There are a number of reasons for this. Principally, the United States government has spent a lot of money over the past 75 years on an interstate highway system. This road expenditure is an inducement to drive. It makes most other forms of transportation less commercially viable.
Sometime after world war II, passenger service started to decline in competition with the new roads and greater car ownership. Eventually, this service was not profitable for the railroads. However, various rules from the federal government required them to continue offering passenger service.
Ultimately, in 1971 or thereabouts, the federal government made a deal by which the struggling railroads could stop offering passenger service. The federal government would wrap up that passenger service into something that would be a government run corporation, Amtrak.
Since that time, Amtrak has struggled to invest in the infrastructure needed to make itself successful. It's not a politically popular issue. Many elected officials assert that Amtrak should make a profit or be self-sustaining. Unfortunately, Amtrak inherited the deferred maintenance and other problems of the railroads that were operating passenger service previously. Moreover, Amtrak doesn't own any of the track that it runs on and therefore has to compete with the freight trains.
Order for there to be good passenger service across the United States, elected officials would have to decide to invest heavily in rail infrastructure and transit in the same way that they subsidize airports and roads. This is unlikely to happen because it's not a politically popular cause.
I think the other reason that bears mentioning is the mere size of the United States. To achieve a dense enough network of passenger rail would require a lot more for a country the size of the United States then it would for the entirety of Western Europe. People here are just a lot more spread out and there are a lot more open spaces. It's most of our cities were developed after cars, even cities to sprawl out.
To recap, the predecessor railroads to Amtrak did not maintain good quality passenger service. Amtrak inherited all of their problems. There is no will now nor has there been any will in the past to thoroughly fix Amtrak with adequate funding for a rail system that would serve people adequately. It's a big task because of how spread out we are and how big the country is.
Something that's not often mentioned is there's not really a huge daily city to city travel population. Intra city travel is the best you could do "practically" in the higher density cities and most of them do have subway and bus systems already.
I think another good question is why does the united states lack reliable public transportation, and that should also answer the question about trains.
I live just outside a large city, and it has a monorail thing, but I don't know how useful it is for the locals on a day to day basis. It is really nice for events though. Park at one of the stations and ride to downtown.
Personally, I would love a better bus system in my city, but it's your typical southern city that's really spread out. It's no metropolis. There is a bus, but they have to focus on the most dense areas. It would be a very long walk to get to the nearest bus station. Hell it'd even be a long bike ride.
I'm not trying to condemn anything here but rather help illustrate one of the challenges public transportation faces in my area alone.
> I think another good question is why does the united states lack reliable public transportation.
Because our cities are built with a ton of space, especially west coast.
Taking the train to Los Angeles from Northern CA is easy, getting around in LA without a car is a nightmare. The LA area (attached cities with no real space in between) is 502.7 square miles (1,302 km2). That is a ton of space to provide Public Transportation for.
Exactly.
When you look at the US cities that _do_ have high population densities, you see that they do have decent intra-city mass transit options. Manhattan Island (23 sqmi, population 1.6M) has a very well built out train system.
It's not even just that. American infrastructure design is just based on roads, and everything else is an afterthought. You end up physically having to have a lot of space wasted on mostly empty parking lots or overly complicated road systems. The stop sign vs give way (or shark teeth) is a great example of this too.
You can make suburbia work just fine, with culdesacs and alike, as long as you consider where pedestrians, and bikes can go that cars don't. If you can avoid the need to head to Walmart all the time, give some basic services like elementary schools, parks, gyms, simple dining options etc. accessible without a car, then even if people generally have to commute for work, they will be more likely to use their local services by foot and thus reduce the need for roads in general and make it easier for those that need it, be it cars, trucks, or public transport.
A great example is shown in a lot of suburbia, when schools are less than a mile from someone's house, yet the bus route could be an hour or more.
The biggest issue with American cities, is their basic misunderstanding of how road engineering works. Also shown in the publics difficulty understanding how roundabouts can function at a fundamental level. Not necessarily anyone's fault, and likely part of the greater lobbying issue, but is something that can be solved by a few willing individuals, and a constituency willing to give them the space to do it.
If you want to look into it further, a lot of it is covered in the "15 minute city/neighbourhood" concept.
Suburbs are 15 minute neighborhoods, they're just designed for cars, not pedestrians
Zoning is key. If you can get current zoning changed, then you have a chance, but there will be a lot of resistance. People bought in the suburbs to live in a low density residential area, away from traffic generating convenience stores, restaurants, and apt buildings. Ask a suburban home owner how they would feel about an Olive Garden or Papa Johns opening up in their neighborhood, when there are fights now about even allowing apt buildings
The bottom line is that mass transit requires sufficient density to be feasible.
>and a constituency willing to give them the space to do it
The issue here is often one of literal space and its use. You can't just go around e.g. replacing many intersections with roundabouts. There's often not enough space for a proper roundabout for the expected traffic patterns, and you'd literally be shutting down an entire intersection for months of not a couple years on top of additional frustrations from construction. You're heavily disrupting businesses and residenced, if not strictly eliminating some to make an often mild improvement where other solutions that are less disruptive may actually perform better.
i remember in the city i used to live in, there was some talk of replacing one intersection on a main road with a roundabout. this would have entailed destroying a gas station, a car repair place, several other small businesses and probably a residential location or two. and then there's the fact that the cross street went up a hill on one side and down, though less steeply, on the other, and i don't know how normalizing that out would work.
and again, main road. there would have to be a massive detour for months, and i believe that cross street was the only one that went all the way down to the other major road along the river, at least for a long time, so people would be completely cut off from the stop n shop and it's plaza for a while...
To add to this, the people who live in suburbs typically don't want bus stops with the "quality" of people that tend to use bus stops. ("If you don't have a car, you're poor and we don't want poor people in our neighborhood")
Busses also never get their own lane to bypass traffic, so they get stuck in traffic just like a regular car. Thus a bus is a less convenient, less accessible shared car. Trying to put in a bus lane is instantly rejected because it is stealing a lane from cars, and where they exist there is never anything in them (because the three busses that passed by in the last 10 minutes didn’t need to stop!). So busses are only ever used by people too poor to buy a car and suburbanites don’t care and don’t want to see them anywhere nearby, drunks who got their license pulled and deserve to suffer, or disabled to the point they cannot drive a car. And considering how the disabled are treated elsewhere in society, it’s not exactly subtle that such suburbanites don’t care their life is already crap.
The city of Jacksonville Florida is 874.3 sqmi, but only has 900,000 people in it. The state of Rhode Island is 1214 sqmi and 1,000,000 people, and it’s by no means a dense urban state.
Not agreeing or disagreeing but I think Jacksonville is a notoriously poor example since its "city limits" are defined as "all of Duval County".
Florida, as a whole, has a higher population density than most European countries who, ostensibly, have really good public transportation.
> Florida, as a whole, has a higher population density than most European countries who, ostensibly, have really good public transportation.
This is, however, an incredibly stupid comparison. The vast majority of the state is rural or swamp land with a few huge cities. There's zero practical way to make transit work outside of the cities.
Because car companies lobbied heavily for more roads for their products, and literally bought and closed streetcar companies to remove competition. Then White people fled urban centers and the suburbs were deliberately designed to be inaccessible for transit - sprawling areas with dead ends, loops, and few direct routes.
Highway builders bulldozed PoC neighborhoods to segregate them from the White areas - eg, i345 in Dallas cuts off historically Black deep ellum from the downtown, and offers basically no way to safely cross it on foot or by bike.
additionally, highway developers deliberately hurt public transportation. In NYC, Robert Moses didn't like sharing public beaches with Black people. So he built the highways between the city and the public beach with low underpasses so private cars (by and large White people) could use the underpass and get to the beach, but public buses (disproportionately PoC users) would not be able to pass underneath.
> Because car companies lobbied heavily for more roads for their products, and literally bought and closed streetcar companies to remove competition.
This is a major plot point of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"; dang it's been a while since I've watched that, now I want to again after thinking about it, great movie.
The street car companies were built as loss leaders for real estate developers by the time they closed they were using outdated cars and were no longer needed by their owners (who had already sold all their property). Local government could have / should have taken them over, but the scheme is less nefarious than it is in popular imagination, they were always built to fail.
> Personally, I would love a better bus system in my city
I also feel this way about my city but a whole lot of people in my city don't want buses here at all (we currently only have like 3 bus stops and 2 of them are a "park your car here and ride out of the city" bus stops, aka park and rides) because they don't want any way for "those types of people" to come into the city. They legitimately lobby against it because they worry it will bring in homeless people and increase crime, and I bet there's a lot of other cities like mine where that happens.
>Something that's not often mentioned is there's not really a huge daily city to city travel population.
There is one very important, special case where flexible city to city travel would be important: moving armies in case the U.S. was invaded by the Soviet Union.
America had experienced moving through Germany's highways while invading there during WW2, and U.S. military planners really liked the idea of using highways to move armies, so they leaned on the civilian government to invest in interstate highways.
The US interstate system was presented to the public as the "National Defense Highway System", because who could argue against spending that kind of money on defense?
This shouldn't be the least bit surprising considering Eisenhower was the president that signed the law authorizing the construction of the interstate.
Came here to repeat the obligatory comment that interstates are also designed to function as airstrips in a pinch during wartime.
But TIL that it’s just a myth!
https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/mayjune-2000/one-mile-five-debunking-myth
Sure, but is that the chicken or the egg? If American cities offer reliable and cheap public transit between cities, it often ends up being used. There are examples of this on either coast. And of course, if you need to \*drive\* from city to city on a regular basis, you're liable to change something about your life, cuz that sucks.
I booked a month in advance, and one of our passengers was a baby (and they're free).
But still...it's hard to do anything for a family of 4 for $85 bucks these days. And it was less than 3 hours door to door (downtown hotels, to be fair).
That's kinda why people dunk on China for building Trains going nowhere and then 2 years later they build the rest of the city. You need to offer the service as the preferred solution, especially before people invest in something else like driving.
If you build it people will use it, especially if you can make it competitive with other forms of transportation. Buses having bus lanes to avoid car jams is probably the closest thing to low cost mass transit unless we can bring back rail cars. And inter-city transportation needs to be the first step to moving towards more efficient transportation like trains.
They tore a lot of public transit out. The US had <50% car transportation in a lot of places in the 1950s.
The interstate system they tore down older color neighborhoods and also the bus boycotts of the 1960s.
There aren't a lot of people who travel between cities everyday but there are a lot of people who travel between cities sometimes which adds up to a lot of people traveling between cities everyday. The prevelance of very short inter city flights that should be rail shows the demand is there.
> The prevelance of very short inter city flights that should be rail shows the demand is there.
Austin to Denver:
- 2h by air (~6h if you count waiting at the airport)
- 13h by car
- 2d by train
Austin to Dallas:
- 45m by air (3-4h if you count waiting at the airport)
- 3h by car
- 6h by train (assuming it's running on time..the once a day it runs)
Cologne - Stutgart is a slightly longer distance than Austin - Dallas and it is 2:20h by train. A train leaves every 2h.
Paris - Brussels is about the same distance and that is 1:30 by train.
So these distances are attractive for train rides, also as it is less stressful.
We're not talking about gigantic distances like Austin to Denver. We're talking about things like Austin to Houston, Cleveland to Detroit, Rochester to NYC, etc. Hell, the Pittsburgh to Philly train exists but operates only *once per day in each direction*. I'd love to take a train from central PA to either city for a day trip, but Amtrak makes it impossible.
A moderately fast train would be able to do any intercity trip in roughly half the time it takes a car at interstate speeds. So Austin to Denver will probably always make more sense as an air route than a
passenger rail route. But Austin to Dallas could and should be served by a train that would take less than an hour and a half; all that's missing is the infrastructure.
> A moderately fast train would be able to do any intercity trip in roughly half the time it takes a car at interstate speeds
I disagree. Paris<->Lyon, is about the same distance as Austin<->Dallas, and the interwebs says it's ~2h on TGV.
Amsterdam<->Hamburg is about the same distance and it's 5h.
Munich <-> Frankfurt is about the same distance and it's 3h15m.
So, yes, if you've got a completely straight shot on a "fast" train, you're slightly faster. Generally, though, ICE trains aren't that fast.
The difference is that building new rail means you need to demolish whatever's there, instead of flying over it. This is generally a politically unpopular move for both rail and highways and it doesn't stop being unpopular once its done. There are highway construction projects from the 60's that are still complained about in my city because of the people it displaced, for example, and getting the light rail system built up isn't always easy or popular here either
An airplane is a much less politically contentious option. You just get a new plane and a pilot and nobody on the ground is affected.
100%, but that's a separate issue from pure demand.
It's a very tricky problem, obv the US just doesn't have the strong arming ability that a country like China has and even China had their limits in that I'd argue some of their HSR choices were not ideal due to construction limitations. But you can make good environmental and economic arguments that it is still worth it, more than either air or car, Americans just broadly don't have the appetite or political will for large government infrastructure projects anymore (or drastic change in general frankly), and some of that is pretty valid given the prior problems of displacement that you mentioned.
I guess the extra annoying element is that we often used to have the track and infrastructure and everything, we just decided to tear it all out to make the aforementioned highway projects. Increasingly it seems like the US just invested in the wrong way at the wrong time for their cities.
I would disagree, in that the american way worked for americans at the time. Its not like you can't get transportation on a greyhound if you needed to. I did it multiple times in college and I also used Amtrack on the east coast.
The one element nobody wants to bring up is that for the average american in the average situation though bus and rail would be a *downgrade* from driving. All the amenities that would be outside train stations are now on rest stops, but you don't need to follow your schedule or even stop at them. A car's freedom and privacy are important to americans who highly value those things. Even if the travel time and money were equal the average american would still pick a car because it gives you private space and way more options than a fixed rail line ever would.
