It's worth pointing out that the intent of transportation infrastructure isn't to turn a profit, but to be a potent multiplier for economic gains in other segments of the economy.
There's barely a road in the entire country that's turned a profit (gas and vehicle registration taxes don't come close to covering road construction costs, and of course most roads aren't tolled), yet we still rightly consider roads as being worth it. We should treat our rail, transit, and other transportation infrastructure similarly. Expecting a profit is completely missing the point, but doing so is a nice bonus.
Nobody is expecting Amtrak to turn a real profit. Even when Amtrak breaks even in operating costs, Congress still pays all capital costs. Amtrak got a $1.8 billion subsidy in 2018.
The real issue is how much we’re paying in subsidies compared to how much we’re paying in subsidies for other forms of transportation, and perhaps what other people are paying in subsidies for the same kinds of transport.
Highways get about $75 billion in subsidies (what’s not covered by gas tax). A lot more than Amtrak for sure. But highways carried over 3 trillion passenger miles last year. Amtrak was just 6.3 billion. We spent 50x as much on highways as Amtrak, but got 500x as much mileage out of those highways.
(You can throw in pollution externalities, etc., but even if you use current carbon recapture methods to suck out CO2 from driving, and ignore the fact that Amtrak’s mainly east coast operations are not powered by renewables, driving still comes out ahead.)
This country has been reconfigured to force almost everyone to drive. Comparing the two on that basis is not fair. Finally, the full cost of car dependence beyond just pollution which is a big one is not bourne by the government but by drivers, just look at the car insurance industry.
Including pedestrians, cyclists and all other forms of transportation that become much more dangerous due to how many cars there are on the road.
Imagine how many people would be biking, riding electric scooters and walking if US cities were actually designed with these modes of transportation in mind.
The good news is that the tide can shift. If you add more bike lanes, people start riding their bikes. People don't like to bike because it's (rightly) perceived as dangerous.
I ride in LA and if you can get a bike lane at all, it's gonna be a faded strip painted 2 feet from the parked cars/along the sewer grates. There needs to be more separation from the batshit drivers here who wouldn't shrug at a hit and run too. Not very inviting, but I can bike all year at least.
I no longer think that bike lanes will get the job done.
Long ago, when I was working in western Tennessee, I noticed that, in that area, the painted bike lanes were almost always on arterial roads. I even found one that was on a stretch of controlled access highway. Asked a colleague who worked for TDOT about that, and it turns out that you could get extra federal money for roads with bike lanes. So of course, the counties would put the bike lanes on the roads that cost the most to maintain, not the ones that made sense for bicycles.
Outside of a few major cities, I suspect that's invariably how bike lanes are going to end up working in the US.
What you could get people on board behind, though, is traffic calming measures. Bill it as fighting back against the hordes of Waze drivers blasting through your neighborhood as a shortcut, and you might be able to get some political momentum behind it. That would then get you to roads that could support mixed traffic without half-assing it by painting cyclists into a thin ghetto full of potholes and broken glass.
And then pair it with movements to get some questions about how to share the road with bicyclists onto the written driving test, so that drivers at least know how to share the road with cyclists. Right now, nobody's telling them, so they genuinely don't know. Even here in Chicago, I've had surprisingly many water cooler conversations where I had to correct a complaining car commuter who thought that it was illegal for all these bikes to be in the road and that they're supposed to stay on the sidewalk.
> how to share the road with bicyclists onto the written driving test, so that drivers at least know how to share the road with cyclists.
That's one of the reasons why the "Share the road" sign is being phased out in favor of the "bikes may use full lane sign".
The proper way to share a lane is in serial fashion, not parallel. This is because lanes are rarely wide enough for a car or truck to pass a cyclist with sufficient distance between the two while both remain within the lane itself.
In fact, many state laws that specify that cyclists must ride as far right as practicable actually have the substandard width lane exception (described above) to that requirement.
The very concept of "traffic calming" is a lie. It's cause for road rage, distraction from watching for pedestrians, slamming brakes, and loud hard-revving engines.
One day when I had reduced ride height due to a tire issue, a "traffic calming" device cracked my oil pan. That was just great for the environment. I leaked carcinogenic used oil all along the way, and then had to get the oil pan replaced. The creation of that new oil pan involved industrial activity that surely was not good for the environment.
Bike lanes are fine on arterial roads if they are separated from traffic well enough. In santa monica they actually give a little room in the bike lane. Arterials get you to places more directly than side streets, that inevitably have to cross 6 lanes of an arterial from a stop sign. Good luck putting a light there without protest.
While that is true, motorcycles are cheaper than cars, but you don't see the majority of people riding motorcycles. Protection from the elements and the ability to carry more cargo is the reason why most people drive cars as opposed to riding bicycles or motorcycles.
Motorcycles are more hassle than both bikes and cars (licensing, attire, helmets) and a WAAAAAAAY more dangerous (about 40 times as likely to die per mile was the figure in the California Motorcycle Safety Course, if memory serves). They're also a pretty big expense since for most people they won't replace a car, and you still need to insure/maintain a motorcycle.
I'm very pro-motorcycle but bicycles have a much lower barrier to entry.
I'll grant you that a car is more convenient for carrying cargo. But with a bike trailer, a bicycle can pretty easily handle most people's cargo requirements—anything from groceries to large appliances like refrigerators. Check out some of these bicycle trailer plans: https://bikecart.pedalpeople.coop
The cargo argument comes up all the time. No, you don't need to buy a truck for the trip to a hardware store. I know some people do, but they often visit the hardware store every day, the majority of people don't. Yet everyone drives a truck up in Montana, I mean so do I, but it was $800 and I can maintain it myself since I bike primarily.
> If you add more bike lanes, people start riding their bikes.
Which may be true, but they encourage cyclists to ride at the edge instead of the middle of the general traffic lane. A motorist not paying attention is going to notice an edge riding cyclist later than they would if they were in the center of the general traffic lane.
> People don't like to bike because it's (rightly) perceived as dangerous.
Not really. Assuming one is riding a bicycle in traffic that's not moving at more than 40 mph, it's not that dangerous at all.
> There needs to be more separation from the batshit drivers here who wouldn't shrug at a hit and run too.
That's a problem with law enforcement, not a problem with the road design. Also, separation doesn't work when there are frequent intersections. It makes more sense to build bike lanes along side arterial roads where traffic is moving in excess of 40 mph and intersections are no more frequent than once every mile or so. On city streets with traffic moving at 0 to 30 mph, it makes far more sense to ride in the center of the general traffic lane while following the rules of the road.
Those inter-city highways are heavily used by people commuting through metropolitan areas. For example the only way to drive from the second largest city (San Francisco) to the third largest city (Oakland) in the Bay Area is over an interstate highway.
Reconfigured from what? I live in the West and most of the communities out here were never served by rail. You either got there by foot or by animal. It seems like car is just an upgraded version of walking or animal-pulled wagons.
Kind of hard to refute this with such blurry phrasing, but many cities in Western U.S. had functioning rail systems in the early 1900s. L.A. had over 1,000 miles of rail, for example. San Francisco, Denver, Phoenix, and many others had pretty extensive streetcar systems as well.
Portland used to be very well-served by an extensive trolley system, as well. This was also removed as city commuting turned to cars and gas-powered buses:
Why do you assume cross country is the only way to drive? Most driving occurs to and from cities for commute and within cities. You can have cars for "cross country" driving and also eliminate the vastly inefficient "driving" in cities by improving our virtually non existent public transportation(compared to other first world countries) options.
> reconfigured from streetcars and buses and trolleys and trains in cities
The real sweet spot for Amtrak are trips between 50 and 200 miles. Within a city, subways / light rail are a better option. Longer than that and air travel starts to look better. Many cities also have regional trains that serve the areas between 10 and 50 miles outside the city.
This is how every city in Europe works. There are only a handful of cities in the US with a well-developed rail network -- and most of those are crumbling due to half a century of under-investment.
With high speed rail, the kind that other countries have plenty of, the sweet spot for rail would extend much farther than 200 miles. Tokyo <-> Kyoto, for example, is around 300 miles and is solidly still within the range of rail being a much better option than flying.
We can argue the exact distance, but it is details. His point is correct: rail makes sense for cities that are not very far apart. Rail trips across continents doesn't make sense (except as tourism).
