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U.S. Passenger Rail Ridership (2013)

57 points by jsc123 12y ago

pstuart 12y ago
Train travel is for the most part impractical because it's so slow -- passenger traffic takes a back seat to freight. I've had a notion that we should nationalize the rail lines and invest in having it handle more passenger (and freight) traffic safely. The lines could be opened to other passenger service (hello, Virgin) and some competition could be had in that space.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route, simply because of the distances involved, even assuming the train runs the top operational speed of the Shanghai Maglev for the entire route. (Chicago isn't what's important; substitute Minneapolis, St. Louis, or Indianapolis; the point is: trains can't efficiently get you from any coast to or from the midwest, or for that matter from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California). The problem is geography, not freight traffic.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    Yeah, even with dedicated lines, there's no way Amtrak could ever compete on a time basis with air travel over long distances. Just a matter of distance and speed. Where the freight is a problem is on the predictability of Amtrak schedules. Delays for freight can throw off long distance Amtrak by many hours, which can make it hard to plan for your arrival.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Freight makes better use of rail infrastructure than passenger transit does. Freight should monopolize the rails; that's the allocation that does the most good for the most people.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route, simply because of the distances involved, even assuming the train runs the top operational speed of the Shanghai Maglev for the entire route. Under your hypothetical, I'd certainly take the train on some of those routes. The Shanghai Maglev's top operational speed is 268 mph. Chicago–Houston is a little over 1000 miles, so that'd make the trip 4 hours, pretty competitive with a plane (the flight is a little under 3 hours, or about 5 if you want city center to city center). Of course that hypothetical is exceedingly unlikely. But TGV-style speeds would be fine on the route, too; I'd take it if it were a 6- or 7-hour trip, if the cost were reasonable. I think the reasonable-cost part is a bigger barrier than any technical feasibility, since the economics are unlikely to work out.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      A plane would crush a 6-7-hour train ride, both in travel time and in cost.
      - _delirium 12y ago
        It wouldn't crush it in travel time, but yes likely so in cost. Travel time is realistically 5 hours right now by plane, if everything goes well, often 6+ when it doesn't (which is about half the time, because IAH-ORD on-time performance sucks). I'd definitely take a high-speed train if it existed and somehow managed to not be a bazillion dollars, which admittedly means I never will.
        tptacek 12y ago
        If planes have to account for delays, so do trains: the on-time performance of the Acela is comparable.
      - toddsiegel 12y ago
        Most Rail stations are in downtown areas. Most large airports are outside of cities. If you're going downtown to downtown you get the driving, parking, security and waiting time back. Air travel may still be better in a pure $ and time basis, but for people like myself looking for a more comfortable travel experience than air, I would still take rail for a few $ more and a little extra time.
  - jdlegg 12y ago
    I disagree with this assessment. The distance from Chicago to Houston is roughly 1100 miles. Non-stop flights from O'Hare to Houston Hobby are listed on Kayak.com at 2 hours and 45 minutes. Add approx. 1 hour for pre-flight check-in, security and an average delay factor (it's O'Hare after all). That's a 3 hour and 45 minute trip time. We could add post-flight transportation from the airport to where you actually want to be and probably add another hour, but let's ignore that detail. In 2007, the French TGV set a speed record on conventional track of 357 mph. The unconventional track (maglev) record belongs to the Japanese SCMaglev and is 368 mph [0]. These were set under very experimental conditions, but if it were possible to realize equivalent speeds in a practical setting (perhaps via underground tunnels), the train trip from Chicago to Houston would require only 3 hours(!). But let's assume the above is impossible in real operating conditions. French TGV passenger routes regularly attain speeds of 200mph. This makes our Houston trip a little under 5 1/2 hours. That strikes me as quite efficient. I'm not an expert, but given the deplorable state of American infrastructure, especially rail, implementation of a system like this would most likely require starting from scratch. As such, equivalence of the French TGV seems very attainable. More likely, new innovation would lead to performance improvements over their system, which was conceived in the 1970s. Is 300mph attainable? I don't know, but it seems like a reasonable goal. That brings our Houston trip to roughly the equivalent of a flight, when including pre-flight check-in procedures. Of course, trains are safer, less energy and infrastructure intensive and a lot more pleasant. All of this without mentioning the fact that SCNF, the operator of the French TGV, achieved a $1.75 billion operating profit in 2007. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehicles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehi...
    - tptacek 12y ago
      The top operating speed of the TGV is in the neighborhood of 230MPH, isn't it? If you can cost-effectively deploy rail that averages 300MPH, rail becomes more attractive. But the average speed of the Shanghai Maglev is 155MPH. It's nothing close to 300MPH. It is extraordinarily unlikely that any train using current technology is going to average 200MPH between Chicago and Houston. Even with TGV-comparable trains, the trip from Chicago to Houston will take 8+ (heh) hours --- and that presumes an expenditure of public resources unparalleled in the last 50 years... all to get to a place where it would still be still be irrational not to take one of the many tens of airliner trips between those two cities every day.
  - melling 12y ago
