16 ms·

New Orleans has a population about 400k, Mobile 200k, it's 140 miles. That should be an hour long trip with 1-2 trains an hour

sokoloff 5y ago
Suppose you ran 20 trains per day each way between those city pairs. What do you guess the average passenger load would be on each of those trains? Could you average even 100 pax per train? Would whatever the average total fare collected be enough to cover just the direct operating costs of that service? I don’t see any non-stop airline flights between those cities for the smattering of dates I checked, suggesting that the airlines don’t find a lot of direct travel demand between that city pair.
- hedora 5y ago
  By this logic, we should also stop allowing passenger cars on the freeways between those cities, and let shipping companies pay for road maintenance if they care.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    When considering whether to run 4 or 20 round trips per day, it seems like the fundamental economics ought to come into play at some point. Otherwise, you eventually run out of other people’s money. As a reference, there are only 7 Acela trains per day (or at least on Monday 4/25) from Boston to New York, two cities with substantially higher population and apparent demand (as evidenced by the 59 non-stop flights from BOS to any of the NYC-3 airports on Monday 4/25)
    - Macha 5y ago
      If you can only fill 7 trains per day between cities with metro areas of 5 million and 20 million, there is something else wrong with your network beyond just how much people like to take trains or not. We manage to do that between a town of 20,000 and a city of 1 million for comparison. Or if you feel commuter routes are different enough to not count, a city of 60,000 and a city of 1 million with similar travel time as google maps quotes me for Boston to New York.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        Note that none of those are “full”. The most crowded of those 7 Acelas is showing ~50% full with the others split between the <20% and ~40% categories. And this is on the Northeast Acela, the crown jewel of the Amtrak network and between two cities with generally functioning public transit once you arrive. Most US city-pairs would be worse.
        ghaff 5y ago
        There are a lot of factors. - There are about double that number of trains if you count the Regional (which you should) so ~hourly trains. - A lot of people still fly. Especially if you live in Boston proper, flying means you can easily make a morning meeting without flying down the night before (which people with families etc. may prefer not to do) - Especially if you're south/west of Boston or in New York's Connecticut suburbs, it's probably cheaper/faster to just drive, something I really try to avoid when it comes to NYC but nonetheless for me taking Amtrak actually involves me driving for an hour in the wrong direction/
        bombcar 5y ago
        I suspect LA-San Diego might be better (Pacific Surfliner is an Amtrak cooperative with the LOSSAN corridor). Those trains end up really full (though off-peak ones are comfortable; the rush hour trains are standing-room only). The only way to get consistent usage is to commuter rail; commuters travel five times a day in both directions vs "travelers/vacationers" which may travel once a month or less.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        It's also not really correct. That's just the Acela. There are about the same number of regional trains (which are almost as fast; I generally don't even take the Acela unless someone else is paying). For people to the south of the Boston metro, there's also the option of taking Metro North from New Haven. The Northeast Corridor service is very popular. In fact, I believe Amtrak has plans to expand it given that it's pretty much the only place in the country Amtrak doesn't lose money.
      - saalweachter 5y ago
    - hedora 5y ago
      Those two stations are 215 miles apart by car, and the trip takes 4 hours by train. The train is only averaging 53mph. I don't think its popularity is a reasonable predictor of demand for a modern train that would be 3-4 times faster. I'd wager if all the other competitors were also running with tech typical of the 1920's, the train would be more popular.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        At some point even if your train is infinitely fast, you can't get above a certain average speed, dependent on the distance between stations. Fun fact: technically the boring large Pacific Surfliner trains could be "high speed rail" since they could get to 120 MPH through Camp Pendleton if the line had PTC and was signaled correctly. As it is hits 80-90 through there, but it soon has to slow down for a stop. To do high-speed rail right you basically need four tracks - a slower local service that stops at every stop, and a faster high-speed express service that only stops rarely.
      - iso1210 5y ago
        Manchester-London is 180 miles and takes 2h20, which isn't great, certainly not high speed, but that's being rectified. Pre covid it was 3 trains an hour for the majority of the day.
- Macha 5y ago
  Modern airport security is fatal for overland airline flights of short durations. An hour by train? You could drive or train that in the time between when you're told you should be at the airport to the time the plane actually takes off
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yes. New Orleans to Texas cities like Houston can make sense but not Mobile. Also public transit isn't great in either New Orleans or Mobile. It's not much more than a two hour drive. People will just get in a car.
    - rascul 5y ago
      > Yes. New Orleans to Texas cities like Houston can make sense but not Mobile. It made sense until Katrina destroyed a bunch of the infrastructure and Amtrak had to stop running. The fight is to restore service, not create a new service.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        My comment was in reference to flying. Although I don't know what the pre-Katrina train traffic looked like on that route, it's not unreasonable to have a train connecting the Gulf coastal communities in that area. Though of course you're competing with a not terribly long drive.
        rascul 5y ago
