, and a well serviced road system as well. So it should be achievable.
Which makes it much more optimal to drive around.
Now if you consider the economical ecosystem that was built around the road traffic, it's no suprise that the train network is having a hard time growing up.
Germany | 137,847 mi^2 (square miles) United States | 3,719,000 mi^2 (square miles)
Paved Roads:
Germany | 400,784 mi United States | 2,674,830 miles
Not sure that's a fair comparison.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/Library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
I live in Montana (tangentially - about the same size as Germany), and if I want to get to the closest population center, I can either ride the bus (yeah, no) or drive. The closest train station is across the state from where I am, and takes 4 hours longer than the drive (or bus) would (not including transit time to the station.
"Montana is ranked 4th in size, but 44th in population and 48th in population density of the 50 United States."
Population density is 2.65 per sq km. Man, that is very sparse. Remind me of outback Australia where traveling distances were measured in "number of beers" drank.
Germany has a highly efficient railway system and the country is so small that I can cross the entire country in a day, and still, I take the car everywhere I go.
I think what some people miss is this: Trains are just worse.
They're slow, not because they don't have a high top speed, but they have to stop so much that their average speed is just worse than a car's. I think there's a couple city pairs (Berlin <-> Frankfurt) where if I was racing a train I would lose by some small margin to one of the non-stop trains, but not by much, and this would only be a true win if on my trip I was going from one city center to another city center, which I'm never doing.
They're still really expensive. Air travel around Germany is always cheaper, and so is the cost of fuel for most cars. You can sometimes find a discount on the train, but those travel at pretty inconvenient times and are quite rare anymore.
They leave only so often. So unlike a car, I can't just set off whenever is convenient for me. I have to find a train that leaves when I want and make sure I get to it on time. So if you live in Frankfurt and want to go visit family outside of Munich for the weekend, leaving after work at 18:00 on a Friday you're going to end up sleeping in a train station in Bavaria overnight as opposed to a car which can continue driving after 12:00 unlike a rural train.
And they never get where I want. For half of the places I regularly travel, when I get there, I need to have someone pick me up with a car or I need to rent a car. There just are no other choices. As densely populated as this country is, it's just still really difficult to get to a huge portion of the country with public transit.
I really find it no wonder the US does not have a decent passenger train system. Every single one of these problems is hugely exacerbated by its sparse population to the point where passenger trains just aren't feasible.
So it follows that the US doesn't have a 'good' passenger train system because there is not such thing.
I think Switzerland comes pretty close to this. Granted, I was only a tourist, but was really nice seeing how you could take a train from Geneva to any of the towns bordering Lake Geneva almost all night long, at pretty good intervals. And they were always on time, at the minute.
You can see this right now around the Washington DC area, where cities and sky rises have been popping up over the last 30 years, centered around individual metro stops.
You build the rail first, and the city builds around that.
Having said that, I love the train because I can much less stressful, I can read, have an engaged conversation etc. Things I can't do while driving the car.
edit: clarity
A 2nd class ICE ticket (without any reductions) is 123€ (1st class is 203€).
Going the 550km (Google Maps estimate) by car will cost 247€ (estimated by the ADAC, the largest German automobile club, for a VW Golf VII).
While you might want to argue that if you drive a lot by car, those costs per km will decrease, the same goes for travelling a lot by train.
But there's two problems with this:
The actual marginal cost of the trip is still 25.4 €, plus let's give it a generous maintenance cost putting it at around 50 €. That's still less than half of the cost of the ICE. Add to this that you now have a car which can carry five people and the costs don't increase at all per person. A trip with 5 people is still going to cost you that 500 € instead of 615 €.
The second problem is that this is when you're buying a new car. Buying a used car would very easily bring your 247 € cost down below that 123 € even with the increase maintenance costs.
Berlin to Frankfurt takes about 4 to 5 hours. For the car, this is time spent driving. For the train, we may have to subtract about 30 mins waiting in Leipzig or Hanover for a connecting train, leaving you with 3.5 to 4.5 hours in the train. At a modest 15€/hour, your car trip is now 77.9 to 92.9€ more expensive than the train journey.
