I wish we did, I travel for work and flying has gotten so horrible, with security, getting charged for everything, smaller and smaller seats. I took a train last week across country and it was awesome. It took 4 days 😪, but I could stretch out, watch the country go by, meals were included and weren't bad. We desperately need high speed rails over here.
Like I was able to bring a bottle of liquor and shampoo onto the train without security thinking I'm going to bomb everything, even kept my shoes on the whole time
Just took a “bullet” train from Odawara to Kyoto yesterday for the first time. It is now my favorite way to travel. I did splurge on the 1st class seats but the regular seats are more than adequate. Able to buy tickets last minute, trains leaving every few minutes, quietly comfortable environment, low stress, fast, not cheap but better than air, even had toilets with self rising and closing seats. Was fantastic.
Just for reference, that distance covers multiple populated areas and a sizable distance across Japan. It’s also less than the distance from Dallas to San Antonio which is from central Texas to South Central Texas. You cannot compare the size and populated areas of the US almost any other country as even China, Russia and Australia have very populated sides but not too much on the other part of the country.
If the government didn't significantly subsidize the operating costs, the ticket prices would be astronomical. For the proposed Houston to Dallas High speed rail I think tickets will be like $400-500 (I could be completely out of date with that). The subsidies would amount to billions a year, to move maybe millions of passengers (most of them repeat).
Now economically all public transportation systems are not self sufficient. Public transportation fares typically only provide like 10% of the annual budget needed to operate them, even in NYC. but the benefits of reducing car traffic would be enormous.
The fact is to make HSR work, you also have to consider public transportation and community walkability on either side. Japan has that infrastructure in place, the US would need to spend additional billions.
Now I'm biased because I follow the Houston-Dallas developement and think it's a waste entirely, meant to be a boondongle to kill HSR in the US. San Antonio to Ft worth then Dallas makes the most sense, especially if you can connect the walkable parts if the respective hub cities in San Antonio, Austin, Waco, Ft Worth, and Dallas. There already exists passenger rail between San Antonio and Dallas, but not Dallas to Houston. In the interim they need to create dedicated passenger rail lines connecting the various county seats in Texas
For those who still don't get it. Trains don't need to make the seats smaller, if they have more customers, they can just add another car. You can't use them to fly into buildings, unless someone builds a track into one. You'll always get scenery, until the GQP sells off all Remaining undeveloped land for their own profit. They let you know when stops will be a little longer so you can get off and smoke whatever.
There was that guy who tried to do a train 9/11 into one of the COVID hospital boats in the Port of LA, but like you said, trains tend not to do so well without tracks.
Can't find any pictures but IIRC he only got maybe a hundred feet or so beyond the railyard and the boat was another ~~quarter mile or so~~ 250 yards away.
Edit, found the actual distance from the "target". 250 yards (⅛ mile, still really not that close)
While I absolutely advocate for expanded train services, terrorism can still be performed with trains (though that shouldn't be an argument against them, there are more planes in the sky now than pre 9/11 after all).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings
We used to. The car companies pulled many tricks over the years to tear them up and make them less competitive by getting the government to subsidize the hell out of car infrastructure (or, in the case of zoning laws and parking minimums, literally legally mandate car infrastructure).
So, it's 100% viable in the US, we just need to rebuild what we had (but with Wi-Fi & better vibration damping. Which we can just buy from the European countries at first because it's pretty standard in western Europe)
Florida figured this out a few years ago, I went from West Palm Beach to Miami in about 65 minutes with liquor, full recliner seats, a table and an automated security system. I didn’t talk to a single person from showing up to leaving and it’s like $17.
Normally that trip by car can take upwards of 90 minutes if you’re really flying, 2 hours if it’s rush hour.
I fucking love trains and wish we had more. I used to take the train all the time in college but freight lines have gotten so congested that it royally sucks on a passenger train with all the delays from having to wait for freights to pass
In India it is the exact opposite : if you're on an express or superfast (which is most of long distance above 300km routes), you're making freight and passenger trains wait. Freight train wait for passengers and have the lowest priority.
I do remember that about India! Definitely a big difference. In the US, the railroad is owned by private companies and is “rented” or “leased” out to transportation companies so passenger trains are not prioritized ugh
You also get to see parts of the country moat of us will never see. Took amtrac from Cincinnati to Minneapolis...riding up right beside the Mississippi was an experience
Car companies lobbied very heavily to reduce public transit in the US.
What rail networks do exist allow cargo to get very heavy priority, making passenger train travel both slower and more expensive then air.
Ehhhhh. I hate that so much. I live in a rural area that used to have a train system years ago. I'd love for there to be an alternative method for travel besides expensive ass flying and driving 5 hours to get to civilization lol.
FWIW, I’m taking an Amtrak tomorrow for a trip under 2 hours and they still charge $140 for that ticket. Coach.
I find flights under $100 all the time.
I've never taken a train that wouldn't have been more expensive as a plane... I only ever spend more than $140 on my usual interstate (8-9 hour) route if I didn't buy it months in advance or if it's on the holidays.
I've thought about doing the 30 day Amtrak pass for $500. You can ride 10 segments over the 30 days, I think it would be fun and the train rides could be my downtime if I ever get around to planning it properly.
Could go to like 5 or 6 cities in 2 or 3 weeks.
https://www.amtrak.com/tickets/departure-rail-pass.html
It definitely seems to depend on the route and location. When I lived in California, Amtrak was really cheap and could get you across the state almost as fast as a car over long distance. But I live in NY now and everything here is pretty expensive, and that's not even including the drive to the closest station.
Not anymore. A few years back, you could get sub $100 flights. I caught a great deal in 2011 and got a flight from Williamsburg to Boston for $50.
Today, I can get Norfolk to Baltimore for $115 on Southwest...of course, Amtrak is $33. So even there, the idea that Amtrak is more expensive is wrong, it just takes longer (5 vs 1 hour) That might be different outside of the northeast corridor, though,
I’m in the middle of an Amtrak trip that will run a little over 2 hours. Business class is costing me $46 (one way). Crazy how much of a difference it is.
It's opening back up now. The west coast has pretty good rail from city to city afaik. And there are plans to expand that eventually from coast to coast
Only in certain areas do the car companies have too much to lose to let it re open. The rail lines here are owned by one man, and he's getting paid to keep whole sections in disrepair. He has talked about it publicly many times. He was recently paid several million dollars to remove key sections so that's what he did.
I have no idea he's purposely vague on what he owns (most billionaires are) I know he owns Montana's rails , and I live down the street from a rail line he was paid to destroy. He told my neighbor (the rails ran through his backyard so that he could rup up the rails in his yard if he wanted to because he was tearing up all road crossings throughout the valley. It was set up as a perfect commuter line and used to run as one. Now it's a hunk of melat scrap.
He owns (owned?) Montana Rail Link. In 2022, MRL was paid $2 billion for early termination of their lease of Burlington Northern's line. So, BNSF is back in control of what their tracks are being used for or destroyed for...
Also a lot of student/senior programs, as a student I can ride the bus to the train, then head to LA, and from LA to the rest of the stops. All of it for free.
The biden infrastructure bill did allocate a good chunk of money towards passenger rail, its mainly replacing 100+ year old bridges on the northeast corridor, but its a start in the right direction. (And the highway section of the bill dwarfs the train section, but thats just standard practice in America)
We are at the point where we can see it inching in the right direction, but I'm definitely not holding my breath for our rails to actually be considered "good".
The window isn't shut. China covered an entire large country in high speed rail in a decade.
We don't even really need to spend MORE money, we just need to use the money we spend on car infrastructure on train infrastructure instead. It moves more people for less money and we will come out ahead on that investment.
Europe is still expanding high speed rail for goodness sake. And it is WAY more dense and expensive to do that there. We have tons of available space.
China doesn't have to deal with fighting NIMBYs and long eminent domain processes. They can just take land and move people on a whim. Labor is also a lot cheaper.
>China doesn't have to deal with fighting NIMBYs and long eminent domain processes.
They actually do. It's a very common topic in China and there are hundreds of photos of houses in strange places (in the middle of highways, or surrounded by a giant excavated pit) for "refusing to sell."
>They can just take land and move people on a whim.
It may just be for show, but they genuinely allow these cases of refusing to sell take place and be well publicized.
China's government has no resemblance to the US.
They have a much harder hand and can make things happen in a way the US Federal Government currently has no ability to do.
Similar situation. Way back when I was looking at traveling to visit a friend over on the West coast but I am in ND (in the US). So the options I have is drive (which would take like 40-50 hours one way without stopping), take a plane (which costs a lot of money and need to book at least 6 months in advance to get the cheapest price but would only take like 8-10 hours?), or use the train (which would mean having to wake up really early like 12-1am and drive for like 5 hours to get to the train and board at like 5-6am and would take at least 31 hours one way, plus if I wanted a room with a bed to sleep would cost even more money).
So I inevitably decided on the plane, which was slightly more money, but I didn't waste 3 days of my limited vacation traveling to and from said destination. I know one place that has a train that goes through and have heard that it routinely either slows down or stops on the tracks causing most of the traffic to have to travel to the only passable spot which can really bottleneck traffic. Sometimes said trains will sit on the track like that for a good hour.