        > My comment was in reference to flying Oops, I missed that. > Although I don't know what the pre-Katrina traffic looked like on that route I don't know either. I didn't live in the area at the time, and I wasn't easily able to find any numbers. > Though of course you're competing with a not terribly long drive. Very true. I've driven part of it a number of times. I-10 can get bad with traffic in some areas at some times of the day, but I suspect the total driving time from New Orleans to Mobile to be around 2.5 hours normally. I'm certainly not authoritative, though.
- iso1210 5y ago
  It's interesting how the American view of transport (other than private cars) has to make a profit. Other countries fund transport to various degrees as it increases economic output and provides social needs. It's a similar distance as Penzance-Exeter in the UK which has 22 trains in each direction on a weekday
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    The word "profit" has turned into a pejorative in the modern lexicon for some reason, but don't think it's unreasonable that such services should be self sufficient
    - lkbm 5y ago
      If all competitors were too, and we internalized all externalities, sure. But personal car travel is currently heavily subsidized (no, the fuel tax does not cover road costs), and has some serious negative externalities (both from air pollution, and traffic accidents being the leading cause of death for people under 30). We demand that public transit be self-sufficient, while subsidizing private personal transportation. The market is a great "figure out the most efficient solution" mechanism, but not if you skew it in favor of one particular solution as we're doing now.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        We pretty obviously don’t demand that. Amtrak has lost money every year since it was created in 1971. https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-amtrak-train-railroad-photos-2019-5?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-amtrak-train-rail...
        lkbm 5y ago
        We don't legally mandate it, but every discussion about Amtrak and public transit involves people insisting it should cover its own costs while ignoring the fact that the alternatives don't.
      - 5y ago
- bombcar 5y ago
  Los Angeles to San Diego is 120 miles, and the Pacific Surfliner serves it - and it only has 9 trains a day (round trip). (I notice that they've added a early morning service getting to LA at working time). The key with these kinds of service is you have to run them consistently for 10-20 years before they start seeing the kind of ridership that can support the train density. People don't start building their lives around a transport option that they can't rely on.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - antisthenes 5y ago
    > The key with these kinds of service is you have to run them consistently for 10-20 years before they start seeing the kind of ridership that can support the train density. That's a good point. Whenever I've had the misfortune of using public transport in the US, it ended up being extremely unreliable. Commuter bus at 6:30PM on a weekday? Just doesn't show up. Have to wait 40 minutes instead of 10. NY to DC bus? Breaks down midway, have to wait an extra 2 hours for a relief bus to arrive. DC to NY amtrak? Union station shut down for 3 hours due to weather-related power outage. Now maybe I'm just super unlucky, but I've never heard of weather straight up shutting down an entire train station in other countries, especially in a nation's capital.
    - yakireev 5y ago
      > I've never heard of weather straight up shutting down an entire train station in other countries, especially in a nation's capital. How about shutting down the entire network? Happens after any snowstorm in the NL. That being said, it's amazing to have a reliable and fast passenger railroad network, which functions like an intercity metro and reliably and predictably brings you where you want to be in those 363 days out of 365 when there's no snowstorm, or a system failure, or a general strike.
- rascul 5y ago
  There's a lot of people and a number of cities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast where the train could also stop.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Those intermediate stops must be severely limited if the train is to cover the 140 miles in an hour total as hypothesized above.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      And one of the huge values of a train is that it CAN stop at those intermediate stops. A high speed few stop rail from the big city near me to the next one is meh as by the time I've driven into the city I might as well just keep driving to my destination. But if a train, even a slower one, stopped in my smaller town or the next one over it becomes much more interesting.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        If you had the high-speed train stop only at Gulfport (xor Biloxi) and maybe at Slidell, with regional service to pick up the small towns in between and take pax to the larger stations where they’d change to the faster train, you may be able to preserve a competitive Mobile to New Orleans time and still catch the intermediate city travelers. (This is a limited version of the airline hub-and-spoke to allow the trains to be faster door-to-door than driving, because if you can’t be better than driving in some obvious and personal way, many people will quite reasonably just drive the 140 miles on their own schedule and terms.)
        bombcar 5y ago
        That's the hardest part - people will drive 6+ hours even when there are faster/better options if they need a car at the other end. So transit between cites doesn't work as well until the endpoints are adequately transited themselves (or your destination is something like an airport where you can't bring your car anyway).
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
MegaBus has two buses each way on that route every day. If demand increased, adding another bus each way would be relatively trivial.
ac29 5y ago
Take a look at the current tracks from the article: https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg That is definitely not going to support trains that would have to average well over 140mph (there are 4 proposed stops between the 2 ends).

