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> the Twin Cities-Chicago market is definitely a route that deserves better service For reference, the distance between Minneapolis and Chicago is about 400 mi

• PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Depending on whether you fly into O'Hare or Midway, you've got a significant or a somewhat significant journey into Chicago after you land. This doesn't negate your point, but needs to be taken into account for city-to-city service.
  • bluGill 6y ago
    Depends on where you go. The arrival is written by someone who lives near the airport in Minneapolis and had to drive (or?) a considerable distance to the train station.
• beisner 6y ago
  FWIW when driving, tolls along that route are roughly $10 each way... and that's low for the midwest.
  • vxNsr 6y ago
    so that's worth about $10 more for a grand total of ~$63 for the trip
  • waterheater 6y ago
    Tolls are actually around $5.50 one way, and they're only in Chicago. You can bypass tolls by taking 41 through Chicagoland and add maybe 15 minutes to the total drive time. No tolls once you're in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
• smabie 6y ago
  The cost of tolls, gas, depreciation per mile, depreciation time, monetary risk of accident, and etc could definitely make driving less economical than taking the train.
  • adrianN 6y ago
    Unfortunately car owners tend to ignore depreciation and risks of accidents in their cost estimates, but include comforts like the ability to carry more luggage.
    • sushshshsh 6y ago
      What happens when you get to your destination? Do you suddenly just stop needing a car?
      • adrianN 6y ago
        Flying is pretty popular and cars don't generally fit into the cargo hold of airplanes.
        • rob74 6y ago
          They do... ok, you could afford a pretty decent used car (or several months of car rental) for the shipping price: https://www.autoshippers.co.uk/air-freight-car-shipping.htm https://www.autoshippers.co.uk/air-freight-car-shipping.htm
          • Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
            From the 1950s to the 1970s there was a regular service transporting cars by air between the UK and various airports in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. It cost about twice as much as the boat from Dover to Calais. They initially used Bristol Superfreighters, which were replaced by Aviation Traders Carvairs (converted for the purpose from second-hand Douglas DC-4s). The Carvair could carry 5 cars and 22 passengers- the cars were loaded through a door in the nose. The "air ferry" service was killed by competition from the new RO-RO car ferries (when it started flying, cars still had to be loaded onto cross-Channel ferries by crane) and especially by the hovercraft service which began in 1968- a crossing by hovercraft with a car didn't cost much more than the conventional ferry while being as fast as the plane. The hovercraft, in turn, stopped being viable because of competition from the car-carrying trains through the Channel Tunnel- it stopped running in 2000.
• BrianHenryIE 6y ago
  > A car is faster and cheaper. I don't own a car and never learned to drive. What's my upfront cost before the $53 incremental cost? Car ownership begets car ownership. AAA says car ownership costs $8,558 per year. I'd have a hard time spending that much on public transport. https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/what-does-it-cost-to-own-and-operate-a-car https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/what-does-it-cost-to...
  • aww_dang 6y ago
    Also consider the health benefits and reduced medical costs if your lifestyle includes bicycling or walking.
    • sushshshsh 6y ago
      until someone hits you with their car or you catch pneumonia from cycling in february
      • lmm 6y ago
        All-cause mortality is significantly lower for cyclists. Yes, motorists do kill a lot of people, but in the big picture they're still less dangerous than a sedentary lifestyle.
      • aww_dang 6y ago
        As a former bike messenger, I can't relate to this kind of fear mongering. Winter biking is enjoyable when you dress properly for the weather and use spiked tires. https://valientemott.com/blog/chances-of-dying-in-a-car-crash/#:~:text=CAR%20CRASH%20DEATHS%20COMPARED%20TO%20OTHER%20CAUSES%20OF%20DEATH https://valientemott.com/blog/chances-of-dying-in-a-car-cras...
      • evgen 6y ago
        Motorists kill more motorists than they do cyclists. Did your car calculation include the odds of getting hit by some other moron in a car while you were driving to your destination?
      • 6y ago
• topkai22 6y ago
  Gas cost isn’t a great stand in for car trip prices, as there are a plenty of other costs to drivers. The IRS per mileage reimbursement rate is 57.5 cents per mile, putting the “real” cost to an 800 mile roundtrip around $400. A different stand in might be the per mile rate I can get from a rental company, which is often around 20 cents a mile. That would be $160 in other costs + the $53 in gas $213. Now, people chronically underestimate the cost of driving (and many of them are fixed costs) so the “competitiveness” of rail doesn’t really change, but IMO we shouldn’t just look at gas costs for automobile transport.
  • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    In Germany, the state rail company (Deutsche Bahn) tries to address this problem by selling rail discount cards. The idea is that people only take into account fuel costs when considering driving. They don't typically take into account capital costs like depreciation. So the DB sells a 250 Euro card that gives you a 50% discount on tickets for a year. The card creates an artificial sunk cost, and lowers the marginal cost of taking the train, making it more comparable with driving.
    • NanoCoaster 6y ago
      > So the DB sells a 250 Euro card that gives you a 50% discount on tickets for a year. A nitpick that's so small as to almost be irrelevant: For people up to (and including) the age of 26, it's actually 60€/year. This makes going by train a financially pretty attractive travel method.
    • kuschku 6y ago
      Or even the 100, which retails at 3878€ (2nd class)/6560€ (1st class) a year and allows pretty much unlimited travel, forever, everywhere.
    • vinay427 6y ago
      The SBB equivalent is Switzerland is even cheaper! 165-185 CHF/year (a bit lower in EUR) and now it's cheaper for younger passengers, which means many people get it without really thinking about it because it almost inevitably pays back even with many local transport tickets or certainly intercity travel. A few trips from Zurich to Geneva would mostly or completely offset the cost depending on your ticket.
• qiqitori 6y ago
  Hrm. If the average car lasts 200,000 miles, then 800 miles is 0.4% of that, and if the car cost $30000, that alone is $120. Just some food for thought -- of course, if you have passengers it'll quickly be worth it even if you decide to factor in this kind of calculation.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    That analysis is incomplete because any car that gets used at all ages by time as well as by mileage. The car is going to depreciate and degrade on a similar timeline regardless of how much you use it. Keeping miles off just changes the shape of the depreciation function.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      That's true especially in regions where there's salt on the road in the winter. But depreciation is usually a lot more mileage-based than time based.
    • pc86 6y ago
      At the end of a car's expected life, absolutely. But compare a two otherwise-identical 2016 or 2017 models, one with 30k miles and one with 120k miles.
      • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        And ~8yr from now the depreciation functions for both those will intersect. The only difference is depreciation now vs later.
• Phobophobia 6y ago
  There are a lot of great counter arguments to what you said, but as someone who is from the Twin Cities and studied in Chicago, I'd recheck each trip and always go car or plane. Often I could car pool, and splitting with one person made zero interest with going train. Train should be easy and way more competitive than it is.
• awalton 6y ago
  It's fun that nobody ever includes the cost of the Interstate Highway System into these throwaway calculations, as if the roads just magically appeared and are maintained by faeries. As if the roads, car companies, and the airlines aren't "massively subsidized" with energy (fuel and corn->ethanol) subsidies. We spent half a trillion dollars building the IHS over five decades, and have historically thrown at least a few billion a year at US oil producers - is it really surprising to anyone that driving is cheap? We keep bailing out the airline industry repeatedly - we already gave them $25 billion in grants this year because of the coronavirus, and they're still asking for more. But, dare we build an alternative to those systems, one that could be more ecologically and financially sound? Nope, too busy feeding our sunk cost industries. Keep blaming Amtrak for being terrible while refusing to give them their own run of rails so they don't constantly get stuck behind freighter traffic. Keep shuting down High Speed Rail projects around the country because the billionaires don't want it in their back yards.
  • pg_bot 6y ago
    We raise ~36 Billion dollars in fuel taxes per annum. That's why no one complains about the Interstate Highway System, it pays for itself. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2016/fe10.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2016/f...
    • bobthepanda 6y ago
      From the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, hardly a negative source about highways: https://www.artba.org/about/faq/ https://www.artba.org/about/faq/ > Highways: The FAST Act provides $45.3 billion for highway and bridge improvements in FY 2019 (the fiscal year from Oct. 1, 2018 through Sept. 30, 2019) and grows this amount to $46.4 billion by FY 2020. Most federal highway investment is used to upgrade and maintain the nation’s core highways, including the Interstate Highway System, and to repair and replace deficient bridges. > An additional $3.4 billion was provided for highway and bridge investments as part of the final FY 2019 spending bills signed into law Feb. 15, 2019. > Since 2008, revenues to the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) have been insufficient to fully support the level of federal highway and transit investment authorized by Congress. Prior to enactment of the FAST Act, the annual investment gap was nearly $15 billion. Congress has not increased the federal motor fuels tax since 1993, but federal highway and public transportation spending has grown substantially over the last 26 years. It should surprise no one that holding the trust fund’s inflow of revenues constant while attempting to address the nation’s growing transportation needs would lead to an unsustainable situation. It is quite clear that even just the Interstates do not "pay for themselves." There's also the issues with the fuel taxes, namely that motorists are not necessarily the only ones paying those taxes, and in addition to the depreciating value from a flat fee not tracking inflation, the value of the tax is continuing to diminish as some motorists switch to alternative fuels and others are driving ever more efficient vehicles.