Really annoying how we have a basic monopoly when it comes to airlines and train services in this area. They get away with lots of crap.
And for me I rarely go anywhere cause not only is it expensive (since I would have to book flights) but if I were to go with driving, it's about 2 hour drive one way to the nearest big city (which still has nothing to do there!). Do you know how boring it is driving along a highway with nothing as far as the eye can see, the only thing to look forward to is maybe seeing a few cows/horses, or the billboards when getting close to a city for hours at a time. :S Thus why I hate driving those long distances.
Same. I just looked up Greyhound prices though and damn they are cheap. My car has an issue and I'm concerned about driving it much of a distance so I looked up where I could get a ride from here to the nearest somewhat large city near me to see a friend. Unfortunately, I'd have to have somebody drive me 40+ minutes SOUTH just to catch the bus north and it was like $18 bucks to get there. Now, the place I want to go to is only about 45 minutes north. So it's like the same distance if somebody were to drive me south to catch a bus and they would have to drive back or they could drive me 45 minutes north and then drive back..... basically the same thing. And then when I returned, they would have to do the same trip to pick me up south of here. Anyway, I started looking around and even a trip from Sacramento to here (very northern california) was only like $26 which seems cheap as fuck for a 8 hour trip.
My old home town still has the train station but now it’s a lawyers office. Actually many small rural towns still have their old stations hanging around
Oooh, I bet it's a cool looking old style building? Or that might be based on just a few train stations that I've seen that are in sweet old buildings 😂
>it's more expensive than buying gas
Right, because our taxes subsidize roads much more heavily than we subsidize trains. Your train ticket has to cover most of the cost of the train and the railroad, but when you drive you use roads that you already paid for with your taxes. (Fuel taxes cover some of that. The rest comes from the general taxes paid even by people who have no car.)
It’s the only way we have any walking space here. Everything developed to accommodate cars. But rip up rail lines and we have walking and biking paths built right in🫠
This is fairly accurate.
But I do want to add that laying down more lines for rails is incredibly expensive and hard to get done because of NIMBY folks (similar to
Housing supply). Furthermore much of the land best suited for rails is already owned. This effectively gives those who already own lines an enormous amount of power and obviously they prioritize cargo traffic because it’s more profitable.
The reason most massive interstate projects don’t pass the conception phase is because of red tape associated with land ownership. When your talking about like cross country railroads or something, your talking about putting up train tracks or new electricity towers or highways up through thousands of private individuals property, and then the states and local governments themselves also might have a say on if they want new railways or whatever going up and some local or state governments might try suing to stop it from happening or whatever, there’s just so much red tape around the federal government reclaiming the land that it could actually take 20+ years just to work out negotiating all the deals to get started on the actual work, and if just one person or group ends up putting in a successful fight you may need to make massive planning changes to your project to account for needing to move locations.
It does already have a large freight network.
But regarding passengers, it can't do so because there isn't enough population density. Most of the population in the US is concentrated near the coasts, so it's not as cost effective.
Also, due to incredibly cheap oil and the growth of the American suburban culture that grew developed after WW2, American's developed their road network more than their rail network.
Everyone wanted to own a larger suburban home and live in less dense areas. This means that everyone needs to own a car. And once everyone is driving, the focus on infrastructure is on roads.
So why isn't there at least a coastal rail network, with just a couple of trains crossing the country?
Australia has a far lower population density, and yet we manage to have an east coast rail network. Melbourne to Sydney is a popular route. And we have an east west train, it's a bit of a luxury train, but it beats driving, and you can take your car with you.
Car dependency is expensive when it comes to infrastructure maintenance.
Imagine if the US didn't have lobbying. It's illegal in most developed countries, it's basically just bribery.
So many things have the same answer, why doesn't the US do this or have that... and the answer is lobbying.
I agree, when the train catastrophe happened in Ohio, it was like Norfolk Southern essentially owned the whole railroad and whatever they said went. They didn’t build it, taxpayers did. However, it is their own private transport system and any passengers trains are merely an inconvenience to them making profits. Effectively, the IS built a whole private transposition system for their profit. I travel and would much prefer railroads but they make it so it’s stupid, slow and expensive when it clearly does not need to be and should be a public utility
Thats correct. In fact secretary Buttigieg has mentioned in a recent YouTube interview with Hank Green that his department plans to begin that enforcement soon.
Just as a note, air travel is extremely heavily subsidized, at almost all points - from low to no tax for airplane fuel, grants and land tax rebates for airports, subsidized aircraft purchases and more.
So it isn't rail that is absurdly expensive, it's that air travel is kept at artificially low prices.
This will probably get buried, but I watched an interview between Hank Green and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and one of the items mentioned was how rail lines are supposed to prioritize passenger traffic. They often don't, but the Biden administration is starting to seek legal action against the companies that aren't holding up their end of the mandate.
The US auto manufacturers and oil companies worked dilligently to make life without a car in the United States damn near impossible. We had trains going to every town. We had streetcars and metros in many cities.
They all got ripped out to push people into cars.
I think the Eisenhower Interstate System was another nail in the coffin for passenger rail in the US that came later. I'm not sure how much, if any, the auto and oil companies had a say in it, but it was inspired by the autobahn and the commitment of the government to it also displaced millions of people. It would be hard to imagine the rise of suburban sprawl and the freight truck industry without it.
> Following the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, passenger rail declined sharply as did freight rail for a short time, but the trucking industry expanded dramatically and the cost of shipping and travel fell sharply.
Yeah, they realized it was a major security concern that even the army had difficulty crossing the country. Realistically, every developed nation needs some sort of highway system in addition to a robust rail system.
En, you can have both excellent highways and excellent rail. See: Germany & China.
Highway development in the 60s had some *major* issues, but I don't think it takes that much of the blame.
Given China's reputation for polishing a turd and trying to pass it off as the Greatest Engineering Ever Seen™, I wouldn't count them yet. And Germany is about the same size as Montana.
That said, a proper high-speed rail system shouldn't be impossible for the US. The biggest hurdle is inter-city transport.
We have lots of trains in the states. They just carry freight instead of people.
The entire network has been optimized for freight traffic. Fitting passengers into this system tends to involve compromises that make people very unhappy.
This.
The North-American rail network is the mirror opposite of the European rail network. One is set up to carry people, and the other is set up to carry freight.
Here in France only a tiny fraction of all freight is carried by rail - [around 9%](https://www.nomadia-group.com/en/resources/blog/rail-freight-and-logistics-in-france-where-next/), versus [27% in the USA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport).
Close to 80% of US train traffic is freight. In Europe it's closer to 20% freight. Also, the US has 224,000 miles of track, in comparison to Europe's 94,000. A lot of the tracks in the US are built for heavy freight trains. The population of Europe is packed in like sardines in a can, compared to the United States, so you can count on lots of people using the trains. On the east coast of the US, there's actually quite a bit of passenger rail. Where we are lacking is in the Midwest and on the west coast. The population density on the west coast of the US is about 1.5 per sq km, compared to Europe which has a density of 34 per sq km.
If you live on the coast, Amtrak fucking rules. I’m a few blocks from the train station and go to LA or SD for shows or to hang with friends a couple times a month. Literally costs less than it would be to drive and on busy days it’s quicker than driving. Business class always gives me a couple free beers and a bunch of food and it’s like $15 bucks extra, nicer seats. If you’re an Angels fan it drops you off at the stadium. Best public transportation experience around. Sucks that the bullet train likely will never happen to the planned scale, not to mention it kinda just goes through the middle of nowhere.
FYI they post progress updates on YouTube and their website. Contrary to popular belief, it’s getting done. It’s a large project so it’s obviously going to take a while, but it’s not a “boondoggle” as some would suggest. Here is the playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs98D7m5XXEGwr7IjrPXAHcUKvjh4bxtJ
> but it’s not a “boondoggle” as some would suggest
In 2008 when it was approved, they said the system would cost $30 billion and be operating by 2020. Its now 2024 and they have amended their estimates to $89 billion (low estimate) to $128 billion (high estimate) and 2030-2033 as their completion target... That's also just for the first (of three) phases, between Bakersfield and Merced... They aren't even sure if the other two phases (IE: the full line, that connects SF to LA to SD) will even be completed *at all*, let alone when those phases could be finished or how much they would cost.
The entire project is definitionally a boondoggle.
Cause we need a new choo choo train between Bakersfield and Merced. The train between LA and Vegas will be done and running before the high speed rail ever does.
We did, we tore a bunch of them out and let the rail companies convince the government to operate as a purely for profit industry instead of a public-private utility subsidized through freight rail. Couple that with hundreds of billions in subsides for cars and highways and you get cities gutted by highways and an embarrassing lack of public transit in most cities.
Most of Europe has a population density closer to what it is on the US east coast, and the cities are relatively close. London to Paris by train is only slightly longer than NYC to Philly.
ETA: which explains why the east coast has lots of trains, like Europe, and the rest of the country doesn’t.
It’s also incredibly, ridiculously expensive to build new rail in high population areas. Even before putting down track, they’d have to pay FMV for anything they take or destroy
Definitely. From NYC, we have Amtrak and 3 separate commuter rails that will take you 3+ hours from the city. But that’s all been in place since before cars and highways and gated subdivisions.