    Why are you providing trips that are 1000 miles rather than ones that are less than 500 or 600 miles? Everyone already knows that jets are better for 1000 mile trips. los angeles to san francisco 400 miles los angeles to san diego 150 miles NYC to Philadelphia 92 miles NYC to Boston 220 miles NYC to Washington DC 226 miles chicago to St Louis 260 miles dallas to houston 240 miles dallas to austin 200 miles austin to houston 170 miles tampa to orlando 85 miles miami to orlando 235 miles
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Because most of the economically important trips in the US are more than 600 miles apart, except for the part of the country that is already well-served by rail?
      - melling 12y ago
        To which trips are you referring? Do you have any data to support your statement? I created a quick list of cities where high-speed rail should fit the distance metric.
        tptacek 12y ago
        Why, yes. I do have data. Thank you for asking. The top 10 cities in the US by GDP are, in order: * New York * Los Angeles * Chicago * Washington D.C. * Houston * Dallas * Philadelphia * San Francisco * Boston * Atlanta Here, for your reading pleasure, are the ground travel distances between all of those cities: New York Los Angeles 2475 Chicago 790 Washington D.C. 226 ** Houston 1416 Dallas 1389 Philadelphia 94 ** San Francisco 2907 Boston 215 ** Atlanta 750 Los Angeles Chicago 1745 Washington D.C. 2288 Houston 1379 Dallas 1235 Philadelphia 2401 San Francisco 380 Boston 2611 Atlanta 1947 Chicago Washington D.C. 696 Houston 1083 Dallas 924 Philadelphia 759 San Francisco 2130 Boston 983 Atlanta 716 Washington D.C. Houston 1400 Dallas 1328 Philadelphia 136 ** San Francisco 2816 Boston 437 ** Atlanta 639 Houston Dallas 239 Philadelphia 1544 San Francisco 1927 Boston 1848 Atlanta 792 Dallas Philadelphia 1464 San Francisco 1726 Boston 1791 Atlanta 781 Philadelphia San Francisco 2876 Boston 307 ** Atlanta 783 San Francisco Boston 3099 Atlanta 2472 Boston Atlanta 1099 I have, I hope helpfully, starred the sub-700-mile routes that are already served by the Acela. The average ground distance between these cities is (wait for it) 1,356 miles. Later You edited your comment upthread to include specific routes. My response --- apart from wondering why taxpayers in Arizona should fund a rail linkage to Orlando, the 30th biggest economy in the country, to Tampa, the 27th --- is to suggest that adding Florida to this graph would not improve the average cost of the edges.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Don't be too sure of those long-distance travel routes. Air travel is reliant on cheap and abundant petroleum. And in the U.S., peak aviation fuel has come and gone. Departures and total passenger miles are both above that level, as more efficient aircraft and higher load factors are rolled out, but peak aviation fuel was reached in 2000 -- that's nearly 15 years ago. The 2000 FAA RITA estimate for 2012 fuel use was 52% higher than actual consumption. http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecasts/2001-2012/media/Table%2022.pdf http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecast... Petroleum supplies past 2020 are going to be increasingly volatile (US EIA projects fracked oil extraction to peak by then). The airline industry is scared, and doesn't seem to have a good plan going forward (Boeing's "biggest breakthrough there is" is quite disapointing). Rail travel can be electrified, which liberates it from dependence on any specific fuel source. At 120 mph average speed (allowing for station stops), the 2,000 mile trip from Chicago to the West Coast would be 16 hours 40 minutes. A 4pm departure would have you arriving at about 7am the next morning for east-west travel, 11 am for west-east. Higher speeds are possible, though stops and dwell tend to reduce this. I see high-speed long-distance rail as viable. The question is how long the present energy/fuel economy can sustain itself. http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_biofuel_breakthrough_less_than/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_...
  - superuser2 12y ago
    >Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route When the weather is good. In the post-winter-break rush the last few years, air traffic on the East Coast went down for a few days and was backed up for several more. The only New Yorkers who made it back to school in time were the ones who got seats on the Lake Shore Limited. When air traffic is functioning smoothly, it's faster, but in a serious winter storm/holiday travel fiasco, ~24 hours on a train beats ~1 week of delays for a flight.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Come on. Like nobody has a horror story about an Amtrak train stopping in the middle of a route, having to disembark from the train, and wait half a day for the bus that comes to finish the trip?
- toddsiegel 12y ago
  It's shame. In the West (Denver) where I live service is terrible. There are always huge delays due to freight priority, as you mention, and other issues. My wife and I are considering visiting her family with our infant son in the Bay Area for Christmas. We don't want to drive and don't really want to fly either. From Denver to Martinez is $526 for coach and $787 for a sleeper, which is a totally reasonable price. But it's 32+ hours, which is insane. And that's before factoring in the massive delays. It they could get this down to under 20 hours I would purchase this in a heartbeat. 1200 miles + 80 mph (no idea how fast the train goes but this seems reasonable for 2014) + 3 hours of stops (seems realistic) = 18 hours. Before the lines are opened to competition I think Amtrak should be given a chance to operate with dedicated passenger lines. If it cannot succeed at that, then open it up to competitors, or break them up and sell the routes to new companies.
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    Standard high speed trains in the UK run at 125mph, but that’s pretty slow compared to countries with shinkansen type trains (e.g. Japan, Germany’s ICE, France’s TGV etc) that regularly hit 200+mph.
  - SystemOut 12y ago
    We did the Martinez to Denver route about 10 years ago. I really really want to love the train and for it to be successful but we were 22 hours late arriving. Some of it was weather but we had a train car lose it's suspension near Truckee, then due to that delay the crew went "dead" due to their hours and we literally had to stop for a couple of hours in the middle of Nevada while the next crew came to us. After that we got moving and made some decent time but then a freight train had issues ahead of us so we sat somewhere in Colorado for a few hours waiting. To top it all off, the woman in the sleeper next to us ran out of extra oxygen because she wasn't expecting to be at higher elevation that long and without access to more oxygen supplies and so we had to wait for an ambulance to come. We flew back. Some of this was Amtrak's fault, some of this was not. If the food were better and the trains a little more modern we wouldn't have minded as much but even then spending 22 hours extra on that route is just not going to work for much of anyone. But with all the moving parts it takes to get right for a train to come in on some semblance of a schedule I just don't see how it will ever be anything but a niche product for long haul routes.
