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The main problem with the US interstate train system is that it's run on freight train lines. Amtrak and Acela do not actually own the railway they use and they

The main problem with the US interstate train system is that it's run on freight train lines. Amtrak and Acela do not actually own the railway they use and they can only go a certain speed due to the grade of the track. I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha. Anyways Amtrak are barely turning a profit as it is and while it would be great to have Euro quality train lines, the economics aren't there. Even in Europe they're having a hard time competing with flixbus.

foota 6y ago
Roads don't break even, why should we expect trains to?
- atoombs 6y ago
  I never understand this line of thought. We invest in infrastructure to enable people to move between places, commune with one another, and trade goods. We've invested a tremendous amount in roads. Why do we expect other things like the USPS, Amtrak, etc. to generate profits when they're an expenditure in infrastructure?
  - tryptophan 6y ago
    The argument goes that if nobody is willing to pay the price for something(passenger rail), and chooses another alternative(driving), then it means that the service is not worth having and subsiding it would just be a waste of taxpayer money. Of course its not that simple, because driving is subsidized(I would prefer every road to be a toll road and get rid of the general taxes that used to go to roads)...but you get the point.
    - foota 6y ago
      I mean, the issue is I can't choose to pay for quality rail service because it doesn't exist here. I can't take HSR from e.g., Boston to NYC, SF to LA, or Seattle to Portland/Vancouver. These are all trips I would have gladly made at 100-400 dollar ticket prices in the last year.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        Yes but you're exceptionally rare, and might discover you're wrong about your preferences if someone were to take the big gamble of building such a service. Also the whole era of passenger rail may have been killed off by lockdowns. Train services are basically always hugely subsidised by governments. They could not survive against cars, buses and trucks if they weren't. The subsidies in Switzerland are eye-wateringly high for example. It's effectively a form of government planning designed to boost city/worker density as governments and others believe offices full of workers yields large benefits, and trains are the highest density/capacity form of passenger transport by far. So if you want ultra-dense urban cores you need a lot of trains. But do we actually need those? Governments sure haven't acted like it this year. Now big corps are eyeing their expensive city centre HQs and wondering if the real estate is worth it, the workers are seeing how much they save when they aren't being forced to pay for the very expensive rail tickets, the managers are seeing that many (but not all) workers are happier without the time sucking, cattle-car commutes ... and governments are basically having to give up on the fiction that rail companies were private in order to keep them from going completely bust. But how long can that be sustained, if travel patterns have been permanently altered? No dense urban cores = few commuters paying business rates for rush hour travel = even worse economics for trains.
    - hansvm 6y ago
      > I would prefer every road to be a toll road and get rid of the general taxes that used to go to roads Off-topic I know, but I'd only like to see this if the tolls were reasonable with respect to the maintenance of the affected stretches of road. $0.50 per car per mile more than pays off a typical 4-lane interstate in a year, yet tolls are often an order of magnitude larger and drawn out for 20+ years.
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
        A fair toll road system would basically ban semi trucks, since they’re the ones that do the overwhelming majority of the damage.
        hansvm 6y ago
        That's an interesting idea. I wonder how workable it would be to automate tolling based on axle weight.
        greenpresident 6y ago
        Germany has a toll system for trucks only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LKW-Maut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LKW-Maut From Wikipedia: > Germany's LKW-Maut is a toll for goods vehicles based on the distance driven in kilometres, the emission category of the vehicle and the number of axles. It's meant to compensate some of these damages caused by high weight. If I remember correctly, road damage scales at a power of four of axle weight. It's billed semi-automatically (wireless stations along the road + device in the truck) and you don't even notice it as a normal driver.
        majewsky 6y ago
        Legal side note: Germany also has a vehicle tax that roughly scales with the size of the vehicle. But this only applies to vehicles registered in Germany. Because of the European Single Market, a lot of trucks running on German highways are registered in foreign countries (esp. Eastern Europe since drivers from those countries draw smaller salaries). The toll was enacted specifically to ensure that those foreign trucks contribute towards road maintenance as well. It does apply to German trucks, too, because the EU has rules against laws that discriminate against foreign EU citizens.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    It's hard to justify investing in rail. At best, in most parts of the US it is slower, more expensive, and less convenient. There are some edge cases that it makes real sense for, but everywhere else is better served by cars and airplanes.
    - Naac 6y ago
      >> It's hard to justify investing in rail. At best, in most parts of the US it is slower, more expensive, and less convenient But that's because we haven't invested in it! Before the 1960s most roads in the US were also terrible, so by that logic we shouldn't have invested in the Highway/Freeway Interstate system.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        Seriously. Here's the Amtrak network: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Amtrak_network_map_2016.png/1200px-Amtrak_network_map_2016.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Am... Here's the US freight rail network: https://i.imgur.com/4TYsU_d.webp?maxwidth=1024&fidelity=medium https://i.imgur.com/4TYsU_d.webp?maxwidth=1024&fidelity=medi... You can't tell me we can't do better.