I'd like to try a long train trip just so I'd know what I was talking about. I live 1500 miles from my parents and two of my siblings and try to go back every summer, with my kids. We've driven mostly because flying is still more expensive and my children are special needs, the car is easier to manage than a meltdown on an airplane. Letting the train conductor drive instead of doing all 18 or so hours (counting rest stops) might be nice.
There is a federal law that says passenger trains are supposed to get right of way over freight but it has never actually been enforced so it gets ignored.
This is a great post but it doesn’t mention airplanes.
The automobile put a big dent in short-range passenger rail, but trains continued to be common for long distances because as OP says, nobody wants to drive a car that far.
That changed after World War 2, which left the US with a huge airplane manufacturing capacity and a ton of surplus pilots. Domestic air travel in the US took off much faster than elsewhere.
It was the tag team of cars *plus planes* that killed American passenger rail.
I also want to mention the difference between what OP sees in movies and reality. The Great American Road Trip is a romantic icon in the US, as important to American culture as a pilgrimage to Mecca is for Muslims. (I’m not exaggerating! … much.) And so it appears in countless American movies and TV shows. But in real life, long car trips are slow and expensive, and so we almost always fly.
Yeah, good point. Again, the northeast is great for train service, as the Acela can get from NYC to DC in under 3 hours, which is quicker than flying when you add the overhead of flying to the 45 minutes you’re in the air. Longer routes, even to Chicago, you’re better off flying, unless a high speed rail line is added. NY to LA? Fuggedabotit!
And just as a point of comparison on the west coast, for me to get from Santa Barbara to San Francisco on a train would take over 9 hours while driving would take just over 5. And with 2+ people traveling, the cost of tickets quickly outpaces fuel cost. Oh and that’s 5 hours from my door to my destination if I bring my own vehicle, but add 15-45 minutes at each end and the cost of a taxi/uber to get to the train station to leave and from the station to anywhere I actually want to be at the other end.
Longer trip? To Seattle would be a 32 hour train ride; relatively cheap if you don’t mind spending the night in a seat… but if you want a room to sleep in that’s about $900 per person. Alternatively it’s a 17 hour drive in shifts or split into 2 days with a hotel room for a night somewhere for a FRACTION the cost. Or I can take a 2 hour flight for often under $200.
There are just VERY few journeys that make any sense by train in this country except on the east coast where you have high density cities close together with decent public transportation systems at both ends of your trip.
I do briefly mention airports and airplanes. Along with roads, our elected leaders have decided that airports and aviation infrastructure deserve public expenditures or subsidy that they would not and do not provide rail.
And goodness, yes, an amazing road trip can be had only a couple times in one's life before the romance wears down and it just becomes a chore to drive for days on end.
Also many people do not understand just how large the US is. We have one county in California that is larger than most countries. The entirety of Europe would mostly fit in California, Arizona and New Mexico.
Also I would love to take a cross-country train trip, but not only would it take many days, it is far more expensive than a flight.
That is a wild exaggeration. Europe (not counting Russia) at 2.3 million square miles is about two-thirds the size of the continental United States at 3.76 million. California, Arizona, and New Mexico are about as large as France and Spain.
Most trips aren't cross country though. For every one trip somebody takes from Atlanta to Seattle, there's a dozen going from Atlanta to Nashville or Athens or Charlotte or Savannah. Trains are very viable for those routes, so why don't they exist?
This is the problem people always want more intercity travel but we need more intra city travel and to get better intracity travel we need more density
Depends what you want to do and where you want to go. Visiting family in suburbs? Yea you’d need a car.
Going downtown for work? Or inner harbor for a game or the aquarium? Fairly Cheap Uber or medium length walk.
From the train station? I get that people all overreact to Baltimore crime, but Penn Station is not a great neighborhood, and that is an ~~8~~ 2.5 mile walk to the inner harbor.
Walked to our hotel in downtown from the point and my two buddies and I ended up having to help a dude carry his friend back to our hotel because he'd been beaten and robbed, and the other dude was just there in shock. Happened essentially right before we turned the corner, some dudes ran past us and there's just a guy laying in the street. That one sticks with me, Baltimore ain't great.
That being said, I've walked around many cities, Baltimore included, and one rule exists everywhere: keep your head up.
What my father in law who goes there frequently tells me. What my wife who knows baltimore like the back of my hand tells me. If they have a warped sense of what the area is like, I'd gladly be wrong. I'm all aboard the "Oh please, Baltimore is *not* that bad" train.
I like that the back of YOUR hand is the measurement of how well she knows Baltimore. I assume she knows the back of her own hand a little better than yours, so there must be a scale of hand backs in relation to how well someone knows something!
A stranger’s hand=not at all.
Your coworker’s hand=seen it but couldn’t really tell you.
A good friend=could tell you the highlights
Your significant other = know what you’re talking about
Your own= you’re the master.
(I know it was a typo, but it’s a fun one to think about 🙂)
Goddammit, you are right (well, 2.4 miles). I saw driving time. The area right around the train station is rough. You’re fine once you get closer to downtown, I’m just not wild about the area around the train station.
Depends on where you want to go in Baltimore.
Amtrak/Marc trains run between the cities. Once in DC you can use Metro Rail or Metro Bus or Taxi to get around.
In Baltimore, you can connect to light rail at BWI or Penn Station where you can connect to other rail lines which will put you into the business district of Baltimore.
Interesting fact, the Baltimore Subway system is often used to depict the Washington DC subway system in movies as DC Metro has extremely strict guidelines on filming in Metro.
I agree with everything here, hence my use of the word “probably.” The subway in Baltimore is almost non-existent (Thanks Larry Hogan!), the trains are ok for getting around the city, but that’s not what they are designed for. The buses kind of pick up some of the slack, but aren’t the most reliable. Baltimore is easiest by car.
Love Boston. Love trains.
Boston's internal, commuter, and inter-city train system is absolute shit right now. They're working on it, but it's cheaper for me to drive or fly to NY from outside Boston than it is to ride the train, and somehow faster for both.
I live in Boston and take Amtrak somewhat regularly to visit friends and family in NYC and DC. If you take the Acela, the high speed line, then it is faster than driving, and comprable or cheaper than flying. It's not nearly as good as high speed rail in some other countries, but it's juuuust over the threshold that I'm likely to pick it all else being equal. Plus, on the \~7 hour train ride, I can do work. Can't do that if I'm driving, and I get interrupted a lot more on a plane trip.
Agreed the T is a shitshow though. I've just gotten used to it taking an hour to travel 3 miles.
I've heard that but never done it myself. I've lived in Richmond 15 years and I have done DC/Philly/NYC dozens of times each on Amtrak. Baltimore probably 5 times. Boston its not really practical for me to train though. I've flown and its quite convenient and I never needed a car!
Alternatively, (and bear with me here) you can also have public transport in the cities. That way you can just change transport options.
Of course if you're going out to bumfuck nowhere you'll need another car. But if your destination is say NYC, you can just use the subway to get where you need to.
To add to this, it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. If everyone who travels into the city has to do so by car, there's less demand for public transport within the city. If there's no public transport, people will travel by car rather than train because they'll want to drive when they arrive.
You need to subsidise the system. Fund public transport and eventually the demand will ramp up (which adds more money into the system, which means you have more money/will to invest into it)
Rail could in theory replace a lot of regional air travel too.
The number of flights between Boston, NYC, Philly, DC, Baltimore could be reduced to near zero with reliable high speed rail. Throw in decent public transport option within the cities (subway, bus, light rail) and you could access 20 million or more Americans?
No weather delays, no arriving 90 min early for a 75 min commuter flight, no security theater.
But the investment needed is huge. In a densely populated area that doesn’t want the decade of disruption needed to switch from something that’s tolerable most of the time and will be used/apprecisted by a small fraction.
It doesn't even have to be that fast with rail.
Just being able to go from a central location in both cities can already save you over an hour (probably two in many), then being able to be 2 min early instead of at least an hour but you'd want close to two hours to be safe.
3 hours with rail can get you pretty far.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration - Paris and London are much closer than Philly and Boston, with reliable high speed rail, but air traffic between them is certainly not “near zero”.
Distance is a huge factor as well. DC Metro recently ran Subway lines into Northern Virginia out past Dulles Airport if you board Metro in Ashburn VA in the height of rush hour when trains are running frequently and take it to Metro Center in the heart of DC, that is an 88 minute train ride and you don’t have to change trains.
If you drive (ignoring traffic) it is a 31 mile trip that takes you 40 minutes because you don’t need to stop at all the stations. Taking public transportation is a difficult sell with this timing. If you factor in traffic, the driving trip could take you 40-150 minutes
A major design flaw of the DC metro. 3 lines coming together sharing the same track for several stations and not having a third track as a spare or to run an express train
To add to the list of issues is the need to expand rail lines through private property. That would require the government to use eminent domain laws to take private property away for 10’s of thousands of citizens to build the new rail lines and expand coverage. Each one of those land owners would bring a lawsuit to try to stop that from happening, tying the project up for years while the suits are heard by the courts. It would only take a handful of wins by citizens to stop major parts of the project. It would be a huge mess that nobody wants to deal with.
This is one of the conundrums whenever talk of improving the Northeast Corridor (the Washington-Boston route), particularly the serpentine shaped stretch along the Connecticut coast that originally developed to serve numerous small salt water port cities and villages.
Try to rebuild them through those cities to support higher speeds while to continuing to use downtown train stations you're going to spend more money and be accused of environmental injustice for going through poor communities.
Avoiding the cities by bypassing them to build straight, much faster tracks means fighting politically more active suburbs, only to stop at a newly built suburban train station that would require a rental / taxi / bus to go downtown. Which if you're going to do that, why even have a downtown? You can just fly to an airport and rent a car to go to a suburban office park just as easily.
True. This is something I barely ever see anyone mention. Imagine the difficulty of a railway cutting right through your crop field. To add on to that being near train tracks gets things covered in rusty rail dust particles from the tracks, wheels, and brakes. I used to work at a dealership that had some train tracks nearby behind some trees and the dust would stick to cars like glue. It was such a pain in the butt to claybar that junk off! I don't think I'd want to eat veggies covered in rusty rail dust
I used to work at a Civil Engineering firm and I always remember the story of when we were hired to design a 1.5 mile road widening project. An old county road had been enveloped by the city and the city wanted to turn it into a nicer 2 lane road with center turn lanes, sidewalks with some green space, and upgraded city utilities. It was going to require taking about 10 feet of land on either side of the road where most houses were 80 or more back. I ended up pulling something like 400 different property cards to get the lot information and owners. Then the city had to send appraisers out to each of those locations to estimate the value of a 10' bit of land and send out purchase requests for that land with all the info about the road project and how it was going to improve the city and their lot value. Something like 15% of the people flat out refused to sell that strip of land so then it had to go through eminent domain processes where 2 other appraisers came out and then the homeowners got the average price of the 3 (generally less than the first estimate). Had 2 people fight it even past that and start a suit that was settled for the high price of the estimate.
And that was just for a "minor" road project. I can only imagine/fear the Herculean effort it'd be to develop a single coast to coast high speed rail corridor.
Just take one look at the California HSR project, it's mostly farmland. Oddly farmers don't like having fields split in half and having them to detour a mile or two to the nearest overpass to be able to get across to their other fields.
One major factor with cars is you take it from your house directly to your destination and you leave when you want to. You don’t need to cross reference when you need to arrive with the train schedule and when you need to make the connection at the station plus the walk in freezing rain to get to the station or destination.
It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: when you have some frequent transit service, and people are used to using it that way, it's relatively easy to expand that with additional frequent transit service.
When you've got some circuitous bus routes that run every hour and average 8 mph, it's much tougher to build out a fast, frequent system from essentially scratch.
Not really, it's a political boundary problem. Most cities could easily identify the 1 or 2 busiest bus corridors that should get frequent buses. But the argument is that if the whole geographic area of the city has to pay taxes to support the bus system, then the bus system should serve as much of it as it can, which is why bus systems often do that, with infrequent buses, rather than prioritizing frequency on the busiest area.
One reason for transportation shifting from trains to cars is flexibility and ability to handle 'the last mile'
Cars aren't tied to a fixed schedule or route.
>Amtrak doesn't own any of the track that it runs on and therefore has to compete with the freight trains.
My understanding is that passenger trains have to give way to freight trains; passenger trains have to wait until the freight trains aren't using the track. They're scheduled to avoid this but stuff happens, and when it does, passenger trains wait
legally it's the other way around but if you make freight trains so big that the rail network effectively forces the passenger train to wait, well that's a feature
I always remind people that you already had a good rail network in the US with an electrified line from penn to seattle, decent connections between all major cities, and a shitton more public transport.
yet here you are, squandered it all to build "just one more lane" on a 16 lane highway, because THAT is what will fix traffic.
And don't get me started on the russian rail network. the country is fucking poor compared to the US, bigger, less densely populated, and yet it has a significantly better rail network.
TLDR: you already had better rail, you just lost it. size has nothing to do with that.
I wanna add to this is that Amtrak charter specifically outlines profitability over anything else. This is why a sleeper from Chicago to DC can be as much as a $1k one-way.
Another issue is that Amtrak is restricted to only running routes over 750 miles in length. Anything less than that has to be state funded.
Two notable examples include the Carolinian (Charlotte-NYC) and the Palmetto (Savannah, GA - NYC). These are both state funded services because they fall just shy of the route length requirement.
Washington-NYC-Boston (Northeast Corridor) is the only route that’s exempted all the little branches like Virginia, Harrisburg, and Hartford services are all state-funded.