I'm not trying to advocate for the car, (I much prefer train travel - especially on DB) but based purely on costs, it doesn't stack up... BTW, train prices are similarly stacked in the UK, with it rarely being more cost effective to take a train unless the convenience factor is a major part, like going to central London...
Also, cars are FAR more expensive than trains. How much do you pay a month for your car? $800/month? People in spend $116 for unlimited train/bus rides.
The biggest problem with cars, though, is that it requires manual labor to operate. You can't take a nap, or work on the computer, like you can on a train. You basically lose 2 hours a day because you need to drive.
Multiply this by hundred million people, and it becomes an drain on the US economy. That's 200 million man-hours wasted per day.
For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
So the claim that "trains don't scale well in the USA" is false. Trains scale just fine to thousands of kilometres. The distance from Bejing to Hong Kong, which has a rail line capable of more than 300 kph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rail_map_of_China.svg) is just shy of 2000 km as the crow flies, which is more than the distance from NYC to Chicago and a bit less than the distance from NYC to Dallas.
And pointing out that LA is more distant from NYC than that is utterly, completely and totally irrelevant. The distance from NYC to LA has absolutely nothing to do with the inability of Americans to build a high speed rail link between various Eastern and Southern cities, and there is zero plausibility to any claim that NYC and Chicago (or Dallas) aren't commerical hubs of comparable importance to the US as Bejing and Hong Kong are to China.
So we can put that false claim to bed now, and never muddy the discussion with it again.
The more plausible reason is the other one you cite, at least by implication: the American economic and political system, uniquely amongst developed democracies, is unable to muster sufficient collective resources in the form of public or private investment to enable creators to build a fairly straightforward rail network that would serve American economic needs.
The US is not "the most technologically advanced coutry in the world". It is two countries, one of which is technologically advanced, the other of which is backward in almost every respect (and kept that way by policies set by the first.)
Until Americans figure out how to deal with their unique social and political deficits and inabilities they will continue to suffer under stub-standard conditions in almost every respect. They will continue to die earlier, live with higher crime rates, lousy railways, and dramatically lower economic efficiency than that enjoyed by citizens of almost any other advanced nation.
Canada also sucks with respect to passenger rail, and we are generally far better than Americans at solving our collective problems, so there may be more to it than that, but clearly size alone is not the issue, or China wouldn't have the amazing high speed rail network it does.
I define great as it being generally possible to get where I want to go on the train (this is the most important factor) and then as a bonus it's usually competitive with driving, busing, flying, cycling, or walking in terms of comfort, cost, and convenience.
When people praise train travel it is largely long distance.
When people complain it is likely to be commuter lines in and around cities.
BTW, TGV is French...
And the difference is not really that stark as you make it sound. Europe can be big too. While only 8 US states have a higher population density than France, there are 35 US states with a higher population density than Sweden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=List_of_U.S._states_by_popul... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
I've drove coast-to-coast like 10 times. It's bit but not that big when you compare it to East Asia (except if you mean "Japan" by that). The Trans-Siberian railway is 5,500 miles -- for comparison Chicago to LA is less than half that.
Heck, Ukraine to Portugal is the same distance as coast to coast US.
[EDIT] Let's put it this way: both China AND Russia, each by itself, is like 30% larger than the US.
The vast majority of trains in Europe cover short distances in densely populated urban areas of which the US has plenty.
Also, I don't buy the "Americans love cars" argument. Americans have an oddly obsessive relationship with owning cars, but it's definitely not "love". Wester Europeans are in general far more passionate and discerning about cars.
I'm also going to have to say "nope" to your auto comment as well. Western Europeans may have more cars per person, but that's not the same thing as love. We're the country of Tesla Motors and Google self-driving cars. That was what my "not a little, a lot" jibe was about—we are all about ratings, blue books, discernment, reviews, specs, mechanics, all of that. There's a reason the song "Fun, Fun, Fun" by the Beach Boys ("And she'll have fun, fun, fun / Till her daddy takes the T-bird away") is such a cultural touchstone in the States.
The American obsession with cars is different, but there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of "love" involved in the American car culture, at least not since the 50s.
No, Australia is mind bogglingly big. America is big-ish.
1. http://www.aboutaustralia.com/australia-size-compared-to-usa...
