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I’m sorry, but are you seriously suggesting that we over invest in rail/Amtrak? Public transit is far more capable of commuting more people in a shorter period

I’m sorry, but are you seriously suggesting that we over invest in rail/Amtrak? Public transit is far more capable of commuting more people in a shorter period of time than roads. What we really need is far more subsidies in urban and dense suburban areas. The problem is that with our bifurcated political system in the US the people who make up less than 50% of the population outside the cities will block investment in the cities because they will feel like they’re not getting equal investment.

lonelappde 7y ago
Public transit is not the same as Amtrak. A fair accounting for Amtrak has to compare to the bus alternative. I suspect Amtrak is pretty efficient in the NE corridor (at 4x the ticket price of buses) due to density, and loses a lot on the long hauls cross country and the rest of the coasts. Also, on the side, remember that non-city dwellers get massive subsidies from city dwellers for their cost ineffective lifestyles. One can argue that this is justified to support the people working in critical agriculture and industry that can't be moved to the cities and we want low sticker prices on, but it's a much hard case to make for suburb dwellers.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Amtrak is a complete joke where I live. Plane tickets are much cheaper, which is absurd. I’d love to ride a train to visit other cities but I can’t unless I’m some sort of masochist. I live within walking distance of an Amtrak stop too.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    I live near SLC Utah, and to get to SF, I'd pay around the same as an airline ticket for coach, but the trip would take 18 hours. If I wanted a sleeper cabin, it costs 2x an coach flight ticket. And this is for 2 tickets, 6 months in advance, which I think has a hefty discount vs individual tickets, especially closer to the trip time. The only way it's cheaper is if I get the "saver" fare, which is a little cheaper, but has no refund if my plans change. I would be happy to pay that if the travel time was better, but it's almost 2x longer than driving and not much cheaper than driving (it's actually more expensive if I'm bringing kids along). Trains were supposed to be more efficient than airlines, so why is taking Amtrak essentially the same price as flying?
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      There is a somewhat competitive market for air travel. Amtrak protects rail freight from any interference from passenger rail. Which isn't a terrible idea, because rail freight is great, but I feel that completely killing any sort of market is going too far. Some sort of competition in passenger rail could really improve life in USA.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Planes are cheaper in a lot of Europe too.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Where is the evidence that suburb dwellers are subsidized by city dwellers? The South Bay is a giant sprawling suburb and brings in significantly more tax money than it receives.
  - kasey_junk 7y ago
    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/we-have-always-subsidized-suburbia/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/we-have-always-...
    - kortilla 7y ago
      That article doesn’t say anything about city dwellers supporting unsustainable suburban lifestyles. Mortgage insurance deductions are available to city dwellers as well. FHA loans do very little to support the insanely high house prices in places like Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.
ethbro 7y ago
As was briefly touched on in the article, the real benefit would be integrating and enabling sister cities (e.g. ~100 km mark around major cities). Regular, daily train service would revitalize and open up a lot of smaller communities. Precisely as major cities are grappling with housing and affordability issues.
- mattrp 7y ago
  Short run regional doesn’t have to be Amtrak’s mandate when there are plenty of feeder lines like NJT and Septa able to step in. The problem is not rail vs road. The problem is that rail becomes a sinkhole for public fantasyland spending. Take for example the article cites how Amtrak got stuck with the bill for hurricane sandy infrastructure repairs never mind its legacy of bailing out Passenger rail service in the 70s. God only knows it would have gotten the ultimate bill for California’s insane rail project when it failed. The issue is there aren’t enough controls to keep out of control allocations, spending and let’s just call it what it is: corruption, greed and graft, from entering the system. This idea that we can’t build roads cost effectively while we can build rail is simply preposterous - Acela was predicated on the idea that twenty years ago Amtrak could figure out how to develop high speed rail and yet Acela beats the regular line by ten minutes between dc and ny and that’s largely due to fewer stops. I’m sorry to be a downer but I have zero confidence in a national rail initiative. If metros and regions want to improve commuter times great but there’s just nearly zero rationale to build more Amtrak infrastructure.
- zanny 7y ago
  Those cities are "grappling" with problems of their own creation by decades of NIMBY zoning and investment policy. We should have more and better rail infrastructure but part of that in terms of commute is insuring that the stations service enough patrons to justify building them. Low density sprawl quarter acre stick houses dotting miles of windy lane and a half road without sidewalk connected by 4 lane boulevards are ill fit to benefit from a rail station even just a few miles away. The opponents of urban development would just decry such projects as wastes of money when ridership doesn't compare well to European and Asian contemporaries because everything beyond the station is so poorly planned. The solution to the urban housing crisis was, continues to be, and will be until its done the building of more housing. A lot more. Density, at every price. Without mandated parking, without vertical clearance limits, without per-unit size limits, without the ability for NIMBYs to stall out or shut down expansion efforts for their own personal gain. Nothing else will cure the ailment - all else is just treating the wound.
TylerE 7y ago
