The thing is its not just the taxes you'll be paying for, its the fare on top of that. It gets really costly if its your only form of transportation, and even with a Halb-tax card it can be pretty expensive. I did it for a year while living and working in Switzerland, and the CHF was pegged to the EUR, so in certain places I just risked it and jumped the tram fare into the city, which I'm told by my friend who worked at the SBB is a bad idea as they have cameras everywhere and could 'in theory' compare it against your halbtax card ID.

The SBB is super convenient and punctual, though; going to Zurich airport from just about anywhere in Switzerland is possible with nothing more than just a tram or bus ride to the nearest Bahnhof. But Switzerland is a tiny country compared to the large sprawling US. And just look at the absurdity with the train that was supposed to connect LA and and SF at $77 Billion. But having dealt with plenty of phantom last trains and having to sleep at the bahnhofs makes me paranoid, I slept at Basel bahnhof like 5 times and at Bern I must have stayed 2 times overnight in the freezing cold with several layers on.

Its funny how all the youth had to have driver licensees, and no cars, and how most just got a halb-tax card from their employer or the Government to get to school or work. The costs to own and fuel a car are obscene by US standards in Switzerland too.

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.

To me this is a huge part of the problem.

I've wanted to take the train many times in the US, but it also is wildly expensive here. Much faster and cheaper to take a plane in most cases.

I'd think the way to solve this is to tax driving a car appropriately, whether through parking or other methods, to encourage and subsidize train travel. If the cost comes down, I'm guessing many more people would do it.

I don't buy this argument. "We are much bigger than $OTHER_COUNTRY therefore we can't have comparable public transport".

I concur that for the whole country this might be a viable argument but it doesn't explain why the public transport in metropolitan areas are also often not good at all.

Of course.

But you wouldn't want to pay for it.

I recently watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA which covered much of the cost breakdowns - especially for American passenger rail. TL;DR:

* 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)

US is cheaper than Switzerland for pretty much any product. If you are talking about train service, then the reason for that is because US (and Canada) prioritize freight traffic. Freight traffic is much more efficient in North America than in Europe [1] and unfortunately (or fortunately) is prioritized over passenger traffic.

Honestly, I think America made the better decision.

[1]https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-...

"European railways had no incentive to take risks to re-engineer and spend billions of euros to increase clearances and rework tunnel heights for double-stacked railcars, because the European railway business model was about moving passengers and not freight – the opposite of how North America dealt with its railroad system. "

Not in the US! I would love to travel by train whenever time permitted, but it is prohibitively expensive to travel by sleeper car.

So… Apparently not…

The USA is probably the worst place in the world for 1) high speed trains 2) buses. And the only place I know where the train _waits_ for cars to go through.

If only they could see by themselves how bad it is during their next trip to Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, London, Paris (even France in general) and many many other countries and cities that have a functional network of high speed trains, metro, tramway and regional lines…

I hope you’re not ready to die on that hill.

You've just described airports, except with trains instead of planes. If I could take a train instead of fly I would.

Yup, that's a train. I really do wish US rail hadn't been turned into what amounts to private property. I live along the Amtrak Cardinal line and would love to use it to travel. But the low speed and frequent stops for higher-priority freight mean a trip takes longer than driving and usually costs more than I would pay in gas.

In my opinion I think rail would displace a great deal of airline traffic because air travel security is such a chore, airlines have done their very best to squeeze out every last nickel and concerns about how green air travel is or is not. Add in the fact that there is far more room per passenger in a train and with dining cars (which are slowly dying) the food can be much better.

The biggest downside to rail travel in the US is the rail lines are owned by and geared for freight train operators. You really need completely separate lines (as you have in Japan) to compete on speed, but then competing on price would be difficult since it means building entirely new infrastructure. It could require government subsidy and in the current political climate that seems unlikely.

When something becomes a cultural priority, economic sectors shift to accommodate it. We are really good at trucking, for example. We have loads of highways. We also have excellent freight rail.

The reason that the passenger rail sector in the US sucks is because it is small at a national scale and so it doesn't benefit from access to the national market. If you model NYC as a small country building its own rail network in a high-cost area surrounded by countries with no transit and expensive labor, suddenly it makes sense. Passenger rail isn't a priority in the curriculum at most universities. People who might learn how to build subways instead learn to build highways. Companies that might specialize in subways specialize in airports. To use a coding analogy, building passenger rail does not follow the happy path for American construction organizations, be they unions or firms.

(In Latin America, the problem starts earlier: primary and secondary school math scores in LA trail the income quantile for, IIRC, all LA countries)

This is a situation that can be changed, but it won't happen in one place or at one time. Alternatively, the country could reduce taxes on foreign contractors building transit infrastructure and recruit more foreign investment, although that would certainly leave a bitter taste if it hurt the car industry.

You don't need to. It's not like those countries with extensive train networks don't have cars and interstate highways. They do and people use them. The point is that in those countries, cheap options exist for all income brackets and all use cases.

In America, it's a car or bust.

I have a lot of experience taking trains all over Europe. In almost no case was a train cheaper than flying once I included transportation to the airport. The few times a train costs more the difference is marginal and you'd end up flying Ryanair or Easyjet --- no thanks.

> And then the profitability of short distance routes is a direct product of the density of population.

Not a problem in the Northeast in the US. Only Amtrak can fail to offer a service that works everywhere else in the world.

They shouldn't though, it's absurd that they are that way in the US.

Air travel is public transport and Americans use it all the time. High speed rail has worked fabolous on 1-2h flight distances for decades in many parts of the world.

It is preferable in every way to flights: total time, comfort, leg space, security & check in hassle, window sizes & scenery, luggage space and so on.

In many areas there are good arguments for why US infrastructure can't be retrofitted into European, but for intercity travel (eg SF-LA-SD or Boston - NYC) all the prerequisites are there.

Obviously, I'm under no illusions that it would actually happen due to attitudes, culture, politics and so on.

Is 4 to 7 times higher than anywhere else in the world. We need to bring it down to reasonable levels.

>commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented

HSR isn't for commuting. It is for trips longer than a normal commute. The US is car-oriented - but I disagree with the word "too". HSR won't do as well (at least for the first dozen years) as other countries, but there are a lot of places where it should do well enough if we ever build it for a reasonable cost.

> intercity buses are very widespread in Europe

They also are in the US.

this is an excuse i have repeated myself, but it is just that, an excuse. have you actually been to china? i have never seen such sprawl. shanghai is massive and sprawling. but yet, they (china) have extremely efficient and unbelievably cheap trains and subways. also, i have never seen a cleaner subway than what i saw in shanghai.

and this excuse doesn't even account for regions like the northeast. the amtrak from boston to new york takes four hours at its absolute fastest and costs couple hundred dollars. this is unbelievably sad. in china, the same ride would take about 1.5 hours and cost around $20 for business class (in u.s. terms, as in china, it's called first class).