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Comment by Goronmon | Hacker News Reader

The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita it's moved from ~0.91 trips per person per year to ~1.19 trips per person per year.

I mean, if the goal is to make the smallest number, why stop at "per person per year"? If you instead reflected the number as "per person per second" then you would see that the improvement is barely measurable.

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But that seems like a reasonably understandable number? For all that everyone talks about how amazing trains are in other countries, I'm a little surprised to learn that I take Amtrak more in the US than the average German citizen takes DB, which is generally a much better system.

That said, that seems like a pretty good improvement, percentage-wise, but a lot of folks talk about trains in Europe as if it's so amazing that everyone is taking it all the time. I'd be curious of that number relative to the number of flights taken per year per capita.

Looks like in 2019 there were 200-250 million airplane trips starting or ending in Germany. So maybe the surprise is how little average people travel rather than how little they rail.

Also all international trips are irrelevant for comparison as the ICE traffic is national.

Give or take. There's plenty of trains between countries in Europe that would also be within driving distance.

In my mind, the optimal realistic situation is to have rail for longer distances (1-8 hours), but not trans-oceanic obviously, and then either ICE or local light rail for smaller trips

The relevant point is that there are no (or very few) international ICE trains. Cross-border are usually slower Euro-city trains that shouldn't be included in the ICE statistics.

Yea, that doesn't seem like that useful of a number, since Frankfurt is a fairly major layover airport for international travel.

I guess the more specific question would be how many Germans fly to elsewhere in Germany or Central Europe vs. taking a train. I generally have to either do a long car trip or a flight to get around in the US outside of some specific corridors. Presumably most of Europe has the option to take the train instead, but are they?

And yet layover flights are decreasing since the 2 engine restriction was "lifted". A 787 can fly non stop for as long as would be comfortable for someone to be on a plane.

According to Wendover Productions.

But there’s still a connection/hub-and-spoke system. You could fill a 787 with enough fuel to fly from Columbus, OH to Venice, but you couldn’t fill it with enough people to make it make sense.

And airlines usually charge more for direct flights (price discrimination), so for leasure long-haul travel it's fairly common for Europeans to have a flight with stopover, even if there's a direct connection available.

> I take Amtrak more in the US than the average German citizen takes DB

Its more than ICE trains not more than the whole of DB. Its 100m ICE trips per year but 2600m DB trips per year in 2019 (c. 31 per capita per year)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/936254/deutsche-bahn-pas...

Sure, but then the better US comparison includes things like the Chicago/NYC/Boston/DC/Atlanta train systems, which I'd imagine a decent number of folks in those cities take more than 31 times a year. Heck, I think I've taken more than 31 MTA rides per year and I don't even live in NYC.

City train systems are not offered by Deutsche Bahn AG, but by local city carriers, so they are not part of that statistic. E.g. Munich is mostly run by MVG and had 596 million passengers in 2018 [1], which aren't included in the numbers above. DB only runs the S-Bahn in Munich.

But yes, the 2600m DB passengers probably mixes long distance and short distance service to some degree.

https://dewiki.de/Lexikon/M%C3%BCnchner_Verkehrsgesellschaft

> I'm a little surprised to learn that I take Amtrak more in the US than the average German citizen takes DB

Amtrak had 31.3 million passengers in 2016 [1]. That's 0.095 passengers per capita. And that's on all Amtrak trains, while the German number is just for the ICE high-speed trains. Amtrak's high-speed Acela trains only had 3.5 million passengers in 2019 or 0.01 per capita. [2]

Per capita is just not a useful number for this discussion.

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155658/acela-high-speed...

Sure, but Amtrak is a weird comparison since its "real" service area isn't anywhere close to the full population of the US. There's plenty of whole states that don't have an Amtrak station in them. Most EU countries have a much lower median distance to a train station than the US does.

I'm not expecting to have them be similar numbers. My original point was purely anecdotal - I usually take 1-3 Amtrak rides a year and I don't even live in a part of the country that has good Amtrak service. It's odd to me that folks in a country with much better service use it less than I feel like I would use Amtrak if I could.

You probably just travel more than most people. Also, America is much bigger than any given European country and that leads to greater travel distances.

America is much bigger, but there’s also something to be said about size and perceptions.

As a general example, the Midwest is roughly the same size and population as France, so if we made the investment we could reasonably have a regional high speed network centered on Chicago. We’ll never have coast to coast high speed rail, but having a few regional networks is certainly doable.

My point wasn't to dismiss your anecdotal evidence, but just to highlight that the number per capita can be easily misleading. Yes Amtrak doesn't serve a lot of the US and IIRC has effectively only a single high-speed line. But the average German citizen is using high-speed railway 100 times more often than the average US citizen (for the obvious reasons we both mentioned). You're just not the average citizen.

I'm pretty sure many Germans don't use the ICE at all. While service is a lot better, the way to and from the high-speed train station often makes it inefficient, especially because the German autobahn is also world-class and doesn't suffer from a "last miles" problem.

There are only 4 states with no Amtrak stations

Per capita is a standard way to contextualize things in statistics and since the original measure is per year, per capita per year. The point is not to "make the smallest number". 99 million trips per year alone doesn't tell us anything. If it was made by 1 million people, the scale is big, if it was made by 100 million people, not so much. That's why contextualizing per capita is important.

Well it could be per capita in decade for a ten-fold increase, but given that a human career lasts around 4 such periods, this metric would not be too useful.

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