jacques_chester 12y ago
I note that the profitable lines are on the East coast. Your choices for intercity travel are: 1. Drive. I hope you like staring at roads and other cars. 2. Fly. I hope you like spending more time getting to, and going through, the airport than you will spend in the air. 3. Take a train. I hope you like having leg room, a view, the ability to do some reading, going from city centre to city centre without fighting traffic, leaving from a train station you arrived at 15 minutes before departure time. From NYC, I can get to Philadelphia or DC substantially faster by train than by any other method[^]. I can get to Boston sufficiently quickly that flying isn't worth it. To travel to Toronto by air takes about 5 hours, once you factor in all the stuff that isn't flying. By train, it's about 10 hours. I am tempted, a lot of the time, to take the damn train. [^] With one whoopee cushion: US rail systems prioritise freight over passenger traffic. You can easily be stuck for 10-30 minutes while several thousand tons of clanking steel crawls past a high speed train. Mind you, they close the airports any time somebody brings in a water bottle or if it's slightly chilly. So.
- tptacek 12y ago
  This is true in the Boston/NYC/Philly region, but not outside it. I prefer the Acela to a Jetblue NYC-IAD(DC), but the flight is the better call for that route. It's also only true of the Acela routes. Intercity travel on normal Amtrak trains is awful.
  - jacques_chester 12y ago
    > This is true in the Boston/NYC/Philly region, but not outside it. Yep. Large, closely-spaced cities, relatively fast trains, less stressful than flying. Under those conditions trains come out looking pretty good. That's why I think it's profitable on those lines and not elsewhere.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Careful. It's not "large, closely-spaced cities"; it's the Acela. There are Amtrak routes between large, nearby cities you don't want to take.
tptacek 12y ago
From this data: almost half of Amtrak's ridership (north of 45%!) occurs on roughly 1000 miles of track, or just 3% of Amtrak's almost 28,000 total miles --- all in the Northeastern US, DC to Boston through NYC and Philly. Another gigantic bite of Amtrak's ridership comes from short-hop California routes --- particularly LA to San Diego. The sharp increase in Amtrak ridership that Brookings notice includes the zero riders to 3.3MM riders from the introduction of the Acela service, plus another 2+MM from other Northeast routes, presumably knock-on benefit from the Acela. Most of Amtrak's route map seems, with this data, to be a pointless waste of money. The "renaissance" is the Acela, and not much more.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  It's mostly because, as I noted, taking a train for short trips has become a better option due to the hoopla and bullshit surrounding flying these days. For long trips though, you're looking at a day of travel vs days of travel. For most people that's not hard to choose between.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    My mental model for flight schedules is: * Add an hour on each side (getting to/through airport, getting from the airport). * Assume a 2-hour minimum flight no matter what the route. * Round up to nearest hour. For routes with a flying time less than 2 hours, I prefer to drive. Amtrak, though, is never an option. My mental model for Amtrak would need to build in the time to complete the trip on a bus.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  And yet the Pacific Surfliner loses as much money as the Texas Eagle. I suspect that's because of multiple trains per day on the Surfliner. I'm not sure, though, that the fact that a route loses money necessarily means that route is a pointless waste of money. Is it not possible that running a government funded service has value even if it does not produce a profit? What I'm getting at is that profit probably isn't the best way to measure the value of these routes. As far as the renaissance, ridership is up considerably on most routes. Even if they aren't profitable, they're certainly serving a lot more people than they were.
wallflower 12y ago
Having taken Amtrak's rail from Coast to Coast, if you ever want a real vacation (albeit one in a semi-confined area), I highly encourage taking Amtrak to get where you are going. I met several retired couples who basically to get to New Orleans went to New York City, Chicago, California, Texas, and then New Orleans. There are kids on trains but unlike air travel and car travel these kids (and parents alike) understand that they are not trying to get anywhere in a hurry. The general vibe is one of just pondering life. Spending hours in an upper-deck observation car staring at the beautiful or even quite mundane passing landscape can really help you focus. The characters who come to the onboard bar are quite interesting. If you do decide to do long-haul Amtrak travel, sleeping in the seat is quite difficult - the door opening can wake you, the observation cars so beautiful during the day are absolutely frigid at night. The costs for a sleeper car though are quite expensive (more than air travel for equivalent destination). And yes, freight has priority over commuter on the tracks because freight owns the tracks - so delays in the hours to days are possible. For some people, it is a bucket list experience. I can honestly say after 5 days on a train - I was in no hurry to get back on (I flew back). I guarantee you will meet interesting people. Two of the most interesting people I met were these two beautiful Latina teenagers who sat for hours working on something hard to figure out. I finally approached them and learned that they were making Sudoku puzzles - by hand... The wi-fi is so spotty that I don't think you'd have much luck working remote from a train if you required ssh connections. http://www.trainweb.com/coaststarlight/ http://www.trainweb.com/coaststarlight/