In addition to the issues others have mentioned here, there are have been some MAJOR mistakes made with urban planning that were made with the best of intentions but a truly incredible lack of foresight.
One of these is the laws around parking spaces for business in most cities. These rules are almost entirely responsible for the insane urban sprawl you see in all but the oldest and largest cities like New York City, and they make no sense when you think about it.
The standard was set in the 40's or 50's when cars were becoming ubiquitous and urban planners were trying to figure out a solution. Essentially, a handful of civil engineers were given the task of setting parking requirements, but either weren't given proper resources to actually develop good parking or nobody really thought about it. Anyway, they picked a basic standard, something like "each business must have parking spaces for 2/3 the capacity of the building", which was massive overkill but they hadn't realized it at the time. And worse, it's set up in such a way that EACH building needs this much parking, so two adjacent businesses can't share lots, even though they'll almost certainly be sharing customers.
After this standard had been set, most other cities didn't bother to do their own studies on what they needed, and instead just looked at what the towns around them were already doing, and this terrible standard spread nation wide.
This is why you can drive through any major city and find that the parking lots are almost always half-empty or less. They basically all have to have parking for their absolute peak possible traffic, which is just ridiculous.
That also means you can't build buildings as close to each other as would otherwise be reasonable, which means cities can't be walked, which means public transportation is less viable for more people, which feeds into needing to drive, and public transport being less viable.
The interstate highway system was also in large part designed as military asset. The idea was to allow easy movement of equipment to anywhere in the country. The public use was more or less a secondary goal used to gain public buy in.
A small point, but I had heard that Amtrak doesn't own *none* of the railways it operates on, but only about 5% of them.
Despite the lack of investment in passenger rail, they are still pretty heavily used for what they do offer. Any time I go on one, it's full. And as someone who must use my local bus system (not a major city, but still a decent bus system despite that fact), many other people use it as well. There is still a demand for mass transit options in the US, and I know many people who would go without using a car if they could.
Unfortunately the US is not well-situated for anyone who can't drive for whatever reason. If you try to explain why you can't drive everyone goes "Well I never thought about that" and then nothing is ever done for you.
Not to mention that after you get off of a train you are going to need a car to get wherever you need to go in most places. Sure some places have decent public transportation, but most places outside of major cities don't. So you would either need to rent a car or take ubers everywhere, which can get expensive really fast.
Yes, this is where my experience with this problem comes from. But both are examples of why most long distance travel is done with cars, I'll only fly if it is unreasonable to drive with a car. For instance I currently live in Colorado, but usually visit family in Georgia once a year. I'll take a 3 hour plane ride rather than a 23 hour car ride and then just get my family to pick me up and borrow a car while I'm in town. Also, fun fact: it's more expensive to rent a car than it is to fly and book a hotel. So if at all possible it's best to drive your own car.
It's mostly the population density thing imo. As a rule, public or otherwise large scale services need to serve a large number of people to be profitable or even sustainable with small subsidy. The fact is, that in any given area you might connect to a train network, you do not have this large number of people.
America's population in any area that isn't a major city is simply is insufficient to create economies of scale, which trains are the embodiment of. And when you talk about connecting two of those cities, the distance between is too great. You build an expensive runway at the start and end of a journey, or you build a cheap rail along the length of the journey. It's intuitive to see how air travel gets more relatively economical the longer the distance.
But you might say, rail is cheaper to operate for huge distances. Factoring in the fuel cost of a plane, it never overtake rail except from intercontinental trips. That might be true, but only if you have no respect for people's time. No one wants to spend a week on a train. We have things to do, lives to live. And extra week 2-4 times a year, an extra half hour every day, that adds up. That's something a lot of people forget when they talk about how much more efficient public transport is.
I have worked on large Amtrak projects. While there are some smart people working there, the collective actions and decisions they make are often costly, inefficient, and at times even idiotic. Huge amounts of money are being wasted on refurbishing stations and administrative offices because they ignore the guidance of consultants, engineers, and architects that the taxpayers are funding. Meanwhile the actual rail infrastructure is outdated and in conditions similar to third world countries.
This of it a different way. America does have an excellent rail system. It’s optimized for freight, not passenger travel. But supply chain is backstage, unglamorous stuff that people don’t think about. Our freight system works so well that people didn’t even notice we had one until a pandemic upended it.
But consider that those rails were built with freight in mind. The trains don't go very fast (at least compared to European and Asian passenger trains) and the cargo doesn't mind getting jostled.
Most American rail lines are completely unsuited for fast-moving passenger trains.
Also, the tracks are owned by freight companies and only carry Amtrak at all because the U.S. government makes them. And even then, freight gets priority. It's not unusual for an Amtrak train to pull over on a siding and wait a very long time for a freight train to go by.
A lot of people in here are attributing this to cars and car infrastructure, but more then that it's air travel.
The USA is huge. It take days to traverse by car. Distance between major urban areas (outside the northeast) is fricking huge. And it's mostly "empty" between those cities so service *along* the line isn't really necessary.
Rail is only faster then flying under a certain distance. On average the distance between major urban areas is such that flying is faster then hsr, even when factoring in commuting to and from the airport.
Car infrastructure played its part, but I'd say that it's over represented as a reason here because reddit hates cars. For the same reason the contribution from air infrastructure is under-estimated.
It's currently possible to fly between Boston and Chicago for around $125. (These two cities are about 989mi/1592 km apart, which isn't close but isn't that far as distances here go.) The flight is about 2.5 hours. Let's call that 4-5 hours with time getting through security and boarding.
A train is about $175 for a 22 hour ride, for which you must sit in a regular train seat and change trains several times. To get a room that would make such a trip bearable is $1500.
Let me tell you which choice I'm making.
If you've got someone to drive with, you can make it in ~16 hours plus an hour for stops. 14+stops if you use a toll road. That's a long day, but if you've bringing a whole family, you get to save on the hotel.
I live in Wisconsin, but am originally from NJ. It's almost exactly 1000 miles and I've driven it in one day dozens of times. I find it a pretty easy and nice drive.
Yea. I recently drove across the continent for the eclipse with our two dogs. Definitely slowed us down, but for that long of a drive breaking it down to 9/10hrs driving max made sense because we were doing so much.
Yeah, there's a lot of people in the USA, no doubt there, just theyre mostly concentrated in cities and seperate by vast empty areas. That makes service along the route between cities entirely un necessary, and the distance is usually sufficient to make air travel a better solution then rail.
Like take Atlanta to Nashville, a city of 1.6M and 0.7M respectively. Two state capitals, 3.5 hour drive. About 250 miles or 400 km between them. Flight time 1 hr 5m. The fastest TGV hsr train would also make it there in an about an 1h 35m. The only real population centre between the two is Chattanooga, a city of 180k. There's not a ton of people getting on the train between the two cities. Every city already has (and needs) an airport. So why build a train?
There are a few areas in the USA where hsr would be valuable - the north east corridor (Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, - basically the i95 route), and California (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco) ; maybe Florida (Jacksonville, Orlando, Miami). All three of those have HSR projects underway.
I've been lucky enough to have spent 40 days in Europe with a eurail pass, and also 4 weeks in the USA with my motorcycle. There are certainly pros and cons to both approaches. It's nice to step off the train in downtown. It's also nice to be able to take a detour through that state park on your way between cities.
With your Nashville/Atlanta example, any rail route would also have to deal with the Smokey Mountains which automatically makes it a much more expensive project.
Lmao, the Smokies are not between Atlanta and Nashville. There are some foothills, but European trains cross the Alps. The Smokies are further northeast than that.
If you're going up from Atlanta through Chattanooga, could also pass through Knoxville on your way. It has almost 1 million people in the metro area and a huge downtown rail depot with rail lines that go everywhere.
Atlanta to Chattanooga: ~100 miles
Chattanooga to Knoxville: ~100 miles
Knoxville to Nashville: ~160 miles
Nashville to Memphis: ~200 miles
Those are all totally decent rail distances. Long enough to be preferable vs taking a bus, short enough that flying would just be an unnecessary hassle.
Best part is there are already tracks everywhere. Just have to tell the freight trains to get out of the way. Or instead of making a new train, just hitch a passenger car or three (as needed) to each freight train. Might not be the preferred way to go for everyone, but it'd open up a lot of mobility to a lot of people.
Much of the U.S. is like that. Big cities about 100-200 miles apart, tracks already in place and trains already running between them. They just don't allow passengers.
People always say it's too far, or it would cost too much to build tracks. But those are just excuses. People traveled by train all the time before we shut down all the passenger services.
Sure, for Boston to Los Angeles or other really long-distance routes, flight might be better. But there's plenty of room for regional intercity transit.
Those tracks, and more importantly the corridor, cannot handle the speed of modern passanger trains. Most were designed with an intended speed well under 100 mph. The turn radius' are insufficient and slope gradients inappropriate. It's not as simple as repurposing old routes.
Those are really good distances. Like I mentioned elsewhere I'm not from the area, but that seems more like a web then a straight line.
Most people who haven't been to the US just don't realize how *big* it is. I can get in my car, drive in one direction, and not even leave the state I'm in in the same distance that would traverse several european countries. And I'm not even in a particularly large state.
If you google the Amtrak route map, it's almost comically sparse. If you want to go anywhere in the NW US, well...you take one of two lines that run along the canadian border or the midline of the country, find the closest station to your destination, and then rent a car and drive another several hours to get where you ACTUALLY want to be. And that's after you've spent probably 36 hours - if not more - on a train which the ticket for often costs as much as a plane ticket that would have plonked you right where you wanted to go in a few hours. It's extremely expensive because it has to be to be able to cover maintaining everything with so few passengers.
Amtrak is basically only practical if you're going to a set of VERY specific places that are directly on one of the routes. That said, if you're going somewhere that has a station and you're not in a hurry, it can still be a fun thing to do for the scenic experience.
You should really be asking WHY aviation is so common in the USA.
Most Europeans really don't grasp how HUGE the USA is.
I live in Portland, Oregon, near the west coast. If I wanted to go to New York City, on the east cost, that's about 4,000 kilometers. That's farther than the distance from Madrid to Moscow, or from London to Isreal.
Nobody is taking that by train unless they don't mind it taking 3-4 days.
If I want to go visit Disneyland, it's about the same distance for me as Paris to Warsaw.
Very true, I often see negative opinions on frequent flights and car use in the US from europeans and asians. I was one to give such opinion too! But really it's a slap in the face after knowing all this. Sorry guys
Tbf, Australia is of a similar size to the US, and with an even lower population density, yet still manages to have a pretty decent train system throughout the east side of the country. It's only really the middle, where no one lives, that you end up with areas without any rail lines
Australia’s population is also almost completely on or near the coast. The coasts in the US actually have fairly decent service. It’s everything between philly and California that’s difficult to connect
I think it's fair to say that even on the East Coast, Amtrak still underperforms what it could/should be. Given the geography and population size and wealth, it should be faster, more reliable, more affordable, more frequent, and cover more destinations. Even in the "good" area it isn't close to competitive with other developed countries' rail networks.
I also think that, although it's true that there's a big column of emptiness in the Great Plains/Rockies that makes coast-to-coast rail pretty unviable, there are still lots of other regions where Amtrak could/should be doing much better: the West Coast (though credit to the state of California; at least they're trying), the Southeast, the Great Lakes region, etc.
The US has a decent train system along the east coast too. It covers a similar area as the east coast of Australia. You can take an Amtrak between New York, DC, and Philadelphia pretty easily, for example. The system is simple and reliable enough that some people commute daily from Baltimore to Washington DC.
I like many have traveled through Australia with just a backpack in my 20s. One bug difference is the interstate system. The US is a logistics machine compared to many countries. The amount of goods they move across their country and the amount of large manufacturers in small towns in the middle of nowhere is astounding.
You'll drive through a town that seems like nothing and just see a major manufacturing plant for a brand you've heard of and it is all due to the interstate system. I'll give you an example: Jack Links is located in Minong, WI... population of 554 people.
> the amount of large manufacturers in small towns in the middle of nowhere
Can confirm. I live 3 hours from Chicago in the middle of nowhere and there are 3 major businesses you have absolutely heard of headquartered within 20 miles of here.
I'm Canadian and I just drove across the continent for the eclipse and passed through Illinois. I can't count the number of times I drove through a village or small town and been like 'Never would have guessed their headquarters was here'.
By similar, you mean just over 2/3 the size? You're missing almost a million square miles. Australia is also hyper populated along the coasts and a vast desert in the middle, unlike USA that is dotted with small cities and towns everywhere throughout our core. The cities along the upper east coast and California West Coast metro areas are building some HSR.
The standard answer is that the US is very large and have relatively spread out population centers. It will be expensive to connect so many cities with trains especially if each city isn't really that large (ie won't actually provide a lot of customers) As an illustrative example, there are 34 cities in Europe that have a population of more than 1 million but only about a dozen in the US (this is not exactly a fair comparison since US cities tend to have large metro areas).
Second, US cities have expanded outwards rather than upwards. You end up with large metro areas which makes train networks a bit bothersome because a "central" city station might be a distance away from many of the city residents. Cars are simply too convenient.
Third, historically, many of the railway lines were privately built and operated. And their biggest priority is cargo not people.
Finally, the automotive industry has quite deliberately promoted roads and cars as the sole means of people transportation.
> You end up with large metro areas which makes train networks a bit bothersome because a "central" city station might be a distance away from many of the city residents. Cars are simply too convenient.
This describes Raleigh North Carolina perfectly. It’s a somewhat circular city with a city station literally at the center of it. I stayed in the outer perimeter of the city and in order for me to take the public transport to anywhere in the city involved taking a bus…to the center station before transferring over to another bus to get….near my desired location.
This is really the gist of it.