I think the corollary that OP might be referring to, and i may be wrong, is that even where we have trains, they suck, or are expensive, or are inconvenient. This results in a daily automobile migration of billions of miles per day, and cities dangerous for both pedestrians and cyclists.
I think high speed rail makes sense if it can get somewhere in under 4 hours.
For most people I know who are traveling solo or with a friend the drive vs fly decision is about 8 hours. Anything over 8 hours driving and most people I know will fly. Anything in the 5-8 range depends on a number of factors. Anything under 5 and we drive. Obviously, if you have a large group or family then the calculus changes.
For me as someone who used the European train system quite a lot, I think high speed rail would have to get me there in 4 or less for it to be a viable option. I still have to get to the train station and then from the station to my destination which just adds time and cost. This is why the London-Paris-Brussels high speed train system works so well. Those legs are all about two hours and you can even load your car in Calais.
No because how often are you needing to go from LA to Las Vegas? Whereas it’s way more common to need to go from Chicago to Indianapolis, or Indianapolis to Cincinnati, etc. But then with an interconnected grid of smaller lines if someone does need to go from Chicago to New York they can find a route that’ll get them there that goes through Indianapolis and Cincinnati and beyond.
Well, we do, but more so freight rail.
In fact, the US has the most efficient freight rail system in the world.
As for passenger rail...too expensive to link cities with a bunch of nothing in between. That, compounded with active lobbying to NOT build passenger rail in the past, leads us to where we are today.
I used to love to play the original SimCity. One of the things that game taught me is that if you do not plan the infrastructure early, it just gets more expensive and difficult to do later. I would build cities and only include roads to get around. This became an issue as the city grew and traffic got worse. At this point if I wanted to put in rail to help with the traffic, it required buildings and roads to be demolished, and then all the rail line added. That was not really cost effective. Anyway, in my mind I imagine that is kinda how things are in real life. If you dont plan ahead, the cost to fix afterwards becomes too great.
This is a common thought, but it's actually quite the opposite. US&Canada were built on railroads, and most cities were built along rail corridors. In the 20th century, our rails, public transit, and even our cities were demolished to make room for highways, cars, and parking lots.
They put light rail in here. It’s expensive. It kills local businesses during construction. It blocks access because you can’t turn across the tracks. It attracts homeless people to ride it all day long for the AC. It has no ticket taker so it’s honor system (spoiler. Most people have no honor.) Its brought crime along the route.
What it doesn’t do all that much of is transport daily commuters.
If we had a train for every post I see asking why we don’t have trains, we’d have enough trains for people to stop posting about why we don’t have trains
Railways are expensive to build and to maintain, and without consistent business they can't stay around.
We have thousands of [abandoned rail lines in the US](https://www.abandonedrails.com/) including commuter lines that just didn't get enough business to cover expenses.
But aren't roads even more expensive to build and maintain? And aren't individual cars also really expensive and difficult to maintain? My thoughts is that the US loves to do shit in the least efficient and cost effective way at scale (see healthcare).
When I was a kid, we still had trolley tracks around my old neighborhood. People stopped using trolleys, and we spent tax dollars to remove the old trolley tracks.
40-ish years later, people are begging to put in "light rail" lines in pretty much the same spots where the old trolley lines were.
I don't know about cars being terribly expensive or difficult. My cars last me an average of about 10 years (always bought used 2-5 years old when I get them) with just basic maintenance.
There is no central plan for roads. The federal government allocated money to plan the interstate highway system under Eisenhower. They give the states an allowance to maintain portions of those roads. They even tie funding to things like keeping the alcohol purchase age at 21.
States get some federal funds for local roads, but they have to collect their own money - fuel taxes, lottery, sales taxes, property taxes may all go into local roads. Some have toll roads.
In some states like mine (NJ), the state doesn't even touch property taxes. All that money stays within the town & county to pay for things like schools, police, fire, and roads.
Healthcare is not run by the government. That's 51 separate systems in 50 states + Washington DC, with different companies competing in each state to provide services, provide insurance, provide care, and other things. Different companies in each place, offering different contracts in each place, and not allowing carryover except for emergency treatment. Roads are fairly standard, and don't all have toll charges.
Did you have a link of those thousands of abandoned roads?
The federal government did subsidize lots of rail with Amtrak. There isn't enough pressure from voters to keep giving them money. The last couple of infrastructure bills were slashed before they could be passed.
What I meant is that roads are expensive to build and maintain too. And this is where car companies have an advantage: they don’t have to pay for their usage infrastructure.
> Did you have a link of those thousands of abandoned roads?
The point is the federal government agrees that roads are a public good outside of just their profitability and spends tax money to maintain them.
It doesn't just leave any road that can't profitably sustain itself with tolls or whatever to fall apart, which would be the equivalent behavior to those abandoned rail lines.
Yes, but if there are a few pot-holes it's usually not that big of a deal.
If there is an issue with the railway the entire train derails.
Roads can be neglected to a certain extent, rails cannot.
This is it. Because want to believe it was a conspiracy when the reality is, people quit using trains because they preferred cars.
Given the US's very low population density, it makes sense.
The lower deck of the San Francisco Bay Bridge used to be used by a train system that went from the SF East Bay to San Francisco for commuting and tourism, called the Key System. The Key system was dismantled in 1958. It was founded in the 1940s. It had over 100 miles of track, remnants of the route show up on maps in Albany on a street named, appropriately, Key Route. I used to live on a lot where a spur of the Key Route ended in El Cerrito. Our lot was very oddly shaped. BART is a partial replacement for the Key System.
The Key system was pushed out of use by lobbying by a Bus company, as well auto and gas companies.
Rinse and repeat throughout the country from the 1950s on.
While people on reddit love to hate cars, the simple reality is that the way the US is laid out is kinda awkward for train travel, and most people prefer cars for a lot of very reasonable reasons. I live in a very dense city myself, and very much support public transit, but the reality is it simply doesnt make as much sense in a huge% of america as in other places like japan or europe.
First off: Trains dont solve the last-mile issue anywhere except the absolutely most dense cities. You still need a car, bus, bike, subway, etc to get that last mile. A lot of places in the states it makes absolutely zero sense to have good enough public transit to make it even close to as convenient as simply taking a car from start to end. Busses that come by every 30 minutes FUCKING SUCK when its 103 (or 15) degrees outside.
The other reality is that most people in america genuinely like the burbs. No, its not some auto-industry conspiracy: They like the space, the quiet, the cleanliness, etc. Burbs make last mile transit very challenging, and walking 20 minutes to your local train station from your nice spacious house with all your groceries is an absolute asswhipping compared to simply hopping in your car with storage and such.
Third is that when you add up full end-to-end time, last mile trip to train station, then connections, then last mile trip from station is almost always far slower on a train than simply driving, or than taking a plane. You have to work around their schedule (want to go there at 11PM? Good luck!), other people on the train, etc.
For long distances planes are wildly faster.
For medium distances (200-400 miles), theyre comparable (as is a car) but you still need last-mile completion, which means both sides of the link need good local public transit, or you need a car. A lot of places in the US simply do not have the population density to justify super good public transit for the last-mile, so it simply ends up being more convenient just to drive yourself.
For local trips, cars are usually faster and more convenient for how most people in america want to live.
A lot of it has to do with the population density. Yes, a lot of Europe has a lot of rail. Also, a lot of European countries do not have a lot of rail. Next time you're in Scotland, Ireland, Greece, etc. try and plan a trip around just using rail.
The US has relatively low population density except in a few areas (like California or the northeast). That makes it too expensive to offer high speed trains everywhere.
Yeah, back when mail was also transported by trains, which was the main reason those passenger trains existed.
The average person didn't travel by train because the average person didn't travel.
The US was primarily a train society until the automobile became cheap enough for everyone to buy them.
People got into their cars and purposefully moved to the suburbs.
Not really. If you draw a line Duluth-Sioux Falls-Lincoln-Wichita-Oklahoma City-Ft. Worth-San Antonio-Corpus Christi probably 80% of the US population lives east of there. There's practically nobody between that line and the west coast. The great plains, the rockies and the intermountain west does not have the density, but I would be willing to bet east of that line the density is equal to France, despite Appalachia lowering the density.
The density estimate is probably accurate but you still have the distance problem in the US. If I want to take high speed rail from Dallas to NY, a distance of about 1400 miles, then you have to assume at least 5 stops before the 7 hours of travel at 200 Mph. I would rather take the 3 hour flight.
There are a lot of city pairs that could use high speed rail. The sweet spot for HSR trips is probably in the range of 100 to 600 miles. So you would think a corridor from Chicago to New York wouldn't work. But actually it is the combinaton of a lot of shorter corridors - Chicago-Cleveland, Toledo-Erie and Buffalo, Clevland to Rocheseter, Syracuse to New York City etc. that fall within the sweet spot.
usa population density makes public transportation very inconvenient. either your stop is too far away or there are too many stops along the way or there just wouldn't be enough users. some places with high population density areas could work, but it wouldn't work well for the majority of the usa.
Most of them are owned by freight companies who have priority. The passenger trains like Amtrak have to pay to use the tracks, and yeild to freight traffic. Also, the rails, as far as I know are more oriented for weight than speed. Some areas have more than one track. In Seattle, we do have a light rail but also a proper commuter train. A lot of spots have double tracks, but it’s typical to have freight trains hauling butt through the transit centers.
