Exactly the reason why the (much slower) train often makes more sense. Sure, the train from Amsterdam to Berlin is six hours. But you only have to be at the station to catch it before it leaves, and it both leaves and arrives right in the center.
We tried this returning from a conference there last fall, and the hotel-door-to-home-door advantage of flying was less than 30 minutes. And on train there was more space, better food, and a bar. Not to mention that there was power and nobody told me to shut down my laptop at any point :-)
This works better in Europe than it does in America. As most trips here on train or car take multiple days. Where as you can fly anywhere in the country in one day. Once you cross into multi-day territory, the train is often too impractical to be used. Which is a real shame, as I really enjoy travelling by train.
The US is large but our trains really do suck and up until the 2010 elections we were on track to build a regional fast speed train system that would connect Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and then east to DC and NYC. Tea Party governors and other GOP obstructionism killed it, especially in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida.
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.
In Europe, barges handle the freight traffic that fills the US railroads and trains handle the cross-continent traffic that runs in airplanes in the USA. It's mostly a result of Europe's many great rivers and the USA's vast open spaces.
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.
The entire interstate highway system is extremely heavily subsidized (along with gasoline). I'd be interested to see how it would compare with passenger trains without the subsidies, but I suspect it's not as lopsided as we think when it comes to a marginal passenger.
I understand what you are saying about the highway system being subsidized, but I'm not sure I understand your reference to gasoline.
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?
The government creates foreign policy around the maintenance of oil supplies, which has a very large cost, and is largely a gift to the oil companies. This is reflected in income taxes rather than in the cost of gasoline. There are also large tax breaks given to oil companies. Domestic fossil fuels like coal and natural gas don't get quite the same treatment, since we have plenty.
Less politically-biased information about rail at Wikipedia[1].
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.
What I always find funny with this type of discussion is that, when an article talks about the state of broadband connection in the US, someone (usually more than one person actually) will inevitably use the argument that the country is too sparsely populated and that's why we can't compare to Europe. While when an article talks about a possible train corridor between some major regional hubs, someone will inevitably mention that there are too many houses on the way and it's not practical :)
Compared to the urgency of high speed rail, they made the right choice!
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.
For Northeast travel in the US, the train is more practical. Pretty much anything from DC to Boston is less painful on the train. You get a seat an continuous alone time.
Exactly. The American/Canada east coast and great lakes region is dense enough that an upgrade rail network could really work for us - Chicago, Boston, NYC, Pittsburgh, Detroit, DC, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa... each of these places have another major city about 3-4 hours drive away. Investment in the local passenger rail network could be worthwhile.
I may be wrong, but I put the medians at a similar price. Both systems can go cheaper or more expensive. This is a little frustrating because 1 hour between major metro areas can cost 50-100x the 1 hour subway ride from the Bronx to Coney Island. In part this is because the train sets it's prices based on competition from airplanes.
MTA is heavily subsidized (it only covers ~50% of its expenses from its operational income), AmTrak is probably not.
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.
In part because America is much larger: NYC to Los Angeles is similar in distance to a trip from London to Baghdad. At that scale, trains are always going to be inconvenient.
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.
It depends entirely where you are. Within the northeast corridor (Boston to DC, population of about 50 million, not too much smaller than France) there is almost no point in flying (unsurprisingly, Amtrak has captured 70% of the market between DC and NYC and 50% between NYC and Boston). The hour and a half flight from DC to Boston becomes a 4 hour exercise in self-flagellation versus a very comfortable 7 hour trip on the Acela.
If you can afford it. The Acela will run you $400-$500 round-trip BOS to WAS unless you take the 5am ones (and then it'll be $330 or so). Flying from BOS to DCA nowadays is $220 round-tip on JetBlue, say, at reasonable times of day.
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...
There are four time zones from one endpoint to the other including the end points, three time zone transitions between the end points, and two time zones that are between the time zones containing the endpoint.
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".
Well this is a great example of when I do pay for the premium.
If I am going to Amsterdamn from London, I'll fly CityJet from LCY. London City Airport is brilliant. Mostly because its only used by frequent travellers, no people pushing right up to the baggage belt here, people all know they can spot and politely walk up to grab.
If your going to Antwerpen, their local airport is brilliant as well. LCY if you've only got carry on, you need only arrive 15 min before your flight. Most routes flown have 6-10 flights a day.
I have left the city (London) at 6pm, and been checked in to my hotel, having a nice trappist beer by 9pm on more than one occasion.
When you consider you can do the London to Antwerpn route for £120, return, including baggage, it is really brilliant. It's a 45 min flight total. The thing here is, its the ground facilities that make it so painless.
this is my position. If I have internet and a power outlet, one place is as good as another, why take the hit on degrading security, exorbitant fee's, and cramped conditions for a few extra hours? Trains are efficient. We need to use them more.
Trains have degraded security though. Once a plane leaves, someone has to be on the plane or have had access to it beforehand to affect the flight. You can defend against this through security at those specific points. On a train, the entire trip is over miles of tracks which 'anyone' can access. Security at boarding doesn't affect the attack surface area as much.
> On a train, the entire trip is over miles of tracks which 'anyone' can access
Indeed, but trains, even high speed ones, are also very robust compared to airplanes.
Even if somebody does manage to get access to the track (not so trivial in many cases), and trigger an explosion on the track with good enough timing to catch the train as it goes by, and manage to derail it, there's still a good chance that all or most passengers would survive the crash.
Similarly, with the size of bomb one might smuggle on board a train, the likely effect would be to just kill a few passengers in the immediate vicinity of the explosion; the train itself would probably be just fine. So basically not much different than setting off an explosion at a random restaurant...
For a terrorist, the odds just aren't all that great with trains, which presumably is why there have been so few attempts at doing such a thing. One of the reasons terrorism is so scary on airplanes is that they feel (and are) so fragile that it magnifies the effect of any attack greatly.
"Degrading" security not "degraded" security. I think the post you are replying to is implying that they would rather take the small risk of being blown up on a train over the certainty of being treated like a terrorist at the airport.
Damn you Western Europeans complaining about train routes. Here in the US the only remotely usable train corridor is from DC to Boston, and even there the best moment was when they deployed "high speed" trains that only exceed 200kph for very short stretches due to a design error.
We tried this returning from a conference there last fall, and the hotel-door-to-home-door advantage of flying was less than 30 minutes. And on train there was more space, better food, and a bar. Not to mention that there was power and nobody told me to shut down my laptop at any point :-)