sokoloff 5y ago

Suppose you ran 20 trains per day each way between those city pairs. What do you guess the average passenger load would be on each of those trains? Could you average even 100 pax per train? Would whatever the average total fare collected be enough to cover just the direct operating costs of that service? I don’t see any non-stop airline flights between those cities for the smattering of dates I checked, suggesting that the airlines don’t find a lot of direct travel demand between that city pair.

hedora 5y ago
By this logic, we should also stop allowing passenger cars on the freeways between those cities, and let shipping companies pay for road maintenance if they care.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  When considering whether to run 4 or 20 round trips per day, it seems like the fundamental economics ought to come into play at some point. Otherwise, you eventually run out of other people’s money. As a reference, there are only 7 Acela trains per day (or at least on Monday 4/25) from Boston to New York, two cities with substantially higher population and apparent demand (as evidenced by the 59 non-stop flights from BOS to any of the NYC-3 airports on Monday 4/25)
  - Macha 5y ago
    If you can only fill 7 trains per day between cities with metro areas of 5 million and 20 million, there is something else wrong with your network beyond just how much people like to take trains or not. We manage to do that between a town of 20,000 and a city of 1 million for comparison. Or if you feel commuter routes are different enough to not count, a city of 60,000 and a city of 1 million with similar travel time as google maps quotes me for Boston to New York.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Note that none of those are “full”. The most crowded of those 7 Acelas is showing ~50% full with the others split between the <20% and ~40% categories. And this is on the Northeast Acela, the crown jewel of the Amtrak network and between two cities with generally functioning public transit once you arrive. Most US city-pairs would be worse.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        There are a lot of factors. - There are about double that number of trains if you count the Regional (which you should) so ~hourly trains. - A lot of people still fly. Especially if you live in Boston proper, flying means you can easily make a morning meeting without flying down the night before (which people with families etc. may prefer not to do) - Especially if you're south/west of Boston or in New York's Connecticut suburbs, it's probably cheaper/faster to just drive, something I really try to avoid when it comes to NYC but nonetheless for me taking Amtrak actually involves me driving for an hour in the wrong direction/
      - bombcar 5y ago
        I suspect LA-San Diego might be better (Pacific Surfliner is an Amtrak cooperative with the LOSSAN corridor). Those trains end up really full (though off-peak ones are comfortable; the rush hour trains are standing-room only). The only way to get consistent usage is to commuter rail; commuters travel five times a day in both directions vs "travelers/vacationers" which may travel once a month or less.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      It's also not really correct. That's just the Acela. There are about the same number of regional trains (which are almost as fast; I generally don't even take the Acela unless someone else is paying). For people to the south of the Boston metro, there's also the option of taking Metro North from New Haven. The Northeast Corridor service is very popular. In fact, I believe Amtrak has plans to expand it given that it's pretty much the only place in the country Amtrak doesn't lose money.
    - saalweachter 5y ago
  - hedora 5y ago
    Those two stations are 215 miles apart by car, and the trip takes 4 hours by train. The train is only averaging 53mph. I don't think its popularity is a reasonable predictor of demand for a modern train that would be 3-4 times faster. I'd wager if all the other competitors were also running with tech typical of the 1920's, the train would be more popular.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      At some point even if your train is infinitely fast, you can't get above a certain average speed, dependent on the distance between stations. Fun fact: technically the boring large Pacific Surfliner trains could be "high speed rail" since they could get to 120 MPH through Camp Pendleton if the line had PTC and was signaled correctly. As it is hits 80-90 through there, but it soon has to slow down for a stop. To do high-speed rail right you basically need four tracks - a slower local service that stops at every stop, and a faster high-speed express service that only stops rarely.
    - iso1210 5y ago
      Manchester-London is 180 miles and takes 2h20, which isn't great, certainly not high speed, but that's being rectified. Pre covid it was 3 trains an hour for the majority of the day.
Macha 5y ago
Modern airport security is fatal for overland airline flights of short durations. An hour by train? You could drive or train that in the time between when you're told you should be at the airport to the time the plane actually takes off
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yes. New Orleans to Texas cities like Houston can make sense but not Mobile. Also public transit isn't great in either New Orleans or Mobile. It's not much more than a two hour drive. People will just get in a car.
  - rascul 5y ago
    > Yes. New Orleans to Texas cities like Houston can make sense but not Mobile. It made sense until Katrina destroyed a bunch of the infrastructure and Amtrak had to stop running. The fight is to restore service, not create a new service.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      My comment was in reference to flying. Although I don't know what the pre-Katrina train traffic looked like on that route, it's not unreasonable to have a train connecting the Gulf coastal communities in that area. Though of course you're competing with a not terribly long drive.
      - rascul 5y ago
