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As a Tor user, I will not patronise an anti-Tor establishment.
In light of all of Amtrak’s other problems, they have a looong way to go.
I would be tempted to try train-hopping on freight trains.
It’s impressive how terrible the amtrak website is. I’ve used amtrak pretty extensively over the years and haven’t been able to login in over a year. I know it’s probably due to some verification code that my tech stack violates but the site certainly doesn’t fail gracefully. I won’t touch the app, of course.
I can still buy tickets, but I need to checkout as a guest and manually enter my rewards number for each transaction. I imagine at some point I’ll need to transact by phone or in person.
It’s a complicated problem. Part of it is that Amtrak is so broken that people wonder if it’s even fixable.
I recently went to a concert in another city for my birthday. I looked into what Amtrak options there were, because I get panic attacks in traffic, and they only offer overnight service, with a middle of the night swap from bus to train. It also would have cost $250 round trip for two tickets vs <$100 in gas to drive, and taken 12 hours vs the 7 to drive.
So instead of taking the extra time off work, we wound up driving, and I had multiple panic attacks instead.
Another part of the problem is that the US likes to talk about whether or not people deserve transit options. Like, my local bus only comes by four times a day between 6am and 6pm, but because I live in a low-income area, I apparently don’t even deserve a bench at the bus stop.
the worst part of Amtrak is how often it’s late, making it not only more expensive than driving or flying but also less reliable.
Old story. That happens when so much of the tracks is owned by freight rail, so little proper passenger rail infrastructure exists and laws that would require passenger rails to be given priority being so weakly enforced and largely ignored, never mind that the infrastructure is maintained as freight rail needs it, which is really bad for passenger rail purposes.
This is the bigger thing I think, Luke AmTrak at least west of the Mississippi doesn’t have a whole lot of options for long distance travel, there’s functionally one train that goes west from Chicago and one train that goes east to Chicago and that’s only if you want to be in the north, but if the rails were govt owned, it would be easier to justify adding more trains and more destinations because they could start making the service note reliable.
it wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Amtrak ran more than once a day in megacities and thrice a week elsewhere
It would be even more of an issue because freight rail would fight the higher track usage of Amtrak even more, making the service even more unreliable. Amtrak needs its own infrastructure and between metropolitan areas there needs to be HSR corridors. This is quite a task even in countries with functioning institutions and capabilities to build infrastructure at a reasonable price. The US isn’t such a country.
If NYC and LA were the only cities, trains would be amazing. Just one HSR sleeper line straight across the empty desert, trains leaving every 5 minutes to meet demand.
With the amount of passengers and the lack of stops along the way, a state-of-the-art 500-600 km/h maglev like the L0 series shinkansen would be able to bring the travel time down to 6-8 hours while being a lot cheaper, more comfortable, more spacious, and with much better access to the city.
My god, it could even be worth trying to build a hyperloop.
Oh man the Shinkansen is amazing. 2 or so hours instead of 9+ by bus to get somewhere while drinking beer or sake and eating is amazing. And you can take a dump lol
hyperloop
Hyperloop are a scam
Yes, so it’s a testament to how ridiculously ideal for public transit this fictional scenario is that in this fiction, hyperloop might be a worthy investment.
One of the reasons hyperloop was a scam is that they never really tried. There were some very public-facing stunts, like the design competitions, but they didn’t do the SpaceX thing of throwing a couple billion dollars worth of government subsidies at failing prototypes until they started working.
Another reason is that high-speed rail makes a lot more sense when you have regular stops like a real-world HSR line would. Accelerating and decelerating take distance, so the faster you go the longer you need to go between stops for a top speed to matter.
And another reason is that high-speed rail didn’t exist yet, and this was presented as a better alternative. If you already have the best open-air HSR money can buy, the next logical step is to stop having it be open-air.
Though, saying that, an atmospheric pressure pneumatic tube where the surrounding air is brought up to the same speed as the maglev train would probably make a lot more sense than a vacuum tube.
HSR existed long before hyperloop
For context, a flight is already 6.5 hours and cost 350-400. To have comparable speed it would only take building two complete mag level rails.
I thought this was going to annoy me but it was hilarious
My brother bringing the receipts!
If only people tended to live together in big conglomerations this would be so much easier to solve!
Who cares of trains are profitable?
That’s the joke — Americans will complain that trains aren’t profitable while ignoring that roads and airports aren’t profitable either. Sometimes it’s stupidity and sometimes it’s a bad faith argument.
Ah, my bad. I thought the graph was showing that they do make money. Now that the full image loads after pressing it, I can see it’s about highways.
What is the bottom right graph and what is the source for it? Looks interesting
I live on a hill in Alaska, am I qualified to be an urban transpotstion person or do you need to live in the denali mountain range?
I was told that part of the reason is that railways are rented and mostly used for freight.
I’m going off of memory here, but what I heard was that passenger rail was never really as profitable as freight, so the government basically had to force all the rail companies to keep doing passenger trains. The massive subsidization of car transit made it hard for them to compete. Amtrak was basically created as a way to take the responsibility for doing passenger rail away from the rail companies, in exchange for guaranteed priority usage of the rails.
The priority of passenger trains is unenforced, so they have to wait for slow freight trains all the time. Additionally, the math on speed is different for freight vs passenger rail. A freight train getting somewhere an hour faster doesnt matter nearly as much as a passenger train getting somewhere an hour faster, so improvements to facilitate faster trains falls on amtrak.
Amtrak does own some rails, e.g., the northeast corridor, which is nice and profitable. It’s also worth noting that the “unprofitable” lines are still vastly vastly vastly more profitable than roads.
By “subsidizing” they loaded passenger trains with mail from usps. In the 20th century, trains had to compete with government subsidized highways.
The US is third on the list of countries in freight volume per year, so yes there’s a lot of freight trains.
Americans should stop train train-haters.
c/fuckcars stans when someone doesn’t have 30,000 people within a square mile of their home:
A big share of the US population lives along feasible HSR corridors. The reason that this HSR doesn’t exist isn’t because there is no potential for it, but because the country is underdeveloped and honestly struggles to stay afloat infrastructure wise.
You use ELR in lower population areas
Look at Russia & China, they’re just as spread out, more so, yet they have an excellent rail network that covers the whole country
Because Americans are highly regarded
Hot take. I don’t think we’ve ever heard its like here before.
America has trains. We use them for freight because it doesn’t care if it sits for a while or takes weeks to cross the country. Much of the US is too spread out for trains to be super useful for passengers. The areas that make sense do have reasonable passenger rail usage, mostly the east coast metropolis and Chicago to nearby cities.
The contiguous United States has a higher population density than Spain, which has a great high speed rail system. Metropolitan France is not much more denser than that as well.
Chicago to nyc is currently a 20 hour train or a two hour flight. High speed rail would be a massive expense to get a best case scenario of maybe 4 hours. The flight just makes more sense for people. Both cities have good rail options for inter city transport, or even out to suburbs.