Have you ever actually taken Amtrak? Outside of the North East Corridor (which, at 125mph max is still glacial by EUropean standards) Amtrak is way slower than driving - and that's assuming it directly connects to where you want to go, which, against, outside of the North East, it doesn't.
- thebradbain 7y ago
  You're discounting the San Diego - Los Angeles Pacific Surfliner route. It connects many cities in Southern California and is often faster than driving with traffic congestion as it is, and a useful commuter rail in its own right.
  - krustyburger 7y ago
    Unless your final destination is Union Station, downtown San Diego or some other place that happens to be very proximate to the various stations in between, using the Surfliner still requires you to use another form of transport like ridesharing to get where you’re going. Southern California is very spread out and still organized around private automobiles.
    - _delirium 7y ago
      Union Station in LA directly connects to several subway, light rail, and commuter rail lines. There are lots of places it's still not convenient to get to, but it's way better than it was 20 years ago, and at least a few million people live within the area that's easy to connect. For example you can easily get to/from Pasadena or Hollywood.
      - jonas21 7y ago
        And on the San Diego end, Santa Fe depot connects to all 3 light rail lines as well as most of the major bus routes in the city. Once the Blue Line extension opens in 2021, you'll be able to get off Amtrak at Old Town and be in the center of the UCSD campus in 15 minutes. San Diegans tend to have a bit of a defeatist attitude toward transit, and there are plenty of suburban areas where transit is bad, but there are also many places where transit is a reasonable option.
bradleyjg 7y ago
We desperately need more investment in regional mass transit. That's not the market Amtrak serves. I'm not convinced we need to invest more on inter-city passenger trains. Of the most popular city pairs for flights, probably only Los Angels <-> Las Vegas makes sense for a rail trip, but LA is so sprawling and lacking in regional mass transit that getting to any train station would probably take away any advantage.
- thebradbain 7y ago
  Dallas to Houston is, I believe, the most popular short-haul flight route in the US (maybe SF-LA beats it, but it's up there), and the geography/distance makes so much sense for a high speed rail that a private company, Texas Central, has secured private capital and is working with the government to bring a Japanese-style Shinkansen to Texas. The station locations have already been secured in downtown Dallas and Houston, and groundbreaking is tentatively set for next year. A 90 minute train ride connecting Texas' largest two cities? Compared to the 4hr trip a car takes or ~2hr for a plane (factoring in security)? At a (tentative) price point of ~two tanks of gas? I'm optimistic that it won't only be a commercial success, but also that it will convince people (and politicians) that a HSR-network is in the public's best interest, even for routes that don't necessarily make sense from a commercial (private) perspective. https://www.texascentral.com/ https://www.texascentral.com/
  - TylerE 7y ago
    At almost 400 miles, I wouldn't consider SF to LA really short haul. That's almost double Houston-Dallas.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Short haul is anything less than 600-800 nmi, depending on who you ask.
      - TylerE 7y ago
        For a plane, sure. But for rail, even high speed rail, not so much.
koolba 7y ago
> What we really need is far more subsidies in urban and dense suburban areas. The problem is that with our bifurcated political system in the US the people who make up less than 50% of the population outside the cities will block investment in the cities because they will feel like they’re not getting equal investment. Cities and metro areas have plenty of taxing authority at their disposal. If they want to institute additional taxes to fund these types of things then they could. Why should people living in rural areas have to pay for it?
- MiroF 7y ago
  As if the net flow of funds from the federal government is rural areas paying for city services and not entirely the other way around
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  Because rural voters hate the idea of taxes at all and so when given the option they will literally vote to ban metro areas from taxing themselves as they just did in WA.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    also a common phenomena with gun laws and abortion
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Why should rural voters pay for a city's transport system? At least city people do drive the rural roads between cities. (though I will agree they are overbuilt - but rural residents would be happy with cheap gravel roads they can afford)
    - lazyasciiart 7y ago
      I think you missed the point. These rural voters have passed an initiative that bans a metro area from taxing the metro area to build transit.
    - MiroF 7y ago
briandear 7y ago
> Public transit is far more capable of commuting more people in a shorter period of time than roads. Assuming you live close to a station and don’t have to carry anything with you. It’s a fools errand to expect a country the size of the US to have stations that connect everything. We also have extensive and ubiquitous air infrastructure as well for long distance travel and airplanes can be rerouted based on demand a lot more easily than fixed rail infrastructure. If there is a big event in some city or town, it’s fairly trivial to add flights, but it’s impossible to add more tracks. Airplanes can better handle seasonal traffic. For commuter traffic, rail can be more efficient, assuming point A to point B. As soon as you need a point C and point D (such as taking kids to karate practice or visiting your aunt Sally, trains become far more painful.
- UserIsUnused 7y ago
  Let the kids go by themselves. That's what happens in actual developed countries. It's just that actual developed countries are safe.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    The only reason my kid can't use transit himself is the need to cross the busy street when getting of the bus. The bus system will get him where he needs to go, and I've ridden it with him enough to be comfortable that he knows how to use it alone. However at the end of all our trips we need to cross the street to get home and there are too many cars for that.