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Seconded on the meeting interesting people front. I never fail to meet interesting people on long distance Amtrak travel. Friendlier people too. Far more often than on air travel of any sort. I think a lot of it is that air travel is just a packed can going from point A to point B as fast as possible. Amtrak is not for people in any kind of hurry, it's for people looking for some sort of interesting experience.
- wglb 12y ago
  I took the Empire Builder from Montana to Chicago when I was in college. It was a 28 or 34 hour ride, depending on which of the two trains you took. sleeping in the seat is quite difficult Yes, but i ended up learning to sleep anywhere, door opening or not. But as you say the view from the upper level in the senic car was worth it. I remember the journey through North Dakota next to route US 2. Those days, everyone had one of the mercury-vapor yard lights that would turn on automatically at dark, and you could see them for 10 miles or more. There would be hour-long stretches in which you would see non of these on either side. Since I got off the train at Shelby, I never went through Glacier Park on the train. Insofar as a bucket list item, put on there taking a convertible on the Going to the Sun highway. I got to check that one off when going to the Glacier/Waterton international Hamfest with a friend when I was in high school.
fesja 12y ago
FYI Spain has the second biggest high speed train network of the world, with over 3.000 km (many more kilometers being built), just after China. This 2014, 28M people will have traveled by train, compared to 31.2M in USA in 2012. The goal is to reach 56M in a few years. After many years where the prices were expensive, we have started to liberalize it and prices have go down. Now it's reasonable cheap. You can buy one-way tickets for 30€ for a 1h30 route (like 4h by car). Madrid-Barcelona is one of the most demanding routes and flights can't compete with the high speed train. In just a few years, people have moved from using flights to most of them using the train. It's way way more comfortable. Of course, the key question is geography. Trains works best for a distance less than 1.000km. In Spain that's the distance from east to west or south to north. In USA there are some areas that make a lot of sense like Boston-NY-Philly-Washington; and California.
- chestnut-tree 12y ago
  In the UK, we tend to look enviously at our continental neighbours such as Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands who we pereceive to have fast, modern, reliable and cheap rail travel. All things that we tend not to have in the UK (especially the cheap bit). One interesting fact I discovered a while ago that greatly surprised me: the percentage of public transport usage (as the main mode of travel) is higher in the UK than in Germany, France and the Netherlands. This finding came from a survey funded by the European Commission in 2010/2011. Country and % whose main mode of travel is public transport Czech Republic 37% Spain 30% UK 22% France 20% Germany 15% Ireland 14% Finland 13% Denmark 12% Netherlands 11% The full list of countries is in the report (see page 8): http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_312_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_312_en.pdf
  - _delirium 12y ago
    The UK has a higher share for public transport than the Netherlands in large part because the Netherlands has a higher share of people who use no mechanized transport at all: 34% of Dutch either bike or walk as their main mode of travel, compared to about half as large a proportion of Britons (16%), according to the source you linked. Here's the ordering (same countries, same source) if you take transit+walking+biking together: Czech Republic 60% Spain 46% Netherlands 45% UK 37% Denmark 35% Germany 35% Finland 35% France 32% Ireland 30% The UK still does pretty well, admittedly. I think the reputation for bad trains in the UK is mostly intercity trains, whereas these "main mode of travel" statistics are more about commuting, which is a different set of concerns; the London Underground alone accounts for a very large number of commuters. (Denmark, by contrast, doesn't look anywhere near as good as its reputation in these kinds of figures. In large part because its reputation is built specifically on Copenhagen, the most visible city by a good margin. Jutland, which has about half of the Danish population, is a sprawling, car-centric collection of towns and suburbs.)
rayiner 12y ago
It's interesting we're talking about so much money between questionably useful routes. In areas not well-served by rail, it might make more sense to put spend that money on express subway lines to the airport and more efficient security processes.
Intermernet 12y ago
I'd never come across the term "ridership" before. What a wonderful word! I note that Google says it's a North American term (in Australia and England this would probably be termed "patronage") but I may start using it. It has a Samuel Clemensy feel to it, although dictionary.reference.com dates it to 1962.[1] [1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ridership http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ridership
jpatokal 12y ago
To bring an outsider's perspective to this discussion, I'm kind of shocked by how low all those numbers are, even with 200% growth and whatnot. Amtrak is offering service on lines that get under 40k passengers a year. By comparison, the Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka has 391k passengers a day, meaning it also racks up the entire Acela corridor's yearly numbers in a week.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  I just looked at one of those routes under 40k passengers, the Hoosier State. Wikipedia has an interesting fact, that there's a 2008 law that requires intercity routes under 750 miles to have their costs covered by the affected states by 2013. 1. That changes almost every discussion in this thread, and really the economics of Amtrak as a whole. 2. The route brings in about $850k a year but costs $3M. Obviously at this point I need to read up on this law that changed the short route train funding. (Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act) Edit - It looks like it's more about "cost-sharing" of various types. Still, that does change things. Amtrak's budget justification for 2014 is interesting. Particularly the graph showing the decrease in operational defecits. http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/851/32/AmtrakFY14-Budget-Request-Justification,0.pdf http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/851/32/AmtrakFY14-Budget-Request...

