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.
That said, I suspect we overinvest in both subsidies because of romantic ideas and status quo bias.