Especially when the full costs of it don't have to be paid right now. Most car dependent places in the US don't enough money to actually repair all of the roads and infrastructure that they have built out. Also, most places there is no option but to drive because of zoning practices effectively banning mixed use. Suburbs from the mid 20th century on are all designed for cars and cars alone. Giant consolidated schools are put far away instead of the traditional smaller schools closer to where people live so kids have to be driven by bus or by parents. It was not always this way but it has indeed been forced by a design choice in how suburbs are laid out.
I guess it depends on where you live (hence the downvoting), but even in a place like NYC, I imagine managing small children on the subway would be pretty challenging.
I live in Brooklyn in NYC and I purchased a car when we were expecting. It is impossible to take a baby on public transit to most places. Buses are not equipped for strollers. Train stations are crowded and inaccessible to strollers. It takes a lot of physical energy to move a child through public transit. Our family, friends, the doctor, babysitter, and schools are not all walking distance and not all at expensive real estate near the train. Having a vehicle is empowering for my family and most like it.
Although I'm all in favor of cars, taking just one baby on public transit isn't much different from going by yourself on public transit. The trick is a sling. Don't even buy a stroller. There are several types of slings for babies. You can use one with a padded pocket and strap, one with fancy parts, a big long strip of cloth, or even just a folded bed sheet with a knot behind your shoulder.
I think the discussion is more focussing on is that 'flexibilty and convenience' from the car based on the fact we have designed and allocated our cities, suburbs and town in the way we have already.. Not so much, well this tool is right for the job, more a question of, did we make this job that requires a tool.
If you were the only person with a car, then all cities are more flexible and convenient with a car than without. It is only when somebody other than you has a car that you get gridlock and the other problems of cars.
If the kindergarten is on a subway/bus stop, it's really not an issue. How do you think we can get more public transport near schools? Hint: fund public transit more than roads. Instead of driving your kid to school, you just take them with you on the subway/bus.
One year in the black? I guess Trump actually got some good people in there, eh?
Outside of the Eastern Seaboard, has anyone ever attempted to book a rail trip? It's insane. You have to really work at it and you are losing a ton of time, have overnight "connections" and other odd problems. Furthermore, nearly all the train stations of any size are in the ghetto. The whole system has not kept up with the times. And while there is still some romantic notion of "riding the rails" it quickly gets subsumed by the price, which is also ridiculous.
Unfortunately there is no other way to 'configure' a mass affluence society (where most people live in separate homes usually having ample plots). We don't have that awful level of car dependence in Europe, true - but we also force most people to live in apartment blocks similar to those which you can see only in slums in the U.S.
The most expensive and desirable locations in the U.S. are mostly apartments/condos, not single family detached homes. Take New York or San Francisco for example -- hardly slums by most measures (yes there is homelessness, but that's partly a byproduct of just how high the cost of living is).
There's nothing about affluence that requires single family detached homes, that's just a fantasy that's been marketed to us for the past hundred years, and at a huge cost in terms of walkability, time/money/land wasted on traffic and parking, traffic fatalities, etc.
Single family detached homes go for $2,000,000 in San Francisco. The condos are less, generally, so I think that says that the most expensive and desirable locations in the U.S. are mostly single family detached homes.
Expensive and desirable locations - sure, but we are speaking of mass society, of everyone - everyone in the U.S. is dependent on cars, not just people in "expensive and desirable locations". These actually have less of that dependence.
This idea have been marketed and for a good reason, it was good way to save U.S. population from Soviet nuclear threat - in a way Coomies could neither counter, nor replicate on their side - when Commies launch their nukes, it's much better if most people find themselves in separate houses with large tracts of land and little combustible materials, and good basements to protect from fallout, and in a few days, can emerge from there and drive their cars in whichever direction civil defense points as safer.
If you need to evacuate everyone at once, sure. But they would evacuate gradually over many days from ~4 days to ~2 weeks from the attack, basically as soon as they will become desperate running out of drinkable water (something a house with a heater tank in the attic is also a good thing for).
No public infrastructure will work for that - bus drivers will quickly die of radiation sickness or just refuse to do their work, but for one, one-way trip to save your own ass it's okay.
Essentially, this is why suburbanisation come to being: war planners realized exactly the thing you are pointing out: that evacuating people in a crisis - while the Soviet bombers will be flying (it was before ICBMs) was an impractical idea, it will kill more people than it will save; but what works instead, is to evacuate people in advance: just make them live far from city centers which can be attacked. And redline the city centers: let only people you don't care about surviving, live there.
In 1950s Soviet Union, "workers and peasants" lived in villages and suburbs, these were replaceable anyway and killing them had little benefit. Difficult to replace cadres - engineers, most qualified workers, high ranking military, Party officials and such - lived in posh Stalinist apartments in city centers, and would perish inevitably. In 1950s U.S., it was already other way around. Soviet Union could do nothing about that: they simply couldn't afford an individual house, and thus inevitably, individual car, for everyone - they still can't. It was a clear win and moved a balance in the Cold War a great lot in U.S. favor.
One thing to realize here, it will best of all work if U.S. attacked first - then they choose the timing and attack in late evening in the U.S. when everyone is at home already, are warned, and don't leave their houses in the morning to avoid being caught in road panic, and have some hours to prepare for the Commie attack such as letting go of any combustibles, covering car so it doesn't suck fallout particles in, and stocking water and if possible, food.
Pripyat had 53,000 people evacuated by bus in one hour.
Hurricane evacuations even a week in advance are horrible by car. Highway infrastructure simply cannot cope with large movements of people in one direction.
A mobile and well-resourced population is a cornerstone of US disaster planning. When a hurricane is comming and an evacuation order given, the assumption is that most americans can drive themselves.
Mass transit is cool, but evacuating an entire modern city on busses isnt viable. (Inter-city rail connections cannot be scaled up in such times.)
Makes no sense. You can’t evacuate a full city on cars. It would get clogged all the way. You would want to use the entire bus system. Don’t know why you say it’s not viable, you can scale up passenger/meters much more with buses.
No you can't. The problem is we don't have enough buses to do that. Every mass bus system large enough to have significant people on the bus works on the model of the bus running all day with a large number of people who use it. That is it goes in full, heads back out, and picks up more people before heading back in.
In the evacuation model those buses drive out a day full, and then need to drive a day to get back before they can pick up more people. It just doesn't work. No transit system has enough buses.
That is before we point out that if you have anywhere near that many people served you probably have some rail systems that cannot operate outside their lines (third rail power or overhead electric)
Cars have the advantage of there are enough of them. Note that in most evacuation situations the cars are full. (the roads don't have the capacity, but the cars do)
It is much easier to stage extra buses near areas that will need rapid evacuation then it is to scale up road infrastructure. There is a fixed limit on howany people can be moved by car out of major metropolitan areas, conversely, most major metropolitan areas are with 12 hours drive of other major metropolitan bus areas which means that well staged buses could easily arrive to rapidly scale evacuation speed. Finally, as car based evacuation reaches it's limit, the rate dramatically decreases, there is no such issue with buses.
It is more complicated than just moving people. Anyone traveling by bus isnt bringing stuff with them. They need shelter. The US evacuation model assumes most people will bring enough with them in thier cars to be self-sustaining for a period of days. The assumption is tgat 90+% of people wont need government help... due to thier independant mobility of people and stuff.
See the recent evac of fort mcmurray canada. That was all cars for hundreds of miles. No hope for busses there.
The "car" evacuation plan seemed to have verged on failure in Fort McMurray. People didn't have enough gas and the roads were clogged. The 25,000 people who fled north ran short of supplies quickly.
So the assumption that "90% of people won't need government help" clearly failed to hold true for this relatively small evacuation of 88k people.
There are logistical issues to be improved on, but if (big if) we learn from experience we can solve them.
The fact remains, most people who are told to evacuate by car will pack their suitcases and enough spending cash so that they can live on their own once they get out. The majority will end up sleeping on the floor of friends/relatives, so once you get them out of danger you don't think about them again. All that is required is enough warning that they can pack (if you don't have this much warning nothing can work anyway), and enough fuel (accounting for gridlock!) along the way.
Government needs to deal with the small number of people who cannot care for themselves, but the vast majority of people can be self sufficient, and having their personal car makes them more self sufficient.
> Government needs to deal with the small number of people who cannot care for themselves, but the vast majority of people can be self sufficient, and having their personal car makes them more self sufficient.
More 25% is not a small number. A car only helps if people can actually get out. A mass evacuation by car of LA, San Francisco, Seattle or NY would fail utterly. Any place that already has significant traffic issues during rush hour (the sorts of places where buses are needed) would face massive drops in the evacuation rate due to gridlock and the areas that they would be evacuating through would rapidly run out of supplies (as happened with Fort McMurray with only 88k people being evacuated).