• stickfigure 6y ago
  I don't know if the the schedules are better out east, but here in CA the Amtrak schedules are wildly optimistic. Like, double the listed travel time. And they run infrequently, at odd hours.
• CalRobert 6y ago
  Surely this calculation is incomplete without considering depreciation. Also, it makes sense to consider a portion of the cost of the insurance, maintenance, etc. towards the vehicle cost.
• pantalaimon 6y ago
  It doesn’t have to be this slow or expensive. A sprinter train from Berlin to Munich, which is a similar distance, takes a bit less than 4h, non Sprinter is 1h more with Tickets starting at 17.50€
  • w-m 6y ago
    But this starting price can be had only if you book way in advance. If you hop on the train from Berlin to Munich today, it will set you back between 93€ and 135€.
    • pantalaimon 6y ago
      Yea the pricing structure is weird. https://bahn.guru/ https://bahn.guru/ Helps to find cheap tickets, so when you are somewhat flexible you can still travel for cheap.
• yourapostasy 6y ago
  Once I got above a threshold compensation package where my time became far more valuable than occupying it with attention-grabbing activities around driving and flying, I came to appreciate trains. I can see how this calculus can change yet again back to valuing money more than freed-up time when one has a family though, if one were strictly evaluating as homo economicus: non-working spouses and children can add significantly to travel costs. However, I've frequently seen families prefer train travel for the time spent together it engenders, with one challenge being coordinating travel logistics once at the destination while wrangling children (ride sharing has alleviated that, I'm sure). On the super-long transcontinental trips, apparently the cell reception with the right gear on trains is much better than when I rode half the country westward many years ago. That makes the train travel mode even more valuable to me if I'm not on a tight schedule and the seating arrangement enables me to look forward to getting work done. What prevents me from using trains more than I do is the demands of many clients upon my time. Not quite lucrative enough for me to justify a satellite data link, but if my financial picture improves by many orders of magnitude, a digital nomadic life with a private railcar set towing shipping container footprint custom structures as a "home base" that I operate vehicles from would be an enjoyable way to my mind to get deeply into locales, while staying in touch with the Net and maintaining full fabrication capabilities with me.
• halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  Chicago - Indianapolis is also another route that would benefit both cities immensely.
  • wpm 6y ago
    And Chicago - Milwaukee. We used to have a train that ran as often as the CTA that you could hop on on the Union Loop downtown that would take you to Milwaukee. Now? You still see some people commuting on the Hiawatha but there's still only 9 of those a day.
• codingdave 6y ago
  The core use cases that the long-haul Amtrak solves are not day trips between large cities. You are right, there are other solutions for those. But Amtrak is the best fit for multi-day trips across the entire country for people who cannot fly. Amtrak also solves transportation for travelling directly from small rural towns to the large cities, and sometimes even from one rural town to another. It is the safest way to get across mountain ranges in the depth of winter (although not the fastest). It doesn't solve every problem, and it does need subsidies, and it always runs late... nevertheless, it connects rural Americans to the large cities in ways that city folk don't even realize.
• paul_f 6y ago
  With a car, you can go point to point. With a train, you have to arrange transportation to the station on both ends. Also, you can leave when you want, you don't have to time your travel with the train or plane schedule or worry about delays and cancellations. To me, up to 6 hours, a car almost always makes sense. Above 6, usually a plane. Rarely does a train beat out both alternatives.
  • pc86 6y ago
    The only time I've found the train beneficial for me is rural/suburban -> urban travel, where the train ride itself is about 3 hours. I live in the middle of nowhere and have gone to NYC via train many times. The train is about 20 minutes longer than driving, I don't have to drive in NYC, and I can park at the rural train station for $5/day. Now granted that could very easily go out the window if there are strict time constraints around when I can travel, and I end up driving because I can leave when I need to, and it's actually faster. Agreed though that car or plane beats train 99% of the time.
• ghaff 6y ago
  The other difference with a car is that, unless you're going downtown to downtown, you may need a car on the other end anyway. One of the reasons I always take a train to Manhattan is that I not only don't need a car but I hate driving into the city and parking is expensive.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    That applies equally to air travel. I've heard Uber and Lyft are popular. Cities and regions built with density, walkability, bikability, and transit in mind avoid or greatly reduce this problem.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      You can take limos/taxis for multi-hour drives but I expect that's relatively rare. I'm about 200 miles from NY and actually backtrack to take the train. But I'm still guessing that an Uber (if I could get one) would be a a good 2x the train and a private car even more. Some areas make it easier to get around other than in an auto than others. Of course, I'm often going somewhere out in the suburbs of a city anyway.