        rootusrootus 6y ago
        We could definitely have a beautiful, big, fast train network. But most people still wouldn't use it.
        ashtonkem 6y ago
        Evidence from Europe and Asia shows that this is probably wrong. People in those areas strongly prefer high speed rail for trips that are less than 3-4 hours long, and begin to switch over to airplanes beyond that.
        dodobirdlord 6y ago
- x87678r 6y ago
  I dont know where you are but in NYC the port authority makes billions from bridge and tunnels to use to subsidize the PATH train system.
- twoodfin 6y ago
  Roads could easily break even with gas taxes or other fees that users would complain about but still pay. Federal gas taxes cover the majority of highway operational and capital expenses, even with ~1/6 diverted to mass transit. Double the gas tax and interstate highways are entirely user-funded at fuel prices lower than prevailed a few years ago. Passenger rail outside of the Northeast corridor can’t even fund its current operating cost through ticket sales, let alone the massive capital needed to build more.
privong 6y ago
> Amtrak and Acela do not actually own the railway they use... This is true for most of the Amtrak mileage, but the Northeast Corridor rails are largely owned by Amtrak[0,pg4]: Amtrak owns and operates 363 route-miles of the 457-route-mile Northeast Corridor (NEC) spine between Washington and Boston. [0] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/nationalfactsheets/Amtrak-Corporate-Profile-FY2019-033120.pdf https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
mattkrause 6y ago
That's true if you consider all of Amtrak. The Northeast Corridor, which the GP is talking about, is a bit of a special case. Amtrak owns the tracks from NY to DC (states own the CT/MA part) and they're good enough to go a bit faster than the otherwise-usual 79 mph speed limit. This part of Amtrak is, IIRC, fairly profitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor In the rest of the country, Amtrak is indeed stuck on freight lines, and service is often slow and unprofitable, but it's not entirely on them either. Passenger traffic is supposed to be prioritized, but the freight lines are not great about it and have been fined for not doing so (though, not enough to make them do it either). There are also weird political considerations about routes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- javiramos 6y ago
  This is 2014 profitability data per route: http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2014/11/amtrak-routes-by-2014-cost-recovery.html http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2014/11/amtrak-routes-by-2014... Pretty much all routes lose money except the Acela and Northeast Regional routes.
conradev 6y ago
We are supposedly building a Shinkansen-like train in Texas: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-speed-train/ https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-...
alFReD-NSH 6y ago
Living in the Netherlands and Flixbus is no competition to the trains here. As for travel inside of country, most of the passengers are travelling for work and normally employers pay for travel costs and if not it would be tax deductible, so they would naturally take trains. A lot of lines are already at maximum capacity during rush hour. As for travel to outside of the country, trains move a lot more passengers than Flixbus. Cheap train tickets are always bought early for holiday season. I find public transport more expensive compared to minimum wage keeping other countries that I lived before, but the quality is high. Trains are fast and reliable here and there's continuous improvements on the trains and their tracks. Every year they would announce that decrease in travel time due to improved tracks or higher frequency for some routes. The only problem is that when something goes wrong extreme weather, signal failure, problem on the tracks in the rush hour, then that route stops working and all neighbouring routes become delayed or overcrowded. Luckily I only experience it every few months.
tvb12 6y ago
I'll probably always take the train into Boston. Even though it's a little more expensive than taking a greyhound or driving (if I can find parking), I don't like to drive in Boston. However, if I needed to go much further I'd be in a bind. The website is really difficult to use at times. I was trying to get to Maryland(?) at one point to buy a used car, but I couldn't find a page that would show me stations near where I needed to go. I ended up finding one nearby using Google, and though the Amtrak website allowed it as a destination, it seemed there were never trains headed there. After 15 minutes of confusion, I checked wikipedia and it turned out the station had been closed to trains for years and only operated as a museum. So even if they redid the rails, they might have to redo the website as well.
- quicklyfrozen 6y ago
  If you can drive in Boston, you can drive almost anywhere -- e.g. I didn't find driving round the Arc de Triomphe in Paris particularly difficult. Who needs lines? :-) But I'd probably take the commuter train instead if they ran more often -- if we ever go back to offices.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  The UI of the Amtrak fare / ticket finding website is terrible.
  - csande17 6y ago
    The website is bad, but phoning Amtrak actually worked pretty well for me! There wasn't much of a wait, the staff were friendly and knowledgeable, and they were able to really quickly plan out complicated routes with multiple transfers and compare different options. (One wonders if they could make whatever fancy planning/booking system they use available to the public.) Admittedly this was a couple years ago, so it's possible COVID or budget cuts have changed things for the worse.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      > The website is bad, but phoning Amtrak actually worked pretty well for me! Underappreciated these days: web is not always the priority method of interaction for people. The web is great, but for historical or practical reasons a lot of people and businesses prefer other solutions. E.g. construction workers and phones
FPGAhacker 6y ago
Amtrak has never turned a profit. Ever. They have never even broken even.
- tclancy 6y ago
  Is this the metric we should be grading everything on? My kid hasn’t either but I love her nonetheless.
  - FPGAhacker 6y ago