57 points by jsc123 12y ago

Train travel is for the most part impractical because it's so slow -- passenger traffic takes a back seat to freight. I've had a notion that we should nationalize the rail lines and invest in having it handle more passenger (and freight) traffic safely. The lines could be opened to other passenger service (hello, Virgin) and some competition could be had in that space.

tptacek 12y ago
Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route, simply because of the distances involved, even assuming the train runs the top operational speed of the Shanghai Maglev for the entire route. (Chicago isn't what's important; substitute Minneapolis, St. Louis, or Indianapolis; the point is: trains can't efficiently get you from any coast to or from the midwest, or for that matter from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California). The problem is geography, not freight traffic.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Yeah, even with dedicated lines, there's no way Amtrak could ever compete on a time basis with air travel over long distances. Just a matter of distance and speed. Where the freight is a problem is on the predictability of Amtrak schedules. Delays for freight can throw off long distance Amtrak by many hours, which can make it hard to plan for your arrival.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Freight makes better use of rail infrastructure than passenger transit does. Freight should monopolize the rails; that's the allocation that does the most good for the most people.
- _delirium 12y ago
  Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route, simply because of the distances involved, even assuming the train runs the top operational speed of the Shanghai Maglev for the entire route. Under your hypothetical, I'd certainly take the train on some of those routes. The Shanghai Maglev's top operational speed is 268 mph. Chicago–Houston is a little over 1000 miles, so that'd make the trip 4 hours, pretty competitive with a plane (the flight is a little under 3 hours, or about 5 if you want city center to city center). Of course that hypothetical is exceedingly unlikely. But TGV-style speeds would be fine on the route, too; I'd take it if it were a 6- or 7-hour trip, if the cost were reasonable. I think the reasonable-cost part is a bigger barrier than any technical feasibility, since the economics are unlikely to work out.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    A plane would crush a 6-7-hour train ride, both in travel time and in cost.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      It wouldn't crush it in travel time, but yes likely so in cost. Travel time is realistically 5 hours right now by plane, if everything goes well, often 6+ when it doesn't (which is about half the time, because IAH-ORD on-time performance sucks). I'd definitely take a high-speed train if it existed and somehow managed to not be a bazillion dollars, which admittedly means I never will.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        If planes have to account for delays, so do trains: the on-time performance of the Acela is comparable.
    - toddsiegel 12y ago
      Most Rail stations are in downtown areas. Most large airports are outside of cities. If you're going downtown to downtown you get the driving, parking, security and waiting time back. Air travel may still be better in a pure $ and time basis, but for people like myself looking for a more comfortable travel experience than air, I would still take rail for a few $ more and a little extra time.
- jdlegg 12y ago
  I disagree with this assessment. The distance from Chicago to Houston is roughly 1100 miles. Non-stop flights from O'Hare to Houston Hobby are listed on Kayak.com at 2 hours and 45 minutes. Add approx. 1 hour for pre-flight check-in, security and an average delay factor (it's O'Hare after all). That's a 3 hour and 45 minute trip time. We could add post-flight transportation from the airport to where you actually want to be and probably add another hour, but let's ignore that detail. In 2007, the French TGV set a speed record on conventional track of 357 mph. The unconventional track (maglev) record belongs to the Japanese SCMaglev and is 368 mph [0]. These were set under very experimental conditions, but if it were possible to realize equivalent speeds in a practical setting (perhaps via underground tunnels), the train trip from Chicago to Houston would require only 3 hours(!). But let's assume the above is impossible in real operating conditions. French TGV passenger routes regularly attain speeds of 200mph. This makes our Houston trip a little under 5 1/2 hours. That strikes me as quite efficient. I'm not an expert, but given the deplorable state of American infrastructure, especially rail, implementation of a system like this would most likely require starting from scratch. As such, equivalence of the French TGV seems very attainable. More likely, new innovation would lead to performance improvements over their system, which was conceived in the 1970s. Is 300mph attainable? I don't know, but it seems like a reasonable goal. That brings our Houston trip to roughly the equivalent of a flight, when including pre-flight check-in procedures. Of course, trains are safer, less energy and infrastructure intensive and a lot more pleasant. All of this without mentioning the fact that SCNF, the operator of the French TGV, achieved a $1.75 billion operating profit in 2007. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehicles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_rail_vehi...
  - tptacek 12y ago
    The top operating speed of the TGV is in the neighborhood of 230MPH, isn't it? If you can cost-effectively deploy rail that averages 300MPH, rail becomes more attractive. But the average speed of the Shanghai Maglev is 155MPH. It's nothing close to 300MPH. It is extraordinarily unlikely that any train using current technology is going to average 200MPH between Chicago and Houston. Even with TGV-comparable trains, the trip from Chicago to Houston will take 8+ (heh) hours --- and that presumes an expenditure of public resources unparalleled in the last 50 years... all to get to a place where it would still be still be irrational not to take one of the many tens of airliner trips between those two cities every day.
- melling 12y ago
  Why are you providing trips that are 1000 miles rather than ones that are less than 500 or 600 miles? Everyone already knows that jets are better for 1000 mile trips. los angeles to san francisco 400 miles los angeles to san diego 150 miles NYC to Philadelphia 92 miles NYC to Boston 220 miles NYC to Washington DC 226 miles chicago to St Louis 260 miles dallas to houston 240 miles dallas to austin 200 miles austin to houston 170 miles tampa to orlando 85 miles miami to orlando 235 miles