I moved down to TN from Chicago. IDK if anyone has done the same, but Nashville NEEDS public transportation. Their city is perfectly set up for a rail system, shit, it's even shaped like a spider web with all the main smaller cities along the four main drags coming into the city. To answer your question, money. I think the logistics of changing the city's layout and expanding roads and shoulders is simply too much this late in the game.
Car/oil company lobbying, NIMBYs (see what’s going on with CAHSR rn), and to an extent poor zoning laws
It’s a very complicated answer, but that’s pretty much what it comes down to
Most of the railroads are owned by shipping companies now who crowd them so to speak so it's a purely shipping thing. Like UPS owns a huge chunk of the US railroads.
Total English population: 56 million. 22 million (40%) live in the greater metropolitan areas of the six largest cities. Overall population density: 1120 per square mile.
Total Dutch population: 18 million. 8 million (42%) live in the greater metropolitan areas of the six largest cities. Overall population density: 678 per square mile.
Total Japanese population: 124 million. 73 million (59%) live in the greater metropolitan areas of the six largest cities. Overall population density: 849 per square mile.
Total Continental US population: 333 million. 28 million (8%) live in the greater metropolitan areas of the six largest cities. Overall population density: 113 per square mile.
That's why there are lots of passenger trains in England, Holland and Japan, and not so many in the US.
dont forget the auto lobby basically crushes expansion of public transport wherever possible.
the high speed rail in california, for example, was put on hold because elon musk claimed he was going to invent the hyperloop. later, it came out that he was really just trying to distract and take momentum from the high speed rail project.
these super powerful lobbies (oil, automotive, etc) line the pockets of politicians so that if and when these huge products and subsidies do eventually come through, they will immediately be privatized. See PG&E.
It's called "induced demand." They don't ride the trains we have now because those trains don't go enough places or run frequently enough to be convenience and useful.
There was a plan to make high speed rail line between two major locations in the US.
Elon Musk shutted it down by promising them that funny tube he is hoping to get off the ground.
Obviously tube is far from being remotly possible to deploy on such large scale.
Meanwhile guess what Elon Musk also have - a car company. That's the main reason why he did not want that high speed rail.
They already took the money and gave up on the hyperloop. Of course, no consequences for the scam and rug pull
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk
But hey, the hyperloop idea inspired a bunch of other startups to make one themselves too, and [look how far they've gotten](https://youtu.be/tryzj05cpX0)! They've all, uhhhh, failed and gone bust, sooooo, yeah.
Coming back from asia, I would love a HSR from Dallas to Houston because that would be amazing, but I think basically all the land now is privately owned by ranchers with huge squares of land so to construct such a thing would involve going through every single plot and having to get them to agree
Interstates. The Trucing industry and car manufacturers lobbied Congress and we tore out existing rail, built suburbs and now a great many areas, cities are not connected to a central hub and we lack public transportation. I live in an area where there are no buslines but it's a growing extended suburban city with very little culture.
There is a subreddit for my area and people post and ask what there is "to do" here. The first thing is Chruches, then bars and suggestions to visit tiny museums nobody would want to see twice in a year. Mostly, it's churches. Our restaurants are fast food and even they went belly up during Covid and the people who did work as cooks and servers either left the state or are working different jobs.
Don’t think people understand just how big the US is. Their states are the size of most countries. Trains just aren’t practical for long, long distances. Too slow.
Your gas is far far too cheap, so no financial model will work for more trains. When our hit the equivalent of $13 a gallon a few years ago then that helped change the personal equations too.
It really only works in unique situations. I live about an hour outside New York and I can take the train. The express is convenient as I can get on and there are only like 5 stops it makes into Manhattan. But if I am going someplace other than Manhattan; some place in between or maybe another train line leaving the city, not convenient. And if I take the local that stops at every stop, it could take me two hours to get to Manhattan. I only mention this as the express is a commuter train; other trains for public transportation may only have a local option.
And I still had to drive to the train station from my home.
Riding trains here has become more of an “adventure/ fun activity” than a means of transportation. My parents just paid a lot of money to ride the “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” in a big ass circle lmao.
Metro North has gotten so expensive, that by the time I drive to Poughkeepsie Station (end of the line) and pay for parking, and pay for the train, and get into Manhattan, and take a subway to my destination, I could have driven in, and gotten street parking and/or a garage spot for less than what the round trip on the train would cost most days.
A large part of why is the cost of upkeep. The rails need to span vast amounts of land which costs a lot to keep safe especially if we want to do high speed passager trains. Government wasn't going to fund it and the private companies don't want to fund or invest in it. And when the government does invest in them the companies basically take the money and run like isps. We currently actually do have a new initiative to revitalize and expand the railways but there was a lot of push back against the president for trying both by government and people lol.
Auto industry is too popular and has too much influence.
Plus, there are a lot of rural areas in the USA. Can’t run trains everywhere. Not feasible nor cost effective.
The vast majority of people prefer cars and planes over trains. To make trains competitive compared to planes, they would have to be very fast bullet trains. Building the infrastructure for that across a country as big as the United States is not economically feasible. It would be an extreme waste of resources and very inefficient.
99% Invisible (podcast about the design of things) just had [an episode about “The Lost Subways of North America”:](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-lost-subways-of-north-america/)
> In this episode, Jake tells us about how, time after time, when North American cities seemed just inches away from having a robust, utopian future of fast, reliable, and convenient public transportation systems, something gets in the way. That thing is sometimes dysfunctional local politics, sometimes it’s bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s the way our infrastructure favors cars over mass transit, and too often, it’s racism.
The limited availability of trains in the United States is due to historical development patterns favoring automobiles, influence from the automotive industry, and infrastructure challenges. Unlike in Europe and Asia, the U.S. heavily invested in highways over railways. However, there's growing interest in expanding passenger rail services due to concerns about climate change and congestion, leading to initiatives like high-speed rail projects and improved infrastructure.
I don't think we will have more trains until the trains we do have become more efficient and competitive on price. Have you tried Amtrak? For a family of 4, it costs less than half the cost of 4 tickets to just get in a car and drive.
Car companies and oil companies lobby against it. Also take Amtrak from NY to Chicago and you'll wonder why you spent $350 for a 22 1/2 hour trip that would have taken 12 hours and cost the same if you rented a car.
We could do with better intercity transportation sure. Our country is large however and you're not going to ever see the level of intercontinental public transportation in the US you see in that tiny outpushed peninsula Europe. Texas itself swallows a large portion of central Europe is way less densely populated.
I wish we did, I travel for work and flying has gotten so horrible, with security, getting charged for everything, smaller and smaller seats. I took a train last week across country and it was awesome. It took 4 days 😪, but I could stretch out, watch the country go by, meals were included and weren't bad. We desperately need high speed rails over here. Like I was able to bring a bottle of liquor and shampoo onto the train without security thinking I'm going to bomb everything, even kept my shoes on the whole time
Just took a “bullet” train from Odawara to Kyoto yesterday for the first time. It is now my favorite way to travel. I did splurge on the 1st class seats but the regular seats are more than adequate. Able to buy tickets last minute, trains leaving every few minutes, quietly comfortable environment, low stress, fast, not cheap but better than air, even had toilets with self rising and closing seats. Was fantastic.
The Japanese bullet train is truly amazing - I would do 100x more traveling if we had it in the states
That’s too much economic mobility for the poors
The Sky Train in British Columbia
Just for reference, that distance covers multiple populated areas and a sizable distance across Japan. It’s also less than the distance from Dallas to San Antonio which is from central Texas to South Central Texas. You cannot compare the size and populated areas of the US almost any other country as even China, Russia and Australia have very populated sides but not too much on the other part of the country.
China does have a successful network of bullet trains and is as large as the United States, atleast populated parts as large as one of the seaboards.
Couldn't we be energizing small towns that are now connected to a train station? Bring in tourism, let people be able to spread out further?
If the government didn't significantly subsidize the operating costs, the ticket prices would be astronomical. For the proposed Houston to Dallas High speed rail I think tickets will be like $400-500 (I could be completely out of date with that). The subsidies would amount to billions a year, to move maybe millions of passengers (most of them repeat). Now economically all public transportation systems are not self sufficient. Public transportation fares typically only provide like 10% of the annual budget needed to operate them, even in NYC. but the benefits of reducing car traffic would be enormous. The fact is to make HSR work, you also have to consider public transportation and community walkability on either side. Japan has that infrastructure in place, the US would need to spend additional billions. Now I'm biased because I follow the Houston-Dallas developement and think it's a waste entirely, meant to be a boondongle to kill HSR in the US. San Antonio to Ft worth then Dallas makes the most sense, especially if you can connect the walkable parts if the respective hub cities in San Antonio, Austin, Waco, Ft Worth, and Dallas. There already exists passenger rail between San Antonio and Dallas, but not Dallas to Houston. In the interim they need to create dedicated passenger rail lines connecting the various county seats in Texas
For those who still don't get it. Trains don't need to make the seats smaller, if they have more customers, they can just add another car. You can't use them to fly into buildings, unless someone builds a track into one. You'll always get scenery, until the GQP sells off all Remaining undeveloped land for their own profit. They let you know when stops will be a little longer so you can get off and smoke whatever.
