441–450 of 468 posts
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Or Japan. Privatize Amtrak completely.
Japan’s rail lines were almost entirely developed by the government, and transferred to private companies later. Private enterprise is great when taxpayers pay for the expensive part.
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"Cattle class" is a kinda faux-pejorative term for economy/coach/whatever the cheapest cabin is in some mode of transport.
"Cattle class" is an established joke, best employed by those actually riding in it. "Don't sit with the cattle" is (IMHO) pretty harsh, and unnecessary. And, for the record, cattle class seats are (or were) about the size of first-class airline seats, in the days before the bed capsules. It's not a cabin but it might be the least-cramped train seating you will ever encounter.
This is true, they're FAR better than standard airline seats. On the other hand, if you're going NY to SF you're going to be sitting in them for 3 days, so they better be comfortable.
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For those that don't know, the Empire Builder from Seattle stops in Spokane to hook up with a train that is coming from Portland. The combined train then goes all the way to Chicago. If either are delayed it can result in waiting for the other and long delays are apparently the norm and not the exception. My wife and her grandfather took the train from Portland to Minnesota in the fall of last year. There were a numb…
>> We were 8 hours late leaving Seattle and couldn't get into our cabin until we got to Spokane because of some sort of merge of trains coming from Portland and Seattle. Got to Spokane, got our cabin, another 6 hour delay. By the time we reached the upper Midwest, they were rationing food, literally cutting every meal (that we had already paid for) in half. We eventually arrived in Chicago about 22 hours late. >> The…
In the US, Canada, and Mexico trains are for freight. Even if you’re in the Northeast Corridor a bus is usually a better option if you aren’t driving or flying. Europe uses trucks for freight.
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Government services in the U.S. are both bad and expensive. The NYC MTA spends seven times as much money to build subway per mile than London or Paris. It spends about twice as much per passenger mile for subway service as London's Tube. We spend more per student than almost anyone else on schools. Why would someone in the U.S., confronted with the evidence, believe that government services aren't poor?
The US government should model its train service after Europe, since Europe clearly knows what it’s doing and the US clearly doesn’t. Also, would you then be consistent and argue that the government shouldn’t be spending so much on highways for cars, since it’ll just waste that money too?
The USA has large areas of sparsley populted land where flying for long distance, and car for the the closer area are hard to beat. This is way different from more densly populated Europe and even more densly populated Japan (especially when excluding Japan's motain regions)
If there were drive more more trains this would first require massive investment in infrastructure, to build both: the medium distance lines through populated area (for example along the east and west coast) as well as a network of connecting services fading out in the suburbs of the hub. Hardly anybody wants to go from hub to hub. If they need an car for "the last mile" anyways it's likely they won't take the detour to the train station and then having no way to continue on the other end ... If instead they can drive the complete distance.
Successful railways need a network connecting complete regions providing enough potential for a frequent service.
Building that requires huge support by politics/society.
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This isn't true at all. The size of the US isn't the problem, at all, no matter how much you want to believe it is. The best places for high-speed train routes aren't across the continent (even with HSR, it wouldn't be terribly competitive with airlines unless you're going partway, e.g. DC to Houston), it's along the coasts. The northeast corridor is the most obvious place to put HSR (no, Acela doesn't count). The ot…
It's not a matter of how much I believe. I went back to the 50's & interstate highway precisely because there could be no debating that it was a time where infrastructure was prioritized. And yet, even then, there was no major build out of rail. Because the geographic realities and subsequent economics don't work for it. The interstates made more sense and in terms of freight capacity still allowed for coast-to-coast…
Canadian cities are generally farther apart than US cities, except for Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. All the Canadian cities are just on the other side of the border, which is the longest undefended international border in the world.
>The exceptions, like on the east coast where points are closer, actually do have better rail. Not great
Not great is a severe understatement.
>I really don't see what's so difficult to understand.
I don't either. San Diego, LA, and SanFran are not that far apart, and would be well served by a high speed rail like they have in Japan and China and Europe. Yet we don't have it. Same goes for the northeast corridor. These cities are no farther apart than the cities served by HSR in these other countries.
My (now) wife and I took the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago about 10 years ago. We purchased a private cabin. We were 8 hours late leaving Seattle and couldn't get into our cabin until we got to Spokane because of some sort of merge of trains coming from Portland and Seattle. Got to Spokane, got our cabin, another 6 hour delay. By the time we reached the upper Midwest, they were rationing food, literally cutt…
I think this was specifically a train for fun and scenery. The destination is part of the point too but this wasn’t marketed or intended as transportation as a means of getting from point a to b.
In short I’m sure your experience is a reliable indicator of at least some of the state of train travel in the us. But it can be better than this, as a niche industry.
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>> We were 8 hours late leaving Seattle and couldn't get into our cabin until we got to Spokane because of some sort of merge of trains coming from Portland and Seattle. Got to Spokane, got our cabin, another 6 hour delay. By the time we reached the upper Midwest, they were rationing food, literally cutting every meal (that we had already paid for) in half. We eventually arrived in Chicago about 22 hours late. >> The…
Stuff like this makes it feel like the USA is falling apart from being a 1st world nation, crumbling in bits and pieces into a 3rd world one. That's exactly the wrong take-away! Amtrak is totally irrelevant for trans-continental travel. There is a "daily" departure from Seattle to Chicago. I.e. one train per day. Probably a few hundred passengers on a good day. I just did a quick check and there are 7 non-stop flight…
It's kind of a "nature preserve" of socialism in the US.
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I misread the comment the same way at first, but he was clearly just being polite and self-deprecating.
Good point - that's 100% my bad. I wish I could retract my comment, but I don't think there's a way; I appreciate your insight.