Which makes Australia seem really really really big.
Approximately 10% of Australia is habitable, compared to 40% of the US.
http://37propertygroup.com.au/real-estate/population-density...
The US percentage would no doubt be higher without Alaska.
Assuming a dedicated high speed rail line based on highway distances, at the best TGV speeds[1] (173mph, includes start and stop, not just high speed running) that would take approximately 1 hour 20 minutes.
[1] http://www.railwaygazette.com/fileadmin/user_upload/railwayg...
Americans don't love cars.
SOME Americans are forced to buy cars because of the infrastructure they live under, but they don't love them.
Most people prefer to go by rail if they can. Millennials especially.
But especially the costs.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/why-dont...
Since Americans hate cars so much, we have to build an economy without them.
Trains are a good way to do that.
This is the best part of it for me. I spend > 7 hours a week on trains and read so, so many books. People always wonder why I can read so much, and it's because I can ride a train instead of driving.
It requires a huge commitment of continued maintenance and very long term planning.
There is no ribbon cutting or photo op after a maintenance project.
In Switzerland alone the yearly operation of the rial system costs almost a Billion a year plus another 600 Million in maintenance. [1]
[1] https://www.sbb.ch/content/sbb/en/desktop/sbb-konzern/ueber-...
[1] https://www.tcs.ch/de/der-club/politik/strassenfinanzierung....
There are areas of the US where high-speed passenger rail would make sense, and it's a shame that more hasn't been done in that area, but I do think that since the industry was deregulated the market has done a good job of concentrating rail investment on areas where it actually makes sense.
Trains don't make economic sense in a country so widely spread apart with an 150-year-old rail system almost completely dedicated to freight. Especially where right-of-way and planning issues can cause simple interstate highway extensions to take decades and billions of dollars to build out.
I'm not saying we couldn't have high-speed trains if we wanted them. If we wanted, we could probably have all sorts of things. I'm saying that building such things only makes sense if we have some sort of nationwide insecurity complex that we would need to address by riding around in cool-looking trains. We do not.
Creating another construction boondoggle for relatives of connected politicians shouldn't be high on our list of things to do. We have a much better shot at creating entirely new infrastructure grids, like the hyperloop. We should look into creating a few experimental long-distance hyperloops instead of trying to take existing infrastructure (physical, social, and technology infrastructure) and beat on it with a hammer until it looks like we want. This would be even more successful if a company clearly outlined the conditions it would take to succeed and various government bodies could then determine whether they could meet these conditions -- which is pretty much the way Google fiber is rolling out.
That said... trains are expensive. No, EXPENSIVE. Swiss have probably best rail system in the world, with train stations being central point of most towns and villages. Buses are just complementary where putting up rail track would be ridiculous (hardcore mountain areas, desolate places with very few people living). But Suisse is small, and wealthy. Not sure about actual cash flow government -> SBB (rail company), but tickets are expensive like hell. Cost wise even for single person road costs same (albeit sometimes it's faster by car, depends), when more people come, car is much cheaper (and convenient). Never been to japan, so no clue how well known Shinkanzen are integrated with more local transport.
Thanx to freaking unions for steady high prices, but not only them. When moving between densely populated areas, trains compete with planes, not cars (and planes are sometimes much cheaper, sometimes faster, sometimes not). If in future we'll get trains moving steadily over 500 km/h, that would be a proper time saving advantage over longer distances. Airports became such a time and energy drain, with ridiculous and annoying security measures that most probably doesn't work anyway, just hikes the price and takes time.
Let's not forget fragility of rail network, any delay/accident can have massive cascading effect that stretches far across network, much more compared to cars and planes (well, here it's more complicated for those with connecting flights)
Caltrain reinvents the wheel with their control system: http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2013/01/cboss-falls-behind.... That would decrease the cost and time to implement few times.
But this is not to say that we haven’t had absolutely execrable forays with our trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC4.
What I mean to say is that, sometimes, public transit is less something to “figure out” than something to “get right”. We got public transportation right, but we’ve been doing our darndest to fuck it up on multiple occasions.
Also, it's a localized issue. Nobody wants to spend money on transportation until the population density in the area grows to the point where things will break down unless its there.