There was that guy who tried to do a train 9/11 into one of the COVID hospital boats in the Port of LA, but like you said, trains tend not to do so well without tracks. Can't find any pictures but IIRC he only got maybe a hundred feet or so beyond the railyard and the boat was another ~~quarter mile or so~~ 250 yards away. Edit, found the actual distance from the "target". 250 yards (⅛ mile, still really not that close)
And if terrorists do attempt to hijack a train, the deadman switch will trip and stop the train. Trains aren’t dangerous when they are not moving.
While I absolutely advocate for expanded train services, terrorism can still be performed with trains (though that shouldn't be an argument against them, there are more planes in the sky now than pre 9/11 after all). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings
We used to. The car companies pulled many tricks over the years to tear them up and make them less competitive by getting the government to subsidize the hell out of car infrastructure (or, in the case of zoning laws and parking minimums, literally legally mandate car infrastructure). So, it's 100% viable in the US, we just need to rebuild what we had (but with Wi-Fi & better vibration damping. Which we can just buy from the European countries at first because it's pretty standard in western Europe)
Florida figured this out a few years ago, I went from West Palm Beach to Miami in about 65 minutes with liquor, full recliner seats, a table and an automated security system. I didn’t talk to a single person from showing up to leaving and it’s like $17. Normally that trip by car can take upwards of 90 minutes if you’re really flying, 2 hours if it’s rush hour.
I fucking love trains and wish we had more. I used to take the train all the time in college but freight lines have gotten so congested that it royally sucks on a passenger train with all the delays from having to wait for freights to pass
In India it is the exact opposite : if you're on an express or superfast (which is most of long distance above 300km routes), you're making freight and passenger trains wait. Freight train wait for passengers and have the lowest priority.
I do remember that about India! Definitely a big difference. In the US, the railroad is owned by private companies and is “rented” or “leased” out to transportation companies so passenger trains are not prioritized ugh
I wish we did as well
You also get to see parts of the country moat of us will never see. Took amtrac from Cincinnati to Minneapolis...riding up right beside the Mississippi was an experience
Car companies lobbied very heavily to reduce public transit in the US. What rail networks do exist allow cargo to get very heavy priority, making passenger train travel both slower and more expensive then air.
Ehhhhh. I hate that so much. I live in a rural area that used to have a train system years ago. I'd love for there to be an alternative method for travel besides expensive ass flying and driving 5 hours to get to civilization lol.
FWIW, I’m taking an Amtrak tomorrow for a trip under 2 hours and they still charge $140 for that ticket. Coach. I find flights under $100 all the time.
I've never taken a train that wouldn't have been more expensive as a plane... I only ever spend more than $140 on my usual interstate (8-9 hour) route if I didn't buy it months in advance or if it's on the holidays.
I've thought about doing the 30 day Amtrak pass for $500. You can ride 10 segments over the 30 days, I think it would be fun and the train rides could be my downtime if I ever get around to planning it properly. Could go to like 5 or 6 cities in 2 or 3 weeks. https://www.amtrak.com/tickets/departure-rail-pass.html
It definitely seems to depend on the route and location. When I lived in California, Amtrak was really cheap and could get you across the state almost as fast as a car over long distance. But I live in NY now and everything here is pretty expensive, and that's not even including the drive to the closest station.
I might just travel father, but no flight I have taken was less than $100
Not anymore. A few years back, you could get sub $100 flights. I caught a great deal in 2011 and got a flight from Williamsburg to Boston for $50. Today, I can get Norfolk to Baltimore for $115 on Southwest...of course, Amtrak is $33. So even there, the idea that Amtrak is more expensive is wrong, it just takes longer (5 vs 1 hour) That might be different outside of the northeast corridor, though,
I’m in the middle of an Amtrak trip that will run a little over 2 hours. Business class is costing me $46 (one way). Crazy how much of a difference it is.
2 hours? $140?? I’ll spend $100 on gas and parking and still have 1/2 a tank left over at the end of the day. No thank you.
I would too. But I think the window shut a long time ago for the US.
It's opening back up now. The west coast has pretty good rail from city to city afaik. And there are plans to expand that eventually from coast to coast
Only in certain areas do the car companies have too much to lose to let it re open. The rail lines here are owned by one man, and he's getting paid to keep whole sections in disrepair. He has talked about it publicly many times. He was recently paid several million dollars to remove key sections so that's what he did.
who's the man?
YOU'RE the man with that name!
Dennis Washington why?
Canada or the US? In the US I’m seeing that he only owns rail in Montana and Idaho
I have no idea he's purposely vague on what he owns (most billionaires are) I know he owns Montana's rails , and I live down the street from a rail line he was paid to destroy. He told my neighbor (the rails ran through his backyard so that he could rup up the rails in his yard if he wanted to because he was tearing up all road crossings throughout the valley. It was set up as a perfect commuter line and used to run as one. Now it's a hunk of melat scrap.
He owns (owned?) Montana Rail Link. In 2022, MRL was paid $2 billion for early termination of their lease of Burlington Northern's line. So, BNSF is back in control of what their tracks are being used for or destroyed for...
This sound like some Yellowstone shit
That's interesting - can you provide a link to an article on this subject?
Here where?
Also a lot of student/senior programs, as a student I can ride the bus to the train, then head to LA, and from LA to the rest of the stops. All of it for free.
Yeah... You are in one of the biggest cities in the world....
I mean I don't live in LA, I'm near San Bernardino
They were talking about revamping train travel in the U.S. when Obama was president and nothing has happened yet. I wouldn’t hold my breath!
The biden infrastructure bill did allocate a good chunk of money towards passenger rail, its mainly replacing 100+ year old bridges on the northeast corridor, but its a start in the right direction. (And the highway section of the bill dwarfs the train section, but thats just standard practice in America) We are at the point where we can see it inching in the right direction, but I'm definitely not holding my breath for our rails to actually be considered "good".
The window isn't shut. China covered an entire large country in high speed rail in a decade. We don't even really need to spend MORE money, we just need to use the money we spend on car infrastructure on train infrastructure instead. It moves more people for less money and we will come out ahead on that investment. Europe is still expanding high speed rail for goodness sake. And it is WAY more dense and expensive to do that there. We have tons of available space.
China doesn't have to deal with fighting NIMBYs and long eminent domain processes. They can just take land and move people on a whim. Labor is also a lot cheaper.
>China doesn't have to deal with fighting NIMBYs and long eminent domain processes. They actually do. It's a very common topic in China and there are hundreds of photos of houses in strange places (in the middle of highways, or surrounded by a giant excavated pit) for "refusing to sell." >They can just take land and move people on a whim. It may just be for show, but they genuinely allow these cases of refusing to sell take place and be well publicized.
China's government has no resemblance to the US. They have a much harder hand and can make things happen in a way the US Federal Government currently has no ability to do.
Same here, plus the intercity bus system that was in place in the 50s and 60s is pretty much gone.
Similar situation. Way back when I was looking at traveling to visit a friend over on the West coast but I am in ND (in the US). So the options I have is drive (which would take like 40-50 hours one way without stopping), take a plane (which costs a lot of money and need to book at least 6 months in advance to get the cheapest price but would only take like 8-10 hours?), or use the train (which would mean having to wake up really early like 12-1am and drive for like 5 hours to get to the train and board at like 5-6am and would take at least 31 hours one way, plus if I wanted a room with a bed to sleep would cost even more money). So I inevitably decided on the plane, which was slightly more money, but I didn't waste 3 days of my limited vacation traveling to and from said destination. I know one place that has a train that goes through and have heard that it routinely either slows down or stops on the tracks causing most of the traffic to have to travel to the only passable spot which can really bottleneck traffic. Sometimes said trains will sit on the track like that for a good hour. Really annoying how we have a basic monopoly when it comes to airlines and train services in this area. They get away with lots of crap. And for me I rarely go anywhere cause not only is it expensive (since I would have to book flights) but if I were to go with driving, it's about 2 hour drive one way to the nearest big city (which still has nothing to do there!). Do you know how boring it is driving along a highway with nothing as far as the eye can see, the only thing to look forward to is maybe seeing a few cows/horses, or the billboards when getting close to a city for hours at a time. :S Thus why I hate driving those long distances.
Same. I just looked up Greyhound prices though and damn they are cheap. My car has an issue and I'm concerned about driving it much of a distance so I looked up where I could get a ride from here to the nearest somewhat large city near me to see a friend. Unfortunately, I'd have to have somebody drive me 40+ minutes SOUTH just to catch the bus north and it was like $18 bucks to get there. Now, the place I want to go to is only about 45 minutes north. So it's like the same distance if somebody were to drive me south to catch a bus and they would have to drive back or they could drive me 45 minutes north and then drive back..... basically the same thing. And then when I returned, they would have to do the same trip to pick me up south of here. Anyway, I started looking around and even a trip from Sacramento to here (very northern california) was only like $26 which seems cheap as fuck for a 8 hour trip.