    I think it’s a pretty reasonable metric for a business whose stated goal is to be profitable. I don’t know what that has to do with your kid, but I’m glad you love her.
ggm 6y ago
> I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha. This premise feels wrong: The Swiss, German, Chinese, Spanish experience is that people pay to have high speed rail services, and the G20 economies in that list pay high marginal rates of taxes just fine, for this outcome. The "you" here is conditionally the "you" of current social mores America. It by no means is the only recent experience of America, under presidents to Reagan, the top rate of marginal tax was significantly higher than at present, and people paid. Perhaps, if Americans were made to pay more supertax they would discover sooner than you think, how few people it inconvenienced (Bezos) and how many it benefitted. "you" might be surprised how low the increment was on your tax base, to fund the state investment your country needs, taking into account the superwealthy, and corporate tax evasion.
- unpopular42 6y ago
  Swiss taxes vary by location but are generally not higher than the US taxes. So it's not about paying more, it's about wasting less.
  - _AzMoo 6y ago
    It's about priorities. Swiss defense spending as a percentage of GDP is 0.675%. US defense spending as a percentage of GDP is 3.2%. I just picked a simple example, but you will find similar disparities across the board.
    - Erik816 6y ago
      And part of US Defense spending helps defend countries like Switzerland. Maybe we still spend too much, but we also "defend" a lot more countries than ourselves, and a lot more territory than Switzerland.
      - callalex 6y ago
        I’m failing to see how this makes it an OK justification for the grift/corruption.
sgustard 6y ago
The US is willing to run at a $3T deficit so the concept of needing tax money or fiscal viability to build things is tenuous at best. Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR?
- supernova87a 6y ago
  No, but the early railroads of this country were built when there were no property rights of competing owners to defend (or respect), few comparable alternative modes of transportation, and practically no safety or regulatory measures to govern how it was built. That said, the cost of building things in the US is a major problem.
  - ornornor 6y ago
    It was also built by Chinese immigrants slaves at essentially no cost to the builders, wasn’t it?
    - Zach_the_Lizard 6y ago
      Depends on the region. Out West it was mostly Chinese workers. Back East it was the Irish.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  > Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR? Heh, I don't know much about the history of the transcontinental railroad in the US, but up here in Canada it was relatively cheap because... well... to be blunt, we used primarily Chinese labour and did not give a single crap about whether or not they died building it.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  The US government gave railroad companies 175 million acres of free land, 10% of the nation (ex. Alaska), to get those railroads built. It was an incredibly costly endeavor.
bogomipz 6y ago
>"Anyways Amtrak are barely turning a profit as it is and while it would be great to have Euro quality train lines, ..." There's no reason that the North Eastern commuter corridor that runs Washington D.C. to Boston couldn't be profitable if Amtrak were to operate as a series of independent regional entities though. The economics are certainly there. Instead Amtrak is a single entity which services large swathes of the country for which there is little demand for rail service.
monadic2 6y ago
Of course I'd be willing to pay for new train tracks. I've wasted days of my life in northern virginia waiting for the track to free up. And they wonder why nobody uses the train!
1980phipsi 6y ago
Amtrak does turn a profit on the Northeast corridor. It's just that it has mandates to provide a lot of service outside the Northeast Corridor that is unprofitable.
scythe 6y ago
>I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha. When something becomes a cultural priority, economic sectors shift to accommodate it. We are really good at trucking, for example. We have loads of highways. We also have excellent freight rail. The reason that the passenger rail sector in the US sucks is because it is small at a national scale and so it doesn't benefit from access to the national market. If you model NYC as a small country building its own rail network in a high-cost area surrounded by countries with no transit and expensive labor, suddenly it makes sense. Passenger rail isn't a priority in the curriculum at most universities. People who might learn how to build subways instead learn to build highways. Companies that might specialize in subways specialize in airports. To use a coding analogy, building passenger rail does not follow the happy path for American construction organizations, be they unions or firms. (In Latin America, the problem starts earlier: primary and secondary school math scores in LA trail the income quantile for, IIRC, all LA countries) This is a situation that can be changed, but it won't happen in one place or at one time. Alternatively, the country could reduce taxes on foreign contractors building transit infrastructure and recruit more foreign investment, although that would certainly leave a bitter taste if it hurt the car industry.
ajmurmann 6y ago
I understand that Acalea still suffered an unusual problem. Because the tracks are connected to freight tracks, regulation required it to do well in a collision with a heavier freight train. This means that it has to be much heavier than true HSTs are in other countries. That's why it goes much slower than HSTs elsewhere and is still pricey.
- Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
  High speed trains in other countries also share tracks with freight- even if there are no freight services on dedicated high-speed lines, they won't necessarily be on such lines all the time. FRA crash safety standards are stricter because of Not Invented Here syndrome.
wbl 6y ago
They own the Northeast corridor.
taurath 6y ago
When we built the interstate highway system the top income tax rate was 87%.
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
>I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha. We already pay the taxes, but unfortunately we spend a trillion dollars a year maintaining our global military empire instead of shoring up our crumbling domestic infrastructure. Priorities!

