Why Trains would NEVER WORK in the USA
(slrpnk.net)
MrMakabar
solarpunk memesIf only people tended to live together in big conglomerations this would be so much easier to solve!
Hilarious! Love it! "one free checked car per passenger" is gold.
To be fair, only one time in my adult life have I flown somewhere and NOT rented a car as soon as I landed.
I thought this was going to annoy me but it was hilarious
It's a complicated problem. Part of it is that Amtrak is so broken that people wonder if it's even fixable.
I recently went to a concert in another city for my birthday. I looked into what Amtrak options there were, because I get panic attacks in traffic, and they only offer overnight service, with a middle of the night swap from bus to train. It also would have cost $250 round trip for two tickets vs <$100 in gas to drive, and taken 12 hours vs the 7 to drive.
So instead of taking the extra time off work, we wound up driving, and I had multiple panic attacks instead.
Another part of the problem is that the US likes to talk about whether or not people deserve transit options. Like, my local bus only comes by four times a day between 6am and 6pm, but because I live in a low-income area, I apparently don't even deserve a bench at the bus stop.
We don't have any buses. Or sidewalks. Or bike lanes. Or trains. Even walking near the road is super dangerous. Tell me more about your limited bus schedule.
the worst part of Amtrak is how often it's late, making it not only more expensive than driving or flying but also less reliable.
Old story. That happens when so much of the tracks is owned by freight rail, so little proper passenger rail infrastructure exists and laws that would require passenger rails to be given priority being so weakly enforced and largely ignored, never mind that the infrastructure is maintained as freight rail needs it, which is really bad for passenger rail purposes.
This is the bigger thing I think, Luke AmTrak at least west of the Mississippi doesn't have a whole lot of options for long distance travel, there's functionally one train that goes west from Chicago and one train that goes east to Chicago and that's only if you want to be in the north, but if the rails were govt owned, it would be easier to justify adding more trains and more destinations because they could start making the service note reliable.
it wouldn't be as much of an issue if Amtrak ran more than once a day in megacities and thrice a week elsewhere
It would be even more of an issue because freight rail would fight the higher track usage of Amtrak even more, making the service even more unreliable. Amtrak needs its own infrastructure and between metropolitan areas there needs to be HSR corridors. This is quite a task even in countries with functioning institutions and capabilities to build infrastructure at a reasonable price. The US isn't such a country.
I live on a hill in Alaska, am I qualified to be an urban transpotstion person or do you need to live in the denali mountain range?
I guess it's covered by 5., but the real, actual reason we can't have trains is the civil engineering firms can't extract infinite money from a completed railway.
Also, have you considered how any public works project that runs longer than a single term of the elected official who gets it approved, is letting the next guy get all the credit for it? That's much worse than having functional mass transit.
California seems to be good at infinite money extraction for rail that never finishes.
The conservatives that filed the many, many lawsuits that delayed construction over and over again are the same people complaining about how long it's taking to be completed. They caused the delays and are the most vocal about the delays. It makes no sense.
I guess it’s covered by 5., but the real, actual reason we can’t have trains is the civil engineering firms can’t extract infinite money from a completed railway.
Actually, they kinda can. Railroad tracks need upkeep just like roads do. Maybe not to the same degree and maybe the costs work out differently but they do need to be maintained. So there's plenty of opportunity to grift the hell out of a railroad buildout.
I was assuming the repair would be done by a different firm, but that's fair. It probably ends the cost-plus contract that the construction firm had, at a minimum.
In seriousness the problem seems to be the contract doesn't incentivize the correct behavior, but I would love to hear from someone with actual knowledge on the topic.
Also, maybe there are too many opportunities to kill projects via zoning ordinances, and its inarguable that oil, auto, and other industries actively combat these projects.
Have you SEEN what the UK is doing? HS2 is at around 700 million/mile (about 900 million USD) now, you can absolutely extract infinite money from a rail line without even finishing it.
