91–100 of 191 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And with that you most likely lose any sort of protection/insurance Lyft gives you.
What protection/insurance?
I followed this as it unfolded on his Twitter account ( https://twitter.com/scalzi ). He has a way of taking some small experience or observation and turning it into a great little story or one-liner. He's written some good sci-fi, too. Worth following.
Since the driver would have had to dead head back to Chicago, if his expenses were a not unreasonable 0.50 cents per mile, the only profit the driver made was the tip.
This is why we need a train system with funding parity to the highway and airport systems. There should be trains leaving constantly, at most every 10 minutes, from Chicago to the east, and frequent, semihourly, trains between neighboring cities along the way. Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.
Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Congress. (Ticket revenue only goes to operating costs.) that’s about $0.13 per passenger mile.
For a guy driving 300 miles, that cost the government $6.00 in road construction and maintenance. For the guy to train that same distance costs the government $39.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t imagine a train leaving every 10 minutes could ever be cost effective. There just aren’t that many people who want to do that trip (8 hours?) when you could do it in 2 hours by plane.
As the crow flies, Chicago to New York is similar to Beijing to Shanghai, which is a long-ish high-speed-rail journey of 4.5 hours. If you have to fight lots of traffic to get to the airport that's not too bad. Probably not enough to drive demand for every ten minutes. The real value of such a network would be an intermediate trip. If Cleveland or Pittsburgh are both two hours away from New York and Chicago and the t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t imagine a train leaving every 10 minutes could ever be cost effective. There just aren’t that many people who want to do that trip (8 hours?) when you could do it in 2 hours by plane.
As the crow flies, Chicago to New York is similar to Beijing to Shanghai, which is a long-ish high-speed-rail journey of 4.5 hours. If you have to fight lots of traffic to get to the airport that's not too bad. Probably not enough to drive demand for every ten minutes. The real value of such a network would be an intermediate trip. If Cleveland or Pittsburgh are both two hours away from New York and Chicago and the t…
This is a fun story—but he should've just booked a round-trip rental car, and dropped it off in Dayton anyway. I've done this a bunch of times, and all they'll do is charge you the one-way rate and grumble a bit... Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
My (very limited and probably outdated) understanding of the rental car industry is that the locations are franchises and the cars are owned by the franchise. If you rent a car round trip and leave it in some other city they have to deal with getting it back.
This is why we need a train system with funding parity to the highway and airport systems. There should be trains leaving constantly, at most every 10 minutes, from Chicago to the east, and frequent, semihourly, trains between neighboring cities along the way. Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.
There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction. Also, our train system has more than funding parity with roads. Road spending is about $175 billion per year, about half of which isn’t recovered from use fees, for 5 trillion passenger miles. That’s about $0.02 per mile subsidy. Amtrak’s capital expenditures is about $900 million per year, which comes directly from Cong…
That's more people than Chicago itself.
If you take Chicagoland as an endpoint and not the city boundaries, Des Moines is also within 300 miles.
Transcontinental high speed rail is, I agree strongly with your subtextual argument, a pipe dream. But regional HSR in the midwest would make a lot of sense.
This is why we need a train system with funding parity to the highway and airport systems. There should be trains leaving constantly, at most every 10 minutes, from Chicago to the east, and frequent, semihourly, trains between neighboring cities along the way. Even if the author could rent a car, having to drive 300 miles is astounding waste of time and mental energy.
Otherwise any train trip that takes over eight hours is unpalatable, no matter how bad airport security becomes.