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Because most of the economically important trips in the US are more than 600 miles apart, except for the part of the country that is already well-served by rail?
    - melling 12y ago
      To which trips are you referring? Do you have any data to support your statement? I created a quick list of cities where high-speed rail should fit the distance metric.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        Why, yes. I do have data. Thank you for asking. The top 10 cities in the US by GDP are, in order: * New York * Los Angeles * Chicago * Washington D.C. * Houston * Dallas * Philadelphia * San Francisco * Boston * Atlanta Here, for your reading pleasure, are the ground travel distances between all of those cities: New York Los Angeles 2475 Chicago 790 Washington D.C. 226 ** Houston 1416 Dallas 1389 Philadelphia 94 ** San Francisco 2907 Boston 215 ** Atlanta 750 Los Angeles Chicago 1745 Washington D.C. 2288 Houston 1379 Dallas 1235 Philadelphia 2401 San Francisco 380 Boston 2611 Atlanta 1947 Chicago Washington D.C. 696 Houston 1083 Dallas 924 Philadelphia 759 San Francisco 2130 Boston 983 Atlanta 716 Washington D.C. Houston 1400 Dallas 1328 Philadelphia 136 ** San Francisco 2816 Boston 437 ** Atlanta 639 Houston Dallas 239 Philadelphia 1544 San Francisco 1927 Boston 1848 Atlanta 792 Dallas Philadelphia 1464 San Francisco 1726 Boston 1791 Atlanta 781 Philadelphia San Francisco 2876 Boston 307 ** Atlanta 783 San Francisco Boston 3099 Atlanta 2472 Boston Atlanta 1099 I have, I hope helpfully, starred the sub-700-mile routes that are already served by the Acela. The average ground distance between these cities is (wait for it) 1,356 miles. Later You edited your comment upthread to include specific routes. My response --- apart from wondering why taxpayers in Arizona should fund a rail linkage to Orlando, the 30th biggest economy in the country, to Tampa, the 27th --- is to suggest that adding Florida to this graph would not improve the average cost of the edges.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Don't be too sure of those long-distance travel routes. Air travel is reliant on cheap and abundant petroleum. And in the U.S., peak aviation fuel has come and gone. Departures and total passenger miles are both above that level, as more efficient aircraft and higher load factors are rolled out, but peak aviation fuel was reached in 2000 -- that's nearly 15 years ago. The 2000 FAA RITA estimate for 2012 fuel use was 52% higher than actual consumption. http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecasts/2001-2012/media/Table%2022.pdf http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecast... Petroleum supplies past 2020 are going to be increasingly volatile (US EIA projects fracked oil extraction to peak by then). The airline industry is scared, and doesn't seem to have a good plan going forward (Boeing's "biggest breakthrough there is" is quite disapointing). Rail travel can be electrified, which liberates it from dependence on any specific fuel source. At 120 mph average speed (allowing for station stops), the 2,000 mile trip from Chicago to the West Coast would be 16 hours 40 minutes. A 4pm departure would have you arriving at about 7am the next morning for east-west travel, 11 am for west-east. Higher speeds are possible, though stops and dwell tend to reduce this. I see high-speed long-distance rail as viable. The question is how long the present energy/fuel economy can sustain itself. http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_biofuel_breakthrough_less_than/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings_...
- superuser2 12y ago
  >Train travel is also impractical because no train is ever going to be competitive with an airplane on a Chicago-Houston, Chicago-Boston, or (heh) Chicago-Seattle route When the weather is good. In the post-winter-break rush the last few years, air traffic on the East Coast went down for a few days and was backed up for several more. The only New Yorkers who made it back to school in time were the ones who got seats on the Lake Shore Limited. When air traffic is functioning smoothly, it's faster, but in a serious winter storm/holiday travel fiasco, ~24 hours on a train beats ~1 week of delays for a flight.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Come on. Like nobody has a horror story about an Amtrak train stopping in the middle of a route, having to disembark from the train, and wait half a day for the bus that comes to finish the trip?
toddsiegel 12y ago
It's shame. In the West (Denver) where I live service is terrible. There are always huge delays due to freight priority, as you mention, and other issues. My wife and I are considering visiting her family with our infant son in the Bay Area for Christmas. We don't want to drive and don't really want to fly either. From Denver to Martinez is $526 for coach and $787 for a sleeper, which is a totally reasonable price. But it's 32+ hours, which is insane. And that's before factoring in the massive delays. It they could get this down to under 20 hours I would purchase this in a heartbeat. 1200 miles + 80 mph (no idea how fast the train goes but this seems reasonable for 2014) + 3 hours of stops (seems realistic) = 18 hours. Before the lines are opened to competition I think Amtrak should be given a chance to operate with dedicated passenger lines. If it cannot succeed at that, then open it up to competitors, or break them up and sell the routes to new companies.
- robin_reala 12y ago
  Standard high speed trains in the UK run at 125mph, but that’s pretty slow compared to countries with shinkansen type trains (e.g. Japan, Germany’s ICE, France’s TGV etc) that regularly hit 200+mph.
- SystemOut 12y ago
  We did the Martinez to Denver route about 10 years ago. I really really want to love the train and for it to be successful but we were 22 hours late arriving. Some of it was weather but we had a train car lose it's suspension near Truckee, then due to that delay the crew went "dead" due to their hours and we literally had to stop for a couple of hours in the middle of Nevada while the next crew came to us. After that we got moving and made some decent time but then a freight train had issues ahead of us so we sat somewhere in Colorado for a few hours waiting. To top it all off, the woman in the sleeper next to us ran out of extra oxygen because she wasn't expecting to be at higher elevation that long and without access to more oxygen supplies and so we had to wait for an ambulance to come. We flew back. Some of this was Amtrak's fault, some of this was not. If the food were better and the trains a little more modern we wouldn't have minded as much but even then spending 22 hours extra on that route is just not going to work for much of anyone. But with all the moving parts it takes to get right for a train to come in on some semblance of a schedule I just don't see how it will ever be anything but a niche product for long haul routes.