What are you suggesting exactly? I don't quite grasp your point
We shouldn't use bus when they are available for evacuation? Why? If we can get all the bus to be used + add bus from other cities nearby, why should we prevent people from using them? This is scaling much better and people with cars are free to leave with their own cars.
"Cars have the advantage of there are enough of them."
--Surely not the case in many urban cities.
I'm suggesting that all the buses in the city, are not enough to make a significant dent in the evacuation needs. This would be the case even if all transit in the city was by bus (no train/subway, and no private cars - obviously this is unrealistic).
New Orleans had huge numbers of school buses. They went unused and were destroyed by flooding.
You might demand that the government not be incompetent, but the reality is that government will screw up badly. Individuals with cars can screw up, but the effects are limited to the people screwing up.
The disaster planning argument is a huge red herring. I've yet to see my home city evacuated like you're saying for any reason. Whereas I've spent the last 17 years driving around everywhere for lack of any other options. So it seems to me like disaster planning is something we would have time to think about even if my city replaced all of our cars with trains and buses. So it just doesn't seem very important.
Yet, in the U.S. they mostly achieved that. 60% of the population live in separate houses. And yes, living space per capita is 2x-3x the EU level. Would be a no problem at all to put 100% in them, if some didn't live in large cities where it's impossible.
Just the economic and yeah, transportation infrastructure we have in Europe won't support that. It's not even the population density really.
Having lived in the US I know what it means to have "mostly achieved that". Gridlocked highways, unwalkable neighborhoods, the requirement of owning and driving a car (at least one car per family, usually 2 or more), and catastrophic CO2 emissions, both from cars, and from the fact that heating free-standing houses is way more expensive than heating apartments that share walls/floors/ceilings.
Until we invent teleportation, putting everyone in their own separate house is unsustainable.
It's hard to see that perspective when you have never seen it. It's funny because I would think that for someone with some knowledge of IT could understand the argument that it just doesn't scale.
For most people, the ideal life is having your yard and be able to drive everywhere with enough lanes on the street to be sure you never hit traffic. Except that ideal situation rarely exists, all the roads are clogged (induced demand!) and having a large house for every person means a big desirable city to work can't scale. Even LA has understood they couldn't keep building highways and needed to densify, it just doesn't scale.
Having lived in a European city I was appalled of how bad the air quality was, how noisy the streets were, how annoying trash collection at 5am was, I had to use a wet mop on the hardwood floor almost on a daily basis to and it was black every day. I had to walk a half a mile to a tiny parklet, always packed with kids as it was the only location in the play. Every morning on the packed subway and street buses. It was awful, I couldn't wait to get back home.
Back home I live in a green environment, trees everywhere, I got my lawn, there are no fences, I forget to close my garage door at night no problem, nothing is ever missing ... I use a wet mop every other week and it is never dirty.
Do you know what generates the CO2 emissions? All that useless junk we buy shipped from all corners of the world. The fix is buying less junk not blaming on someone that happens to want to live in a green environment.
The funny thing is that this has all been measured. Shipping emissions are nowhere near what they are for personal vehicle transportation. On top of that, all suburbs still require shipping in an even more unsustainable way (you need a truck to go around the neighbourhood for hours instead of having a single truck that can fulfill a single condo tower).
I know it's hard to be criticized for your lifestyle, but please do your research, suburbans lifestyle is nowhere near sustainable. That's not anecdata, that's data.
Honestly, it is not so obviously better to have hundreds of tiny stores in each neighborhood, stocked every day rather than going out doing grocery shopping once(!) a week! I am sure there is a tradeoff there - the many delivery trucks suffocating the same space they are supposed to serve.
I don't actually live in the suburbs, just a small town that looks like a suburb, and I also lived in European style cities hence I understand the attractiveness of a suburb. It is a different lifestyle and you can't "fix" the suburbs with the wrong kind of arguments - "you my friend suck for wanting to live there" Find a suburb looking place in Europe and check the prices ... now think about it, do Europeans assign value to that?
The vast majority of cities do not even remotely look like some of the elite and lucky European cities that are built on the many advantages they got from (not looking for a flamewar here) but exploiting other nations (the behavior is in the past, but the advantages remain and accumulate), all I am saying is that it cannot be a model for <insert eastern european city here>.
If anything the clean, quiet, well kept European city is non-sustainable and non-replicate-able as a global model. We need to fix the problems of the suburbs but not by imposing a model that cannot work.
I know this might be a tangent, but separate houses has caused HUGE housing problems. Wealthy homeowners refuse to give up their single family homes near large cities where that space should house 30 families.
I will throw in here that apartments in Germany I have seen or lived in are mostly nicer and have better construction quality than apartment complexes in even nice and high priced US regions (E.g., Texas, California). Hardly slums.
A counterargument is that both highways and trains benefit from economies of scale. If you gave highways 1.8 billion in subsidies and Amtrak 75 billion, I would expect the miles per dollar of subsidy to look substantially better for Amtrak than they do now, and worse for roads.
That said, I suspect we overinvest in both subsidies because of romantic ideas and status quo bias.
I’m sorry, but are you seriously suggesting that we over invest in rail/Amtrak? Public transit is far more capable of commuting more people in a shorter period of time than roads.
What we really need is far more subsidies in urban and dense suburban areas. The problem is that with our bifurcated political system in the US the people who make up less than 50% of the population outside the cities will block investment in the cities because they will feel like they’re not getting equal investment.
Have you ever actually taken Amtrak? Outside of the North East Corridor (which, at 125mph max is still glacial by EUropean standards) Amtrak is way slower than driving - and that's assuming it directly connects to where you want to go, which, against, outside of the North East, it doesn't.
This did not used to be the case. The mid-century expansion of the highway system coincided with massive disinvestment in the rail system, which had carried the country out of international backwater-dom. Many of this country's small and medium-sized towns would not exist without the now-defunct, often-demolished train stations that they used to be built around or nearby (including my hometown).
AmTrak is primarily slower because all commercial freight has priority on the pitiful amount of track we have in the US (the NW/West coast routes are what I know best) so passenger trains have to regularly sit around waiting for freight traffic to pass. Other than that, travel times are about equal to cars, which is pretty amazing given how awful our rail infrastructure is.
I think everyone has heard this claim from Amtrak. Anyone who has actually caught Amtrak has seen the gigantic inefficiency’s (the ridiculous boarding process, ancient trains). I’ve been stuck behind freight traffic on Amtrak, but only after we were already running late and had stopped for random “signaling” issues.
If Amtrak want to prove it’s the freight traffic causing the slowness they should quantify how many otherwise ontime routes are delayed by freight.
I have ridden a fairly large amount of Amtrak. I have never seen the boarding process cause a delay. I find the boarding process to be much preferable to airplanes.
"Signaling issues" usually means traffic and sometimes means under-invested infrastructure. There is no question that the slowness of Amtrak is directly related to underinvestment.
>I have ridden a fairly large amount of Amtrak. I have never seen the boarding process cause a delay. I find the boarding process to be much preferable to airplanes.
Same here. I frequently ride between Boston and New York.
In New York, I've seen over 200+ people leave the train and another 200+ board the train, especially on Sunday evenings. The whole process takes < 15 minutes.
Boarding is heaven compared to flying. No security theater, no ridiculous parking issues. I used to ride from Rhode Island to DC, and I could literally arrive 10 minutes before my departure time, grab my bags, lock my car, walk 100 feet to the platform, and still make the train. The trip took most of the day, but now that cell service is no longer an issue, it's possible to spend the entire ride relaxing or getting work done.
And I can't believe no one has talked about how much better the seating is than any other form of long distance travel in the US.
I recently traveled from BOS<->NYC for business. I left my office an hour before scheduled departure and walked 30 minutes to Penn Station. A slightly different experience than getting to Newark/La Guardia/JFK. As a bonus, I was returning on short notice, so I was able to easily change to an earlier train 10 minutes before it departed, with no extra fee.
At the end of the return trip, I overheard a group of four other travelers saying that they got so much work done, they should just ride the train back and forth every day.
Seat and ride comfort are totally different as well. To me, it's well worth trading in some time for a much better travel experience. I've had a year where I logged close to 50k air miles in coach and over 10k train miles in coach, so I've seen the good and bad of both modes of travel (on and off the NEC for the trains).