        > My comment was in reference to flying Oops, I missed that. > Although I don't know what the pre-Katrina traffic looked like on that route I don't know either. I didn't live in the area at the time, and I wasn't easily able to find any numbers. > Though of course you're competing with a not terribly long drive. Very true. I've driven part of it a number of times. I-10 can get bad with traffic in some areas at some times of the day, but I suspect the total driving time from New Orleans to Mobile to be around 2.5 hours normally. I'm certainly not authoritative, though.
iso1210 5y ago
It's interesting how the American view of transport (other than private cars) has to make a profit. Other countries fund transport to various degrees as it increases economic output and provides social needs. It's a similar distance as Penzance-Exeter in the UK which has 22 trains in each direction on a weekday
- missedthecue 5y ago
  The word "profit" has turned into a pejorative in the modern lexicon for some reason, but don't think it's unreasonable that such services should be self sufficient
  - lkbm 5y ago
    If all competitors were too, and we internalized all externalities, sure. But personal car travel is currently heavily subsidized (no, the fuel tax does not cover road costs), and has some serious negative externalities (both from air pollution, and traffic accidents being the leading cause of death for people under 30). We demand that public transit be self-sufficient, while subsidizing private personal transportation. The market is a great "figure out the most efficient solution" mechanism, but not if you skew it in favor of one particular solution as we're doing now.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      We pretty obviously don’t demand that. Amtrak has lost money every year since it was created in 1971. https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-amtrak-train-railroad-photos-2019-5?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-amtrak-train-rail...
      - lkbm 5y ago
        We don't legally mandate it, but every discussion about Amtrak and public transit involves people insisting it should cover its own costs while ignoring the fact that the alternatives don't.
    - 5y ago
bombcar 5y ago
Los Angeles to San Diego is 120 miles, and the Pacific Surfliner serves it - and it only has 9 trains a day (round trip). (I notice that they've added a early morning service getting to LA at working time). The key with these kinds of service is you have to run them consistently for 10-20 years before they start seeing the kind of ridership that can support the train density. People don't start building their lives around a transport option that they can't rely on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- antisthenes 5y ago
  > The key with these kinds of service is you have to run them consistently for 10-20 years before they start seeing the kind of ridership that can support the train density. That's a good point. Whenever I've had the misfortune of using public transport in the US, it ended up being extremely unreliable. Commuter bus at 6:30PM on a weekday? Just doesn't show up. Have to wait 40 minutes instead of 10. NY to DC bus? Breaks down midway, have to wait an extra 2 hours for a relief bus to arrive. DC to NY amtrak? Union station shut down for 3 hours due to weather-related power outage. Now maybe I'm just super unlucky, but I've never heard of weather straight up shutting down an entire train station in other countries, especially in a nation's capital.
  - yakireev 5y ago
    > I've never heard of weather straight up shutting down an entire train station in other countries, especially in a nation's capital. How about shutting down the entire network? Happens after any snowstorm in the NL. That being said, it's amazing to have a reliable and fast passenger railroad network, which functions like an intercity metro and reliably and predictably brings you where you want to be in those 363 days out of 365 when there's no snowstorm, or a system failure, or a general strike.
rascul 5y ago
There's a lot of people and a number of cities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast where the train could also stop.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Those intermediate stops must be severely limited if the train is to cover the 140 miles in an hour total as hypothesized above.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    And one of the huge values of a train is that it CAN stop at those intermediate stops. A high speed few stop rail from the big city near me to the next one is meh as by the time I've driven into the city I might as well just keep driving to my destination. But if a train, even a slower one, stopped in my smaller town or the next one over it becomes much more interesting.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      If you had the high-speed train stop only at Gulfport (xor Biloxi) and maybe at Slidell, with regional service to pick up the small towns in between and take pax to the larger stations where they’d change to the faster train, you may be able to preserve a competitive Mobile to New Orleans time and still catch the intermediate city travelers. (This is a limited version of the airline hub-and-spoke to allow the trains to be faster door-to-door than driving, because if you can’t be better than driving in some obvious and personal way, many people will quite reasonably just drive the 140 miles on their own schedule and terms.)
      - bombcar 5y ago
        That's the hardest part - people will drive 6+ hours even when there are faster/better options if they need a car at the other end. So transit between cites doesn't work as well until the endpoints are adequately transited themselves (or your destination is something like an airport where you can't bring your car anyway).

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

MegaBus has two buses each way on that route every day. If demand increased, adding another bus each way would be relatively trivial.

ac29 5y ago

Take a look at the current tracks from the article: https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg That is definitely not going to support trains that would have to average well over 140mph (there are 4 proposed stops between the 2 ends).