      • dredmorbius 6y ago
        Uber or Lyft would provide local point-to-point transport once at the long-haul destination. If you're making extended or multi-stop day or multi-day trips at a destination, you no longer have a simple long-haul transport need. A local car hire, group tour bus, bicycle rental, transporting your own bike, or similar arrangement could satisfy this. Boeing 737s and Airbus A330s would be equally or more handicapped under such circumstances, though a Cesna or comparable bush plane might be appropriate in some regions.
• leoedin 6y ago
  This is a chicken and egg problem. Of course there's hardly any demand for a slow, expensive and often late service which only runs once a day. It's not useful. A journey I do often in the UK is London to Edinburgh by train. The distance is almost the same (400 miles). London is a bit bigger than Chicago (12 million metro vs ~8 million metro) but then the Twin Cities are quite a lot larger than Edinburgh (1 million metro vs ~4 million metro). However, the track has been improved, is at least doubled the whole way and has significant portions at 125 mph. As a result the journey takes just over 4 hours. If the trains are more than 1 hour late you get all your money back. On an average weekday there's 41 trains travelling each way between those cities. And many of them are full. They're constantly doing improvements to try and increase the number of trains travelling. I understand it's a different situation - the result of decades of political apathy towards railways. But I think it's important to understand that the Amtrak situation doesn't have to be the way it is. There's not an inherent lack of demand for fast, regular train services between major cities.
  • biztos 6y ago
    Berlin to Frankfurt is also 4 (ICE) to 7 (IC) hours, and has a bunch of trains every day, and in my experience (pre-Covid) was usually pretty full when I took it. Lots of countries have good rail service that people actively choose over cars or planes between major cities. I find it maddening that my own country can't bring itself to really want that.
• WhompingWindows 6y ago
  There are a ton of subsidies at play behind these numbers. Cars and planes get the massive subsidies of non-taxed externalities due to carbon emissions and air pollution, for instance. There's a lack of long-term policy here: do we want to be in a society in 20-30 years that's still using personal cars to do that journey, when a high speed rail would be much more efficient and pleasant? If a true high speed rail were enabled, that 400 mile trip might take 3 hours instead of 6-8 for other modes of transit, and it would incur less negative externalities to boot. I'm all for individuals making informed decisions in the short term, while government and society should be taking long-term steps to promote the health of the commons as well.
• briffle 6y ago
  The Obama Administration tried to build high speed rail from Chicago to Madison, WI. It was supposed to be the first segment that would eventually extend to the twin cities. They have $700M dedicated to it. Then WI had an election for governor, and the incoming Republican (Scott Walker) managed to somehow conflate high speed inter-city rail with 'light rail' and scrapped it. He claimed it was too expensive, since the state would have to spend $7Million or so each year for their part of the maintenance (even though the feds were going to fully fund construction). After Scrapping it, the State then had to pay $90Million to upgrade the tracks between Chicago and Milwaukee (that was going to be paid for) and then had to pay $40M for the high speed Talgo Trains. Plus, Talgo moved their US headquarters from Milwaukee to Chicago.
  • yellowbkpk 6y ago
    Interestingly, it wasn't the Obama administration that tried to build the high speed rail. It was the Republican governor of Wisconsin (Tommy Thompson) that pushed for it. Scott Walker used it as a wedge to split the electorate and win the election. Wisconsin Public Radio did a great podcast about it here: https://www.wpr.org/derailed/wisconsins-high-speed-rail-saga-was-decades-making https://www.wpr.org/derailed/wisconsins-high-speed-rail-saga...
  • gbronner 6y ago
    The route is seriously dumb -- goes straight to Milwaukee and then south, versus going directly through Madison. Badger bus already does MSN-MKE cheaply and quickly, and there's almost no chance that this routing could ever be time-efficient versus the direct route. The route in Madison was supposed to go to Monona Terrace, which is singularly inconvenient for most people, limiting the catchment basin. Getting out of Madison requires huge numbers of grade crossings, limiting speed, and disrupting traffic. So this route was never going to be anything other than a slow drain on the treasury, and SW wisely killed it.
  • jackschultz 6y ago
    We could really need the Milwaukee to Chicago train up to speed. I'm in Milwaukee and would go to a Chicago office twice a week on that train and it just got tough with 1:30 each way. The train is packed too, where on the way back in the evening, people can be standing because not enough seats. Higher speed, like cutting it down to :45 or :50, would mean a ton. The problem is the value of that isn't able to be calculated and in pretty much all infrastructure cases, it gets purely political.
• hvs 6y ago
  A lot of people are pointing out that you are only including gas costs, but they are also ignoring the fact that cars get you precisely where you want to go. Trains only get you into the city you are going.
  • scatters 6y ago
    Cars get you to the nearest parking lot to where you want to go. Depending on the city, that could be further away than the nearest metro or rail station to your destination.