Hacker News Reader

Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com