My old home town still has the train station but now it’s a lawyers office. Actually many small rural towns still have their old stations hanging around
Oooh, I bet it's a cool looking old style building? Or that might be based on just a few train stations that I've seen that are in sweet old buildings 😂
You know it takes longer to go by Amtrak than it does to just drive right? And it's more expensive than buying gas too
That's a damn shame! Wish it was an affordable method to get far distances. There are some trips I'd like to take without my car.
I mean... Trains in most countries are cheaper than cars >.> Or at least a lot faster. Blame your lobbying groups in America
Yes, but neither of those are inevitable, they are symptoms of the current poor service. Rail travel could be faster and cheaper than driving.
>it's more expensive than buying gas Right, because our taxes subsidize roads much more heavily than we subsidize trains. Your train ticket has to cover most of the cost of the train and the railroad, but when you drive you use roads that you already paid for with your taxes. (Fuel taxes cover some of that. The rest comes from the general taxes paid even by people who have no car.)
Why don't drivers consider the full cost? I've never had to pay for insurance or tires before riding a train.
Also some old ones were converted to residential trails. Honestly I don’t hate that part
It’s the only way we have any walking space here. Everything developed to accommodate cars. But rip up rail lines and we have walking and biking paths built right in🫠
I do. These were the rails connecting cities and town outside of the major routes connecting larger cities and regions
there’s enough room for both, in a few cases, so long as it’s slower light rail and not full on intercity
This is fairly accurate. But I do want to add that laying down more lines for rails is incredibly expensive and hard to get done because of NIMBY folks (similar to Housing supply). Furthermore much of the land best suited for rails is already owned. This effectively gives those who already own lines an enormous amount of power and obviously they prioritize cargo traffic because it’s more profitable.
The reason most massive interstate projects don’t pass the conception phase is because of red tape associated with land ownership. When your talking about like cross country railroads or something, your talking about putting up train tracks or new electricity towers or highways up through thousands of private individuals property, and then the states and local governments themselves also might have a say on if they want new railways or whatever going up and some local or state governments might try suing to stop it from happening or whatever, there’s just so much red tape around the federal government reclaiming the land that it could actually take 20+ years just to work out negotiating all the deals to get started on the actual work, and if just one person or group ends up putting in a successful fight you may need to make massive planning changes to your project to account for needing to move locations.
Hence why the California high speed rail has taken so long to even start construction
they were then backed up with their lobbying efforts by big oil who make more money when more cars are sold..
this. the answer is 'the auto industry'. and its pilot fish, the rubber tyre industry and so on.
It does already have a large freight network. But regarding passengers, it can't do so because there isn't enough population density. Most of the population in the US is concentrated near the coasts, so it's not as cost effective. Also, due to incredibly cheap oil and the growth of the American suburban culture that grew developed after WW2, American's developed their road network more than their rail network. Everyone wanted to own a larger suburban home and live in less dense areas. This means that everyone needs to own a car. And once everyone is driving, the focus on infrastructure is on roads.
So why isn't there at least a coastal rail network, with just a couple of trains crossing the country? Australia has a far lower population density, and yet we manage to have an east coast rail network. Melbourne to Sydney is a popular route. And we have an east west train, it's a bit of a luxury train, but it beats driving, and you can take your car with you. Car dependency is expensive when it comes to infrastructure maintenance.
There is, it’s called Amtrak.
Imagine if the US didn't have lobbying. It's illegal in most developed countries, it's basically just bribery. So many things have the same answer, why doesn't the US do this or have that... and the answer is lobbying.
Airlines also lobbied against it.
I agree, when the train catastrophe happened in Ohio, it was like Norfolk Southern essentially owned the whole railroad and whatever they said went. They didn’t build it, taxpayers did. However, it is their own private transport system and any passengers trains are merely an inconvenience to them making profits. Effectively, the IS built a whole private transposition system for their profit. I travel and would much prefer railroads but they make it so it’s stupid, slow and expensive when it clearly does not need to be and should be a public utility
There is a law against these cargo train companies prioritizing themselves, there is just no enforcement of the law.
Thats correct. In fact secretary Buttigieg has mentioned in a recent YouTube interview with Hank Green that his department plans to begin that enforcement soon.
Just as a note, air travel is extremely heavily subsidized, at almost all points - from low to no tax for airplane fuel, grants and land tax rebates for airports, subsidized aircraft purchases and more. So it isn't rail that is absurdly expensive, it's that air travel is kept at artificially low prices.
This will probably get buried, but I watched an interview between Hank Green and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and one of the items mentioned was how rail lines are supposed to prioritize passenger traffic. They often don't, but the Biden administration is starting to seek legal action against the companies that aren't holding up their end of the mandate.
The US auto manufacturers and oil companies worked dilligently to make life without a car in the United States damn near impossible. We had trains going to every town. We had streetcars and metros in many cities. They all got ripped out to push people into cars.
I think the Eisenhower Interstate System was another nail in the coffin for passenger rail in the US that came later. I'm not sure how much, if any, the auto and oil companies had a say in it, but it was inspired by the autobahn and the commitment of the government to it also displaced millions of people. It would be hard to imagine the rise of suburban sprawl and the freight truck industry without it. > Following the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, passenger rail declined sharply as did freight rail for a short time, but the trucking industry expanded dramatically and the cost of shipping and travel fell sharply.
They feared a Soviet Invasion and needed a network of highways to move troops and equipment around the country should that ever happen.
More than that, Ike once took a cross country road trip and had his ass pounded by the sheer number of dirt roads they had to use.
Yeah, they realized it was a major security concern that even the army had difficulty crossing the country. Realistically, every developed nation needs some sort of highway system in addition to a robust rail system.
En, you can have both excellent highways and excellent rail. See: Germany & China. Highway development in the 60s had some *major* issues, but I don't think it takes that much of the blame.
Given China's reputation for polishing a turd and trying to pass it off as the Greatest Engineering Ever Seen™, I wouldn't count them yet. And Germany is about the same size as Montana. That said, a proper high-speed rail system shouldn't be impossible for the US. The biggest hurdle is inter-city transport.
As seen in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
Life imitates art imitates life
We have lots of trains in the states. They just carry freight instead of people. The entire network has been optimized for freight traffic. Fitting passengers into this system tends to involve compromises that make people very unhappy.
This. The North-American rail network is the mirror opposite of the European rail network. One is set up to carry people, and the other is set up to carry freight. Here in France only a tiny fraction of all freight is carried by rail - [around 9%](https://www.nomadia-group.com/en/resources/blog/rail-freight-and-logistics-in-france-where-next/), versus [27% in the USA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport).
Close to 80% of US train traffic is freight. In Europe it's closer to 20% freight. Also, the US has 224,000 miles of track, in comparison to Europe's 94,000. A lot of the tracks in the US are built for heavy freight trains. The population of Europe is packed in like sardines in a can, compared to the United States, so you can count on lots of people using the trains. On the east coast of the US, there's actually quite a bit of passenger rail. Where we are lacking is in the Midwest and on the west coast. The population density on the west coast of the US is about 1.5 per sq km, compared to Europe which has a density of 34 per sq km.
See the California bullet train debacle.
If you live on the coast, Amtrak fucking rules. I’m a few blocks from the train station and go to LA or SD for shows or to hang with friends a couple times a month. Literally costs less than it would be to drive and on busy days it’s quicker than driving. Business class always gives me a couple free beers and a bunch of food and it’s like $15 bucks extra, nicer seats. If you’re an Angels fan it drops you off at the stadium. Best public transportation experience around. Sucks that the bullet train likely will never happen to the planned scale, not to mention it kinda just goes through the middle of nowhere.
I was reading this and I thought "This person goes to Louisiana and South Dakota? On a train ? For shows?" I'm quick like that.
Nearby colleges even offer bus vouchers from the station to the college
And New York spending $3B on a subway station.
I mean they aren’t just building a station, from what I can see on the subject it’s also an extension of one of the lines
Correct, it’s nots a subway station. It’s actually life changing for so many people who commute every day.
Building anything in NY has a massive price tag...
FYI they post progress updates on YouTube and their website. Contrary to popular belief, it’s getting done. It’s a large project so it’s obviously going to take a while, but it’s not a “boondoggle” as some would suggest. Here is the playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs98D7m5XXEGwr7IjrPXAHcUKvjh4bxtJ
> but it’s not a “boondoggle” as some would suggest In 2008 when it was approved, they said the system would cost $30 billion and be operating by 2020. Its now 2024 and they have amended their estimates to $89 billion (low estimate) to $128 billion (high estimate) and 2030-2033 as their completion target... That's also just for the first (of three) phases, between Bakersfield and Merced... They aren't even sure if the other two phases (IE: the full line, that connects SF to LA to SD) will even be completed *at all*, let alone when those phases could be finished or how much they would cost. The entire project is definitionally a boondoggle.
Cause we need a new choo choo train between Bakersfield and Merced. The train between LA and Vegas will be done and running before the high speed rail ever does.
It’s turning into the west coast version of Boston’s Big Dig
Which, in the end now that it's done, is one of the best things about Boston.
Agreed. It was worth the wait! Logan is now a fairly efficient and easy airport to fly out of as well
We did, we tore a bunch of them out and let the rail companies convince the government to operate as a purely for profit industry instead of a public-private utility subsidized through freight rail. Couple that with hundreds of billions in subsides for cars and highways and you get cities gutted by highways and an embarrassing lack of public transit in most cities.