lonelappde 7y ago

Public transit is not the same as Amtrak. A fair accounting for Amtrak has to compare to the bus alternative. I suspect Amtrak is pretty efficient in the NE corridor (at 4x the ticket price of buses) due to density, and loses a lot on the long hauls cross country and the rest of the coasts. Also, on the side, remember that non-city dwellers get massive subsidies from city dwellers for their cost ineffective lifestyles. One can argue that this is justified to support the people working in critical agriculture and industry that can't be moved to the cities and we want low sticker prices on, but it's a much hard case to make for suburb dwellers.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Amtrak is a complete joke where I live. Plane tickets are much cheaper, which is absurd. I’d love to ride a train to visit other cities but I can’t unless I’m some sort of masochist. I live within walking distance of an Amtrak stop too.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  I live near SLC Utah, and to get to SF, I'd pay around the same as an airline ticket for coach, but the trip would take 18 hours. If I wanted a sleeper cabin, it costs 2x an coach flight ticket. And this is for 2 tickets, 6 months in advance, which I think has a hefty discount vs individual tickets, especially closer to the trip time. The only way it's cheaper is if I get the "saver" fare, which is a little cheaper, but has no refund if my plans change. I would be happy to pay that if the travel time was better, but it's almost 2x longer than driving and not much cheaper than driving (it's actually more expensive if I'm bringing kids along). Trains were supposed to be more efficient than airlines, so why is taking Amtrak essentially the same price as flying?
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    There is a somewhat competitive market for air travel. Amtrak protects rail freight from any interference from passenger rail. Which isn't a terrible idea, because rail freight is great, but I feel that completely killing any sort of market is going too far. Some sort of competition in passenger rail could really improve life in USA.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Planes are cheaper in a lot of Europe too.
kortilla 7y ago
Where is the evidence that suburb dwellers are subsidized by city dwellers? The South Bay is a giant sprawling suburb and brings in significantly more tax money than it receives.
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/we-have-always-subsidized-suburbia/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/we-have-always-...
  - kortilla 7y ago
    That article doesn’t say anything about city dwellers supporting unsustainable suburban lifestyles. Mortgage insurance deductions are available to city dwellers as well. FHA loans do very little to support the insanely high house prices in places like Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.