foota 6y ago

Roads don't break even, why should we expect trains to?

atoombs 6y ago
I never understand this line of thought. We invest in infrastructure to enable people to move between places, commune with one another, and trade goods. We've invested a tremendous amount in roads. Why do we expect other things like the USPS, Amtrak, etc. to generate profits when they're an expenditure in infrastructure?
- tryptophan 6y ago
  The argument goes that if nobody is willing to pay the price for something(passenger rail), and chooses another alternative(driving), then it means that the service is not worth having and subsiding it would just be a waste of taxpayer money. Of course its not that simple, because driving is subsidized(I would prefer every road to be a toll road and get rid of the general taxes that used to go to roads)...but you get the point.
  - foota 6y ago
    I mean, the issue is I can't choose to pay for quality rail service because it doesn't exist here. I can't take HSR from e.g., Boston to NYC, SF to LA, or Seattle to Portland/Vancouver. These are all trips I would have gladly made at 100-400 dollar ticket prices in the last year.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Yes but you're exceptionally rare, and might discover you're wrong about your preferences if someone were to take the big gamble of building such a service. Also the whole era of passenger rail may have been killed off by lockdowns. Train services are basically always hugely subsidised by governments. They could not survive against cars, buses and trucks if they weren't. The subsidies in Switzerland are eye-wateringly high for example. It's effectively a form of government planning designed to boost city/worker density as governments and others believe offices full of workers yields large benefits, and trains are the highest density/capacity form of passenger transport by far. So if you want ultra-dense urban cores you need a lot of trains. But do we actually need those? Governments sure haven't acted like it this year. Now big corps are eyeing their expensive city centre HQs and wondering if the real estate is worth it, the workers are seeing how much they save when they aren't being forced to pay for the very expensive rail tickets, the managers are seeing that many (but not all) workers are happier without the time sucking, cattle-car commutes ... and governments are basically having to give up on the fiction that rail companies were private in order to keep them from going completely bust. But how long can that be sustained, if travel patterns have been permanently altered? No dense urban cores = few commuters paying business rates for rush hour travel = even worse economics for trains.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    > I would prefer every road to be a toll road and get rid of the general taxes that used to go to roads Off-topic I know, but I'd only like to see this if the tolls were reasonable with respect to the maintenance of the affected stretches of road. $0.50 per car per mile more than pays off a typical 4-lane interstate in a year, yet tolls are often an order of magnitude larger and drawn out for 20+ years.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      A fair toll road system would basically ban semi trucks, since they’re the ones that do the overwhelming majority of the damage.
      - hansvm 6y ago
        That's an interesting idea. I wonder how workable it would be to automate tolling based on axle weight.
        greenpresident 6y ago
        Germany has a toll system for trucks only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LKW-Maut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LKW-Maut From Wikipedia: > Germany's LKW-Maut is a toll for goods vehicles based on the distance driven in kilometres, the emission category of the vehicle and the number of axles. It's meant to compensate some of these damages caused by high weight. If I remember correctly, road damage scales at a power of four of axle weight. It's billed semi-automatically (wireless stations along the road + device in the truck) and you don't even notice it as a normal driver.
        majewsky 6y ago