It is the entire English speaking world that lost the ability to built passenger rail without it costing multiple times of what it costs in other developed countries.
If NYC and LA were the only cities, trains would be amazing. Just one HSR sleeper line straight across the empty desert, trains leaving every 5 minutes to meet demand.
With the amount of passengers and the lack of stops along the way, a state-of-the-art 500-600 km/h maglev like the L0 series shinkansen would be able to bring the travel time down to 6-8 hours while being a lot cheaper, more comfortable, more spacious, and with much better access to the city.
My god, it could even be worth trying to build a hyperloop.
For context, a flight is already 6.5 hours and cost 350-400. To have comparable speed it would only take building two complete mag level rails.
Oh man the Shinkansen is amazing. 2 or so hours instead of 9+ by bus to get somewhere while drinking beer or sake and eating is amazing. And you can take a dump lol
Nothing stopping you from taking a dump on a bus either, some people do that already
Your fellow passengers might not approve, but that's another matter entirely.
Fits more with c/fuck cars, but solid meme and welcome here
I was told that part of the reason is that railways are rented and mostly used for freight.
The US is third on the list of countries in freight volume per year, so yes there's a lot of freight trains.
I'm going off of memory here, but what I heard was that passenger rail was never really as profitable as freight, so the government basically had to force all the rail companies to keep doing passenger trains. The massive subsidization of car transit made it hard for them to compete. Amtrak was basically created as a way to take the responsibility for doing passenger rail away from the rail companies, in exchange for guaranteed priority usage of the rails.
The priority of passenger trains is unenforced, so they have to wait for slow freight trains all the time. Additionally, the math on speed is different for freight vs passenger rail. A freight train getting somewhere an hour faster doesnt matter nearly as much as a passenger train getting somewhere an hour faster, so improvements to facilitate faster trains falls on amtrak.
Amtrak does own some rails, e.g., the northeast corridor, which is nice and profitable. It's also worth noting that the "unprofitable" lines are still vastly vastly vastly more profitable than roads.
That's basically correct. Passenger rail was a highly regulated industry, and it was always more profitable to transport freight over the same lines. Eventually, the private passenger rail companies were basically all losing money, and filed for permission to discontinue passenger service (in the previous regulatory framework, companies needed government permission to make any changes to service), so that Congress basically created Amtrak to take over the prior passenger lines. As it stands, though, Amtrak needs to lease/license access to tracks it doesn't own, so it's hard to increase speeds or service, as the track owners would need to give permission for the upgrades to the track or the effect on timetables. That's even true of the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak owns most of the track, but some segments are owned by freight rail companiex CSX and Norfolk Southern.
Not to mention railroad companies found loop holes to force priority to freight by making trains longer than rails inbetween side stops.
By "subsidizing" they loaded passenger trains with mail from usps. In the 20th century, trains had to compete with government subsidized highways.
What I don't get is why people are okay with all-day drives that could be comfy train rides. Not to mention commute traffic jams of everyone going in the same direction at the same time every workmorning and workevening.
Honest answer? Partly because I can operate on my schedule and not the train’s schedule. And the rest of it is getting to have adventures along the way that otherwise would mean getting off the train, finding a bus, taking a long bus ride to the thing, taking a long bus ride back to the train, getting on the train again…
Sometimes I drive to Seattle, sometimes I take the train. There are times when I like the relaxing ‘let someone else get me there’ vibes, but there are times when the train schedule doesn’t work with my schedule, or I want to check stuff out on route, like fun restaurants I’ve read about, cool educational places, silly tourist traps…
I remember seeing a sign for ‘World’s Largest Egg!’ one trip, so I just took that exit and went to find the World’s Largest Egg, because why not?
And another reason is sometimes I just don’t want to be around a lot of people. One crowded train trip up I was treated to a child that felt the best way to pass the time on the 3.5-hour journey was to scream. A lot. It was also a trip where I’d forgotten my headphones. Not fun.