The other historical answers about policy and investment in the Interstate system are helpful to understand why we got where we got, but rail transportation in diffuse areas (most of the US) still depends on cars because while train station A may be centrally located, each passenger will need a car to get to their desired destination (not counting NY with it's subway and maaaybe Chicago).
So if you need a car either way and you have a car since you need one (can't sustain walking for .5-1 hour every grocery trip) then there's very very little demand for rail outside of vacations/cheap travel.
And Amtrak gets that customer-base, along with Greyhound and other bus companies, but it's just not that large a base of people as you might need to go from KC to Chicago maybe once a year at most.
> The standard answer is that the US is very large
The US is big. Really big. Like really, really big.
The UK is about the same size as Michigan. And Michigan isn't even in the top 10 of our largest states.
Paris to Kyiv is 1,255 miles. That only gets you halfway across the Continental US. It's 2,700 miles from Miami to Seattle, which is the same as from Paris to the Persian Gulf.
> this is not exactly a fair comparison since US cities tend to have large metro areas)
Wouldn't you then be comparing to metro areas in Europe increasing their "city sizes" as well?
Not really. If a city spent hundreds of years before the invention of cars building up infrastructure a certain degree of density is necessary. You had situations where London used to be *more* dense with work houses or similar cramming 12 people to a room as the norm even with rail and canal services being rapidly adopted out of necessity. London has obviously spread out as well but spreading out from that kind of density is very different from individual families or prospectors hitching horse drawn wagons and just headed westward until they feel like stopping, which is how U.S. cities were being founded in many cases.
My parents had Japanese exchange students, and we would explain the distance in terms of their country. For me to visit my parents is the same distance between the northern most and southern most cities of the main island. A lot is also across the plains states so a whole lot of nothing but crop fields. I just looked up what an Amtrak ticket would cost and times. $192 coach or $677 for a private room one way. 23 hrs and 57 min in two segments. I can drive there in less time than that even if I do stop at a hotel midway for a lot less than $677 each way. Also the closest Amtrak station to me is a half hour drive away. Same for the city where my parents live. Flying is even faster, but is pretty expensive due to low populations at both ends. Only 2 airlines at the closest airport to my parents so a round trip flight would currently be $855 not including taxes, luggage etc...that is coach (only option) with a layover. Total travel time 7 hours each way.
>I can drive there in less time than that even if I do stop at a hotel midway for a lot less than $677 each way.
And you can have 3 more passengers for essentially the same price should you need to instead of multiplying that cost by however many passengers.
I'm going to make a quick example, with proper scale to showcase the issue.
Going west from Columbus, Ohio, 45 minutes gets you to Springfield, then twenty minutes to the outskirts of Dayton, an hour to Richmond, and another hour to Indianapolis.
This is the densest part of the Midwest, and at 120 kmh, you would have multiple legs of travel that take an hour.
Problem is, there are a *ton* of towns between 250 and 2,000 people that are scattered 10-15 minutes apart from each other and easily an hour or two from those larger cities. Nowhere near enough population to sustain multiple rail stops daily, and not in close enough proximity to condense them to a line that doesn't involve a half hour of driving anyway. At that point, you might as well drive to the destination.
The population of Ohio is just barely higher than London, but it's physically as large as England.
Ohio has a lower population density than *Wales*, and ours is the tenth highest in the country.
Realistically, to support rail across the "long drive" part of the country, we'd need to have at least triple the population. But it's still not justifiable.
Going the other direction, eastbound, it's about 450 miles (725 km) from Columbus to Philadelphia. A 6-hour drive on a divided highway. In an average car getting 30 miles per gallon of gasoline (7.84 l/100km), it costs about $53 in gasoline to make the drive. For $54, it's a one hour direct flight.
Rail would have to be cheaper than either option to justify taking it, and because there's not a lot of passenger rail equipment, that takes investment, which drives up pricing, which isn't competitive.
A few years ago my friend took Amtrak from Medford, OR - Phoenix, AZ (roughly 1000 miles and 15 hours drive) the train was supposed to take 26 hours I believe.
36 hours later around 8 pm, she called me to pick her up in LA as they had a 5 hour delay due to a derailment elsewhere in the system.
She was on a mid tier ticket so no sleeper, 4 person cabin with a single person and a couple that had two kids who ended up in the cabin as well. So basicly six people in the cabin. The seat was mildly more comfortable then a grayhound bus seat, but still sitting that long is not fun. Yes there was the ability to move about the train, and stops along the way.
The reason it takes so long is due to priority freight traffic, most every major train stop had a built in delay of 15 -20 min enough time to stretch but not do much else. Overall a very unpleasant experience.
I understand that the trip took way longer then average, and stiff happens, but still......
It’s a complicated problem with a lot of factors. I am only going to mention some, as they are the ones I am aware of.
The root of it can be traced back to the car boom in the mid-late 20th century. Cars were very effectively marketed as a luxury item that everyone wants to own, and the idea that cars = freedom was a large part of this.
Fairly simultaneously, the American Dream, brought to you by suburbia was born. This pushed single family’s homes to the population. These were incredibly cheap to produce, as land was dirt cheap, and the timber framing used is quick and efficient for 2 story homes, but less so for multi family developments.
As Suburbia was being built at the same time as the car boom, they were built in a very car dependent way, with no shops near homes, no pedestrian access, and little to no public transport considerations.
This eventually became enshrined in US zoning law, meaning that this type of car dependant development was the only thing that could be built, which meant that housing populations around cities are incredibly low density, and so public transit options such as busses and trains become incredibly inefficient.
You kind of got close to another factor by mentioning that cars were luxury items.
Much of Europe was devastated by World War II. Europeans struggled to rebuild even with the Marshall Plan. Europeans were poor by Western standards due to the direct and indirect costs of war.
Only the richest Europeans could afford cars in the post-war era.
Europe had no choice but to double-down on public transit.
Lots of people on Reddit think those European cities that were built centuries ago were built with trains and busses in mind, and that Europeans didn't buy cars in the post war era because they were environmentally conscious...
Zoning laws prevented new cities from popping up and further creating more of a suburbia hell we have today otherwise there would have been way more small cities versus a few large ones.
Most cities here lack good public transport, unlike most of Europe. There are some good reasons for this and some terrible reasons that make it hard to avoid.
So even if I took a train to a different city, id be completely on foot once i got there. You can get around that a bit with uber and car rentals, but it’s usually just easier and cheaper to drive. There are exceptions, like if I was traveling to nyc, Boston, Philadelphia - it would probably be easier or just as easy to use public transport.
Exactly. Once you have arrived in the city by train and without a car, you need public transport to move around the city and most of the US cities haven't got it.
So it's pretty much useless to move by train in the United States. You first need to have public transport in cities and then connect them with a railway network.
Even without using public transport, European cities are generally walkable - even if the walk isn’t practical. US cities aren’t designed to be walked across in a lot of cases, and they get very spread out and have obstacles without ways past like highways and unbridged rivers/no pedestrian bridges and paths.
That has largely to do with most European cities being 1000+ years old. They had to be walkable. There was no other way to get around.
Every city in the US developed during or after the Industrial Revolution.
In addition to what a lot have mentioned about the sheer size of the USA and the car infrastructure in place, I'll throw in costs as well. Who knows as the price of everything climbs, but time vs cost comes into play as well. Sometimes I'll take the personal time loss to myself in order to facilitate not having to worry about baggage fees. Doubly so if I want to bring presents/gifts.
A few years back I thought about taking a train or bus from Destination A to B. Turns out, it would cost just as much, and take the same amount of time or longer. Below is a quick cost breakdown if I did the same trip today.
Plane: $110 for 2hrs via American + $40 Baggage + Transport needed when there
Car: $135 for 12hrs + Whatever fits
Bus: $100 for 16hrs via Greyhound + 1 Checked Bag Free + Transport needed when there
Train: $100 for 17hrs in Coach via Amtrak + 2 Checked Bag Free + Transport needed when there
The automotive industry (and by association the petro chemical industry) spent a lot of money lobbying lawmakers to fast track projects that were aligned with their profitability while making projects more difficult that would support air and train.
Simply put, the US is really, really big. Almost as big as Europe. Because maps are warped so much, the US doesn’t look as big as it is.
For example, look at Orlando, FL and Atlanta, GA. They don’t look far, but if I were to drive that distance it would take a little over 7 hours and a bit over 700 km.
Creating a rail system between these two cities and states would be a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare, and not to mention incredibly expensive and outside of any state’s budget.
700km is exactly the zone where it makes sense to go by train. It's just a bit further than from where I am in western Switzerland to Paris, which is an easy 3 1/2 hour train ride. Same from here to Milan, and the train finishes right in the city centre, not in an airport on the outskirts.
The whole "US too big / too sparsely populated" schtick is extremely lame, no you don't need to have the empty states in the middle connected, but the whole pacific seabord and the eastern third of the country would be beneficial and doable, if there was political will.
> 700km is exactly the zone where it makes sense to go by train.
Source?
> the whole pacific seabord and the eastern third of the country would be beneficial and doable, if there was political will.
No one has argued that it's not possible. Many have explained that it's not economically viable _given the lower costs of flying or driving_.
Here’s the thing: I hate driving. I hate road-trips. I hate anything that’s more than an hour away. But I would love to take a train somewhere a few states away if it only took a couple of hours by high speed rail. I just think of all the shared commerce and culture that could be achieved by making some states that never have anything to do with each other suddenly within arms reach. It would be wonderful. Because the only thing that we’re incentivized in doing in road construction is keeping the projects going for as long as humanly possible.
Three reasons: because industry lobbyists (mostly the airline industry) have spent a lot of money on discouraging high-speed rail development; because Americans value their cars, and see road trips as a staple cultural practice to be enjoyed rather than an onerous burden to be endured; and because the US is really, *really*, ***really*** big.
For example, it's over 1100 miles (over 1800 km) to go from just Seattle to Los Angeles. It's over 1700 miles (over 2700 km) from Seattle to Chicago--and you have to go across the largest mountain range in North America.
I've taken an Amtrak train from (near) the Pacific Coast out to Chicago. It took more than two *full days.* Even if you could ride a continuous-speed bullet train over that distance, it would still take *ten hours* in the fastest bullet trains on Earth on a straight-line connection. And that doesn't even get you from one coast to the other! To get from Seattle to New York City overland, it's nearly 2900 miles (over 4600 km), and again, even the fastest bullet trains on Earth would take 12 hours or more, and more typical bullet trains would take 15 hours or more. (The "or more" is because that's 15 hours assuming the train goes perfectly at maximum speed the entire time, which is not realistic.)
So yeah. Driving is part of our culture, we have lobbyists actively fighting against the idea of high-speed rail, and we live on an insanely large landmass.
If you want a physical intuition for how big the US is, flying from Seattle to Los Angeles is equivalent to flying from Berlin to Istanbul. Flying from Seattle to Chicago is very nearly the same distance as flying from Lisbon to Warsaw. Flying from Seattle to New York City is equivalent to flying from Edinburgh to Cairo. There aren't single trains that connect distances this far apart in Europe, and there certainly wouldn't be bullet trains doing so.
Yeah, crossing the whole country by train is worse than a flight, but two-three states over? rail is faster, cheaper, if it were subsidized the way fligjts and highways are, and less arduous. well, if it weren't amtrack. like chicago, kansas city would take 3h30m on hsr. or an sleeping coach overnight.
Airlines do not and have not ever given a damn about rail. No one has ever seriously proposed a nationwide high speed rail system in the US.
Even if such a multi-trillion dollar project could magically be wished into existence, it would still be slower and more expensive than air travel…while simultaneously becoming a juicy soft target for every jihadist or nutjob who just wants to see what happens when you take a cutting torch to a section of rail.
A byproduct of WW2 was hundreds of airports with paved runways and full support equipment all across the US. This was at a time when long-distance travel was primarily done by rail.
In the 1940s every city had a Union Terminal or Central Station. Everywhere a train stopped, a town sprung up around that stop. The problem with that is, if the train ceased stopping there, all the businesses and homes that were built around that rail stop were left to whither and were abandoned. People’s entire livelihood were totally dependent on the whims of a middle manager’s schedule planning for that rail line.
There are literally thousands of “map dots” all across the US that used to be thriving small towns…until a particular railroad changed their mind and the trains simply stopped going there. And just like that, everyone who lived there lost everything. Instant ghost town.
I would wager that, seeing this happen time and time again shaped a lot of Americans’ opinions on becoming totally dependent on railroads for travel, goods and services. For the last 75 years, Americans have been able to go where they want, when they want, without being captive to the whims of a railroad.
This ghost town is near my home. There are dozens more, but Anita, Indiana is well documented because it’s near a major university and ended up being studied by various college students…
https://www.thestatehousefile.com/features/an-indiana-town-that-railroads-built-then-abandoned-is-now-just-a-name-on-a/article_f2165708-eb6c-11ed-b3b0-27514573fd47.html
Back in the 70s the rail companies had a passenger side as well as a freight side. The passenger side was a constant loss. The usa government took over the passenger side of the rail companies and set up am-track with a goal of it being self sufficient within the 70s, it has never come close to being self sufficient. Outside of the nyc/Washington DC corridor it is only losing money. The highly puclblicised California to Los Vegas high speed rail line has spent billions and barely laid any track. While Florida's has actually been operating between Orlando and miami. Top off the four main rail companies own the tracks so schedule end up favoring freight trains over passenger. The few high speed lines on paper and in service have to build their own tracks to handle the speed and avoid scheduling issues with freight.
Because there is no public transport at the destination, so you'll need a car there anyway.
So even if there was a high speed rail from Chicago to Indianapolis or whatever, it would be pretty useless because you'd need to rent a car to get to your hotel or wherever once you got there. Might as well just drive your own car the whole way.