        Legal side note: Germany also has a vehicle tax that roughly scales with the size of the vehicle. But this only applies to vehicles registered in Germany. Because of the European Single Market, a lot of trucks running on German highways are registered in foreign countries (esp. Eastern Europe since drivers from those countries draw smaller salaries). The toll was enacted specifically to ensure that those foreign trucks contribute towards road maintenance as well. It does apply to German trucks, too, because the EU has rules against laws that discriminate against foreign EU citizens.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  It's hard to justify investing in rail. At best, in most parts of the US it is slower, more expensive, and less convenient. There are some edge cases that it makes real sense for, but everywhere else is better served by cars and airplanes.
  - Naac 6y ago
    >> It's hard to justify investing in rail. At best, in most parts of the US it is slower, more expensive, and less convenient But that's because we haven't invested in it! Before the 1960s most roads in the US were also terrible, so by that logic we shouldn't have invested in the Highway/Freeway Interstate system.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      Seriously. Here's the Amtrak network: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Amtrak_network_map_2016.png/1200px-Amtrak_network_map_2016.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Am... Here's the US freight rail network: https://i.imgur.com/4TYsU_d.webp?maxwidth=1024&fidelity=medium https://i.imgur.com/4TYsU_d.webp?maxwidth=1024&fidelity=medi... You can't tell me we can't do better.
      - rootusrootus 6y ago
        We could definitely have a beautiful, big, fast train network. But most people still wouldn't use it.
        ashtonkem 6y ago
        Evidence from Europe and Asia shows that this is probably wrong. People in those areas strongly prefer high speed rail for trips that are less than 3-4 hours long, and begin to switch over to airplanes beyond that.
        dodobirdlord 6y ago
x87678r 6y ago
I dont know where you are but in NYC the port authority makes billions from bridge and tunnels to use to subsidize the PATH train system.
twoodfin 6y ago
Roads could easily break even with gas taxes or other fees that users would complain about but still pay. Federal gas taxes cover the majority of highway operational and capital expenses, even with ~1/6 diverted to mass transit. Double the gas tax and interstate highways are entirely user-funded at fuel prices lower than prevailed a few years ago. Passenger rail outside of the Northeast corridor can’t even fund its current operating cost through ticket sales, let alone the massive capital needed to build more.

privong 6y ago

> Amtrak and Acela do not actually own the railway they use... This is true for most of the Amtrak mileage, but the Northeast Corridor rails are largely owned by Amtrak[0,pg4]: Amtrak owns and operates 363 route-miles of the 457-route-mile Northeast Corridor (NEC) spine between Washington and Boston. [0] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/nationalfactsheets/Amtrak-Corporate-Profile-FY2019-033120.pdf https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

mattkrause 6y ago

That's true if you consider all of Amtrak. The Northeast Corridor, which the GP is talking about, is a bit of a special case. Amtrak owns the tracks from NY to DC (states own the CT/MA part) and they're good enough to go a bit faster than the otherwise-usual 79 mph speed limit. This part of Amtrak is, IIRC, fairly profitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor In the rest of the country, Amtrak is indeed stuck on freight lines, and service is often slow and unprofitable, but it's not entirely on them either. Passenger traffic is supposed to be prioritized, but the freight lines are not great about it and have been fined for not doing so (though, not enough to make them do it either). There are also weird political considerations about routes.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
javiramos 6y ago
This is 2014 profitability data per route: http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2014/11/amtrak-routes-by-2014-cost-recovery.html http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2014/11/amtrak-routes-by-2014... Pretty much all routes lose money except the Acela and Northeast Regional routes.