For the long distance trains, I consider the time it takes to travel one of the benefits. In today's highly connected, highly active world, I find having 24 hours to simply look out the window and be alone with my thoughts to be incredibly rejuvenating.
Signals on the lines are also owned and maintained by freight railroads, because outside the NEC literally the only thing Amtrak owns is the trains themselves.
Wait in a central waiting hall until the train arrives, at which time a big screen shows what platform the train is on. Then you and everyone else rush to be first to get to the single escalator going down to the platform.
A conductor checks your ticket at the top of the escalator. That's how it works in NY. It's also approximately how it works in China, unfortunately (though their stations put Penn Station to shame in almost every other way).
That’s because there isn’t room on the platforms under Penn Station. And it’s very common in Europe not to announce the platform until 10 minutes or so before. What Amtrak could do though is have actual reserved seats on their all reserved trains.
It depends on where you are in Europe. In Germany and Switzerland, the platform is announced up to a year in advance, and you can go and wait there for your train. Sometimes you can even buy a coffee directly on the platform while you're waiting.
49 U.S. Code § 24308 says "Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing unless the Board orders otherwise under this subsection" [0]
In practicality, I agree with you that freight lines abuse this without consequence.
Ha, I never knew! Thank you for the citation. I have taken hundreds if train rides from Portland to Seattle, and sat waiting for freight trains to pass, or for a passenger train that was late due to freight traffic, nearly as many times.
Agreed - I used to take NY to Baltimore a few times a month. Typically I had a few co workers with me. So let’s do the math: if we shared a car and left at 8:30, we’d spend .. what $30 in tolls round trip? Another $50 in gas..one of us would drive and the other two could take calls or work on their computer. If we took Amtrak, we’d have to add an extra half hour to get the station and park, each one of us would spend $150 in round trip tickets, another $20 each in parking, etc and we’d be shushed the whole way down so calls were out and half the time the internet didn’t work. If it’s just one person going alone, I can see the case because you can actually focus on work... but ironically the more people in your party the worse the benefit of rail gets.
I've done the NYC to DC train numerous times. Penn Station (no parking, take the subway), hop onto the Acela, grab a 4 top. Now me and my coworkers can chat on the way to DC and work on our laptops with shoddy WiFi. There's no shushing unless you are in the quiet car, which you shouldn't do if you are expecting to have a working commute. This is much better than a car - can't work on your laptop unless you enjoy motion sickness. Or taking a flight - now you have real costs of time because of security and commute. Big fan of Amtrak in the NE corridor. Better than driving or flying for business trips.
There is more productivity by having four coworkers sit together on a train and travel together than to have people in a car. Psychologically it’s easier for most to work on a train then a car, even if it’s a perfectly fine medium for you. Those time and financial costs are minimal when compared to the productivity you create by working together uninterrupted on the train.
If I were a manager I would ban driving and insist on trains (if the work would benefit from the added collaboration)
This has been my frustration in Ontario trying to use VIA for family trips. Once you have two adults and a couple kids, the train is significantly more expensive than just driving, and only faster than the absolute worst case traffic conditions.
It's even worse for long-haul. I have family along the Canadian route (Toronto -> Vancouver), and taking the overnight sleeper train out there is about 4x the cost of flying.
Yeah long haul on Amtrak also has this annoying feature where connecting trains are often 1 day apart because the connecting train left an hour before the arriving train gets there. And forget about the cost. I’m about to fly to the west coast on frontier for $75/RT... go price that on Amtrak.. I’m guessing $400-$600 ... and easily 4-5 days of travel. We’ve also looked into NY to Orlando because you can bring your car... you might as well buy a car down there! I get the romance of rail travel - I’ve done Chicago to Minneapolis and LA to Santa Barbara.. it’s beautiful. But wildly impractical.
Well and in some ways the branding for it even leans into that, with promotions more akin to what you'd expect from a cruise line than from a transportation company.
I mean, maybe that's just the obvious path given what they're working with in terms of cost structure, but it's still annoying.
You're discounting the San Diego - Los Angeles Pacific Surfliner route. It connects many cities in Southern California and is often faster than driving with traffic congestion as it is, and a useful commuter rail in its own right.
Unless your final destination is Union Station, downtown San Diego or some other place that happens to be very proximate to the various stations in between, using the Surfliner still requires you to use another form of transport like ridesharing to get where you’re going.
Southern California is very spread out and still organized around private automobiles.
As someone who’s lived in LA for 4 years now without a car, I think it’s a trap that we’ve all fallen into to assume SoCal was fundamentally designed exclusively for the car. While, yes, automobiles have dominated the regional planning conversation from the 1960s up until very recently (LA and neighboring cities are finally taking public transit planning seriously), up until the 50s Los Angeles had one of the world’s largest streetcar and interurban train systems in the world. The city was, quite literally, built by and for transit — even its far-flung suburbs, like the town of Huntington Beach or Claremont, were built and developed as terminuses to train lines (and the train line to Claremont, on the very eastern edge of LA County, still exists in the form of the MetroLink).
There’s been some serious sprawl since then, yes, but at its heart Los Angeles is a city that is conducive — not contradictory — to public transit. And I think our planning decisions will only get more effective once we, as a region, realize that.
Union Station in LA directly connects to several subway, light rail, and commuter rail lines. There are lots of places it's still not convenient to get to, but it's way better than it was 20 years ago, and at least a few million people live within the area that's easy to connect. For example you can easily get to/from Pasadena or Hollywood.
And on the San Diego end, Santa Fe depot connects to all 3 light rail lines as well as most of the major bus routes in the city. Once the Blue Line extension opens in 2021, you'll be able to get off Amtrak at Old Town and be in the center of the UCSD campus in 15 minutes.
San Diegans tend to have a bit of a defeatist attitude toward transit, and there are plenty of suburban areas where transit is bad, but there are also many places where transit is a reasonable option.
Also, not to mention SANDAG is proposing to drastically expand the existing public transit system with commuter rail and other modes of transit along major commuting corridors, even going so far as to divert funds historically used for (with, we can say now, disappointing results) highway expansion.
I took the train from Dearborn, MI to Chicago in 2010, figuring I could work on the train and use the additional two hours of travel time versus the 4 hours and change driving.
It took 10 hours. Could've gone to Chicago, turned around and headed home, and still had time to grab dinner. That was enough to turn me off to long-distance train travel. All these years later I'm curious again, but still very dubious.
There are some short-line commuter rails that are absolutely worth it. Some of them are even run by Amtrak. That does not outweigh the general statement, but I do want to point out that rail is not a universal failure in the US.
We have high speed airplanes. Why not make airports and the TSA theater better instead? Airplanes don’t require maintaining thousands of miles of track — or buying up land to put it on. Capitol-centric countries like France do well with trains because Paris is the center of the country in terms of commerce and population, but the US has much lower population density. Who really wants to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles other than tourists? If we cite China as a counter example, one ought not forget that most trains in China are slow and the population doesn’t have much money. Long distance trains are a 19th century affliction. We should be looking up and not down.
Who really wants to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles other than tourists?
Pretty much no one. But Chicago to St. Louis? Or Chicago to Minneapolis? Or Charlotte to Atlanta? Or Dallas to Houston? Or LA to San Francisco? Etc/etc? Lots of people. That's here high-speed rail investment helps. High-speed planes are fine, until it snows in Chicago, or thunderstorms in Atlanta, or high winds in Denver and then the whole national air system gets screwed up. Alternatives are good.
There are certainly city pairs where it would make sense, if the rail lines were to be built for free by some genie.
But if you add up all the people who want to travel between Chicago and St Louis in a year, and then multiply by the hour-ish that they might be able to save by catching a high speed train instead of driving, and then divide by the tens of billions that such a railway line would cost to build and maintain, then... is it really a sensible use of funds per man-hour saved?
How many hours are spent stuck in traffic? How much loss is that to society.
Perhaps people would start moving closer along the rail lines, now that frees up land from sprawl. Etc. The same rail line could carry goods (fewer trucks on the road). The rail line could be electrified, now pollution will be down and so on.
Billions of dollars is not all that expensive. The US is a rich country. First time realized this when I saw a small town with 30K population easily built a new high school for 150 million USD - compared to that, the "billions" does not sound all that big if it reconfigures the economy at that extent.
Yes. Because each one going in one car, specially in a american's very popular gas wasting cars is not only super ineffective in terms of energy and costs per trip but also extremely bad for the environment.
