Wow, this is depressing.
For comparison, here's Germany's:
http://www.apps-bahn.de/bin/livemap/query-livemap.exe/dn?L=v...
(might need to zoom in to see more trains)
For comparison, here's Germany's:
http://www.apps-bahn.de/bin/livemap/query-livemap.exe/dn?L=v...
(might need to zoom in to see more trains)
Which has >50M people, 2/3 of the population of Germany. In that comparison, that region should have then 2/3 of the rail network of Germany. It has 1 medium-speed rail line.
> while the Amtrak map is just inter-city
The Capitol Corridor, for example, is comparable to a Regio train in Germany (but slower, shittier, etc.).
What the U.S. also has is 275 million other people who (1) won't benefit from such a rail network; and (2) won't vote to fund it; (3) will condition any support of Amtrak on useless long-distance routes through low-density regions that sap money away from the only corridor in the U.S. where rail makes sense. And it's a completely rational decision for those people.
And it isn't even a rational decision for those people, the economic gains would largely outweigh the costs, being a net-positive for the rest of the country.
Yes, because that economic gain would translate into more taxes, which would be applied across the rest of the country, funding, for example, infrastructure in Kansas.
Of course, that's assuming a reasonable government...
Besides, the map to which you refer is the best possible result of voter preferences. Those who prefer lower spending are bribed into a compromise by those who prefer higher spending. If we didn't see the results you note, that would indicate a failure of democracy.
No, that's not what it shows. It talks about the balance of tax revenue vs subsidies for each state. That distinction is critical and can completely change the balance of which state is receiving more 'benefit'.
If this confuses you, consider the following scenario. State A is filled with farmers subsidized to grow food so everyone in State B has a stable an cheap food supply. From a purely monetary accounting perspective A looks like a leech, but in reality it's a major part of the success of B (and the rest of the states it trades cheap food with) and separating them is a pointless exercise designed to score political points.
This applies to any states receiving subsidies to support the rest of the states (e.g. ones with military bases, government research labs, etc).
All of the states that look like they are self-sustaining mega economies would fall apart without the neighboring states that they suck cheap power, land use, etc off of. Don't perpetuate the myth that some states are just carrying the rest of them, it's just designed to divide people.
Consumers in NYC don’t sit around saying, “thank goodness I have this expensive cane sugar and cheap high fructose corn syrup because of the exorbitant tariffs on Brazilian sugar and subsidized crop insurance for corn production!”
New Yorkers also don’t get much direct benefit from Conservation Reserve, where farmers are paid to do restoration work on marginal farmland rather than sending the topsoil down the river.
Finally, SNAP, which makes up 75% of the cost of the farm bill, last time I checked, is a conditional transfer directly to consumers, so SNAP tax expenditures to agricultural states are feeding poor people in those states, not subsidizing urban consumers in other states. That seems like a fine way to do the accounting to me.
I support the conservation bits of the farm bill, and SNAP and Medicaid (which dominate interstate transfer payments), but not because they benefit rich urban states directly; I don’t think they do at all. I just think top soil conservation and providing food and health care to the poor are moral mandates, and I’m philosophically in favor of transfer payments from the rich to the poor.
There is a reason we are called the "United" states - no?
As for the NEC, it suffers from being a very early build. With the exception of the Penn Station approaches, the line is 4-tracked all the way through the NJ-CT corridor. Despite being 4-tracked, the capacity is still insufficient in places. Furthermore, the line in CT in particular is a fairly curvy line that prevents building up high-speed. So getting higher speed trains really requires building new track, a lot of it in topographically interesting locations and in high-priced real estate locations.
On top of that, there's quite a few tunnels and bridges whose condition is best described not as "past its expected lifespan" but rather as "this should have failed already." So improvements on the order of billions of dollars, basically. It doesn't help that Amtrak appears to have decided that money will never be forthcoming, so all of its plans get scope-creeped to massive pie-in-the-sky boondoggles rather than trying to find smaller chunks that can make immediate improvements for relatively cheap. That's why there's a $150 billion plan to get 3-hr Boston-NYC-DC super-express service involving virgin track the entire length of the corridor and brand new stations (requiring extensive tunneling in downtown cores!) in Philly and Baltimore, or why Amtrak insists on building an entire new station annex in NYC when asking for just two new tubes under the Hudson.
The other major issue with mass transit is the longer you wait to build the infrastructure, the cost per foot of track continues to go up. Seattle has a long history with light rail cost overruns.
That said, the website for buying tickets was atrociously bad. We had a group of six and the website was full of bugs and broken for tickets with more than five people. You essentially have to do one ticket with 5 and one with 1.
We even went to the gate agent for help and they had similar problems.
No excuses.
We have more people stretched out over more land with more varying regions with more varying needs and costs with more conservative social, political and economic values. Nearly all of our trade involves trucking and cargo ships, with freight making up the raw material shipping that isn't time sensitive.