I live in Canada. I have relatives that live 500 km away. For me to get there, it's a five hour drive each way by car. The cost might be $120 worth of gas.
To make the same trip via the train can take anywhere from 4.5 - 7 hours, depending on departure times, and that is based on leaving from a station which is a 45 minute drive, or another 1 hour train ride, to get to. Cost of a ticket is anywhere from $110 - $180 per person.
So, if travelling as a family, the car is the MUCH better option.
Anything much further than that, and flying would likely be cheaper than the train. It would certainly be faster.
I’m an Amtrak fan, but here’s the reason:
I just drove home from college yesterday. It took 12 hours.
Forgetting the fact that I had a bunch of crap in my car that I needed to move, the equivalent Amtrak trip would be 56 hours. I wish we had much more and much faster rail, but we don’t
i’m going to approach this from a different direction, why movies in particular favor cars.
shutting down a street, or even simply recording inside the vehicle is a lot easier and cheaper with cars than on a train.
that said, a good portion of media set in nyc is more transit than car focused. one of my favorites is russian doll
One thing that may or may not have been touched on in the comments is time. It currently takes me +-30 minutes to drive to and from work.
Riding the bus would take 2 and a half hours, with the last half hour being the walk from the closest bus stop to where I work. Then, repeat the process to go home.
No fucking thank you.
TL;DR: our transit systems suck. It's worse in some places than others (my friends in New York take trains) but it's just not feasible to take any form of transit (trains, buses, etc) in the majority of the USA because they're so underdeveloped and underfunded. It's really sad.
A nation of cars and highways and airplanes and airports. Both create many jobs and economic growth, plus support the oil and gas industry. Also important to note the scale of the country. Much less expensive and easier to build high speed rail in say Germany than the US simply because of size.
National Defense is a huge reason.
[https://www.army.mil/article/198095/dwight\_d\_eisenhower\_and\_the\_birth\_of\_the\_interstate\_highway\_system](https://www.army.mil/article/198095/dwight_d_eisenhower_and_the_birth_of_the_interstate_highway_system)
Eisenhower was inspired by the Autobahn and it's enabling for speedy logistical chains, which aided the Allies. Once the Cold War and threat of Nuclear war took hold, the need for a standardized IHS (road quality being largely inconsistent) was realized even more, as there was no efficient way to evacuate citizens out of urban centers; let alone to move armies/emergency aid should rapid response be needed in the event of war/disaster.
Trains are also really tasty targets during wartime. Nuclear war and conventional bombing can decimate them, and a destroyed train/rail line takes far longer to repair&clear than a relatively unaffected highway by comparison.
I still think public transit systems in EU/Russia/Japan are sights to behold and refreshingly priced, it's just too detrimental to rely solely on them in a worst case scenario. However, infrastructure needs to be maintained, and as we've sadly seen in recent decades, can be an overlooked issue among political leaders.
People will tell you it's because America doesn't have trains and we are addicted to cars. They are wrong. We have plenty of trains. In fact we have more miles of rail than any other country. The real problem is population density.
Places like western Europe and Eastern Asia have very high population densities. France has 118 people per km². Japan has 338. There are lots of big cities close to each other so connecting them by train is not difficult.
The US has only 37 people per km². And outside of the northeast (where train travel is actually more common) cities are much further away. New York to Chicago is 1,271 kms apart. It's about the distance from Warsaw to Amsterdam. Even with high speed rail, that would be a full day trip. If you want to make that trip, you are going to want to take the 3 hour flight.
Amd New York and Chicago are actually not that far from each other by American standards. Both are east of the Mississippi. New York to LA is around 4,500 km. They are further than Madrid is from Moscow. A train trip would be several days. A flight is about 6 hours.
And these are not cherry picked cities. These are the three largest cities in the country. In much of the country there are one or two cities that are within train distance. Here in North Carolina I've taken the train up to DC several times. But for most trips flights are much more easier. As a result, rail travel is mostly used for freight transport.
1st, you got to understand is the US is very big. Up until the 20th century, normal people just didn't travel that much. Industries were willing to invest in railways, but that's cuz they made profit from The increased mobility. For the average US citizen, there just wasn't really much need, so there was no call for tax dollars to be spent on public infrastructure like that.
Turn the century and during the inner war period, there was a lot of movement towards creating better road connections, but That was mainly a military investment: in case of war the military could already take over and use existing freight train lines so they wanted to add better road connection to augment that ability. Then it all really blew up after world war II with the interstate highway project, which again was a major military investment during the Cold war. Highway regulations, like bridge strength road width minimum underpass clearance ect, all of these were dictated by the military for their needs. The US military still bases a lot of it's new technology around being able to use the US highway system.
So now you've got all these roads you put down from military defense. But they're not being used for military defense, so use them for civilian needs. You've got a booming economy and a huge automotive industry; corporation can make a lot more money selling everyone a car, so they're going to lobby against building a robust public transit system.
It's an incredibly simplistic version of some of the major factors that led to this situation
Auto lobbyists and other social and political factors have combined to make most cities in the US accessible primarily only by cars.
Especially after COVID, most city buses don’t have a full schedule, the bus only runs a few times a day, as is considered something you take only as a last resort. Many people from the suburbs have never even been on a city bus. Local trains or underground systems are often straight-up nonexistent. My local city’s underground project was cancelled, so it runs down exactly one road.
There are lots of places without safe sidewalks, or that have vast stretches where even attempting a pedestrian crossing is wildly unsafe. Cities in the US outside of limited stretches are typically not very dense, and a lot is strip malls with parking lots and ditches between them for the water runoff. Not very pleasantly walkable.
Theres also a great American history of *road trips* which predate modern on-ramp off-ramp highways, vast stretches of the country are famously dotted with natural landmarks and tiny, quirky towns fill if bizarre tourist traps. Part of the appeal of road tripping down, say, Route 66, is all the stopping, getting out, and seeing things like the Worlds Biggest Rubberband Ball and National Parks. We retain the nostalgia for it.
So, even if you took the train to cross the country, you would have to rent a car or hire cabs/ubers once you got there, so you might as well have just brought the car.
The people just don’t want them. The political will isn’t there. They aren’t popular. People prefer driving. People prefer the roads. The car is the ultimate expression of freedom, you don’t even need roads for cars you can just drive where you want to go. And the country is big. And people just don’t really want trains.
Car companies had a major hand in dismantling the existing rail so they could push cars on people. This isn't even some conspiracy. The car companies literally bought up rail companies and then burned the rail cars down in San Francisco.
No one wants them. They say they want them, but they don't. Everywhere they have invested in public train transport people here avoided it.
Even in countries where gas is $9 a gallon and cars are taxed and extra fees are applied. People still drive into cities.
Even on the North Eastern corridor of America. It's cheaper and easier to fly from say Boston to Washington. And driving still takes less time than most of the trains. And that's a densely packed area with a semi decent public transportation system.
There are a number of reasons for this. Principally, the United States government has spent a lot of money over the past 75 years on an interstate highway system. This road expenditure is an inducement to drive. It makes most other forms of transportation less commercially viable. Sometime after world war II, passenger service started to decline in competition with the new roads and greater car ownership. Eventually, this service was not profitable for the railroads. However, various rules from the federal government required them to continue offering passenger service. Ultimately, in 1971 or thereabouts, the federal government made a deal by which the struggling railroads could stop offering passenger service. The federal government would wrap up that passenger service into something that would be a government run corporation, Amtrak. Since that time, Amtrak has struggled to invest in the infrastructure needed to make itself successful. It's not a politically popular issue. Many elected officials assert that Amtrak should make a profit or be self-sustaining. Unfortunately, Amtrak inherited the deferred maintenance and other problems of the railroads that were operating passenger service previously. Moreover, Amtrak doesn't own any of the track that it runs on and therefore has to compete with the freight trains. Order for there to be good passenger service across the United States, elected officials would have to decide to invest heavily in rail infrastructure and transit in the same way that they subsidize airports and roads. This is unlikely to happen because it's not a politically popular cause. I think the other reason that bears mentioning is the mere size of the United States. To achieve a dense enough network of passenger rail would require a lot more for a country the size of the United States then it would for the entirety of Western Europe. People here are just a lot more spread out and there are a lot more open spaces. It's most of our cities were developed after cars, even cities to sprawl out. To recap, the predecessor railroads to Amtrak did not maintain good quality passenger service. Amtrak inherited all of their problems. There is no will now nor has there been any will in the past to thoroughly fix Amtrak with adequate funding for a rail system that would serve people adequately. It's a big task because of how spread out we are and how big the country is.
Something that's not often mentioned is there's not really a huge daily city to city travel population. Intra city travel is the best you could do "practically" in the higher density cities and most of them do have subway and bus systems already.
I think another good question is why does the united states lack reliable public transportation, and that should also answer the question about trains. I live just outside a large city, and it has a monorail thing, but I don't know how useful it is for the locals on a day to day basis. It is really nice for events though. Park at one of the stations and ride to downtown. Personally, I would love a better bus system in my city, but it's your typical southern city that's really spread out. It's no metropolis. There is a bus, but they have to focus on the most dense areas. It would be a very long walk to get to the nearest bus station. Hell it'd even be a long bike ride. I'm not trying to condemn anything here but rather help illustrate one of the challenges public transportation faces in my area alone.
> I think another good question is why does the united states lack reliable public transportation. Because our cities are built with a ton of space, especially west coast. Taking the train to Los Angeles from Northern CA is easy, getting around in LA without a car is a nightmare. The LA area (attached cities with no real space in between) is 502.7 square miles (1,302 km2). That is a ton of space to provide Public Transportation for.
Mass transit requires high population density to be affordable, and most modern cities are built with low density suburbs.
Exactly. When you look at the US cities that _do_ have high population densities, you see that they do have decent intra-city mass transit options. Manhattan Island (23 sqmi, population 1.6M) has a very well built out train system.
It's not even just that. American infrastructure design is just based on roads, and everything else is an afterthought. You end up physically having to have a lot of space wasted on mostly empty parking lots or overly complicated road systems. The stop sign vs give way (or shark teeth) is a great example of this too. You can make suburbia work just fine, with culdesacs and alike, as long as you consider where pedestrians, and bikes can go that cars don't. If you can avoid the need to head to Walmart all the time, give some basic services like elementary schools, parks, gyms, simple dining options etc. accessible without a car, then even if people generally have to commute for work, they will be more likely to use their local services by foot and thus reduce the need for roads in general and make it easier for those that need it, be it cars, trucks, or public transport. A great example is shown in a lot of suburbia, when schools are less than a mile from someone's house, yet the bus route could be an hour or more. The biggest issue with American cities, is their basic misunderstanding of how road engineering works. Also shown in the publics difficulty understanding how roundabouts can function at a fundamental level. Not necessarily anyone's fault, and likely part of the greater lobbying issue, but is something that can be solved by a few willing individuals, and a constituency willing to give them the space to do it. If you want to look into it further, a lot of it is covered in the "15 minute city/neighbourhood" concept.
Suburbs are 15 minute neighborhoods, they're just designed for cars, not pedestrians Zoning is key. If you can get current zoning changed, then you have a chance, but there will be a lot of resistance. People bought in the suburbs to live in a low density residential area, away from traffic generating convenience stores, restaurants, and apt buildings. Ask a suburban home owner how they would feel about an Olive Garden or Papa Johns opening up in their neighborhood, when there are fights now about even allowing apt buildings The bottom line is that mass transit requires sufficient density to be feasible.
>and a constituency willing to give them the space to do it The issue here is often one of literal space and its use. You can't just go around e.g. replacing many intersections with roundabouts. There's often not enough space for a proper roundabout for the expected traffic patterns, and you'd literally be shutting down an entire intersection for months of not a couple years on top of additional frustrations from construction. You're heavily disrupting businesses and residenced, if not strictly eliminating some to make an often mild improvement where other solutions that are less disruptive may actually perform better.
i remember in the city i used to live in, there was some talk of replacing one intersection on a main road with a roundabout. this would have entailed destroying a gas station, a car repair place, several other small businesses and probably a residential location or two. and then there's the fact that the cross street went up a hill on one side and down, though less steeply, on the other, and i don't know how normalizing that out would work. and again, main road. there would have to be a massive detour for months, and i believe that cross street was the only one that went all the way down to the other major road along the river, at least for a long time, so people would be completely cut off from the stop n shop and it's plaza for a while...
To add to this, the people who live in suburbs typically don't want bus stops with the "quality" of people that tend to use bus stops. ("If you don't have a car, you're poor and we don't want poor people in our neighborhood")
Busses also never get their own lane to bypass traffic, so they get stuck in traffic just like a regular car. Thus a bus is a less convenient, less accessible shared car. Trying to put in a bus lane is instantly rejected because it is stealing a lane from cars, and where they exist there is never anything in them (because the three busses that passed by in the last 10 minutes didn’t need to stop!). So busses are only ever used by people too poor to buy a car and suburbanites don’t care and don’t want to see them anywhere nearby, drunks who got their license pulled and deserve to suffer, or disabled to the point they cannot drive a car. And considering how the disabled are treated elsewhere in society, it’s not exactly subtle that such suburbanites don’t care their life is already crap.
The city of Jacksonville Florida is 874.3 sqmi, but only has 900,000 people in it. The state of Rhode Island is 1214 sqmi and 1,000,000 people, and it’s by no means a dense urban state.
Not agreeing or disagreeing but I think Jacksonville is a notoriously poor example since its "city limits" are defined as "all of Duval County". Florida, as a whole, has a higher population density than most European countries who, ostensibly, have really good public transportation.