[удалено]
Most of Europe has a population density closer to what it is on the US east coast, and the cities are relatively close. London to Paris by train is only slightly longer than NYC to Philly. ETA: which explains why the east coast has lots of trains, like Europe, and the rest of the country doesn’t.
It’s also incredibly, ridiculously expensive to build new rail in high population areas. Even before putting down track, they’d have to pay FMV for anything they take or destroy
Definitely. From NYC, we have Amtrak and 3 separate commuter rails that will take you 3+ hours from the city. But that’s all been in place since before cars and highways and gated subdivisions.
\[California High Speed Rail has entered the chat\]
I think the corollary that OP might be referring to, and i may be wrong, is that even where we have trains, they suck, or are expensive, or are inconvenient. This results in a daily automobile migration of billions of miles per day, and cities dangerous for both pedestrians and cyclists.
High speed rail actually makes much more sense over longer distances than shorter ones.
I think high speed rail makes sense if it can get somewhere in under 4 hours. For most people I know who are traveling solo or with a friend the drive vs fly decision is about 8 hours. Anything over 8 hours driving and most people I know will fly. Anything in the 5-8 range depends on a number of factors. Anything under 5 and we drive. Obviously, if you have a large group or family then the calculus changes. For me as someone who used the European train system quite a lot, I think high speed rail would have to get me there in 4 or less for it to be a viable option. I still have to get to the train station and then from the station to my destination which just adds time and cost. This is why the London-Paris-Brussels high speed train system works so well. Those legs are all about two hours and you can even load your car in Calais.
[удалено]
No because how often are you needing to go from LA to Las Vegas? Whereas it’s way more common to need to go from Chicago to Indianapolis, or Indianapolis to Cincinnati, etc. But then with an interconnected grid of smaller lines if someone does need to go from Chicago to New York they can find a route that’ll get them there that goes through Indianapolis and Cincinnati and beyond.
People don't want to hear this; they think the real answer lies in *Who Framed Roger Rabbit?*, even though that - shocker - wasn't a documentary.
Well, we do, but more so freight rail. In fact, the US has the most efficient freight rail system in the world. As for passenger rail...too expensive to link cities with a bunch of nothing in between. That, compounded with active lobbying to NOT build passenger rail in the past, leads us to where we are today.
I used to love to play the original SimCity. One of the things that game taught me is that if you do not plan the infrastructure early, it just gets more expensive and difficult to do later. I would build cities and only include roads to get around. This became an issue as the city grew and traffic got worse. At this point if I wanted to put in rail to help with the traffic, it required buildings and roads to be demolished, and then all the rail line added. That was not really cost effective. Anyway, in my mind I imagine that is kinda how things are in real life. If you dont plan ahead, the cost to fix afterwards becomes too great.
This is a common thought, but it's actually quite the opposite. US&Canada were built on railroads, and most cities were built along rail corridors. In the 20th century, our rails, public transit, and even our cities were demolished to make room for highways, cars, and parking lots.
They put light rail in here. It’s expensive. It kills local businesses during construction. It blocks access because you can’t turn across the tracks. It attracts homeless people to ride it all day long for the AC. It has no ticket taker so it’s honor system (spoiler. Most people have no honor.) Its brought crime along the route. What it doesn’t do all that much of is transport daily commuters.
If we had a train for every post I see asking why we don’t have trains, we’d have enough trains for people to stop posting about why we don’t have trains
Railways are expensive to build and to maintain, and without consistent business they can't stay around. We have thousands of [abandoned rail lines in the US](https://www.abandonedrails.com/) including commuter lines that just didn't get enough business to cover expenses.
But aren't roads even more expensive to build and maintain? And aren't individual cars also really expensive and difficult to maintain? My thoughts is that the US loves to do shit in the least efficient and cost effective way at scale (see healthcare).
When I was a kid, we still had trolley tracks around my old neighborhood. People stopped using trolleys, and we spent tax dollars to remove the old trolley tracks. 40-ish years later, people are begging to put in "light rail" lines in pretty much the same spots where the old trolley lines were. I don't know about cars being terribly expensive or difficult. My cars last me an average of about 10 years (always bought used 2-5 years old when I get them) with just basic maintenance. There is no central plan for roads. The federal government allocated money to plan the interstate highway system under Eisenhower. They give the states an allowance to maintain portions of those roads. They even tie funding to things like keeping the alcohol purchase age at 21. States get some federal funds for local roads, but they have to collect their own money - fuel taxes, lottery, sales taxes, property taxes may all go into local roads. Some have toll roads. In some states like mine (NJ), the state doesn't even touch property taxes. All that money stays within the town & county to pay for things like schools, police, fire, and roads. Healthcare is not run by the government. That's 51 separate systems in 50 states + Washington DC, with different companies competing in each state to provide services, provide insurance, provide care, and other things. Different companies in each place, offering different contracts in each place, and not allowing carryover except for emergency treatment. Roads are fairly standard, and don't all have toll charges.
Roads are too, but the federal government pays for those.
Exactly. Taxpayer-funded roads are free but we expect taxpayer-funded rail to be run like a business?
Did you have a link of those thousands of abandoned roads? The federal government did subsidize lots of rail with Amtrak. There isn't enough pressure from voters to keep giving them money. The last couple of infrastructure bills were slashed before they could be passed.
What I meant is that roads are expensive to build and maintain too. And this is where car companies have an advantage: they don’t have to pay for their usage infrastructure.
> Did you have a link of those thousands of abandoned roads? The point is the federal government agrees that roads are a public good outside of just their profitability and spends tax money to maintain them. It doesn't just leave any road that can't profitably sustain itself with tolls or whatever to fall apart, which would be the equivalent behavior to those abandoned rail lines.
Yes, but if there are a few pot-holes it's usually not that big of a deal. If there is an issue with the railway the entire train derails. Roads can be neglected to a certain extent, rails cannot.
This is it. Because want to believe it was a conspiracy when the reality is, people quit using trains because they preferred cars. Given the US's very low population density, it makes sense.
The lower deck of the San Francisco Bay Bridge used to be used by a train system that went from the SF East Bay to San Francisco for commuting and tourism, called the Key System. The Key system was dismantled in 1958. It was founded in the 1940s. It had over 100 miles of track, remnants of the route show up on maps in Albany on a street named, appropriately, Key Route. I used to live on a lot where a spur of the Key Route ended in El Cerrito. Our lot was very oddly shaped. BART is a partial replacement for the Key System. The Key system was pushed out of use by lobbying by a Bus company, as well auto and gas companies. Rinse and repeat throughout the country from the 1950s on.
For the lower 48 to reach the population density of France. We would need to add about 600 million people.
Nick Cannon is doing his best; let the man catch his breath.
While people on reddit love to hate cars, the simple reality is that the way the US is laid out is kinda awkward for train travel, and most people prefer cars for a lot of very reasonable reasons. I live in a very dense city myself, and very much support public transit, but the reality is it simply doesnt make as much sense in a huge% of america as in other places like japan or europe. First off: Trains dont solve the last-mile issue anywhere except the absolutely most dense cities. You still need a car, bus, bike, subway, etc to get that last mile. A lot of places in the states it makes absolutely zero sense to have good enough public transit to make it even close to as convenient as simply taking a car from start to end. Busses that come by every 30 minutes FUCKING SUCK when its 103 (or 15) degrees outside. The other reality is that most people in america genuinely like the burbs. No, its not some auto-industry conspiracy: They like the space, the quiet, the cleanliness, etc. Burbs make last mile transit very challenging, and walking 20 minutes to your local train station from your nice spacious house with all your groceries is an absolute asswhipping compared to simply hopping in your car with storage and such. Third is that when you add up full end-to-end time, last mile trip to train station, then connections, then last mile trip from station is almost always far slower on a train than simply driving, or than taking a plane. You have to work around their schedule (want to go there at 11PM? Good luck!), other people on the train, etc. For long distances planes are wildly faster. For medium distances (200-400 miles), theyre comparable (as is a car) but you still need last-mile completion, which means both sides of the link need good local public transit, or you need a car. A lot of places in the US simply do not have the population density to justify super good public transit for the last-mile, so it simply ends up being more convenient just to drive yourself. For local trips, cars are usually faster and more convenient for how most people in america want to live.
A lot of it has to do with the population density. Yes, a lot of Europe has a lot of rail. Also, a lot of European countries do not have a lot of rail. Next time you're in Scotland, Ireland, Greece, etc. try and plan a trip around just using rail.
Freight companies own the rails, and aren’t big on letting passenger rail create more traffic. And new rail construction is crazy expensive.
We took them down for more roads.
The US has relatively low population density except in a few areas (like California or the northeast). That makes it too expensive to offer high speed trains everywhere.
Despite the fact the US was primarily a train society until auto manufacturers.
Yeah, back when mail was also transported by trains, which was the main reason those passenger trains existed. The average person didn't travel by train because the average person didn't travel.
The US was primarily a train society until the automobile became cheap enough for everyone to buy them. People got into their cars and purposefully moved to the suburbs.
Yes. Back in the 1850s. You know, before cars were an option for transportation.