ethbro 7y ago

As was briefly touched on in the article, the real benefit would be integrating and enabling sister cities (e.g. ~100 km mark around major cities). Regular, daily train service would revitalize and open up a lot of smaller communities. Precisely as major cities are grappling with housing and affordability issues.

mattrp 7y ago
Short run regional doesn’t have to be Amtrak’s mandate when there are plenty of feeder lines like NJT and Septa able to step in. The problem is not rail vs road. The problem is that rail becomes a sinkhole for public fantasyland spending. Take for example the article cites how Amtrak got stuck with the bill for hurricane sandy infrastructure repairs never mind its legacy of bailing out Passenger rail service in the 70s. God only knows it would have gotten the ultimate bill for California’s insane rail project when it failed. The issue is there aren’t enough controls to keep out of control allocations, spending and let’s just call it what it is: corruption, greed and graft, from entering the system. This idea that we can’t build roads cost effectively while we can build rail is simply preposterous - Acela was predicated on the idea that twenty years ago Amtrak could figure out how to develop high speed rail and yet Acela beats the regular line by ten minutes between dc and ny and that’s largely due to fewer stops. I’m sorry to be a downer but I have zero confidence in a national rail initiative. If metros and regions want to improve commuter times great but there’s just nearly zero rationale to build more Amtrak infrastructure.
zanny 7y ago
Those cities are "grappling" with problems of their own creation by decades of NIMBY zoning and investment policy. We should have more and better rail infrastructure but part of that in terms of commute is insuring that the stations service enough patrons to justify building them. Low density sprawl quarter acre stick houses dotting miles of windy lane and a half road without sidewalk connected by 4 lane boulevards are ill fit to benefit from a rail station even just a few miles away. The opponents of urban development would just decry such projects as wastes of money when ridership doesn't compare well to European and Asian contemporaries because everything beyond the station is so poorly planned. The solution to the urban housing crisis was, continues to be, and will be until its done the building of more housing. A lot more. Density, at every price. Without mandated parking, without vertical clearance limits, without per-unit size limits, without the ability for NIMBYs to stall out or shut down expansion efforts for their own personal gain. Nothing else will cure the ailment - all else is just treating the wound.

TylerE 7y ago

Have you ever actually taken Amtrak? Outside of the North East Corridor (which, at 125mph max is still glacial by EUropean standards) Amtrak is way slower than driving - and that's assuming it directly connects to where you want to go, which, against, outside of the North East, it doesn't.

thebradbain 7y ago
You're discounting the San Diego - Los Angeles Pacific Surfliner route. It connects many cities in Southern California and is often faster than driving with traffic congestion as it is, and a useful commuter rail in its own right.
- krustyburger 7y ago
  Unless your final destination is Union Station, downtown San Diego or some other place that happens to be very proximate to the various stations in between, using the Surfliner still requires you to use another form of transport like ridesharing to get where you’re going. Southern California is very spread out and still organized around private automobiles.
  - _delirium 7y ago
    Union Station in LA directly connects to several subway, light rail, and commuter rail lines. There are lots of places it's still not convenient to get to, but it's way better than it was 20 years ago, and at least a few million people live within the area that's easy to connect. For example you can easily get to/from Pasadena or Hollywood.
    - jonas21 7y ago
      And on the San Diego end, Santa Fe depot connects to all 3 light rail lines as well as most of the major bus routes in the city. Once the Blue Line extension opens in 2021, you'll be able to get off Amtrak at Old Town and be in the center of the UCSD campus in 15 minutes. San Diegans tend to have a bit of a defeatist attitude toward transit, and there are plenty of suburban areas where transit is bad, but there are also many places where transit is a reasonable option.