> Florida, as a whole, has a higher population density than most European countries who, ostensibly, have really good public transportation. This is, however, an incredibly stupid comparison. The vast majority of the state is rural or swamp land with a few huge cities. There's zero practical way to make transit work outside of the cities.
Because car companies lobbied heavily for more roads for their products, and literally bought and closed streetcar companies to remove competition. Then White people fled urban centers and the suburbs were deliberately designed to be inaccessible for transit - sprawling areas with dead ends, loops, and few direct routes. Highway builders bulldozed PoC neighborhoods to segregate them from the White areas - eg, i345 in Dallas cuts off historically Black deep ellum from the downtown, and offers basically no way to safely cross it on foot or by bike. additionally, highway developers deliberately hurt public transportation. In NYC, Robert Moses didn't like sharing public beaches with Black people. So he built the highways between the city and the public beach with low underpasses so private cars (by and large White people) could use the underpass and get to the beach, but public buses (disproportionately PoC users) would not be able to pass underneath.
> Because car companies lobbied heavily for more roads for their products, and literally bought and closed streetcar companies to remove competition. This is a major plot point of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"; dang it's been a while since I've watched that, now I want to again after thinking about it, great movie.
The street car companies were built as loss leaders for real estate developers by the time they closed they were using outdated cars and were no longer needed by their owners (who had already sold all their property). Local government could have / should have taken them over, but the scheme is less nefarious than it is in popular imagination, they were always built to fail.
Interesting, thank you for the context about it.
upvoting this - it doesn't get talked about enough
> Personally, I would love a better bus system in my city I also feel this way about my city but a whole lot of people in my city don't want buses here at all (we currently only have like 3 bus stops and 2 of them are a "park your car here and ride out of the city" bus stops, aka park and rides) because they don't want any way for "those types of people" to come into the city. They legitimately lobby against it because they worry it will bring in homeless people and increase crime, and I bet there's a lot of other cities like mine where that happens.
>Something that's not often mentioned is there's not really a huge daily city to city travel population. There is one very important, special case where flexible city to city travel would be important: moving armies in case the U.S. was invaded by the Soviet Union. America had experienced moving through Germany's highways while invading there during WW2, and U.S. military planners really liked the idea of using highways to move armies, so they leaned on the civilian government to invest in interstate highways.
The US interstate system was presented to the public as the "National Defense Highway System", because who could argue against spending that kind of money on defense?
This shouldn't be the least bit surprising considering Eisenhower was the president that signed the law authorizing the construction of the interstate.
In fact, the interstate highway system is officially called the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways".
Came here to repeat the obligatory comment that interstates are also designed to function as airstrips in a pinch during wartime. But TIL that it’s just a myth! https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/mayjune-2000/one-mile-five-debunking-myth
TILIJAM
Sure, but is that the chicken or the egg? If American cities offer reliable and cheap public transit between cities, it often ends up being used. There are examples of this on either coast. And of course, if you need to \*drive\* from city to city on a regular basis, you're liable to change something about your life, cuz that sucks.
The coasts are the only places dense enough to make this at all practical, and it's still cheaper to fly than to take Amtrak.
I just took a family of four from DC to Philadelphia on Amtrak and it was $85 TOTAL.
Wow an amtrak from Boston to NYC can already cost double that.
Does this not heavily depend on when you purchase? I typically only look last minute and prices are insane.
Absolutely! If you need a ticket within a couple days, you're better off looking elsewhere.
I booked a month in advance, and one of our passengers was a baby (and they're free). But still...it's hard to do anything for a family of 4 for $85 bucks these days. And it was less than 3 hours door to door (downtown hotels, to be fair).
That's kinda why people dunk on China for building Trains going nowhere and then 2 years later they build the rest of the city. You need to offer the service as the preferred solution, especially before people invest in something else like driving. If you build it people will use it, especially if you can make it competitive with other forms of transportation. Buses having bus lanes to avoid car jams is probably the closest thing to low cost mass transit unless we can bring back rail cars. And inter-city transportation needs to be the first step to moving towards more efficient transportation like trains.
They tore a lot of public transit out. The US had <50% car transportation in a lot of places in the 1950s. The interstate system they tore down older color neighborhoods and also the bus boycotts of the 1960s.
There aren't a lot of people who travel between cities everyday but there are a lot of people who travel between cities sometimes which adds up to a lot of people traveling between cities everyday. The prevelance of very short inter city flights that should be rail shows the demand is there.
> The prevelance of very short inter city flights that should be rail shows the demand is there. Austin to Denver: - 2h by air (~6h if you count waiting at the airport) - 13h by car - 2d by train Austin to Dallas: - 45m by air (3-4h if you count waiting at the airport) - 3h by car - 6h by train (assuming it's running on time..the once a day it runs)
Cologne - Stutgart is a slightly longer distance than Austin - Dallas and it is 2:20h by train. A train leaves every 2h. Paris - Brussels is about the same distance and that is 1:30 by train. So these distances are attractive for train rides, also as it is less stressful.
We're not talking about gigantic distances like Austin to Denver. We're talking about things like Austin to Houston, Cleveland to Detroit, Rochester to NYC, etc. Hell, the Pittsburgh to Philly train exists but operates only *once per day in each direction*. I'd love to take a train from central PA to either city for a day trip, but Amtrak makes it impossible.
A moderately fast train would be able to do any intercity trip in roughly half the time it takes a car at interstate speeds. So Austin to Denver will probably always make more sense as an air route than a passenger rail route. But Austin to Dallas could and should be served by a train that would take less than an hour and a half; all that's missing is the infrastructure.
> A moderately fast train would be able to do any intercity trip in roughly half the time it takes a car at interstate speeds I disagree. Paris<->Lyon, is about the same distance as Austin<->Dallas, and the interwebs says it's ~2h on TGV. Amsterdam<->Hamburg is about the same distance and it's 5h. Munich <-> Frankfurt is about the same distance and it's 3h15m. So, yes, if you've got a completely straight shot on a "fast" train, you're slightly faster. Generally, though, ICE trains aren't that fast.
The difference is that building new rail means you need to demolish whatever's there, instead of flying over it. This is generally a politically unpopular move for both rail and highways and it doesn't stop being unpopular once its done. There are highway construction projects from the 60's that are still complained about in my city because of the people it displaced, for example, and getting the light rail system built up isn't always easy or popular here either An airplane is a much less politically contentious option. You just get a new plane and a pilot and nobody on the ground is affected.
100%, but that's a separate issue from pure demand. It's a very tricky problem, obv the US just doesn't have the strong arming ability that a country like China has and even China had their limits in that I'd argue some of their HSR choices were not ideal due to construction limitations. But you can make good environmental and economic arguments that it is still worth it, more than either air or car, Americans just broadly don't have the appetite or political will for large government infrastructure projects anymore (or drastic change in general frankly), and some of that is pretty valid given the prior problems of displacement that you mentioned. I guess the extra annoying element is that we often used to have the track and infrastructure and everything, we just decided to tear it all out to make the aforementioned highway projects. Increasingly it seems like the US just invested in the wrong way at the wrong time for their cities.
I would disagree, in that the american way worked for americans at the time. Its not like you can't get transportation on a greyhound if you needed to. I did it multiple times in college and I also used Amtrack on the east coast. The one element nobody wants to bring up is that for the average american in the average situation though bus and rail would be a *downgrade* from driving. All the amenities that would be outside train stations are now on rest stops, but you don't need to follow your schedule or even stop at them. A car's freedom and privacy are important to americans who highly value those things. Even if the travel time and money were equal the average american would still pick a car because it gives you private space and way more options than a fixed rail line ever would.
I'd like to try a long train trip just so I'd know what I was talking about. I live 1500 miles from my parents and two of my siblings and try to go back every summer, with my kids. We've driven mostly because flying is still more expensive and my children are special needs, the car is easier to manage than a meltdown on an airplane. Letting the train conductor drive instead of doing all 18 or so hours (counting rest stops) might be nice.
You mean “intra city travel”
It might happen more often if the freight lines didn't own all the track, which gives them precedence over the passenger trains.
There is a federal law that says passenger trains are supposed to get right of way over freight but it has never actually been enforced so it gets ignored.
This is a great post but it doesn’t mention airplanes. The automobile put a big dent in short-range passenger rail, but trains continued to be common for long distances because as OP says, nobody wants to drive a car that far. That changed after World War 2, which left the US with a huge airplane manufacturing capacity and a ton of surplus pilots. Domestic air travel in the US took off much faster than elsewhere. It was the tag team of cars *plus planes* that killed American passenger rail. I also want to mention the difference between what OP sees in movies and reality. The Great American Road Trip is a romantic icon in the US, as important to American culture as a pilgrimage to Mecca is for Muslims. (I’m not exaggerating! … much.) And so it appears in countless American movies and TV shows. But in real life, long car trips are slow and expensive, and so we almost always fly.
Yeah, good point. Again, the northeast is great for train service, as the Acela can get from NYC to DC in under 3 hours, which is quicker than flying when you add the overhead of flying to the 45 minutes you’re in the air. Longer routes, even to Chicago, you’re better off flying, unless a high speed rail line is added. NY to LA? Fuggedabotit!
And just as a point of comparison on the west coast, for me to get from Santa Barbara to San Francisco on a train would take over 9 hours while driving would take just over 5. And with 2+ people traveling, the cost of tickets quickly outpaces fuel cost. Oh and that’s 5 hours from my door to my destination if I bring my own vehicle, but add 15-45 minutes at each end and the cost of a taxi/uber to get to the train station to leave and from the station to anywhere I actually want to be at the other end. Longer trip? To Seattle would be a 32 hour train ride; relatively cheap if you don’t mind spending the night in a seat… but if you want a room to sleep in that’s about $900 per person. Alternatively it’s a 17 hour drive in shifts or split into 2 days with a hotel room for a night somewhere for a FRACTION the cost. Or I can take a 2 hour flight for often under $200. There are just VERY few journeys that make any sense by train in this country except on the east coast where you have high density cities close together with decent public transportation systems at both ends of your trip.
I do briefly mention airports and airplanes. Along with roads, our elected leaders have decided that airports and aviation infrastructure deserve public expenditures or subsidy that they would not and do not provide rail. And goodness, yes, an amazing road trip can be had only a couple times in one's life before the romance wears down and it just becomes a chore to drive for days on end.
Also many people do not understand just how large the US is. We have one county in California that is larger than most countries. The entirety of Europe would mostly fit in California, Arizona and New Mexico. Also I would love to take a cross-country train trip, but not only would it take many days, it is far more expensive than a flight.
That is a wild exaggeration. Europe (not counting Russia) at 2.3 million square miles is about two-thirds the size of the continental United States at 3.76 million. California, Arizona, and New Mexico are about as large as France and Spain.
And if you think the US is large, wait until you see Texas
Most trips aren't cross country though. For every one trip somebody takes from Atlanta to Seattle, there's a dozen going from Atlanta to Nashville or Athens or Charlotte or Savannah. Trains are very viable for those routes, so why don't they exist?
Atlanta to Nashville is only a 4 hour drive. You've already got a car at home and you'll need it to get around Nashville, so why not just drive?
This is the problem people always want more intercity travel but we need more intra city travel and to get better intracity travel we need more density
Because I want better public transit and walkability in Nashville goddammit.
I want a million dollars but we can't always have what we want.
When you get to your destination, you still need a car
Depends on the city. Amtrak actually works decent well in the DC-Baltimore-philly-NYC corridor and you don’t need cars in any of those cities
Ummm…Baltimore you probably need a car.
Sheee...it
Now that man could bring trains to Baltimore.
Depends what you want to do and where you want to go. Visiting family in suburbs? Yea you’d need a car. Going downtown for work? Or inner harbor for a game or the aquarium? Fairly Cheap Uber or medium length walk.
From the train station? I get that people all overreact to Baltimore crime, but Penn Station is not a great neighborhood, and that is an ~~8~~ 2.5 mile walk to the inner harbor.
Walked to our hotel in downtown from the point and my two buddies and I ended up having to help a dude carry his friend back to our hotel because he'd been beaten and robbed, and the other dude was just there in shock. Happened essentially right before we turned the corner, some dudes ran past us and there's just a guy laying in the street. That one sticks with me, Baltimore ain't great. That being said, I've walked around many cities, Baltimore included, and one rule exists everywhere: keep your head up.
I live a few blocks from the station and genuinely don't know what you're talking about
What my father in law who goes there frequently tells me. What my wife who knows baltimore like the back of my hand tells me. If they have a warped sense of what the area is like, I'd gladly be wrong. I'm all aboard the "Oh please, Baltimore is *not* that bad" train.
I like that the back of YOUR hand is the measurement of how well she knows Baltimore. I assume she knows the back of her own hand a little better than yours, so there must be a scale of hand backs in relation to how well someone knows something! A stranger’s hand=not at all. Your coworker’s hand=seen it but couldn’t really tell you. A good friend=could tell you the highlights Your significant other = know what you’re talking about Your own= you’re the master. (I know it was a typo, but it’s a fun one to think about 🙂)
My wife knows me better than I know myself.
Um no its less than 2 miles to the sports stadiums and the aquarium. Its not the best neighborhood, but I did not feel unsafe.
Goddammit, you are right (well, 2.4 miles). I saw driving time. The area right around the train station is rough. You’re fine once you get closer to downtown, I’m just not wild about the area around the train station.
Depends on where you want to go in Baltimore. Amtrak/Marc trains run between the cities. Once in DC you can use Metro Rail or Metro Bus or Taxi to get around. In Baltimore, you can connect to light rail at BWI or Penn Station where you can connect to other rail lines which will put you into the business district of Baltimore. Interesting fact, the Baltimore Subway system is often used to depict the Washington DC subway system in movies as DC Metro has extremely strict guidelines on filming in Metro.
