>Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of taking a metro home from the airport. I think most people would love that too, which is why everyone is so excited about it. But even if everyone will use it at some point or another, most only go to the airport once or twice a year. Thus, on any given day, not many people will use it. And that means low ridership.
And how is that a problem for the person writing the post?
Other than tax-wise, which can easily be solved with a ticket price?
> The intercity rail part is the easy part. Getting people to actually use it requires a pretty decent city transit network on each end.
I don’t think this is true. People take airplanes and rent a cars all the time. The same could be true for train travel. All of the ways someone would leave a train station generally exist.
People don’t take trains for two reasons:
1. They take too long.
2. They are too expensive.
For example sf to la takes at least ~9-13h and costs between 50-80 dollars. Versus a southwest flight for ~140 that takes an hour. For most people that extra 60 dollars for 7-11 hours is worth it.
> Should you tax the flights? But then you basically say that rich people can take the plane.
Rich people will pay premium for a superior experience. If the train is faster than the plane they would like to use it I think. Could railway companies add a very expensive business class to help fund cheaper tickets? They could try a pilot project where they deploy this kind business class between two major cities.
Trains do not have that great of an internet connection as well. Why not provide a yearly internet subscription for a fee? Businesses might pay for this for their employees when they travel between cities and they can keep working.
> But it is complex: first, it works in such a way that the plane tends to be cheaper.
Currently yes that is the case a lot of the times. With renewables getting cheaper and the ever increasing electrification of trains why could trains not become cheaper in the future? Maybe it is not possible but I feel like by banning it we are giving up before really trying.
Airlines have international competition which forces prices down. On the other hand railway companies often face little competition because the states maintain a public monopoly. Public monopolies have little incentive to keep prices low as they are the only game in town.
I would like to see them try more things to increase efficiency, convenience and push prices down to become closer to planes. Maybe they could try to sell more services to fund the rest of the system.
Maybe as you say it is impossible to match current planes prices no matter what improvements we make. I just have not seen evidence that it is impossible to make a system where you can sell train tickets at similar rates to planes. But before doing it I need to see at least an honest attempt at bringing in more revenue.
> the perception is different: people tend to trust the plane more (even though planes have delays, too) and underestimate the commute time for the plane (I often hear people compare the time between two train stations against the time between two airports, completely forgetting all the time to the airport and back, checking in, fetching the bags, etc.
Ok then maybe try to change the perception. If you tell people how much time they waste, you could convince at least some people to change. Do they already have some advertisements that try to change this perception? I have not seen any but maybe they already have.
> One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused.
> The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, ...
Errm, you do see the contradiction here, no?
The 49 Euro ticket is actually heavily subsidized which means more tax payer money is wasted that could be invested into the infrastructure of public transport.
>Expensive to run. A big reason North American systems are so heavily subsidized is that they are really cheap to ride.
Huh? Here in DC, the subway fares are rather high compared to the fares I payed in Germany and Japan. Germany was downright cheap, with multi-day all-you-can-ride passes available for what it costs me to take 3 rides on the DC Metro. The NYC MTA isn't very inexpensive either, though I think it's still cheaper than DC's. But for the money, it's a far, far worse user experience than the systems in Germany and Japan.
> There isn't many people in the USA that love the idea of driving their car to ride a train so that they can then rent a car to get where they are going.
You've just described airports, except with trains instead of planes. If I could take a train instead of fly I would.
> starved of cash by politicians who want to kill it
I don’t think this is completely unreasonable. In FY20, Amtrak made $2.4B in revenue from riders and had $5B in costs.
I like trains and this post made me want to take a long ride. But the California Zephyr only serves 250k riders a year.
How much should politicians subsidize these trains? Is the money better spent subsidizing Disneyland?
I’m not sure what the right amount is, but I don’t think it’s really possible to spend the money that is needed given the costs and the utility. The only real hope is that one day population density will increase between Chicago and California so it becomes less costly to operate.
* Labor is expensive. That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. The faster speed of an equivalent plane ride means you're not paying pilots for as long, or allows them to make more trips.
* Rail is expensive. You have to buy the land between point A and point B. You have to build the rails, bridges, crossing guards, with lots of labor to build and maintain it all, with plenty of regulatory burdens to work through (ecological, safety, eminent domain, ...). The sky between airports, on the other hand, is free.