Also, you make a good high speed railway, and the demand will appear. In my coutry also nobody used the train, untill they were modernized, suddenly the word started to spread that it was nice, and now too many people ride the trains and we need more.
Air travel contributes greatly to climate change. When we are talking about High-speed rail in the US, no one is really talking about cross country trips like Chicago to LA. They are talking about regional trips like LA to SF or DC to NYC. Ideas like maglev or even the hyperloop are what I consider to be "looking up"
Used to take the train from Orlando to South Florida (Ft Lauderdale) it cost as much as me driving but me not driving is a convenience I appreciated. It takes 3 hours to drive. It takes Amtrak on a good day 6 hours to get me there. On one holiday date I took 12 hours.
Generally cheaper than the train. Might or might not be faster depending on how many stops they have to make where you don't want to be. (they have to leave the freeway and travel to their stop which can eat a lot of time going places you don't care to be) Also depends on specific conditions of traffic, though in most cases the bus can detour around problems easier than the train.
Just noting that every time I'm stuck crawling down 80 from SFO to Sacramento I regret not being on the lovely, quick, and pleasant Capital Corridor which zips from San Jose to Sacramento and joins BART at Richmond and Oakland.
Even in the Northeast corridor, Amtrak is often no faster than driving. Acela between NY and Boston is about 3.5 hours, which is barely faster than driving.
Those cities are "grappling" with problems of their own creation by decades of NIMBY zoning and investment policy. We should have more and better rail infrastructure but part of that in terms of commute is insuring that the stations service enough patrons to justify building them. Low density sprawl quarter acre stick houses dotting miles of windy lane and a half road without sidewalk connected by 4 lane boulevards are ill fit to benefit from a rail station even just a few miles away. The opponents of urban development would just decry such projects as wastes of money when ridership doesn't compare well to European and Asian contemporaries because everything beyond the station is so poorly planned.
The solution to the urban housing crisis was, continues to be, and will be until its done the building of more housing. A lot more. Density, at every price. Without mandated parking, without vertical clearance limits, without per-unit size limits, without the ability for NIMBYs to stall out or shut down expansion efforts for their own personal gain. Nothing else will cure the ailment - all else is just treating the wound.
Your part of the country may be different, but the major cities (typically rail hubs) in mine have fairly dense towns at regular intervals along the tracks leading out of the city.
Unfortunately, for the past century the larger cities have been steadily sucking their population and talent away. Hub and spoke rail systems are an excellent way to revitalize these towns and encourage population balancing.
Because not everyone wants to live in a Singaporean econobox.
Traditionally, the limitation on this has been weakness / corruption of local government vs the major freight railroads.
Amtrak, with proper Congressional support, could play an interesting part in reopening existing rail to passenger traffic.
Not sure why you think rail cannot service suburbs. I grew up 20 miles outside of Chicago in the suburbs and and we had a train station in the middle of town. Furthest you could be from the train station and still be in the town was about a mile.
Short run regional doesn’t have to be Amtrak’s mandate when there are plenty of feeder lines like NJT and Septa able to step in. The problem is not rail vs road. The problem is that rail becomes a sinkhole for public fantasyland spending. Take for example the article cites how Amtrak got stuck with the bill for hurricane sandy infrastructure repairs never mind its legacy of bailing out Passenger rail service in the 70s. God only knows it would have gotten the ultimate bill for California’s insane rail project when it failed. The issue is there aren’t enough controls to keep out of control allocations, spending and let’s just call it what it is: corruption, greed and graft, from entering the system. This idea that we can’t build roads cost effectively while we can build rail is simply preposterous - Acela was predicated on the idea that twenty years ago Amtrak could figure out how to develop high speed rail and yet Acela beats the regular line by ten minutes between dc and ny and that’s largely due to fewer stops. I’m sorry to be a downer but I have zero confidence in a national rail initiative. If metros and regions want to improve commuter times great but there’s just nearly zero rationale to build more Amtrak infrastructure.
We desperately need more investment in regional mass transit. That's not the market Amtrak serves. I'm not convinced we need to invest more on inter-city passenger trains. Of the most popular city pairs for flights, probably only Los Angels <-> Las Vegas makes sense for a rail trip, but LA is so sprawling and lacking in regional mass transit that getting to any train station would probably take away any advantage.
Dallas to Houston is, I believe, the most popular short-haul flight route in the US (maybe SF-LA beats it, but it's up there), and the geography/distance makes so much sense for a high speed rail that a private company, Texas Central, has secured private capital and is working with the government to bring a Japanese-style Shinkansen to Texas. The station locations have already been secured in downtown Dallas and Houston, and groundbreaking is tentatively set for next year.
A 90 minute train ride connecting Texas' largest two cities? Compared to the 4hr trip a car takes or ~2hr for a plane (factoring in security)? At a (tentative) price point of ~two tanks of gas?
I'm optimistic that it won't only be a commercial success, but also that it will convince people (and politicians) that a HSR-network is in the public's best interest, even for routes that don't necessarily make sense from a commercial (private) perspective.
I don’t see commuter rail speeds increasing much in the US. If the LIRR, Metro North, and Jersey Transit could have effective speeds (i.e. station to station) of even 60 miles an hour it would be a game changer for the US’ largest and most economically important metro area.
Alas, that’s a pipe dream, much less bringing New Haven or Philadelphia into the reasonable commuting radius which is what I suspect you are alluding to.
I'm a West-Coaster so am not sure why that would be so impossible a task. What stops us in the Bay Area is heavy diesel trains and lots of stops with no passing tracks, and I understand we're working on fixing all of those issues, slowly though we may progress.
I keep hoping we'll get SLC <-> LA via Las Vegas. We have commuter rail from SLC down about 100 miles, and there are some fairly popular destinations along that route that could benefit from train access (lots of National and State parks, St. George is a popular retirement and vacation destination, etc).
But to be viable, it has to be competitive with airline travel, and that means fast trains. It currently costs more to go from SLC <-> SF than by airplane, and it takes a full day (18 hours or so, I forget exactly) to get there vs 2 hours or so by airplane and 10 hours by car. If it was 4-6 hours (120-200mph), it would be competitive with airlines if you take into account security and baggage on both ends. I know I would take Amtrak if that were the case, but for now, I'm only going to take it as a vacation in itself.
There are a lot of companies in CA that have offices in Utah now, so improving the train system between them may make sense if they can get speeds to be reasonable.
So, you're either blasting a giant gap in the Sierras, blasting a giant tunnel under the Sierras, or have some novel HSR technology that'll run over the Sierras.
For a much less useful route, it'll probably be more expensive than the actual full proposed CA HSR system.
Not saying it is worth it, but I did want to point out a massive tunnel below mountains has been done before[1]. The Gotthard tunnel train below the Alps cost about $12 billion to tunnel about 35 miles. Pretty awesome engineering.
For reference, the LA<->SFO train was last estimated about $75-100 billion to complete before it was canceled. Of course, there's almost no way anyone could build such a train tunnel in the USA for the same price as they did in Switzerland.
Public transit is not the same as Amtrak. A fair accounting for Amtrak has to compare to the bus alternative. I suspect Amtrak is pretty efficient in the NE corridor (at 4x the ticket price of buses) due to density, and loses a lot on the long hauls cross country and the rest of the coasts.
Also, on the side, remember that non-city dwellers get massive subsidies from city dwellers for their cost ineffective lifestyles. One can argue that this is justified to support the people working in critical agriculture and industry that can't be moved to the cities and we want low sticker prices on, but it's a much hard case to make for suburb dwellers.
Amtrak is a complete joke where I live. Plane tickets are much cheaper, which is absurd. I’d love to ride a train to visit other cities but I can’t unless I’m some sort of masochist. I live within walking distance of an Amtrak stop too.
I live near SLC Utah, and to get to SF, I'd pay around the same as an airline ticket for coach, but the trip would take 18 hours. If I wanted a sleeper cabin, it costs 2x an coach flight ticket. And this is for 2 tickets, 6 months in advance, which I think has a hefty discount vs individual tickets, especially closer to the trip time. The only way it's cheaper is if I get the "saver" fare, which is a little cheaper, but has no refund if my plans change.
I would be happy to pay that if the travel time was better, but it's almost 2x longer than driving and not much cheaper than driving (it's actually more expensive if I'm bringing kids along).
Trains were supposed to be more efficient than airlines, so why is taking Amtrak essentially the same price as flying?