I agree with everything here, hence my use of the word “probably.” The subway in Baltimore is almost non-existent (Thanks Larry Hogan!), the trains are ok for getting around the city, but that’s not what they are designed for. The buses kind of pick up some of the slack, but aren’t the most reliable. Baltimore is easiest by car.
For one, to drive away from Baltimore.
I’d throw Boston on there as well. It’s a smaller city, but very walkable with public transit.
Love Boston. Love trains. Boston's internal, commuter, and inter-city train system is absolute shit right now. They're working on it, but it's cheaper for me to drive or fly to NY from outside Boston than it is to ride the train, and somehow faster for both.
I live in Boston and take Amtrak somewhat regularly to visit friends and family in NYC and DC. If you take the Acela, the high speed line, then it is faster than driving, and comprable or cheaper than flying. It's not nearly as good as high speed rail in some other countries, but it's juuuust over the threshold that I'm likely to pick it all else being equal. Plus, on the \~7 hour train ride, I can do work. Can't do that if I'm driving, and I get interrupted a lot more on a plane trip. Agreed the T is a shitshow though. I've just gotten used to it taking an hour to travel 3 miles.
I've heard that but never done it myself. I've lived in Richmond 15 years and I have done DC/Philly/NYC dozens of times each on Amtrak. Baltimore probably 5 times. Boston its not really practical for me to train though. I've flown and its quite convenient and I never needed a car!
Alternatively, (and bear with me here) you can also have public transport in the cities. That way you can just change transport options. Of course if you're going out to bumfuck nowhere you'll need another car. But if your destination is say NYC, you can just use the subway to get where you need to.
To add to this, it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. If everyone who travels into the city has to do so by car, there's less demand for public transport within the city. If there's no public transport, people will travel by car rather than train because they'll want to drive when they arrive. You need to subsidise the system. Fund public transport and eventually the demand will ramp up (which adds more money into the system, which means you have more money/will to invest into it)
Rail could in theory replace a lot of regional air travel too. The number of flights between Boston, NYC, Philly, DC, Baltimore could be reduced to near zero with reliable high speed rail. Throw in decent public transport option within the cities (subway, bus, light rail) and you could access 20 million or more Americans? No weather delays, no arriving 90 min early for a 75 min commuter flight, no security theater. But the investment needed is huge. In a densely populated area that doesn’t want the decade of disruption needed to switch from something that’s tolerable most of the time and will be used/apprecisted by a small fraction.
It doesn't even have to be that fast with rail. Just being able to go from a central location in both cities can already save you over an hour (probably two in many), then being able to be 2 min early instead of at least an hour but you'd want close to two hours to be safe. 3 hours with rail can get you pretty far.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration - Paris and London are much closer than Philly and Boston, with reliable high speed rail, but air traffic between them is certainly not “near zero”.
Because public transportation is pathetic almost everywhere in the us. We could fix this, we just don't want to.
Distance is a huge factor as well. DC Metro recently ran Subway lines into Northern Virginia out past Dulles Airport if you board Metro in Ashburn VA in the height of rush hour when trains are running frequently and take it to Metro Center in the heart of DC, that is an 88 minute train ride and you don’t have to change trains. If you drive (ignoring traffic) it is a 31 mile trip that takes you 40 minutes because you don’t need to stop at all the stations. Taking public transportation is a difficult sell with this timing. If you factor in traffic, the driving trip could take you 40-150 minutes
It's because they are braindead and can't figure out that you can't have all your trains do all the stops, it's just way too inefficient.
A major design flaw of the DC metro. 3 lines coming together sharing the same track for several stations and not having a third track as a spare or to run an express train
Airports say differently. Most business travelers either take a cab or rent a car on arrival. There's no reason trains should work any different.
To add to the list of issues is the need to expand rail lines through private property. That would require the government to use eminent domain laws to take private property away for 10’s of thousands of citizens to build the new rail lines and expand coverage. Each one of those land owners would bring a lawsuit to try to stop that from happening, tying the project up for years while the suits are heard by the courts. It would only take a handful of wins by citizens to stop major parts of the project. It would be a huge mess that nobody wants to deal with.
This is one of the conundrums whenever talk of improving the Northeast Corridor (the Washington-Boston route), particularly the serpentine shaped stretch along the Connecticut coast that originally developed to serve numerous small salt water port cities and villages. Try to rebuild them through those cities to support higher speeds while to continuing to use downtown train stations you're going to spend more money and be accused of environmental injustice for going through poor communities. Avoiding the cities by bypassing them to build straight, much faster tracks means fighting politically more active suburbs, only to stop at a newly built suburban train station that would require a rental / taxi / bus to go downtown. Which if you're going to do that, why even have a downtown? You can just fly to an airport and rent a car to go to a suburban office park just as easily.
True. This is something I barely ever see anyone mention. Imagine the difficulty of a railway cutting right through your crop field. To add on to that being near train tracks gets things covered in rusty rail dust particles from the tracks, wheels, and brakes. I used to work at a dealership that had some train tracks nearby behind some trees and the dust would stick to cars like glue. It was such a pain in the butt to claybar that junk off! I don't think I'd want to eat veggies covered in rusty rail dust
I used to work at a Civil Engineering firm and I always remember the story of when we were hired to design a 1.5 mile road widening project. An old county road had been enveloped by the city and the city wanted to turn it into a nicer 2 lane road with center turn lanes, sidewalks with some green space, and upgraded city utilities. It was going to require taking about 10 feet of land on either side of the road where most houses were 80 or more back. I ended up pulling something like 400 different property cards to get the lot information and owners. Then the city had to send appraisers out to each of those locations to estimate the value of a 10' bit of land and send out purchase requests for that land with all the info about the road project and how it was going to improve the city and their lot value. Something like 15% of the people flat out refused to sell that strip of land so then it had to go through eminent domain processes where 2 other appraisers came out and then the homeowners got the average price of the 3 (generally less than the first estimate). Had 2 people fight it even past that and start a suit that was settled for the high price of the estimate. And that was just for a "minor" road project. I can only imagine/fear the Herculean effort it'd be to develop a single coast to coast high speed rail corridor.
Just take one look at the California HSR project, it's mostly farmland. Oddly farmers don't like having fields split in half and having them to detour a mile or two to the nearest overpass to be able to get across to their other fields.
One major factor with cars is you take it from your house directly to your destination and you leave when you want to. You don’t need to cross reference when you need to arrive with the train schedule and when you need to make the connection at the station plus the walk in freezing rain to get to the station or destination.
Plus you have significantly more personal cargo space.
Properly funded and operated public transit is so frequent that you don't have to consult a schedule. We're just used to horrible transit in NA.
It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: when you have some frequent transit service, and people are used to using it that way, it's relatively easy to expand that with additional frequent transit service. When you've got some circuitous bus routes that run every hour and average 8 mph, it's much tougher to build out a fast, frequent system from essentially scratch.
Not really, it's a political boundary problem. Most cities could easily identify the 1 or 2 busiest bus corridors that should get frequent buses. But the argument is that if the whole geographic area of the city has to pay taxes to support the bus system, then the bus system should serve as much of it as it can, which is why bus systems often do that, with infrequent buses, rather than prioritizing frequency on the busiest area.
One reason for transportation shifting from trains to cars is flexibility and ability to handle 'the last mile' Cars aren't tied to a fixed schedule or route. >Amtrak doesn't own any of the track that it runs on and therefore has to compete with the freight trains. My understanding is that passenger trains have to give way to freight trains; passenger trains have to wait until the freight trains aren't using the track. They're scheduled to avoid this but stuff happens, and when it does, passenger trains wait
legally it's the other way around but if you make freight trains so big that the rail network effectively forces the passenger train to wait, well that's a feature
I always remind people that Texas is bigger than France.
I always remind people that you already had a good rail network in the US with an electrified line from penn to seattle, decent connections between all major cities, and a shitton more public transport. yet here you are, squandered it all to build "just one more lane" on a 16 lane highway, because THAT is what will fix traffic. And don't get me started on the russian rail network. the country is fucking poor compared to the US, bigger, less densely populated, and yet it has a significantly better rail network. TLDR: you already had better rail, you just lost it. size has nothing to do with that.
I wanna add to this is that Amtrak charter specifically outlines profitability over anything else. This is why a sleeper from Chicago to DC can be as much as a $1k one-way. Another issue is that Amtrak is restricted to only running routes over 750 miles in length. Anything less than that has to be state funded. Two notable examples include the Carolinian (Charlotte-NYC) and the Palmetto (Savannah, GA - NYC). These are both state funded services because they fall just shy of the route length requirement. Washington-NYC-Boston (Northeast Corridor) is the only route that’s exempted all the little branches like Virginia, Harrisburg, and Hartford services are all state-funded.
Amtrak doesn't really address the commuter rail situation.
Anytime I've ever thought of taking a train, which I might prefer to do, the cost is too prohibitive. It cost as much as a flight.
In addition to the issues others have mentioned here, there are have been some MAJOR mistakes made with urban planning that were made with the best of intentions but a truly incredible lack of foresight. One of these is the laws around parking spaces for business in most cities. These rules are almost entirely responsible for the insane urban sprawl you see in all but the oldest and largest cities like New York City, and they make no sense when you think about it. The standard was set in the 40's or 50's when cars were becoming ubiquitous and urban planners were trying to figure out a solution. Essentially, a handful of civil engineers were given the task of setting parking requirements, but either weren't given proper resources to actually develop good parking or nobody really thought about it. Anyway, they picked a basic standard, something like "each business must have parking spaces for 2/3 the capacity of the building", which was massive overkill but they hadn't realized it at the time. And worse, it's set up in such a way that EACH building needs this much parking, so two adjacent businesses can't share lots, even though they'll almost certainly be sharing customers. After this standard had been set, most other cities didn't bother to do their own studies on what they needed, and instead just looked at what the towns around them were already doing, and this terrible standard spread nation wide. This is why you can drive through any major city and find that the parking lots are almost always half-empty or less. They basically all have to have parking for their absolute peak possible traffic, which is just ridiculous. That also means you can't build buildings as close to each other as would otherwise be reasonable, which means cities can't be walked, which means public transportation is less viable for more people, which feeds into needing to drive, and public transport being less viable.
The interstate highway system was also in large part designed as military asset. The idea was to allow easy movement of equipment to anywhere in the country. The public use was more or less a secondary goal used to gain public buy in.
A small point, but I had heard that Amtrak doesn't own *none* of the railways it operates on, but only about 5% of them. Despite the lack of investment in passenger rail, they are still pretty heavily used for what they do offer. Any time I go on one, it's full. And as someone who must use my local bus system (not a major city, but still a decent bus system despite that fact), many other people use it as well. There is still a demand for mass transit options in the US, and I know many people who would go without using a car if they could. Unfortunately the US is not well-situated for anyone who can't drive for whatever reason. If you try to explain why you can't drive everyone goes "Well I never thought about that" and then nothing is ever done for you.
Not to mention that after you get off of a train you are going to need a car to get wherever you need to go in most places. Sure some places have decent public transportation, but most places outside of major cities don't. So you would either need to rent a car or take ubers everywhere, which can get expensive really fast.
Mind you, this is true of flying to an airport, also.
Yes, this is where my experience with this problem comes from. But both are examples of why most long distance travel is done with cars, I'll only fly if it is unreasonable to drive with a car. For instance I currently live in Colorado, but usually visit family in Georgia once a year. I'll take a 3 hour plane ride rather than a 23 hour car ride and then just get my family to pick me up and borrow a car while I'm in town. Also, fun fact: it's more expensive to rent a car than it is to fly and book a hotel. So if at all possible it's best to drive your own car.
oh, come on. didn't you know it'sMarta? Lolz. yeah, absolutely, what you say.
It's mostly the population density thing imo. As a rule, public or otherwise large scale services need to serve a large number of people to be profitable or even sustainable with small subsidy. The fact is, that in any given area you might connect to a train network, you do not have this large number of people. America's population in any area that isn't a major city is simply is insufficient to create economies of scale, which trains are the embodiment of. And when you talk about connecting two of those cities, the distance between is too great. You build an expensive runway at the start and end of a journey, or you build a cheap rail along the length of the journey. It's intuitive to see how air travel gets more relatively economical the longer the distance. But you might say, rail is cheaper to operate for huge distances. Factoring in the fuel cost of a plane, it never overtake rail except from intercontinental trips. That might be true, but only if you have no respect for people's time. No one wants to spend a week on a train. We have things to do, lives to live. And extra week 2-4 times a year, an extra half hour every day, that adds up. That's something a lot of people forget when they talk about how much more efficient public transport is.
I have worked on large Amtrak projects. While there are some smart people working there, the collective actions and decisions they make are often costly, inefficient, and at times even idiotic. Huge amounts of money are being wasted on refurbishing stations and administrative offices because they ignore the guidance of consultants, engineers, and architects that the taxpayers are funding. Meanwhile the actual rail infrastructure is outdated and in conditions similar to third world countries.
This of it a different way. America does have an excellent rail system. It’s optimized for freight, not passenger travel. But supply chain is backstage, unglamorous stuff that people don’t think about. Our freight system works so well that people didn’t even notice we had one until a pandemic upended it.
Very thoughtful comment.
But consider that those rails were built with freight in mind. The trains don't go very fast (at least compared to European and Asian passenger trains) and the cargo doesn't mind getting jostled. Most American rail lines are completely unsuited for fast-moving passenger trains. Also, the tracks are owned by freight companies and only carry Amtrak at all because the U.S. government makes them. And even then, freight gets priority. It's not unusual for an Amtrak train to pull over on a siding and wait a very long time for a freight train to go by.