It makes no financial sense whatsoever to fund railroads. We have extensive interstate highways and most of our people have cars. Why pay for a railroad the size of Europe when you don't have to go all over Europe, and all your needs are met via the existing shipping mechanisms? What would be the point?
If you took our cars away, maybe it would make sense, maybe. But before we pay for railroads we might need to pay for our health care or education.
There are more people in Europe, there is more land in Europe, etc. Stop with the fake excuses.
Europeans enjoy all of it: cars, trains, and airplanes. The simple fact is that North America is lame and deficient in passenger rail transportation compared to Europe and East Asia, and the comparison keeps getting worse.
Well duh. The key to making trains useful is having people focused in heavily populated areas. If the US were like Europe, some heavily built rail in the Midwest would cover the vast majority of the population.
Look at this map to put in perspective how much more rail would be required to connect together the major population centers of the US. https://becovegan.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/europe-us-over...
Here's a better map of the European railway network: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/European_rail...
Why would we pay for that?
Amtraks trains from the west coast to Chicago sell the same seat 2x - 3x over the course of one journey. Most people are NOT going end to end. I have ridden the California Zephyr from California to Denver.
I have see others get on (there are seat tickets) :
* in Utah going to Iowa.
* Nevada going further east in Nevada
* etc.
You’re only making the argument harder for Americans (like me!) who like trains by being dismissive of excellent path-dependent and population-dependent reasons why the US passenger train networks died out.
There's a reason we're flush with self-driving car companies and not railroad companies.
I agree that long distance passenger rail mostly doesn't make a lot of financial sense.
Even today, most passengers on Amtrak are NOT riding end-to-end. They are riding between Utah and Nebraska; Or between South Carolina and Vermont; Or Boston to Connecticut.
On the California Zephyr - a coach seat is sold 2-3x times for different segments of the same journey.
Cross country trains in the US are a perennial loss maker, subsidized by under-investing in the profitable dense population corridors, where we could conceivably invest in high speed rail if there was political will to do so (there’s not, but that’s a separate issue).
Replacing cross country Amtrak with comfortable buses would be faster, more reliable, cheaper, and more acccessible to the population that uses trains. Buses are just lower status in the USA, which I think is a pretty silly reason to keep subsidizing Amtrak’s cross country routes.
How much money does the interstate highway system make? Yet we keep funding that for some reason. How much money does you local streets make ?
And before you pull out the "completely different card" remember that both rail and highways serve the exact same societal need: Moving goods and humans from one place to another. We stick humans/goods in a box with wheels and roll them to their destination.
Explain why the box rolling on asphalt should be subsidized but the box rolling on steel should not?
> Replacing cross country Amtrak with comfortable buses would be faster, more reliable, cheaper, and more acccessible to the population that uses trains
I don't believe you have ever taken a bus long distances. I have. Its like being stuck in an airplane. The long distance busses in Thailand are o.k. However you are still glued to your seat in a way that is not true for trains.
Train focused people need to get over themselves on the highway system. That is what path dependency is. Of course, as a train loving person, I wish the automobile industry hadn’t played so many dirty tricks to get us to an investment posture that makes passenger rail irrelevant, but pretending it’s not so doesn’t help.
Pretending that Americans aren’t happy to pay (whether through gas taxes or the occasional new-construction-over-maintenance boondoggle) for highways and local roads is a fantasy.
Americans, on average, don’t like trains. My wife, specifically, refuses to let us travel by train anymore, she hates them. It’s very sad for me, but my wife’s perspective is shared by the vast majority of Americans. They like cars. They like airplanes. They don’t like trains.
Please don't be so broad brush in your statements.
WRT your wife - go to Europe and ride the trains there. Recently I went to Spain. In Spain even the ratty commuter train traveled at 90+ mph.
Ride the TGV or AVE train. Those are quick and comfortable.
If at that point she still feels the way she does fine. But "Americans don't like trains" is a statement that is not correct. On the east coast, Americans use the trains a lot
A much better statement is "Americans don't like an uncomfortable experience"
BTW: http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
And in San Francisco Area, Caltrain is electrifying precisely because people love the train so much. Caltrain needs extra capacity and the only way to get that capacity is with electrification. Plenty of Americans seem to like Caltrain. Plenty of Californians are ready to use the HSR project when segments open up.
The vast majority of Americans, when polled, don’t like the idea of taking a train between two cities. I say this as a card carrying member of NARP (they seem to have rebranded themselves RPA, but whatever)!
I just don’t think rail partisans are practicing effective politics by pretending that current US voters support tax expenditure’s on rail.
The average California voter might, just barely, be in favor of interurban rail. I think the jury’s still out on that one, because the actual money that’s been approved by voter’s in Prop 1A is so vastly insufficient to the task, but I agree that at least in California, there’s enough popular support to at least try to make a go of a decent modern train system.