I've seen some suggestions that the sweet spot for trains is in medium length routes ("too far to drive, too near to fly"), with short haul routes being dominated by road vehicles (cars, taxis, buses) and long haul routes being dominated by airplanes (fast, don't need to buy/lease/maintain rails across thousands of miles)
> Cheap fares? You get decrepit busses from the 80s and the timetable's just a suggestion (what my city used to have)
I don’t think this is generally true... If it is true, then the I suspect government subsidize are a bigger factor in explaining the variance of public transit quality then fare price.
Take Reykjavík as an example. It has the most expensive public transit fare price in Europe (86% above the European average) and all you get are some buses every 30-60 min (with only a handful of lines running more frequently during rush hour), timetables from the 80s and a ticketing system that never actually works. It is safe to say that Reykjavík has an expensive, poorly developed and unreliable transit system.
I think a well funded transit system can actually accomplish all three pretty easily, as long as they are willing to sacrifice some convenience for private vehicles.
My fear is that in case of public transportation, reducing the cost will change the product, and the changed product will be in less demand in the long run.
> Do you have any evidence of a reduction in price leading to a reduction in demand for public transport anywhere in the world?
No, I haven't, and the well-known example of Hasselt in Belgium seems to suggest otherwise [0]. But I am not convinced that what works in a small town in Belgium, or a medium-sized city in Estonia, will work in larger cities.
> There are people who do not drive or fly but use trains.
So this isn't about providing people with access to transportation, because people do, in fact, have access to other transportation options. It's about catering to the whimsical preferences of people who like to ride trains. I don't think catering to those whimsical preferences is a necessary public service.
> Has anyone seen what it costs to get around on the tube?
I recently visited London for the first time in 10 years. Obviously it’s not the same as a visitor as it is as a resident, but the public transport and the tube in particular, was fantastic. It was easy, I could use PayWay, it adjusted my fees to a daily maximum and got me everywhere quickly (except for the outages on Sundays).
It might be imperfect, but I’m envious.
> I use rail when I visit multiple European cities. It’s great.
I'm going to counterargument this.
Certain rail corridors are great--Naples to Rome, for example, was wonderful. But somehow when we were visiting Europe, we often found that air actually did better in both price and time.
The cheap rail fares often require quite a bit further advance purchase than air fares. This strikes me as ... odd.
>> I'd really like to travel by train sleeper car, but I just can't justify it as transportation
> What an odd comment. It gets you where you're going, the same as any other form of transportation. For a long time it was the default way people took long distance trips.
But far slower than air travel, which I imagine is a big reason why air travel displaced it.
> Do you also consider road trips or long bus rides to be not transportation?
I don't take the bus, but when I drive, it's cheaper than flying (or flying + car rental).
>> given the prices.
> Again, with two people, it's been about the same price the last few times we've done it.
> I already pay almost $20 per day for public transportation.
You may be an outlier. Usually people buy monthly passes for 150-200 dollars. It gets expensive when you have to commute from another town though, like taking the GO Train in Toronto.
> I'm a big fan of rail. I wish we had a bullet train going from E to W coast through Kansas City. I would happily pay more taxes for it.
You're in the "people who like rail" camp. So are many of my friends. (I'm the lonely S.O.B. in both.)
> Why is [our cost] so high per mile?
On why rail is so much more expensive here, we don't know [1]. "Many of the world's most expensive projects are in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, which, like the United States, have common-law systems," [2] so it might be that right-of-way costs dominate.
New York's MTA costs $4.11 per ride to operate [3]. The analogs for London and Paris are $2.61 and $1.93, respectively [2]. The cost difference appears to be explained by unnecessarily higher staffing levels in New York. So it might be that public-sector union and well-paid contractor costs dominate.
Measuring these things is hard, perhaps intentionally so.
> I’ve lived all over this country, the only places I can think of where most of an urban area can take any sort of train from most of the city to the airport are NY, Boston, Chicago.
DC has the most convenient airport for transit access; if you park, you literally have to work through the train station to get to the airport. Atlanta has a mediocre train system, but it has excellent access to the airport. Philadelphia has a mediocre connection to the airport, but stronger system overall. SFO also is reasonably accessible by BART.
Indeed, the only US city I can think of with a large urban rail system with an abysmal airport connection is LA, although LA's rail transit network in general is just a smorgasbord of sadness.
> The US has a population density of 1/12th the Netherlands.
Yeah, that's because there's large expanses of land in Alaska or the West where literally nobody lives. But most people live in urban environments of some kind; the fifty largest MSAs account for over half the population (too lazy to do the math to get the exact number), and even the fiftieth largest is of a size that would, in Europe, have a functional transit system of some kind.
And how is that a problem for the person writing the post?
Other than tax-wise, which can easily be solved with a ticket price?
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