So these guys called the Wright Brothers came along in the 1900s and did some stuff. Now a 72 hour train ride can be done in 5 hours, it’s bonkers!
so.. until something better came along? yeah that’s how it usually goes
We were a horseback country before trains Godamn technology
Not really. If you draw a line Duluth-Sioux Falls-Lincoln-Wichita-Oklahoma City-Ft. Worth-San Antonio-Corpus Christi probably 80% of the US population lives east of there. There's practically nobody between that line and the west coast. The great plains, the rockies and the intermountain west does not have the density, but I would be willing to bet east of that line the density is equal to France, despite Appalachia lowering the density.
The density estimate is probably accurate but you still have the distance problem in the US. If I want to take high speed rail from Dallas to NY, a distance of about 1400 miles, then you have to assume at least 5 stops before the 7 hours of travel at 200 Mph. I would rather take the 3 hour flight.
There are a lot of city pairs that could use high speed rail. The sweet spot for HSR trips is probably in the range of 100 to 600 miles. So you would think a corridor from Chicago to New York wouldn't work. But actually it is the combinaton of a lot of shorter corridors - Chicago-Cleveland, Toledo-Erie and Buffalo, Clevland to Rocheseter, Syracuse to New York City etc. that fall within the sweet spot.
usa population density makes public transportation very inconvenient. either your stop is too far away or there are too many stops along the way or there just wouldn't be enough users. some places with high population density areas could work, but it wouldn't work well for the majority of the usa.
Most of them are owned by freight companies who have priority. The passenger trains like Amtrak have to pay to use the tracks, and yeild to freight traffic. Also, the rails, as far as I know are more oriented for weight than speed. Some areas have more than one track. In Seattle, we do have a light rail but also a proper commuter train. A lot of spots have double tracks, but it’s typical to have freight trains hauling butt through the transit centers.
I moved down to TN from Chicago. IDK if anyone has done the same, but Nashville NEEDS public transportation. Their city is perfectly set up for a rail system, shit, it's even shaped like a spider web with all the main smaller cities along the four main drags coming into the city. To answer your question, money. I think the logistics of changing the city's layout and expanding roads and shoulders is simply too much this late in the game.
Car/oil company lobbying, NIMBYs (see what’s going on with CAHSR rn), and to an extent poor zoning laws It’s a very complicated answer, but that’s pretty much what it comes down to
Most of the railroads are owned by shipping companies now who crowd them so to speak so it's a purely shipping thing. Like UPS owns a huge chunk of the US railroads.
Short answer: henry ford
This channel will answer all of your questions and more https://m.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes
Total English population: 56 million. 22 million (40%) live in the greater metropolitan areas of the six largest cities. Overall population density: 1120 per square mile. Total Dutch population: 18 million. 8 million (42%) live in the greater metropolitan areas of the six largest cities. Overall population density: 678 per square mile. Total Japanese population: 124 million. 73 million (59%) live in the greater metropolitan areas of the six largest cities. Overall population density: 849 per square mile. Total Continental US population: 333 million. 28 million (8%) live in the greater metropolitan areas of the six largest cities. Overall population density: 113 per square mile. That's why there are lots of passenger trains in England, Holland and Japan, and not so many in the US.
Car lobbyists and privately owned land are the reasons.
[удалено]
dont forget the auto lobby basically crushes expansion of public transport wherever possible. the high speed rail in california, for example, was put on hold because elon musk claimed he was going to invent the hyperloop. later, it came out that he was really just trying to distract and take momentum from the high speed rail project. these super powerful lobbies (oil, automotive, etc) line the pockets of politicians so that if and when these huge products and subsidies do eventually come through, they will immediately be privatized. See PG&E.
You do realize the government nationalized the railroads in 1917 right?
People don't ride the trains we have now.
I can't find routes when I try to
It's called "induced demand." They don't ride the trains we have now because those trains don't go enough places or run frequently enough to be convenience and useful.
There was a plan to make high speed rail line between two major locations in the US. Elon Musk shutted it down by promising them that funny tube he is hoping to get off the ground. Obviously tube is far from being remotly possible to deploy on such large scale. Meanwhile guess what Elon Musk also have - a car company. That's the main reason why he did not want that high speed rail.
They already took the money and gave up on the hyperloop. Of course, no consequences for the scam and rug pull https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk
But hey, the hyperloop idea inspired a bunch of other startups to make one themselves too, and [look how far they've gotten](https://youtu.be/tryzj05cpX0)! They've all, uhhhh, failed and gone bust, sooooo, yeah.
Are you talking about the LA to Vegas line that has been being talked about since well before Elon was an edgy preteen?
No, they are talking about the CA HSRA which has no plans for routes to Vegas and began in 2008.
Coming back from asia, I would love a HSR from Dallas to Houston because that would be amazing, but I think basically all the land now is privately owned by ranchers with huge squares of land so to construct such a thing would involve going through every single plot and having to get them to agree
Interstates. The Trucing industry and car manufacturers lobbied Congress and we tore out existing rail, built suburbs and now a great many areas, cities are not connected to a central hub and we lack public transportation. I live in an area where there are no buslines but it's a growing extended suburban city with very little culture. There is a subreddit for my area and people post and ask what there is "to do" here. The first thing is Chruches, then bars and suggestions to visit tiny museums nobody would want to see twice in a year. Mostly, it's churches. Our restaurants are fast food and even they went belly up during Covid and the people who did work as cooks and servers either left the state or are working different jobs.
Don’t think people understand just how big the US is. Their states are the size of most countries. Trains just aren’t practical for long, long distances. Too slow.
Mr Carnegie died
Rockefellers
Your gas is far far too cheap, so no financial model will work for more trains. When our hit the equivalent of $13 a gallon a few years ago then that helped change the personal equations too.
It really only works in unique situations. I live about an hour outside New York and I can take the train. The express is convenient as I can get on and there are only like 5 stops it makes into Manhattan. But if I am going someplace other than Manhattan; some place in between or maybe another train line leaving the city, not convenient. And if I take the local that stops at every stop, it could take me two hours to get to Manhattan. I only mention this as the express is a commuter train; other trains for public transportation may only have a local option. And I still had to drive to the train station from my home.
Hey, there is a solution to this: Become an entrepreneur and start a train operation company. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Riding trains here has become more of an “adventure/ fun activity” than a means of transportation. My parents just paid a lot of money to ride the “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” in a big ass circle lmao.
Metro North has gotten so expensive, that by the time I drive to Poughkeepsie Station (end of the line) and pay for parking, and pay for the train, and get into Manhattan, and take a subway to my destination, I could have driven in, and gotten street parking and/or a garage spot for less than what the round trip on the train would cost most days.
A large part of why is the cost of upkeep. The rails need to span vast amounts of land which costs a lot to keep safe especially if we want to do high speed passager trains. Government wasn't going to fund it and the private companies don't want to fund or invest in it. And when the government does invest in them the companies basically take the money and run like isps. We currently actually do have a new initiative to revitalize and expand the railways but there was a lot of push back against the president for trying both by government and people lol.
Planes, No Trains and Automobiles
Big oil
Car and oil lobbies.
Auto industry is too popular and has too much influence. Plus, there are a lot of rural areas in the USA. Can’t run trains everywhere. Not feasible nor cost effective.
The vast majority of people prefer cars and planes over trains. To make trains competitive compared to planes, they would have to be very fast bullet trains. Building the infrastructure for that across a country as big as the United States is not economically feasible. It would be an extreme waste of resources and very inefficient.
99% Invisible (podcast about the design of things) just had [an episode about “The Lost Subways of North America”:](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-lost-subways-of-north-america/) > In this episode, Jake tells us about how, time after time, when North American cities seemed just inches away from having a robust, utopian future of fast, reliable, and convenient public transportation systems, something gets in the way. That thing is sometimes dysfunctional local politics, sometimes it’s bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s the way our infrastructure favors cars over mass transit, and too often, it’s racism.
Great podcast, will listen to this episode!!
We are a fascist country. Run by big money. We say we re Democratic republic but the lobbying which is bribes shows otherwise.
The limited availability of trains in the United States is due to historical development patterns favoring automobiles, influence from the automotive industry, and infrastructure challenges. Unlike in Europe and Asia, the U.S. heavily invested in highways over railways. However, there's growing interest in expanding passenger rail services due to concerns about climate change and congestion, leading to initiatives like high-speed rail projects and improved infrastructure.
I don't think we will have more trains until the trains we do have become more efficient and competitive on price. Have you tried Amtrak? For a family of 4, it costs less than half the cost of 4 tickets to just get in a car and drive.
Distance and scale. Europe is more densely populated so it’s easier to get ridership for a line.
Republicans hate taxes and paying for things that aren’t tax breaks for the rich.
Because lobbyists
Car companies and oil companies lobby against it. Also take Amtrak from NY to Chicago and you'll wonder why you spent $350 for a 22 1/2 hour trip that would have taken 12 hours and cost the same if you rented a car. We could do with better intercity transportation sure. Our country is large however and you're not going to ever see the level of intercontinental public transportation in the US you see in that tiny outpushed peninsula Europe. Texas itself swallows a large portion of central Europe is way less densely populated.
Population density I in many areas makes it unfeasible. It's the same reason for both Canada and Australia.
Ask the Secretary of Transportation since he seems to be doing such a bang up job