jacques_chester 12y ago

I note that the profitable lines are on the East coast. Your choices for intercity travel are: 1. Drive. I hope you like staring at roads and other cars. 2. Fly. I hope you like spending more time getting to, and going through, the airport than you will spend in the air. 3. Take a train. I hope you like having leg room, a view, the ability to do some reading, going from city centre to city centre without fighting traffic, leaving from a train station you arrived at 15 minutes before departure time. From NYC, I can get to Philadelphia or DC substantially faster by train than by any other method[^]. I can get to Boston sufficiently quickly that flying isn't worth it. To travel to Toronto by air takes about 5 hours, once you factor in all the stuff that isn't flying. By train, it's about 10 hours. I am tempted, a lot of the time, to take the damn train. [^] With one whoopee cushion: US rail systems prioritise freight over passenger traffic. You can easily be stuck for 10-30 minutes while several thousand tons of clanking steel crawls past a high speed train. Mind you, they close the airports any time somebody brings in a water bottle or if it's slightly chilly. So.

tptacek 12y ago
This is true in the Boston/NYC/Philly region, but not outside it. I prefer the Acela to a Jetblue NYC-IAD(DC), but the flight is the better call for that route. It's also only true of the Acela routes. Intercity travel on normal Amtrak trains is awful.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  > This is true in the Boston/NYC/Philly region, but not outside it. Yep. Large, closely-spaced cities, relatively fast trains, less stressful than flying. Under those conditions trains come out looking pretty good. That's why I think it's profitable on those lines and not elsewhere.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Careful. It's not "large, closely-spaced cities"; it's the Acela. There are Amtrak routes between large, nearby cities you don't want to take.

tptacek 12y ago

From this data: almost half of Amtrak's ridership (north of 45%!) occurs on roughly 1000 miles of track, or just 3% of Amtrak's almost 28,000 total miles --- all in the Northeastern US, DC to Boston through NYC and Philly. Another gigantic bite of Amtrak's ridership comes from short-hop California routes --- particularly LA to San Diego. The sharp increase in Amtrak ridership that Brookings notice includes the zero riders to 3.3MM riders from the introduction of the Acela service, plus another 2+MM from other Northeast routes, presumably knock-on benefit from the Acela. Most of Amtrak's route map seems, with this data, to be a pointless waste of money. The "renaissance" is the Acela, and not much more.

jacques_chester 12y ago
It's mostly because, as I noted, taking a train for short trips has become a better option due to the hoopla and bullshit surrounding flying these days. For long trips though, you're looking at a day of travel vs days of travel. For most people that's not hard to choose between.
- tptacek 12y ago
  My mental model for flight schedules is: * Add an hour on each side (getting to/through airport, getting from the airport). * Assume a 2-hour minimum flight no matter what the route. * Round up to nearest hour. For routes with a flying time less than 2 hours, I prefer to drive. Amtrak, though, is never an option. My mental model for Amtrak would need to build in the time to complete the trip on a bus.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
And yet the Pacific Surfliner loses as much money as the Texas Eagle. I suspect that's because of multiple trains per day on the Surfliner. I'm not sure, though, that the fact that a route loses money necessarily means that route is a pointless waste of money. Is it not possible that running a government funded service has value even if it does not produce a profit? What I'm getting at is that profit probably isn't the best way to measure the value of these routes. As far as the renaissance, ridership is up considerably on most routes. Even if they aren't profitable, they're certainly serving a lot more people than they were.

wallflower 12y ago

Having taken Amtrak's rail from Coast to Coast, if you ever want a real vacation (albeit one in a semi-confined area), I highly encourage taking Amtrak to get where you are going. I met several retired couples who basically to get to New Orleans went to New York City, Chicago, California, Texas, and then New Orleans. There are kids on trains but unlike air travel and car travel these kids (and parents alike) understand that they are not trying to get anywhere in a hurry. The general vibe is one of just pondering life. Spending hours in an upper-deck observation car staring at the beautiful or even quite mundane passing landscape can really help you focus. The characters who come to the onboard bar are quite interesting. If you do decide to do long-haul Amtrak travel, sleeping in the seat is quite difficult - the door opening can wake you, the observation cars so beautiful during the day are absolutely frigid at night. The costs for a sleeper car though are quite expensive (more than air travel for equivalent destination). And yes, freight has priority over commuter on the tracks because freight owns the tracks - so delays in the hours to days are possible. For some people, it is a bucket list experience. I can honestly say after 5 days on a train - I was in no hurry to get back on (I flew back). I guarantee you will meet interesting people. Two of the most interesting people I met were these two beautiful Latina teenagers who sat for hours working on something hard to figure out. I finally approached them and learned that they were making Sudoku puzzles - by hand... The wi-fi is so spotty that I don't think you'd have much luck working remote from a train if you required ssh connections. http://www.trainweb.com/coaststarlight/ http://www.trainweb.com/coaststarlight/

