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Please remember that car and bus traffic are also already highly subsidized. Only a small fraction of those roads are toll roads, gas taxes are nowhere near en
by eesmith 2y ago
Please remember that car and bus traffic are also already highly subsidized.
Only a small fraction of those roads are toll roads, gas taxes are nowhere near enough to pay for maintenance, the US spends of lot of money keeping the oil supply flowing, the focus on direct subsidies ignore the indirect costs of pollution, or the impact of forcing people out of their houses through eminent domain - roads require more land than rails for the same carrying capacity.
I didn't see any luxury coach service offering a private bed, only lie-flat seats. No showers or family suite either. They seem to compare themselves to first-class airline seats than a train cabin. (To be fair, most people on the Southwest Chief are not in a cabin but in a seat.)
The Southwest Chief carries about an order of magnitude more people than a luxury bus. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Chief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Chief ) mentions a 2022 incident with 12 crew and 275 passengers. That's almost 23 passengers per crew member.
Looking at a few sites, a luxury bus has a driver and an attendant for ~25 passengers, so twice the staff, and with 10 bus engines to maintain instead of one locomotive engine.
- rayiner 2y agoAmtrak is more subsidized than those other modes: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=18116 https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=18116 “Americans spent an average of 25.0 cents per passenger-mile driving their cars, light trucks, and motorcycles, while highway subsidies averaged 1.1 cents per passenger-mile. Subsidies to highway trucking, incidentally, averaged 0.8 cents per ton-mile. These highway subsidies compare to subsidies of 1.1 cents per passenger-mile to air travelers, 36 cents to Amtrak passengers, and $1.09 to transit riders. Amazingly, air travel is by far the least-expensive mode of travel, costing passengers just 13.8 cents per passenger-mile, while Amtrak fares average 38 cents and transit fares 30 cents per passenger-mile.”
- eesmith 2y agoAnd as I wrote, focusing on transportation cost subsidies like this means leaving out environmental impacts, social impacts, subsidizes for maintaining the flow of oil, and other indirect costs. Overshadowing all that is a century of deliberate planning decisions to promote car transit over all other forms - something an "antiplanner" should certainly be aware of and against - resulting in a system of land use and transportation policy which is locally optimized for vehicles, and which cannot be easily changed without substantial cost, even if there is a better option. Do I know the answers? No. What I can say is I much prefer taking the train to taking the bus.