This is a truly dumb article and I'm sorry I wasted time reading it.
Anyone who's familiar with the NYC->BOS Acela route will tell you that both the tracks and artificial speed limitations when going through Westchester suck. When you ride on the train, you can be productive the whole time.
> Anyone who's familiar with the NYC->BOS Acela route will tell you that both the tracks and artificial speed limitations when going through Westchester suck.
If you're from the rest of the world and aren't familiar, maybe this would be a helpful article?
Starting in the 1940s, the USA stopped using passenger transport on trains in favor of automobiles. In the 1950s, a huge highway system was constructed/upgraded in order to make military mobilization effective. No similar program was ever executed for rail systems.
Today, all long-route passenger service is handled by Amtrak, a for-profit corporation which is both a monopoly and subsidized by the Federal government. The only electrified Amtrak rails are in the northeast, running from Washington DC past NYC to New Haven, Connecticut, and then a different electrification scheme from New Haven to Boston, plus a route across half of Pennsylvania. Everywhere else across the country, long-haul rail is strictly diesel.
The person you quoted is talking about the portion of the NYC - Boston route just north of NYC, going through a fairly expensive area called Westchester. It is noted for high incomes and high property taxes. The train tracks are not in good repair and there are too many at-grade road crossings. The result is that Amtrak is chronically late.
> Anyone who's familiar with the NYC->BOS Acela route
And that is literally like almost nobody. I bet less then 1% of anyone living in NYC or Boston metropolitan area have ever ridden on Amtrak, let alone the Acela.
Amtrak is extremely popular in the Northeast Corridor. The Acela has 3,442,188 yearly riders. 10 million Amtrak passengers pass through Penn Station every year. The Northeast Corridor line has 12 million yearly riders.
Your numbers for that station include inter-city rail, commuter rail, and subway lines. My numbers were only for Amtrak (inter-city rail). If everything is included, then Penn Station serves about 600k passengers per day.
Divided by about 200 workdays a year and you end up with about 17,000. Even tripling that as you adjust for things and you probably have less than 25,000 semi-regular riders or better.
That's an odd accounting. Acela isn't commuter rail. I'm sure some people use it for regular commuting, but your numbers seem to suggest that's its primary use. It's not.
If you took the set of people in DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston who had salaries at $100K+ and who also had long-term business/job interests in one of those cities besides their home city (that is, had business travel), I bet ~50% of them have taken the Acela. The people who take the Acela basically run the country, and you can witness the country being run on any given Acela train.
Absolutely. Even though it takes a bit longer, I prefer it to flying precisely because I can work the whole time rather than wait in long lines for TSA pageantry.
Anyone who's familiar with the NYC->BOS Acela route will tell you that both the tracks and artificial speed limitations when going through Westchester suck. When you ride on the train, you can be productive the whole time.