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US rail is so pathetic. Not the rail’s fault per se, but it's pretty embarrassing for a a supposedly wealthy country to not be able to offer its citizens cheap,

US rail is so pathetic. Not the rail’s fault per se, but it's pretty embarrassing for a a supposedly wealthy country to not be able to offer its citizens cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> US rail is so pathetic National passenger rail. We still have the world's largest rail network [1]. It's just focussed on freight. (We also have world-class municipal and regional rail in the New York area.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
- saubeidl 1y ago
  I'm not sure municipal rail in NY is quite world-class, tho it is by far the best the US has to offer.
- jcranmer 1y ago
  > (We also have world-class municipal and regional rail in the New York area.) If by world-class you mean something that most of the world would consider a rail system, yes (in comparison to most US cities' attempts which aren't really worth even pretending constitutes regional rail). If you mean something that most of the world would consider as something worth emulating, nope.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    Metro-North and the LIRR have on-time rates rivalling the Swiss rail system.
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  I wonder what the cost would be to build a passenger rail network that simply parallels the freight network, even if low speed. Amtrak is terrible mostly because freight trains get priority and it screws up the schedules.
kylehotchkiss 1y ago
I've found that looking at USA as a middle-income country with extremely wealthy regions helps me better understand our country. The supposed wealth doesn't seem relevant in the hollowed out towns between the coasts. It's generally not being sent or spent there in any meaningful way. Much of the actual wealth is in the northeast corridor, where the Acela is improving the quality of their product, and in California, where Southern CA and the Bay Area both have fairly nice regional trains that go as fast as the right of way will let them. I think we've done OK connecting places that matter, and as flying continues to enshittify and people will choose rail for comfort.
idiomat9000 1y ago
The rivers are to good as mass good transport medium. They make goods transport bx rail economically unviable for the core country, leaving only a ring of economic routes.
- eqvinox 1y ago
  [Regardless of validity, which is questionable—] Why are you bringing cargo into this? The argument was about passenger travel…
- ianburrell 1y ago
  That is weird thing to say when US has the best freight rail in the world. Lots of containers are transported by rail from west coast to east coast ports. The competition is trucks, not barge. If anything, that is one reason that passenger rail sucks because the freight companies own the rails. They delay passenger trains and don’t get punished. The freight companies don’t spend on maintenance, and have pulled up double track.
dc396 1y ago
Yes, US rail is pathetic, at least for passenger travel. However, a quick search on Google Flights shows a one-way ticket from LA to DC costs $98.00 on Frontier via Atlanta (YMMV) so I don't think it's correct to say there isn't cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country.
- legitster 1y ago
  It's also worth pointing out that even at TGV speeds, a coast-to-coast train ride would take ~20 hours. It would have to be sooo much cheaper than an equivalent plane ticket to be worth it.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    If we price the extra travel time at the level of US minimum wage, $7.25/hr, the extra ~15 hours of travel alone would add up to a price tag of $100. And if you don't have a bullet train, then the time-economy gets even worse. That sure seems like it explains a lot about the state of US passenger rail.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      You could do a sleeper train one can work on. No loss of working time.
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        Which makes the train considerably less passenger-dense, and thus makes the train tickets more expensive. In return for reduced value hours: hours that aren't as productive as real office hours, or as entertaining as real vacation hours. I'm not sure if this would be enough to make coast to coast passenger trains more viable.
- mrpopo 1y ago
  It's also 700kg of CO2, one of the best ways to worsen climate change per dollar spent
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Most people don't want trains. Most places where people want trains have them (high density places).
- garciasn 1y ago
  It’s a chicken or egg problem. Unfortunately, because train travel is slow and expensive, it’s simply less expensive and faster to fly. If the rail infrastructure was upgraded to allow for faster travel and the costs were lowered, Americans would find them more desirable—-guaranteed.
  - ryoshu 1y ago
    I'll take the Acela over flying any day. It's cheaper and less of a hassle. Time-to-commute is a wash when you do the airport security theater dance + delayed flights on the tarmac.
- mrpopo 1y ago
  Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities. They benefit everyone, even people with cars. You have a business trip and need to go from A to B by yourself? Take a train, it frees your brain and the highway for people traveling in groups or with lots of luggage. Incidentally it also avoids moving 2 tonnes of material for no reason.
  - ReptileMan 1y ago
    >Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities. If the cities are closer than 600 km. Trains are good for movement inside a typical state, but rarely between states.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    You're preaching to the choir but the average person doesn't care.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    A passenger train in the USA weighs about 1000 tons, plus another 150 or so tons of locomotive, before we add the passengers (seating 80 per car and about 11 cars for 880 passengers). That’s about a ton per passenger.
legitster 1y ago
The area in question (Northeast) is about the only place in the US that matches the population density of the parts of Europe served by high-speed rail. It's not a question of wealth but of efficiency. Even if you took every single meter of high speed rail that France has built in the last 50 years, you would barely cover 2/3 of the distance of a single line between New York and LA.
- tantalor 1y ago
  Florida has high speed rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
  - allturtles 1y ago
    With an average speed of 70 mph, the Brightline isn't high-speed as it would be defined elsewhere in the world. Neither is the Amtrak Acela, for that matter.
  - legitster 1y ago
    It's not technically fast enough to be called high speed rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail But it is worth calling out that good regional rail services exist in the US, and they don't even have to be that fast to be successful!
- rafram 1y ago
  New York to LA would be a terrible high-speed rail route. Just way too far. But the US has many city pairs - SF and LA, LA and Vegas, Denver and Salt Lake, Chicago and Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philly, and so on - where high-speed rail could easily replace most flights if it were built.
  - legitster 1y ago
    "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". Some of those routes sound nice, but they don't usually have enough daily traffic between them to warrant the massive infrastructure costs. LA to Vegas would rival the distance of the longest European high speed lines, but with many fewer stops between and a fraction of the passengers between. Outside of connector flights, I don't even know how many people even regularly travel between Chicago and Detroit. Part of the advantage places like Japan and Europe have over the US is not just that they are dense, but that their population skews to one massive metropolitan center. So it's easy to design a hub model where traffic patterns are easy - in and out of one area. You see this in the success of regional commuter rail networks in the US. (SF and LA is a great candidate though, and it's failure a highlight of how hard it is to build in the US)
toast0 1y ago
We do have cheap easy high speed travel across the country. It's just not rail. In the US, rail is for freight. In the US, cross country distances are too large for terrestrial transport to be high speed. A flight network allows for much better speed, without needing to have continuous infrastructure. Rail in general requires pretty specific alignment and limits on turns and slope; high speed rail has even tighter tolerances. It's very expensive to build that, especially through rocky terrain, and through existing development. Flight networks are much more flexible. If you have room for an airport, and demand, you can get direct flights to/from anywhere. Roads are good too; because of their utility, they have a large network which tends to offer better routing than rail, and piecemeal upgades work for roads; switching routes is much easier for cars than trains, and roads can be quite rough but still usable at low speeds.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  China is about the same size as the US. Here's a map of their HSR network: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/railway.jpg https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/railway.jpg Flights are nowhere near as efficient as rail, not to speak of the environmental issues. It's factors like this that show how the US is falling behind in international competition.
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    That's not a map of their HSR network, that's a map of their rail network. Openrailwaymap plots tracks by max speed, and you can see the map of China here: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=maxspeed&lat=30.95876857077987&lon=-248.851318359375&zoom=6 https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=maxspeed&lat=30.9587685707... --the tracks that are red-to-purple are the ones that are high speed.
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      I'm having a hard time reading that map - but this one also goes by speed and shows the extent of the HSR lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#/media/File:Rail_map_of_PRC.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#/medi...