There is a somewhat competitive market for air travel. Amtrak protects rail freight from any interference from passenger rail. Which isn't a terrible idea, because rail freight is great, but I feel that completely killing any sort of market is going too far. Some sort of competition in passenger rail could really improve life in USA.
Where is the evidence that suburb dwellers are subsidized by city dwellers? The South Bay is a giant sprawling suburb and brings in significantly more tax money than it receives.
That article doesn’t say anything about city dwellers supporting unsustainable suburban lifestyles. Mortgage insurance deductions are available to city dwellers as well. FHA loans do very little to support the insanely high house prices in places like Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.
> Public transit is far more capable of commuting more people in a shorter period of time than roads.
Assuming you live close to a station and don’t have to carry anything with you. It’s a fools errand to expect a country the size of the US to have stations that connect everything. We also have extensive and ubiquitous air infrastructure as well for long distance travel and airplanes can be rerouted based on demand a lot more easily than fixed rail infrastructure. If there is a big event in some city or town, it’s fairly trivial to add flights, but it’s impossible to add more tracks. Airplanes can better handle seasonal traffic. For commuter traffic, rail can be more efficient, assuming point A to point B. As soon as you need a point C and point D (such as taking kids to karate practice or visiting your aunt Sally, trains become far more painful.
The only reason my kid can't use transit himself is the need to cross the busy street when getting of the bus. The bus system will get him where he needs to go, and I've ridden it with him enough to be comfortable that he knows how to use it alone. However at the end of all our trips we need to cross the street to get home and there are too many cars for that.
> What we really need is far more subsidies in urban and dense suburban areas. The problem is that with our bifurcated political system in the US the people who make up less than 50% of the population outside the cities will block investment in the cities because they will feel like they’re not getting equal investment.
Cities and metro areas have plenty of taxing authority at their disposal. If they want to institute additional taxes to fund these types of things then they could.
Why should people living in rural areas have to pay for it?
Because rural voters hate the idea of taxes at all and so when given the option they will literally vote to ban metro areas from taxing themselves as they just did in WA.
Why should rural voters pay for a city's transport system? At least city people do drive the rural roads between cities. (though I will agree they are overbuilt - but rural residents would be happy with cheap gravel roads they can afford)
> rural residents would be happy with cheap gravel roads they can afford
doubt it. regardless, federal government revenue goes disproportionately towards funding rural services and welfare, including many services that city residents don't use at all. federal funding of a city's transport system would still not shift that balance.
regardless, you missed the point of the parent comment.
If you cut funding to highways for a year it's not like traffic would go down. If you resurfaced every interstate at once, it's not like people are going to be buying brand new cars with magic new disposable income. At a certain point, the global demand on the roads is a fixed number. Induced demand might kick in locally, but that involves people who already have cars waiting out traffic.
That's only because highways cover the country like a fishermans net. Capacity and connectivity are massive for roads. Locally it might back up, but average the capacity of every road in the U.S., and it can probably handle the population of earth. Imagine if that were the case for high speed trains, it would be borderline idiotic to drive.
It seems like recently transit agencies are finally working to improve options for commuters beyond the road network. Simple fixes, needing only a can of paint and a traffic cop enforcing law and order, like bike lanes and buss lanes can be done practically overnight in many urban areas.
LA metro has studies done for hundreds of transit corridors involving bus lanes, BRT, LRT, and HRT. The only barrier seems to be political will, not the engineering. I'm sure this is the case for most large cities, so if we ever get an administration that would prioritize funding transit projects on a federal level, as was done a century ago, we could see a transit explosion.
If you cut funding for highways for a decade or two and instead build lots of rail the story is very different. Demand for roads is not constant at all.
That money is better spent on roads. How much bang could Amtrak get for even $75 billion?
California's high speed rail was cancelled after its projected cost topped $77 billion. And that was for just one line between two cities.
Your numbers are orders of magnitude too low. $75B is just national highways. There are millions of miles of road, and even the cheapest local road is like $4k/mi. Interstates are about $28k, and everything else is in the middle.
Amtrak is a speck on the federal budget. It’s a worthwhile investment if only to keep the rights of way open for the future
But interstates only make sense because of local roads. If local roads didn't connect to the interstates, then we can discount them from the equation.
Personally, I think people should be paying more for using the roads. From what I can tell, most states' use related taxes (gas taxes, registration taxes, etc) account for less than half of total road funding. This makes driving artificially cheap compared to mass transit options, to the point where it's often cheaper to drive than to take a bus or train, which is absolutely ridiculous. For example, my commute is ~10 miles, and the IRS claims this costs me $5 (~$0.50/mile). I did some math and estimate that my costs are closer to $0.30/mile, probably less (insurance, registration, gas, maintenance). A bus ticket is $2.50 each way. The bus takes >40 minutes assuming I ride my bike there, >60 minutes if I walk, and driving takes ~20 minutes.
Assuming my state funds roads ~50% with income taxes, switching this over to purely use-based taxes (gas and registration taxes) would likely double my driving costs, making mass transit make sense financially, as it should. It certainly uses less resources to take the bus than drive, so it should also be cheaper. Yet it doesn't look that way according to my calculations.
Also, taking Amtrak is often more expensive than taking an airplane, even if direct routes exist, and it takes way longer. Amtrak should be way cheaper than flying, yet at best it's a wash, but usually way more expensive. We need faster, cheaper trains, and trips within 800 miles should be competitive with airlines (<6 hours, about the same price or cheaper than flights).
> It certainly uses less resources to take the bus than drive
In terms of road maintenance, that might actually not be the case. Road destruction by traffic scales with the fourth power of axle load, for weak pavement surfaces and heavy loads with the sixth (!) power of axle load.
(Of course you are right with respect to traffic congestion, CO2 emissions, particulate pollution and noise pollution.)
Most states have too many roads and not enough money to even pay for the ones they have. Another second over negative effect of roads is that people will build wherever there are decent roads to get there. In order to preserve natural areas, the best way to do so is to just make sure there are no good ways to get there.
That's one way to look at it. Roads are part of an overall system. You need to look at transit holistically -- how do trains, busses, etc impact the overall mix of trips.
With respect to the rights of way, an asset unused goes away. That is a big reason why car companies bought out streetcar lines to kill them. I live in an area (Albany, NY) which was a big transit driven place until the postwar era. The New York Central, Delaware & Hudson and various streetcar/trolley lines had all sorts of rights of way connecting various communities in a relatively small area.
That stuff is all gone, converted to roads, parks and subdivisions.
For an entity like Amtrak, the rights they have in major cities are worth billions, but in reality are priceless. Without operating service, that value would diminish to near zero very quickly.
Are you including the combined local, state, and federal subsidies for roadways? Are you considering the implicit subsidies to automobile infrastructure such as "free" curbside parking, and the ones that are offloaded onto the private sector, such as mandatory minimum parking requirements. Or zoning and urban planning that explicitly seek to structure society around cars.
Glad you mentioned the externalities of pollution that people are allowed to create without penalty, but are you also considering that CO2 is hardly the only thing to worry about. Air pollution is a major cause of neurological illnesses, since auto exhaust is neurotoxic, as is non-exhaust pollution from brake pads and tires.
What do the numbers look like if you include the cost of cars? Trains are paid for by the transit authority, but cars are not. Regardless, someone still pays.
That's a good question, but you also have to take into account that passengers also pay transit fares, which can sometimes cost as much as a car. I expect that mass transit would still be significantly cheaper for most people though, if there was a proper mass transit network in place.
Despite being a huge fan of public transit, I actually think the efficiency numbers would probably still come out in favor of cars, in America, in the near term. Our country has been car focused for a hundred years and the assumption of car travel is baked into the way our cities (and especially suburbs) are designed. There would need to be years of shifting urban planning before mass transit really won everywhere.
Amtrak is long haul, not "mass transit network", outside of the NE corridor which is a very special case in Amtrak.
Having a cheap enough car and expensive enough transit bill to exceed it is an extreme statistical outlier. I saw this as an owner of a cheap car and an expensive commuter rail pass.
>but you also have to take into account that passengers also pay transit fares
But that's part of why he excluded expenditures covered by the gas tax on the road comparison, you'd want to add that back in if you are adding in fares.
While that isn't a good question, it isn't always valid. Once someone has a car, most of the costs are already sunk. You pay for the car and insurance even when it is sitting at home. The variable costs of a car are very low, so when comparing a car you already have to transit the incremental costs of taking the car are tiny. Transit looks even worse when you have a family and notice that the variable costs of taking the car don't change why the costs of transit go up per family member.