conradev 6y ago

We are supposedly building a Shinkansen-like train in Texas: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-speed-train/ https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-...

alFReD-NSH 6y ago

Living in the Netherlands and Flixbus is no competition to the trains here. As for travel inside of country, most of the passengers are travelling for work and normally employers pay for travel costs and if not it would be tax deductible, so they would naturally take trains. A lot of lines are already at maximum capacity during rush hour. As for travel to outside of the country, trains move a lot more passengers than Flixbus. Cheap train tickets are always bought early for holiday season. I find public transport more expensive compared to minimum wage keeping other countries that I lived before, but the quality is high. Trains are fast and reliable here and there's continuous improvements on the trains and their tracks. Every year they would announce that decrease in travel time due to improved tracks or higher frequency for some routes. The only problem is that when something goes wrong extreme weather, signal failure, problem on the tracks in the rush hour, then that route stops working and all neighbouring routes become delayed or overcrowded. Luckily I only experience it every few months.

tvb12 6y ago

I'll probably always take the train into Boston. Even though it's a little more expensive than taking a greyhound or driving (if I can find parking), I don't like to drive in Boston. However, if I needed to go much further I'd be in a bind. The website is really difficult to use at times. I was trying to get to Maryland(?) at one point to buy a used car, but I couldn't find a page that would show me stations near where I needed to go. I ended up finding one nearby using Google, and though the Amtrak website allowed it as a destination, it seemed there were never trains headed there. After 15 minutes of confusion, I checked wikipedia and it turned out the station had been closed to trains for years and only operated as a museum. So even if they redid the rails, they might have to redo the website as well.

quicklyfrozen 6y ago
If you can drive in Boston, you can drive almost anywhere -- e.g. I didn't find driving round the Arc de Triomphe in Paris particularly difficult. Who needs lines? :-) But I'd probably take the commuter train instead if they ran more often -- if we ever go back to offices.
supernova87a 6y ago
The UI of the Amtrak fare / ticket finding website is terrible.
- csande17 6y ago
  The website is bad, but phoning Amtrak actually worked pretty well for me! There wasn't much of a wait, the staff were friendly and knowledgeable, and they were able to really quickly plan out complicated routes with multiple transfers and compare different options. (One wonders if they could make whatever fancy planning/booking system they use available to the public.) Admittedly this was a couple years ago, so it's possible COVID or budget cuts have changed things for the worse.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    > The website is bad, but phoning Amtrak actually worked pretty well for me! Underappreciated these days: web is not always the priority method of interaction for people. The web is great, but for historical or practical reasons a lot of people and businesses prefer other solutions. E.g. construction workers and phones

FPGAhacker 6y ago

Amtrak has never turned a profit. Ever. They have never even broken even.

tclancy 6y ago
Is this the metric we should be grading everything on? My kid hasn’t either but I love her nonetheless.
- FPGAhacker 6y ago
  I think it’s a pretty reasonable metric for a business whose stated goal is to be profitable. I don’t know what that has to do with your kid, but I’m glad you love her.

ggm 6y ago

> I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha. This premise feels wrong: The Swiss, German, Chinese, Spanish experience is that people pay to have high speed rail services, and the G20 economies in that list pay high marginal rates of taxes just fine, for this outcome. The "you" here is conditionally the "you" of current social mores America. It by no means is the only recent experience of America, under presidents to Reagan, the top rate of marginal tax was significantly higher than at present, and people paid. Perhaps, if Americans were made to pay more supertax they would discover sooner than you think, how few people it inconvenienced (Bezos) and how many it benefitted. "you" might be surprised how low the increment was on your tax base, to fund the state investment your country needs, taking into account the superwealthy, and corporate tax evasion.