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> US rail is so pathetic National passenger rail. We still have the world's largest rail network [1]. It's just focussed on freight. (We also have world-class municipal and regional rail in the New York area.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...

saubeidl 1y ago
I'm not sure municipal rail in NY is quite world-class, tho it is by far the best the US has to offer.
jcranmer 1y ago
> (We also have world-class municipal and regional rail in the New York area.) If by world-class you mean something that most of the world would consider a rail system, yes (in comparison to most US cities' attempts which aren't really worth even pretending constitutes regional rail). If you mean something that most of the world would consider as something worth emulating, nope.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  Metro-North and the LIRR have on-time rates rivalling the Swiss rail system.
SilverElfin 1y ago
I wonder what the cost would be to build a passenger rail network that simply parallels the freight network, even if low speed. Amtrak is terrible mostly because freight trains get priority and it screws up the schedules.

kylehotchkiss 1y ago

I've found that looking at USA as a middle-income country with extremely wealthy regions helps me better understand our country. The supposed wealth doesn't seem relevant in the hollowed out towns between the coasts. It's generally not being sent or spent there in any meaningful way. Much of the actual wealth is in the northeast corridor, where the Acela is improving the quality of their product, and in California, where Southern CA and the Bay Area both have fairly nice regional trains that go as fast as the right of way will let them. I think we've done OK connecting places that matter, and as flying continues to enshittify and people will choose rail for comfort.

idiomat9000 1y ago

The rivers are to good as mass good transport medium. They make goods transport bx rail economically unviable for the core country, leaving only a ring of economic routes.

eqvinox 1y ago
[Regardless of validity, which is questionable—] Why are you bringing cargo into this? The argument was about passenger travel…
ianburrell 1y ago
That is weird thing to say when US has the best freight rail in the world. Lots of containers are transported by rail from west coast to east coast ports. The competition is trucks, not barge. If anything, that is one reason that passenger rail sucks because the freight companies own the rails. They delay passenger trains and don’t get punished. The freight companies don’t spend on maintenance, and have pulled up double track.

dc396 1y ago

Yes, US rail is pathetic, at least for passenger travel. However, a quick search on Google Flights shows a one-way ticket from LA to DC costs $98.00 on Frontier via Atlanta (YMMV) so I don't think it's correct to say there isn't cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country.