The only time your question matters is if/when the transit system is useful enough that someone can actually consider selling a car. I sold my car to ride the bus to work. However the one week my wife's car was in the shop convinced us that we won't be doing without a car anytime soon. (We often take trips that are 5 minutes by car that were 55 minutes by bus! Then there is the annoyance of the one time we missed the bus)
Source on those 3 trillion passenger miles being on exclusively federally-funded highways? That sounds horribly off, pretty sure you're referring to total passenger miles for cars across all road types, which would then have to take into account subsidies at the local and state levels.
But is each vehicle-mile equally important as an Amtrak-mile to the economy? It could be that each mile on Amtrak is 10× more important to the economy than each mile driven. (I have no idea whether this is true; I just don't think it's obvious that there's parity.)
I think the burden of proof is on you here. It seems like such an unlikely claim as to be outlandish. I'd max out such a claim at 5x (assuming that each car has 4 useless passengers), which is obviously extreme already. 10x seems ludicrous.
I'd go even further and say that vehicle miles are more valuable than train miles because vehicle miles generally head exactly where you want to go without detours, without time-consuming stops and without a fixed schedule. A fairly direct line of travel, no unnecessary stops and ability to depart at any time make vehicle miles much more valuable.
For some very very specific routes, train miles may be more valuable, but generally speaking they are less valuable.
You're missing many other ways how we (America) subside driving I.E. how much of our armed forces (especially the Navy) have been built out and utilized post WWII to ensure a steady stream of oil.
On a side note, that would be an interesting PhD dissertation - figuring out the actual cost of America's car-centric lifestyle broken down locally, state and nationally.
Some good news for you then: the US no longer needs a navy to ensure a steady stream of oil for itself.
The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now. Everyone in the industry says it is only a matter of time before the US will be able to produce all the oil the US needs. Whether that happens next year or 5 years from now depends on pricing and production decisions made by the OPEC producers.
I wouldn't be surprised if in 8 or 10 years the US will be in a position to guarantee a steady supply of oil to one of its strategic partners: the UK or Japan, say.
But this has thread has gotten off track because like grandparent already pointed out, Amtrak run on oil, too. I suppose your reply to that is that it is easier to convert Amtrak to renewables than to convert the highway system to renewables
> Some good news for you then: the US no longer needs a navy to ensure a steady stream of oil. The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now.
There's more to it than that.
first, oil is a commodity product traded around the world, so, say, if Indonesian (offshore) oilfields go offline, china will simply buy from the saudis, which will drive up the price of Saudi oil and encourage US producers to export instead. Now rising price encourages local production, but most of it can't be switched on and off in a instant.
And in fact they already both import and export; for example tar sands "oil" from Canada is removed with a shovel, not a pipe. Refining it is very expensive (and energy demanding) so only gets mined when the price of oil is high enough to justify it. Currently the US exports about as much oil as it imports.
Lots of great stats on this topic from the Energy Information Administration (though some of the important statistics stopped being collected last year, alas). Here is the petroleum import & export page: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
What you write is relevant to the price of oil, which is a tangent from what we were talking about, namely, ensuring a supply of oil in chaotic circumstances, e.g., closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is itself a tangent from the original topic of Amtrak versus highways (since as GGGP already pointed out, Amtrak runs on oil, too).
But OK, let's talk about price. There's probably a 100 years worth of 'tight' oil just in Texas that can be produced for the price oil currently sells for. In other words, the cost of fracking that oil has decreased a lot. (And that oil is easier to refine than the stuff that comes from Saudi Arabia.)
> "I suppose your reply to that is that it is easier to convert Amtrak to renewables than to convert the highway system to renewables"
It's probably the other way around. The highways (ie: cars and trucks) will gradually convert to electric in the coming decades as the vehicle fleet is replaced and old equipment is retired.
On the other hand, electrifying long-distance rail requires a lot of very expensive infrastructure investment. Battery electric technology may mean that cost comes down, however (perhaps you only need wires on intermittent sections of track).
Yes, because if we're comparing the merits of one system to the other it's important to remember the goal is to move people and things where they want to be, not maximize people-miles.
And we already redesigned every city in the country, so clearly it's an option.
Amtrak subsidies are highway subsidies. Without Amtrak, a good chunk of those passengers would be in single-occupancy autos traveling on highways. It only takes a small increase (1% to 5% depending on the specific highway) to go from level-of-service C to LOS F (basically congested, but flowing traffic to stop-and-go traffic), but keeping those passengers off roads, interstate traffic is reduced.
I wonder what happens if you throw in the amount of money people spend on cars, insurance, and gas. You're counting maintenance and fuel for Amtrak, but not for roads.
What is the total spent per person-mile of travel?
Based on the content of this comment, it looks like you're comparing rail and highway passenger miles only. The major use of rail in the US is not passenger service, but freight. Freight is also obviously common on the highways. My only point is that the comparison of these things is more complex than just looking at passenger miles.
And yet, I still think we need to subsidize Amtrak more. Perhaps a lot more so it could at least begin to electrify those railways and put some electric locomotives in service. What's up with this mid-century diesel bullshit they're running now?
And for 1/10th of the price of that we could have overhead power lines powering the locomotives with whatever source of energy is cheap/safe/available..
This is a tendentious, statist philosophy of infrastructure. America's freight railroads are private infrastructure. They are a paragon of excellence and efficiency, the envy of the world, and they do a damn fine job of turning a profit and being a multiplier at the same time.
If infrastructure is really such a multiplier, people should be able pay for it from the multiples they earn, and the infrastructure owners will turn a profit. This means that more infrastructure gets built, and higher multipliers achieved, until the multiplier is not so big, and they stop. (This is a state where owners earn an accounting profit, but not what the economists call an "economic" profit, that is, it's not any more money than you could make investing anywhere else.)
This is how the price mechanism works, and how the pursuit of profit in a market works, and why capitalism is actually good at making things happen. The alternatives to using the pricing mechanism generally leave you underprovisioning infrastructure (leaving these potential profits on the table), or overprovisioning infrastructure (wasting money), or in a state where people overuse infrastructure in wasteful ways (see the nation's road system, which is very good at connecting things -- but socializing its construction and access has led to ridiculous traffic jams in many cities, and many segments that are heavily accessed by trucks charge extra for the wear and tear through the use of tolls.)
Are there obstacles to realizing this capitalist utopia of efficiency in practice? Yes. Definitely, lots of them, and especially for network-y infrastructure like railroads. Is state intervention warranted sometimes? Yes. Is abandoning the pricing mechanism entirely, because multipliers exist, the only thing to do? No. And even when it is, it is a fraught endeavor. Among other things, the people who benefit are not the same as the people who pay, and the transfers involved can be unfair.
> If infrastructure is really such a multiplier, people should be able pay for it from the multiples they earn, and the infrastructure owners will turn a profit.
Let's say a good quality rail link from Town X to some big center of employment has the following effects:
* Raises attorney Alice's salary from $150,000 to $175,000
* Raises barista Bob's salary from $23,000 to $28,000
* Raises retiree Clive's home price from $300,000 to $400,000 although he'll never set foot on a train himself.
* Allows business-owner Doris to fill a specialist job that previously she hadn't been able to fill, indirectly leading to a better product and improved sales in ways that are hard to quantify, but are probably several times that employee's salary.
Which of those should the rail link owners capture, and how would you propose they do so?
The challenge of for-profit infrastructure is, even if you choose ticket prices to capture 50% of Bob's benefit, you only capture 10% of Alice's benefit, and ~0% of Clive and Doris's benefits.
Exactly this, the interstate wasn't built for profit - and the importance of interstates for US economy can't be understated.
More recently, China have managed to build more high speed rail network than the rest of the world, and served it at loss. As I understand and having personally rode it, the effect of such transportation option to both the economy and personal convenience can be said to rival that of the interstate.
You could argue that roads ought to be fully funded according to use and therefore turn a profit. Something like a value-added tax. Just about every other essential business turns economic value into profit-- if Amtrak services were so valuable the business could raise its prices and people would pony up. But its services just aren't that much value-added and passengers have plenty of alternatives. Namely, buses.
Catch 22. If you underinvest in rail, you end up with trains slower than bus, which makes them a bad option. If you actually invest in rail, you end up in a situation where the rail is faster than bus and has less externality on the environment
Worse: if you underinvest, you end up with an unreliable and cost-inefficient train service that becomes ever more difficult to support politically. Which is exactly what we're seeing in this thread, good news from Amtrak notwithstanding.