unpopular42 6y ago
Swiss taxes vary by location but are generally not higher than the US taxes. So it's not about paying more, it's about wasting less.
- _AzMoo 6y ago
  It's about priorities. Swiss defense spending as a percentage of GDP is 0.675%. US defense spending as a percentage of GDP is 3.2%. I just picked a simple example, but you will find similar disparities across the board.
  - Erik816 6y ago
    And part of US Defense spending helps defend countries like Switzerland. Maybe we still spend too much, but we also "defend" a lot more countries than ourselves, and a lot more territory than Switzerland.
    - callalex 6y ago
      I’m failing to see how this makes it an OK justification for the grift/corruption.

sgustard 6y ago

The US is willing to run at a $3T deficit so the concept of needing tax money or fiscal viability to build things is tenuous at best. Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR?

supernova87a 6y ago
No, but the early railroads of this country were built when there were no property rights of competing owners to defend (or respect), few comparable alternative modes of transportation, and practically no safety or regulatory measures to govern how it was built. That said, the cost of building things in the US is a major problem.
- ornornor 6y ago
  It was also built by Chinese immigrants slaves at essentially no cost to the builders, wasn’t it?
  - Zach_the_Lizard 6y ago
    Depends on the region. Out West it was mostly Chinese workers. Back East it was the Irish.
tonyarkles 6y ago
> Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR? Heh, I don't know much about the history of the transcontinental railroad in the US, but up here in Canada it was relatively cheap because... well... to be blunt, we used primarily Chinese labour and did not give a single crap about whether or not they died building it.
jeffbee 6y ago
The US government gave railroad companies 175 million acres of free land, 10% of the nation (ex. Alaska), to get those railroads built. It was an incredibly costly endeavor.

bogomipz 6y ago

>"Anyways Amtrak are barely turning a profit as it is and while it would be great to have Euro quality train lines, ..." There's no reason that the North Eastern commuter corridor that runs Washington D.C. to Boston couldn't be profitable if Amtrak were to operate as a series of independent regional entities though. The economics are certainly there. Instead Amtrak is a single entity which services large swathes of the country for which there is little demand for rail service.

monadic2 6y ago

Of course I'd be willing to pay for new train tracks. I've wasted days of my life in northern virginia waiting for the track to free up. And they wonder why nobody uses the train!

1980phipsi 6y ago

Amtrak does turn a profit on the Northeast corridor. It's just that it has mandates to provide a lot of service outside the Northeast Corridor that is unprofitable.

scythe 6y ago

>I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha. When something becomes a cultural priority, economic sectors shift to accommodate it. We are really good at trucking, for example. We have loads of highways. We also have excellent freight rail. The reason that the passenger rail sector in the US sucks is because it is small at a national scale and so it doesn't benefit from access to the national market. If you model NYC as a small country building its own rail network in a high-cost area surrounded by countries with no transit and expensive labor, suddenly it makes sense. Passenger rail isn't a priority in the curriculum at most universities. People who might learn how to build subways instead learn to build highways. Companies that might specialize in subways specialize in airports. To use a coding analogy, building passenger rail does not follow the happy path for American construction organizations, be they unions or firms. (In Latin America, the problem starts earlier: primary and secondary school math scores in LA trail the income quantile for, IIRC, all LA countries) This is a situation that can be changed, but it won't happen in one place or at one time. Alternatively, the country could reduce taxes on foreign contractors building transit infrastructure and recruit more foreign investment, although that would certainly leave a bitter taste if it hurt the car industry.

ajmurmann 6y ago

I understand that Acalea still suffered an unusual problem. Because the tracks are connected to freight tracks, regulation required it to do well in a collision with a heavier freight train. This means that it has to be much heavier than true HSTs are in other countries. That's why it goes much slower than HSTs elsewhere and is still pricey.

Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
High speed trains in other countries also share tracks with freight- even if there are no freight services on dedicated high-speed lines, they won't necessarily be on such lines all the time. FRA crash safety standards are stricter because of Not Invented Here syndrome.

wbl 6y ago

They own the Northeast corridor.

taurath 6y ago

When we built the interstate highway system the top income tax rate was 87%.

StanislavPetrov 6y ago

>I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha. We already pay the taxes, but unfortunately we spend a trillion dollars a year maintaining our global military empire instead of shoring up our crumbling domestic infrastructure. Priorities!