NYC to LA shouldnt be our metric for everything. A lot of travel is regional. Why do I need to get up at 5am in Chicago to get on a 10am flight that lasts 2 hours to DC? Or the 30 minutes to milwaukee? Or the 1.5 hr flight to Kansas City? With all the hassle of TSA, airport madness, restrictions, and the horrible crampedness of flying? Chicago > DC is about the same distance as Madrid to Paris. Sure, the train will take longer, but it sure beats flying.
You mean passenger trains. For the most part, the US rail network was constructed for and is primarily used for cargo transportation, where it excels.
The perpetual comparison of the US (cargo) train network to the other passenger train networks (Europe, Japan, China) is a tedius and misguided apples to oranges comparison.
Most of these comparisons blatently ignore the fact that population density is radically different between the US and these other systems, which is an important criteria in understanding the time/economic tradeoffs.
I like train travel a lot and living in the New York to Boston corridor I've always had easy access to commuter trains, the New York and Boston subway systems, and Amtrak for longer regional travel. Regardless, I don't think passenger rail makes much economic sense outside high-density areas and even then only survives with dubious tax subsidies.
That doesn't mean we can have great high speed rail from Boston to DC and Florida, from SF to LA, and from Chicago to New York, just like Europe can run freight trains under the Swiss Alps.
The main reason quality passenger rail doesn't get built and run well in the parts of the USA where it should is politics. The FRA regulations, the national transportation funding process, the state funding politics, the work rules, liability rules, labor regulations, safety regulations, and environmental regulations all work to make high speed rail five or more times as expensive per mile as in Europe. At that price, we should just live with the low quality infrastructure we've got. The only alternative is to reform the process and even supposed rail advocates like Obama haven't lifted a finger on the most obvious abuses, e.g. to loosen FRA buff strength standards or strict Buy American rules for rolling stock.
Private energy companies explore, extract, refine, and sell gasoline, with all sorts of taxes (as opposed to subisidies) along the way. What subsidies are you refering to for gasoline?
Politically biased opinion: the Dems could have done anything from 2008-2010, and they chose healthcare. TSA didn't get any better, nor were trains built. More stringent mileage requirements were handed down, for those eco-friendly types out there, but we are not aggressively pursuing nuclear/fusion power generation like we should.
I would love to be able to grab a train from Houston to Dallas, as it would certainly beat the air travel experience, as other comments have mentioned the additional time required for check-in, security, etc. But the cost of new rail is in the billions per route, and we have lots of land to cover in America.
We are too cheap for high-speed aircraft, but we can (hopefully) do something to rid us of TSA and the accompanying security theatre, which would make air travel so much better.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_S...
A decision the nation and the Democratic Party will be kicking themselves for for decades.
I do not agree with the exact details of how they chose to tackle health care, but there is no question that it was the right priority at the time. Healthcare costs were at 18% of GDP and rising rapidly.
Even the hospitals and insurance companies recognized that something had to be done very soon. Between increasing poverty and companies dropping health care for their employees, they were losing patients at a record pace.
The risk of launching a startup was becoming almost unbearable. Many young entrepreneurs arbitrage the cost of their health risk by betting they won't get seriously ill and make themselves, their companies, and their investor funds go bankrupt. That is NOT a safe bet.
This holds less on broader travel.
Also, a train e.g. from NYC to Philadelphia looks inside much more like a plane (seats, tables, power sockets, wifi) than like a subway train, and obviously moves much faster. This all ought to cost more, even at zero profit point.
Now, that's not to say trains in the US are good, but they are never going to be the best form of transportation for a 3,000 mile trip.
If we had six weeks off, going four days each way in a train to spend two or three weeks somewhere could be a great vacation.
If you happen to be traveling as a family, the price situation is even worse, of course. At some point driving actually starts to look pretty attractive...
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I'd be hesitant to call any of those numbers wrong when offered as the number of timezones between SF and NY, either three or four probably match the most common uses specifically related to timezones, though two would probably best match the usual use of "number of Xs between Y and Z".