Ive heard maybe a dozen or so people whip out the ol "if everyone at the light hit the gas at the same time, at least 3+ more cars could get through the intersection"
If only there were some way to connect these many single cars into one vehicle... And if only it were cheaper... And faster... And didnt have to stop as often...
Because public transit is for poor people/minorities, and if they used it they'd be around a bunch of poor people/minorities.
Then they can't fly less than Leer, a 747 is as "public" as any Amtrak train.
I think this is a big factor. A lot of people are racist, and a lot of people are like pathologically anti-social.
and they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed [m|b|tr]illionaires, right?
I also can’t comprehend all-day drives over all-day trains. If I take a train on my own or with my family, those are (partially) actionable hours. I can read a book, grab a coffee, work on my laptop, draw with my kid. If I go by car, best I can do is a podcast.
Since I don’t own a car, my point of view is also biased by not having to make sense of a large investment. But if you factor is the costs of having the car, gas and tolls… I’d rather go by train. If necessary, I can rent a car at my arrival destination.
If you're just one person a train can be attractive if you have reasonable transportation to and from the station. A car gets really cheap once it's a family of 4. Planes also offer significant time savings for a comparable price.
I would love to have public transit where I live that could easily get me to work, without having to take the freeway and deal with traffic. There isn't a train near me which goes to my workplace, sadly.
That seems more like a task for a bus and/or tram network alongside trains, maybe also a taxi (I'd argue there should be a public transit form of taxis to fulfill a hole not covered by existing modes).
Of course, that's not a personal failure, that's a policy failure.
Funny thing, there is a public taxi system where I live. Though the taxi doesn't even go near my place of work. Also, there use to be bus lines going through here, but that disappeared.
c/fuckcars stans when someone doesn't have 30,000 people within a square mile of their home:
A big share of the US population lives along feasible HSR corridors. The reason that this HSR doesn't exist isn't because there is no potential for it, but because the country is underdeveloped and honestly struggles to stay afloat infrastructure wise.
It's normal that people don't look beyond their tiny horizon. If I was king of the world I would order everyone to live in town and later on the countryside. And in at least 20 different countries of the world during their lifetime. I believe that would completely change how people see each other. Best people generally speaking are those who travel a lot (cultural travel, NOT business).
Who cares of trains are profitable?
That's the joke — Americans will complain that trains aren't profitable while ignoring that roads and airports aren't profitable either. Sometimes it's stupidity and sometimes it's a bad faith argument.
Ah, my bad. I thought the graph was showing that they do make money. Now that the full image loads after pressing it, I can see it's about highways.
Americans should stop train train-haters.
Because Americans are highly regarded
America has trains. We use them for freight because it doesn't care if it sits for a while or takes weeks to cross the country. Much of the US is too spread out for trains to be super useful for passengers. The areas that make sense do have reasonable passenger rail usage, mostly the east coast metropolis and Chicago to nearby cities.
The contiguous United States has a higher population density than Spain, which has a great high speed rail system. Metropolitan France is not much more denser than that as well.
You can't generalize population density across the entire continent like that. Montana and Wyoming have a wildly different population density than California or New Jersey and they're all in the contiguous United States. Even just looking at the region east of the Mississippi to between the Mississippi and the Rockies, shows a striking difference in population density.
Also, Spain is like 1/16 the size of the US with mostly a singular population center in the literal center of the country. And, the Paris metropolitan area is comparable to the tri-state NY Metro area and a fraction of the size of the surrounding region from NY to D.C., which itself is a tiny fraction of the area we call the East Coast.
Chicago to nyc is currently a 20 hour train or a two hour flight. High speed rail would be a massive expense to get a best case scenario of maybe 4 hours. The flight just makes more sense for people. Both cities have good rail options for inter city transport, or even out to suburbs.
If you guys ever properly tax your carbon, that 4 hour electric train will sound much better than a 1 or 2 hour flight in jet fuel.
Though this is a problem worldwide, even here in Europe jet fuel isn't taxed enough.