This is a common libertarian argument. And I think it'd be very interesting to see in practice. I live in a state with many toll highways and people complain about the cost. But those highways are well maintained. And they complain about the potholes on the free roads. So I think it's more of an issue of people wanting everything for nothing.
One problem with a private road system is that roads take up space and prevent people from using that space for something else. I think that property tax on road surface area would be prohibitively expensive if a private entity were to own it.
Another problem is that building or expanding a road through an already populated area basically requires eminent domain.
As strange as it is, the average person has many an opinion on roads and road maintenance, but very little understanding of the costs involved and where the money comes from. Also, I agree that everyone does want everything for nothing and complain vociferously if those free things are taken away.
Any subsidization of transportation requiring costs such as an automobile, insurance, licensing, and gas are also regressive; making a great argument that tolls should fund public transit (but with opportunity that that goes towards busses, rideshares etc in the private sphere too)
Roads would still be built and planned by governments. But privately owned. See Highway 407 in Toronto, which was "sold" (100 year lease) to generate revenue.
Private ownership should be the product of private development in my opinion. Especially when what you'd be doing is granting a monopoly over a public asset.
We should never privatize profits deriving from public investment.
Highway 407 is a great example of what for profit highway systems look like: high prices, dynamic pricing, tons of hidden fees. Prices per mile are something like $0.80-1.00USD (for passenger cars), not including a few bucks in fees. When I traveled to Toronto for work, my bill per trip on the 407 was at around $50USD. This was in around 2014 and I imagine that prices have gone up a lot since then.
According to wikipedia, for each dollar collected by the 407, $0.21 goes to maintenance, and $0.79 to profits ($0.66 are paid out in dividends). The 407 collects $1.3 billion dollars annually with double-digit annual growth.
Private roads are economically unsustainable and serve only to leech wealth from society.
I do not agree in the least. Roads should be publicly owned and maintained. Private corporations will always seek to squeeze every last drop of money out of commuters because they are effectively a monopoly, especially on very long chunks of highways.
I didn't say I agree with that position. I think it's a terrible one, and the government that sold the 407 was incredibly misguided. But that's how it would work.
Which are? Having ridden on buses and Amtrak, buses go to the same places and more, cheaper, faster, with more available times, and keeping on schedule (the NE corridor may be faster and on schedule, I'm not in that part of the country-- but that would be the exception). There may be a small pollution difference but its probably negligible.
Amtrak absolutely can. Simply by raising their prices.
The iPhone revolutionized mobile phones and greatly expanded the interconnectivity of the world. And yet nobody is demanding that the general public should subsidize Apple.
They should be dropping prices, not raising them, at least for longer trips. It costs about the same to take Amtrak vs an airplane for a direct connection 750 miles away, which is ridiculous because it should be far cheaper to run a train at 60mph than an airplane at 400+mph per passenger, and trains can carry far more people than airplanes. They also need to be way faster (120mph at least, ideally faster than that) to be a reasonable alternative to airlines.
The only way Amtrak gets to raise rates is if it drastically improves service.
Trains need infrastructure all 750 miles of that trip. Airplanes need infrastructure only at each end of the trip. Thus airplanes are cheaper to run very long distances.
Mass transit can both be profitable and a multiplier (just like any other set of goods and services). See Japan: excellent train systems that are private and profitable.
It is remarkable that so few across many countries in the world see the strength of that argument for healthcare.
Healthcare fundamentally, aside from its intrinsic value, additionally, is perhaps the most ‘potent multiplier for economic gains’ in the wider economy.
> It's worth pointing out that the intent of transportation infrastructure isn't to turn a profit
It's also worth pointing out that transportation systems that do turn a profit are generally healthy and run well. It is difficult to turn a profit on a poorly run system.
> Expecting a profit is completely missing the point
On the contrary, expecting a profit is expecting excellence, which we should absolutely do. There is no reason not to have high standards and high expectations.
Computing is a multiplier, as is communication, etc.. That doesn't mean that providers thereof are exempt from the realities of business, the need to watch expenses and creatively respond to change and competition.
I suppose if Intel had been nationalized then they would be loss-making and we would be hearing about how taxpayers should feel good about subsidizing their losses.
It’s a false equivalence though, rails and roads (and the internet) are like arteries, you can have redundant arteries but it’s wasteful. So free market economics no longer apply.
A utility monopoly is different than a profit-seeking one. If Amtrak became exclusively profit-seeking, it might raise prices dramatically cut unprofitable routes (say, to poorer towns), etc. Those things might increase profits but undermine the economic benefit that was being provided.
There's a whole slew of what are effectively network-effect activities (including VC), often with a risk-based element and/or winner-take-all dynamics, in which we have come to expect "tent-pole" successes to bolster numerous indirectly-profitable ventures.
Film, television, publishing, and music are classic examples of this. A huge and often unrecognised role that the gatekeepers play (studios, distribution companies, broadcast and cable networks, presses, recording labels) is to assume risk on the part of individual ventures. VC operates on a similar logic, where of ten efforts, 1 hit and 2-3 merely profitable ones account for another 6-7 failures. (I suspect the actual success rate is much lower, with increasingly decadal megahits seeming prevalent.)
Those are time-based bets.
In geographic networks -- canals, railroads, highways, air travel, telegraph (often co-tenant with railroad rights of way -- 19th century maps of each are fascinating), telephone, electricity, even water, oil, gas, and other pipeline networks -- a few major success/concentration points support numerous others. Transit systems in particular seem to go through an evolution of private venture to public-subsidy, to wholly-publicly-owned.
Though it's more complex than even that.
Postal subsidies played a massive role in supporting rail and early air transport. Through the mid-1960s, the US Post Office ran mail-sorting cars on trains where mail was sorted en route. The introduction of Zone Instant Postal Codes, better known as ZIP Codes, as well as pre-sorted mail, allowed for routing at origin (or regional) postal hubs, rather than in transit. The loss of this subsidy proved fatal to trains.
Many city transit systems -- bus and streetcar -- were cooperative ventures serving factory and office employers, retailers, and real estate developers, more than the actual daily riders of the systems. It was the creation of a viable transport link between locations that induced the resultant value of those locations.
In the Chicago region, a network of electric-powered commuter rail systems emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not only the above dynamic came into play, but these transit links created new linear bands of viable "bedroom community" suburbs surrounding the urban core. Transit times from 30 miles out were less than an hour, shorter than today's commutes.
Construction of highways (notably the Eisenhower Expressway) lead to a sudden collapse in 1956.
Rural electric and telephone service have long been at best marginally profitable, and development of infrastructure (as well as considerable generating and mainline distribution) were enabled through rural electric and telephone cooperatives, supported by surcharges on urban/suburban service.
Private enterprise enjoys cherry-picking profitable areas/regions for operation. Reality is that a functional country and economy require some level of subsidy.
The gyrations of PG&E over the past two decades may be preamble to a transfer to public (state) control of electricity services in California, possibly elsewhere. This may be a more general trend in such services: originating as private operators, shifting to government services over time.
Profits are nice though in that they will finally allow Amtrak to invest in more services and maintaining/upgrading the network, because that money is not coming from Congress any time soon.
Amtrak isn’t infrastructure though. It is a “business” that operates on rail infrastructure. Rail is treated like highways by the real businesses that actually make money using it.
> the intent of transportation infrastructure isn't to turn a profit
If you listen to some activists and look at the budget, you'd think that the intent of AmTrak is to lose as much money as possible without arousing suspicion.
There's a big difference between not turning a consistent profit and losing more money than it could possibly save us. If the point was really to serve as transportation that can compete with the automobile at the point of sale (so that it would actually take cars off the road), or in terms of speed (increasing the economic output of passengers), most AmTrak lines and railcar-miles fail that test.
The intent of Amtrak was to take the burden of passenger rail off the private railroads, lose money for a few years, and then quietly shut down. It's long been in a political gray area, just popular enough that the government wouldn't dare close it, but not popular enough to be funded and managed like "real" modes of transportation. So it's stuck in the '70s and probably always will be.
There's barely a road in the entire country that's turned a profit (gas and vehicle registration taxes don't come close to covering road construction costs, and of course most roads aren't tolled), yet we still rightly consider roads as being worth it. We should treat our rail, transit, and other transportation infrastructure similarly. Expecting a profit is completely missing the point, but doing so is a nice bonus.