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My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

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Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#111

Post by GlenTheMachine »

God, yes.

The last three times I’ve had international flights, the puddle jumper connecting flights have been so delayed that I missed the connection. It seems like the big flights rarely get delayed, but God help you if you need to fly from, say DC to Philly (145 miles) or Baltimore to New York (250 miles).

On my next-to-last trip, it took American 13 HOURS to get me from DC to Montreal (450 miles). And they lost my luggage. Literally, I could have taken the bus faster.

It’s gotten so bad that I no longer take the puddle jumper flights. I now book to fly directly out of Dulles or Philly or New York and just drive there, or take Amtrak. It’s both faster and cheaper.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#112

Post by strange_quark »

lancesells wrote: post #70
kevin_b_er wrote: post #6

The utter inability to get a one-way rental is quite obnoxious. Also the bit about how he was able to reserve a car, but he wasn't a charter flight. Hertz's utter incompetence on the phone was striking as well from some sort of bizarro catch-22 world.

The entire rental car experience is ridiculously complicated and inefficient. Look at the difference in renting a Zipcar (owned by Avis) and a regular rental car company. With Zipcar I can reserve a car in minutes, pick up the car I actually reserved without waiting in line or even going into an office, get charged the amount I was quoted and not find out it's twice the cost from some hidden fees and taxes.

I don’t rent a ton of cars but Avis is the only company that seems to have it together. A couple months ago I rented a car from them only because it was the cheapest option. Got an email when my flight landed with my exact car and what spot it was in in the rental car garage. When I got to the car, the keys were in the ignition and I just drove away. I was very surprised how pleasant the experience was.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#113

Post by 013a »

rayiner wrote: post #95
khrbrt wrote: post #24

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…

> There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction.

My lord, what?! Three of the top 25 largest cities in the entire US are within 300 miles of Chicago (Columbus, Indianapolis, Detroit), and the Twin Cities (3rd largest metropolitan area in the US, larger than Chicago itself) are only 350 miles away.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#114

Post by rayiner »

mulmen wrote: post #105
rayiner wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a very convenient way to define parity. If we funded railroads at 175bn per year what would be subsidy come to? Presumably there would be a lot more passengers at that level.

Most of our rail network, outside the northeast corridor, is already vastly underutilized. Roads get more funding because that's what people use, and that's what's most convenient for 95% of people (who don't live in the downtown core of a major city) to use.

But regardless, you can get an idea from the EU. EU rail subsidies amount to 73 billion euro annually. EU rail carried 465 billion passenger-kilometers in 2017, or 300 billion passenger miles. That's a subsidy of $0.24 euro per passenger mile, even worse than Amtrak.

Roads are just really cheap to build and maintain. A 6-lane interstate highway costs $11 million per mile in urban-ish areas: http://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road. It's going to cost $1.4 billion to add four lanes to the 35 miles of the BW Parkway (which goes through a dense urban area connecting two major cities). At $40 million per mile, that's 1/6 of what it cost to build the Metro Silver line through less dense areas in an existing freeway median. That's 1/9 the per-mile cost of the purple line, a light rail line that mostly travels at grade without its own right of way.

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#116

Post by bobthepanda »

rayiner wrote: post #96
bobthepanda wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

LGA to ORD is 3 million passengers per year. Beijing to Shanghai is 7 million by air, plus 180 million by train (including intermediate stops). Total US air travel between all destinations is only 750 million per year. The ability of the Chinese to recoup their capital investment through ridership is massive compared to what you could expect in the US.

It's worth noting that at least some of that 180 million is travel induced by the availability of the train in the first place. There are plenty of city pairs that people don't travel between because

* plane travel is too much of a hassle for such a short trip, and usually expensive

* roads (bus & car) are too congested

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#117

Post by bb101 »

"But since I flew into O’Hare on a commercial flight, like a common schmuck, Hertz wouldn’t give me the car, even though they clearly had it to give. Basically, I wasn’t rich enough to rent the car Hertz had allowed me to reserve, so they weren’t going to let me have it. Which, I don’t know. Seems like a real dick move on Hertz’s part, and doesn’t incline me to use them ever again for anything."

The author's experience with Hertz mirrors my own experiences with them. Much like using UPS, they are an absolute last choice for us. We have a saying in our house: "It's called Hertz because it hurts."

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#118

Post by willbw »

013a wrote: post #113
rayiner wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There is nothing, except Chicago’s suburbs, within about 300 miles of Chicago in every direction. My lord, what?! Three of the top 25 largest cities in the entire US are within 300 miles of Chicago (Columbus, Indianapolis, Detroit), and the Twin Cities (3rd largest metropolitan area in the US, larger than Chicago itself) are only 350 miles away.

I'm nitpicking but Chicago is significantly larger (if you are talking metropolitan areas)

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI MSA 9,498,716

Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI MSA 3,629,190

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#119

Post by pdonis »

tptacek wrote: post #104
ChickeNES wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot Detroit, and Louisville, and almost in spitting distance of Minneapolis

Oh, you're right! My brain always stops at Ann Arbor, which I thought was too small to include.

Too small? Hey! Ann Arbor is nice, I lived there for about 8 years.

But I can totally understand stopping your brain at Ann Arbor if the alternative is to go on to Detroit...

Re: My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford

#120

Post by gok »

tptacek wrote: post #99
rayiner wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You mean besides Milwaukee, Madison, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Cedar Rapids, St Louis, Cincinatti and Toledo? 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.

Honestly I'd start with high frequency, non-high-speed rail. With no new track or stations, a lot of routes would be competitive with driving if they just ran more often and reliably.
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