legitster 1y ago
It's also worth pointing out that even at TGV speeds, a coast-to-coast train ride would take ~20 hours. It would have to be sooo much cheaper than an equivalent plane ticket to be worth it.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  If we price the extra travel time at the level of US minimum wage, $7.25/hr, the extra ~15 hours of travel alone would add up to a price tag of $100. And if you don't have a bullet train, then the time-economy gets even worse. That sure seems like it explains a lot about the state of US passenger rail.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    You could do a sleeper train one can work on. No loss of working time.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      Which makes the train considerably less passenger-dense, and thus makes the train tickets more expensive. In return for reduced value hours: hours that aren't as productive as real office hours, or as entertaining as real vacation hours. I'm not sure if this would be enough to make coast to coast passenger trains more viable.
mrpopo 1y ago
It's also 700kg of CO2, one of the best ways to worsen climate change per dollar spent

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

Most people don't want trains. Most places where people want trains have them (high density places).

garciasn 1y ago
It’s a chicken or egg problem. Unfortunately, because train travel is slow and expensive, it’s simply less expensive and faster to fly. If the rail infrastructure was upgraded to allow for faster travel and the costs were lowered, Americans would find them more desirable—-guaranteed.
- ryoshu 1y ago
  I'll take the Acela over flying any day. It's cheaper and less of a hassle. Time-to-commute is a wash when you do the airport security theater dance + delayed flights on the tarmac.
mrpopo 1y ago
Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities. They benefit everyone, even people with cars. You have a business trip and need to go from A to B by yourself? Take a train, it frees your brain and the highway for people traveling in groups or with lots of luggage. Incidentally it also avoids moving 2 tonnes of material for no reason.
- ReptileMan 1y ago
  >Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities. If the cities are closer than 600 km. Trains are good for movement inside a typical state, but rarely between states.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  You're preaching to the choir but the average person doesn't care.
- bombcar 1y ago
  A passenger train in the USA weighs about 1000 tons, plus another 150 or so tons of locomotive, before we add the passengers (seating 80 per car and about 11 cars for 880 passengers). That’s about a ton per passenger.

legitster 1y ago

The area in question (Northeast) is about the only place in the US that matches the population density of the parts of Europe served by high-speed rail. It's not a question of wealth but of efficiency. Even if you took every single meter of high speed rail that France has built in the last 50 years, you would barely cover 2/3 of the distance of a single line between New York and LA.

tantalor 1y ago
Florida has high speed rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
- allturtles 1y ago
  With an average speed of 70 mph, the Brightline isn't high-speed as it would be defined elsewhere in the world. Neither is the Amtrak Acela, for that matter.
- legitster 1y ago
  It's not technically fast enough to be called high speed rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail But it is worth calling out that good regional rail services exist in the US, and they don't even have to be that fast to be successful!
rafram 1y ago
New York to LA would be a terrible high-speed rail route. Just way too far. But the US has many city pairs - SF and LA, LA and Vegas, Denver and Salt Lake, Chicago and Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philly, and so on - where high-speed rail could easily replace most flights if it were built.
- legitster 1y ago
  "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". Some of those routes sound nice, but they don't usually have enough daily traffic between them to warrant the massive infrastructure costs. LA to Vegas would rival the distance of the longest European high speed lines, but with many fewer stops between and a fraction of the passengers between. Outside of connector flights, I don't even know how many people even regularly travel between Chicago and Detroit. Part of the advantage places like Japan and Europe have over the US is not just that they are dense, but that their population skews to one massive metropolitan center. So it's easy to design a hub model where traffic patterns are easy - in and out of one area. You see this in the success of regional commuter rail networks in the US. (SF and LA is a great candidate though, and it's failure a highlight of how hard it is to build in the US)

toast0 1y ago

We do have cheap easy high speed travel across the country. It's just not rail. In the US, rail is for freight. In the US, cross country distances are too large for terrestrial transport to be high speed. A flight network allows for much better speed, without needing to have continuous infrastructure. Rail in general requires pretty specific alignment and limits on turns and slope; high speed rail has even tighter tolerances. It's very expensive to build that, especially through rocky terrain, and through existing development. Flight networks are much more flexible. If you have room for an airport, and demand, you can get direct flights to/from anywhere. Roads are good too; because of their utility, they have a large network which tends to offer better routing than rail, and piecemeal upgades work for roads; switching routes is much easier for cars than trains, and roads can be quite rough but still usable at low speeds.

saubeidl 1y ago
China is about the same size as the US. Here's a map of their HSR network: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/railway.jpg https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/railway.jpg Flights are nowhere near as efficient as rail, not to speak of the environmental issues. It's factors like this that show how the US is falling behind in international competition.
- jcranmer 1y ago
  That's not a map of their HSR network, that's a map of their rail network. Openrailwaymap plots tracks by max speed, and you can see the map of China here: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=maxspeed&lat=30.95876857077987&lon=-248.851318359375&zoom=6 https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=maxspeed&lat=30.9587685707... --the tracks that are red-to-purple are the ones that are high speed.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    I'm having a hard time reading that map - but this one also goes by speed and shows the extent of the HSR lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#/media/File:Rail_map_of_PRC.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#/medi...