bradleyjg 7y ago

We desperately need more investment in regional mass transit. That's not the market Amtrak serves. I'm not convinced we need to invest more on inter-city passenger trains. Of the most popular city pairs for flights, probably only Los Angels <-> Las Vegas makes sense for a rail trip, but LA is so sprawling and lacking in regional mass transit that getting to any train station would probably take away any advantage.

thebradbain 7y ago
Dallas to Houston is, I believe, the most popular short-haul flight route in the US (maybe SF-LA beats it, but it's up there), and the geography/distance makes so much sense for a high speed rail that a private company, Texas Central, has secured private capital and is working with the government to bring a Japanese-style Shinkansen to Texas. The station locations have already been secured in downtown Dallas and Houston, and groundbreaking is tentatively set for next year. A 90 minute train ride connecting Texas' largest two cities? Compared to the 4hr trip a car takes or ~2hr for a plane (factoring in security)? At a (tentative) price point of ~two tanks of gas? I'm optimistic that it won't only be a commercial success, but also that it will convince people (and politicians) that a HSR-network is in the public's best interest, even for routes that don't necessarily make sense from a commercial (private) perspective. https://www.texascentral.com/ https://www.texascentral.com/
- TylerE 7y ago
  At almost 400 miles, I wouldn't consider SF to LA really short haul. That's almost double Houston-Dallas.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Short haul is anything less than 600-800 nmi, depending on who you ask.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      For a plane, sure. But for rail, even high speed rail, not so much.

koolba 7y ago

> What we really need is far more subsidies in urban and dense suburban areas. The problem is that with our bifurcated political system in the US the people who make up less than 50% of the population outside the cities will block investment in the cities because they will feel like they’re not getting equal investment. Cities and metro areas have plenty of taxing authority at their disposal. If they want to institute additional taxes to fund these types of things then they could. Why should people living in rural areas have to pay for it?

MiroF 7y ago
As if the net flow of funds from the federal government is rural areas paying for city services and not entirely the other way around
lazyasciiart 7y ago
Because rural voters hate the idea of taxes at all and so when given the option they will literally vote to ban metro areas from taxing themselves as they just did in WA.
- MiroF 7y ago
  also a common phenomena with gun laws and abortion
- bluGill 7y ago
  Why should rural voters pay for a city's transport system? At least city people do drive the rural roads between cities. (though I will agree they are overbuilt - but rural residents would be happy with cheap gravel roads they can afford)
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    I think you missed the point. These rural voters have passed an initiative that bans a metro area from taxing the metro area to build transit.
  - MiroF 7y ago

briandear 7y ago

> Public transit is far more capable of commuting more people in a shorter period of time than roads. Assuming you live close to a station and don’t have to carry anything with you. It’s a fools errand to expect a country the size of the US to have stations that connect everything. We also have extensive and ubiquitous air infrastructure as well for long distance travel and airplanes can be rerouted based on demand a lot more easily than fixed rail infrastructure. If there is a big event in some city or town, it’s fairly trivial to add flights, but it’s impossible to add more tracks. Airplanes can better handle seasonal traffic. For commuter traffic, rail can be more efficient, assuming point A to point B. As soon as you need a point C and point D (such as taking kids to karate practice or visiting your aunt Sally, trains become far more painful.

UserIsUnused 7y ago
Let the kids go by themselves. That's what happens in actual developed countries. It's just that actual developed countries are safe.
- bluGill 7y ago
  The only reason my kid can't use transit himself is the need to cross the busy street when getting of the bus. The bus system will get him where he needs to go, and I've ridden it with him enough to be comfortable that he knows how to use it alone. However at the end of all our trips we need to cross the street to get home and there are too many cars for that.