waterlesscloud 12y ago
Seconded on the meeting interesting people front. I never fail to meet interesting people on long distance Amtrak travel. Friendlier people too. Far more often than on air travel of any sort. I think a lot of it is that air travel is just a packed can going from point A to point B as fast as possible. Amtrak is not for people in any kind of hurry, it's for people looking for some sort of interesting experience.
wglb 12y ago
I took the Empire Builder from Montana to Chicago when I was in college. It was a 28 or 34 hour ride, depending on which of the two trains you took. sleeping in the seat is quite difficult Yes, but i ended up learning to sleep anywhere, door opening or not. But as you say the view from the upper level in the senic car was worth it. I remember the journey through North Dakota next to route US 2. Those days, everyone had one of the mercury-vapor yard lights that would turn on automatically at dark, and you could see them for 10 miles or more. There would be hour-long stretches in which you would see non of these on either side. Since I got off the train at Shelby, I never went through Glacier Park on the train. Insofar as a bucket list item, put on there taking a convertible on the Going to the Sun highway. I got to check that one off when going to the Glacier/Waterton international Hamfest with a friend when I was in high school.

fesja 12y ago

FYI Spain has the second biggest high speed train network of the world, with over 3.000 km (many more kilometers being built), just after China. This 2014, 28M people will have traveled by train, compared to 31.2M in USA in 2012. The goal is to reach 56M in a few years. After many years where the prices were expensive, we have started to liberalize it and prices have go down. Now it's reasonable cheap. You can buy one-way tickets for 30€ for a 1h30 route (like 4h by car). Madrid-Barcelona is one of the most demanding routes and flights can't compete with the high speed train. In just a few years, people have moved from using flights to most of them using the train. It's way way more comfortable. Of course, the key question is geography. Trains works best for a distance less than 1.000km. In Spain that's the distance from east to west or south to north. In USA there are some areas that make a lot of sense like Boston-NY-Philly-Washington; and California.

chestnut-tree 12y ago
In the UK, we tend to look enviously at our continental neighbours such as Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands who we pereceive to have fast, modern, reliable and cheap rail travel. All things that we tend not to have in the UK (especially the cheap bit). One interesting fact I discovered a while ago that greatly surprised me: the percentage of public transport usage (as the main mode of travel) is higher in the UK than in Germany, France and the Netherlands. This finding came from a survey funded by the European Commission in 2010/2011. Country and % whose main mode of travel is public transport Czech Republic 37% Spain 30% UK 22% France 20% Germany 15% Ireland 14% Finland 13% Denmark 12% Netherlands 11% The full list of countries is in the report (see page 8): http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_312_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_312_en.pdf
- _delirium 12y ago
  The UK has a higher share for public transport than the Netherlands in large part because the Netherlands has a higher share of people who use no mechanized transport at all: 34% of Dutch either bike or walk as their main mode of travel, compared to about half as large a proportion of Britons (16%), according to the source you linked. Here's the ordering (same countries, same source) if you take transit+walking+biking together: Czech Republic 60% Spain 46% Netherlands 45% UK 37% Denmark 35% Germany 35% Finland 35% France 32% Ireland 30% The UK still does pretty well, admittedly. I think the reputation for bad trains in the UK is mostly intercity trains, whereas these "main mode of travel" statistics are more about commuting, which is a different set of concerns; the London Underground alone accounts for a very large number of commuters. (Denmark, by contrast, doesn't look anywhere near as good as its reputation in these kinds of figures. In large part because its reputation is built specifically on Copenhagen, the most visible city by a good margin. Jutland, which has about half of the Danish population, is a sprawling, car-centric collection of towns and suburbs.)

rayiner 12y ago

It's interesting we're talking about so much money between questionably useful routes. In areas not well-served by rail, it might make more sense to put spend that money on express subway lines to the airport and more efficient security processes.

Intermernet 12y ago

I'd never come across the term "ridership" before. What a wonderful word! I note that Google says it's a North American term (in Australia and England this would probably be termed "patronage") but I may start using it. It has a Samuel Clemensy feel to it, although dictionary.reference.com dates it to 1962.[1] [1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ridership http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ridership

jpatokal 12y ago

To bring an outsider's perspective to this discussion, I'm kind of shocked by how low all those numbers are, even with 200% growth and whatnot. Amtrak is offering service on lines that get under 40k passengers a year. By comparison, the Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka has 391k passengers a day, meaning it also racks up the entire Acela corridor's yearly numbers in a week.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
I just looked at one of those routes under 40k passengers, the Hoosier State. Wikipedia has an interesting fact, that there's a 2008 law that requires intercity routes under 750 miles to have their costs covered by the affected states by 2013. 1. That changes almost every discussion in this thread, and really the economics of Amtrak as a whole. 2. The route brings in about $850k a year but costs $3M. Obviously at this point I need to read up on this law that changed the short route train funding. (Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act) Edit - It looks like it's more about "cost-sharing" of various types. Still, that does change things. Amtrak's budget justification for 2014 is interesting. Particularly the graph showing the decrease in operational defecits. http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/851/32/AmtrakFY14-Budget-Request-Justification,0.pdf http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/851/32/AmtrakFY14-Budget-Request...