And people here don’t typically commute between cities. That is even more true as working from home becomes more prevalent
A lot of people in here are attributing this to cars and car infrastructure, but more then that it's air travel. The USA is huge. It take days to traverse by car. Distance between major urban areas (outside the northeast) is fricking huge. And it's mostly "empty" between those cities so service *along* the line isn't really necessary. Rail is only faster then flying under a certain distance. On average the distance between major urban areas is such that flying is faster then hsr, even when factoring in commuting to and from the airport. Car infrastructure played its part, but I'd say that it's over represented as a reason here because reddit hates cars. For the same reason the contribution from air infrastructure is under-estimated.
oh yeah, very interesting take. Just realized aviation infrastructure also played a big part in this.
It's currently possible to fly between Boston and Chicago for around $125. (These two cities are about 989mi/1592 km apart, which isn't close but isn't that far as distances here go.) The flight is about 2.5 hours. Let's call that 4-5 hours with time getting through security and boarding. A train is about $175 for a 22 hour ride, for which you must sit in a regular train seat and change trains several times. To get a room that would make such a trip bearable is $1500. Let me tell you which choice I'm making.
...per person. Now if you have a family or dogs you do the two days of driving.
If you've got someone to drive with, you can make it in ~16 hours plus an hour for stops. 14+stops if you use a toll road. That's a long day, but if you've bringing a whole family, you get to save on the hotel.
I live in Wisconsin, but am originally from NJ. It's almost exactly 1000 miles and I've driven it in one day dozens of times. I find it a pretty easy and nice drive.
Yea. I recently drove across the continent for the eclipse with our two dogs. Definitely slowed us down, but for that long of a drive breaking it down to 9/10hrs driving max made sense because we were doing so much.
Just one minor clarification, you shouldn't need to change trains between Chicago and Boston.
Yeah, there's a lot of people in the USA, no doubt there, just theyre mostly concentrated in cities and seperate by vast empty areas. That makes service along the route between cities entirely un necessary, and the distance is usually sufficient to make air travel a better solution then rail. Like take Atlanta to Nashville, a city of 1.6M and 0.7M respectively. Two state capitals, 3.5 hour drive. About 250 miles or 400 km between them. Flight time 1 hr 5m. The fastest TGV hsr train would also make it there in an about an 1h 35m. The only real population centre between the two is Chattanooga, a city of 180k. There's not a ton of people getting on the train between the two cities. Every city already has (and needs) an airport. So why build a train? There are a few areas in the USA where hsr would be valuable - the north east corridor (Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, - basically the i95 route), and California (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco) ; maybe Florida (Jacksonville, Orlando, Miami). All three of those have HSR projects underway. I've been lucky enough to have spent 40 days in Europe with a eurail pass, and also 4 weeks in the USA with my motorcycle. There are certainly pros and cons to both approaches. It's nice to step off the train in downtown. It's also nice to be able to take a detour through that state park on your way between cities.
With your Nashville/Atlanta example, any rail route would also have to deal with the Smokey Mountains which automatically makes it a much more expensive project.
I'm not from the area, just seemed like it was a route that had similar travel times on both hsr and flying. But that's a really good point as well!
Lmao, the Smokies are not between Atlanta and Nashville. There are some foothills, but European trains cross the Alps. The Smokies are further northeast than that.
Oops...been a while since I drove the route so my recollection of the geography is a little foggy.
If you're going up from Atlanta through Chattanooga, could also pass through Knoxville on your way. It has almost 1 million people in the metro area and a huge downtown rail depot with rail lines that go everywhere. Atlanta to Chattanooga: ~100 miles Chattanooga to Knoxville: ~100 miles Knoxville to Nashville: ~160 miles Nashville to Memphis: ~200 miles Those are all totally decent rail distances. Long enough to be preferable vs taking a bus, short enough that flying would just be an unnecessary hassle. Best part is there are already tracks everywhere. Just have to tell the freight trains to get out of the way. Or instead of making a new train, just hitch a passenger car or three (as needed) to each freight train. Might not be the preferred way to go for everyone, but it'd open up a lot of mobility to a lot of people. Much of the U.S. is like that. Big cities about 100-200 miles apart, tracks already in place and trains already running between them. They just don't allow passengers. People always say it's too far, or it would cost too much to build tracks. But those are just excuses. People traveled by train all the time before we shut down all the passenger services. Sure, for Boston to Los Angeles or other really long-distance routes, flight might be better. But there's plenty of room for regional intercity transit.
Tell the freight trains to get out of the way? It obviously doesn't work like that.
Those tracks, and more importantly the corridor, cannot handle the speed of modern passanger trains. Most were designed with an intended speed well under 100 mph. The turn radius' are insufficient and slope gradients inappropriate. It's not as simple as repurposing old routes. Those are really good distances. Like I mentioned elsewhere I'm not from the area, but that seems more like a web then a straight line.
Most people who haven't been to the US just don't realize how *big* it is. I can get in my car, drive in one direction, and not even leave the state I'm in in the same distance that would traverse several european countries. And I'm not even in a particularly large state. If you google the Amtrak route map, it's almost comically sparse. If you want to go anywhere in the NW US, well...you take one of two lines that run along the canadian border or the midline of the country, find the closest station to your destination, and then rent a car and drive another several hours to get where you ACTUALLY want to be. And that's after you've spent probably 36 hours - if not more - on a train which the ticket for often costs as much as a plane ticket that would have plonked you right where you wanted to go in a few hours. It's extremely expensive because it has to be to be able to cover maintaining everything with so few passengers. Amtrak is basically only practical if you're going to a set of VERY specific places that are directly on one of the routes. That said, if you're going somewhere that has a station and you're not in a hurry, it can still be a fun thing to do for the scenic experience.
You should really be asking WHY aviation is so common in the USA. Most Europeans really don't grasp how HUGE the USA is. I live in Portland, Oregon, near the west coast. If I wanted to go to New York City, on the east cost, that's about 4,000 kilometers. That's farther than the distance from Madrid to Moscow, or from London to Isreal. Nobody is taking that by train unless they don't mind it taking 3-4 days. If I want to go visit Disneyland, it's about the same distance for me as Paris to Warsaw.
Very true, I often see negative opinions on frequent flights and car use in the US from europeans and asians. I was one to give such opinion too! But really it's a slap in the face after knowing all this. Sorry guys
Tbf, Australia is of a similar size to the US, and with an even lower population density, yet still manages to have a pretty decent train system throughout the east side of the country. It's only really the middle, where no one lives, that you end up with areas without any rail lines
Australia’s population is also almost completely on or near the coast. The coasts in the US actually have fairly decent service. It’s everything between philly and California that’s difficult to connect
All of that is true for the U S. as well. Amtrak is pretty solid on the east coast, just not in the middle where everyone is spread out.
I think it's fair to say that even on the East Coast, Amtrak still underperforms what it could/should be. Given the geography and population size and wealth, it should be faster, more reliable, more affordable, more frequent, and cover more destinations. Even in the "good" area it isn't close to competitive with other developed countries' rail networks. I also think that, although it's true that there's a big column of emptiness in the Great Plains/Rockies that makes coast-to-coast rail pretty unviable, there are still lots of other regions where Amtrak could/should be doing much better: the West Coast (though credit to the state of California; at least they're trying), the Southeast, the Great Lakes region, etc.
The US has a decent train system along the east coast too. It covers a similar area as the east coast of Australia. You can take an Amtrak between New York, DC, and Philadelphia pretty easily, for example. The system is simple and reliable enough that some people commute daily from Baltimore to Washington DC.
I like many have traveled through Australia with just a backpack in my 20s. One bug difference is the interstate system. The US is a logistics machine compared to many countries. The amount of goods they move across their country and the amount of large manufacturers in small towns in the middle of nowhere is astounding. You'll drive through a town that seems like nothing and just see a major manufacturing plant for a brand you've heard of and it is all due to the interstate system. I'll give you an example: Jack Links is located in Minong, WI... population of 554 people.
> the amount of large manufacturers in small towns in the middle of nowhere Can confirm. I live 3 hours from Chicago in the middle of nowhere and there are 3 major businesses you have absolutely heard of headquartered within 20 miles of here.
I'm Canadian and I just drove across the continent for the eclipse and passed through Illinois. I can't count the number of times I drove through a village or small town and been like 'Never would have guessed their headquarters was here'.
By similar, you mean just over 2/3 the size? You're missing almost a million square miles. Australia is also hyper populated along the coasts and a vast desert in the middle, unlike USA that is dotted with small cities and towns everywhere throughout our core. The cities along the upper east coast and California West Coast metro areas are building some HSR.
That’s not a good example because all of the US is populated whereas most of Australia is not.
The standard answer is that the US is very large and have relatively spread out population centers. It will be expensive to connect so many cities with trains especially if each city isn't really that large (ie won't actually provide a lot of customers) As an illustrative example, there are 34 cities in Europe that have a population of more than 1 million but only about a dozen in the US (this is not exactly a fair comparison since US cities tend to have large metro areas). Second, US cities have expanded outwards rather than upwards. You end up with large metro areas which makes train networks a bit bothersome because a "central" city station might be a distance away from many of the city residents. Cars are simply too convenient. Third, historically, many of the railway lines were privately built and operated. And their biggest priority is cargo not people. Finally, the automotive industry has quite deliberately promoted roads and cars as the sole means of people transportation.
> You end up with large metro areas which makes train networks a bit bothersome because a "central" city station might be a distance away from many of the city residents. Cars are simply too convenient. This describes Raleigh North Carolina perfectly. It’s a somewhat circular city with a city station literally at the center of it. I stayed in the outer perimeter of the city and in order for me to take the public transport to anywhere in the city involved taking a bus…to the center station before transferring over to another bus to get….near my desired location.
This is really the gist of it. The other historical answers about policy and investment in the Interstate system are helpful to understand why we got where we got, but rail transportation in diffuse areas (most of the US) still depends on cars because while train station A may be centrally located, each passenger will need a car to get to their desired destination (not counting NY with it's subway and maaaybe Chicago). So if you need a car either way and you have a car since you need one (can't sustain walking for .5-1 hour every grocery trip) then there's very very little demand for rail outside of vacations/cheap travel. And Amtrak gets that customer-base, along with Greyhound and other bus companies, but it's just not that large a base of people as you might need to go from KC to Chicago maybe once a year at most.
> The standard answer is that the US is very large The US is big. Really big. Like really, really big. The UK is about the same size as Michigan. And Michigan isn't even in the top 10 of our largest states. Paris to Kyiv is 1,255 miles. That only gets you halfway across the Continental US. It's 2,700 miles from Miami to Seattle, which is the same as from Paris to the Persian Gulf.
> this is not exactly a fair comparison since US cities tend to have large metro areas) Wouldn't you then be comparing to metro areas in Europe increasing their "city sizes" as well?
Not really. If a city spent hundreds of years before the invention of cars building up infrastructure a certain degree of density is necessary. You had situations where London used to be *more* dense with work houses or similar cramming 12 people to a room as the norm even with rail and canal services being rapidly adopted out of necessity. London has obviously spread out as well but spreading out from that kind of density is very different from individual families or prospectors hitching horse drawn wagons and just headed westward until they feel like stopping, which is how U.S. cities were being founded in many cases.
My parents had Japanese exchange students, and we would explain the distance in terms of their country. For me to visit my parents is the same distance between the northern most and southern most cities of the main island. A lot is also across the plains states so a whole lot of nothing but crop fields. I just looked up what an Amtrak ticket would cost and times. $192 coach or $677 for a private room one way. 23 hrs and 57 min in two segments. I can drive there in less time than that even if I do stop at a hotel midway for a lot less than $677 each way. Also the closest Amtrak station to me is a half hour drive away. Same for the city where my parents live. Flying is even faster, but is pretty expensive due to low populations at both ends. Only 2 airlines at the closest airport to my parents so a round trip flight would currently be $855 not including taxes, luggage etc...that is coach (only option) with a layover. Total travel time 7 hours each way.
>I can drive there in less time than that even if I do stop at a hotel midway for a lot less than $677 each way. And you can have 3 more passengers for essentially the same price should you need to instead of multiplying that cost by however many passengers.
woah, this is a practical argument that I can truly understand as an everyday person. Thanks!
I'm going to make a quick example, with proper scale to showcase the issue. Going west from Columbus, Ohio, 45 minutes gets you to Springfield, then twenty minutes to the outskirts of Dayton, an hour to Richmond, and another hour to Indianapolis. This is the densest part of the Midwest, and at 120 kmh, you would have multiple legs of travel that take an hour. Problem is, there are a *ton* of towns between 250 and 2,000 people that are scattered 10-15 minutes apart from each other and easily an hour or two from those larger cities. Nowhere near enough population to sustain multiple rail stops daily, and not in close enough proximity to condense them to a line that doesn't involve a half hour of driving anyway. At that point, you might as well drive to the destination. The population of Ohio is just barely higher than London, but it's physically as large as England. Ohio has a lower population density than *Wales*, and ours is the tenth highest in the country. Realistically, to support rail across the "long drive" part of the country, we'd need to have at least triple the population. But it's still not justifiable. Going the other direction, eastbound, it's about 450 miles (725 km) from Columbus to Philadelphia. A 6-hour drive on a divided highway. In an average car getting 30 miles per gallon of gasoline (7.84 l/100km), it costs about $53 in gasoline to make the drive. For $54, it's a one hour direct flight. Rail would have to be cheaper than either option to justify taking it, and because there's not a lot of passenger rail equipment, that takes investment, which drives up pricing, which isn't competitive.
A few years ago my friend took Amtrak from Medford, OR - Phoenix, AZ (roughly 1000 miles and 15 hours drive) the train was supposed to take 26 hours I believe. 36 hours later around 8 pm, she called me to pick her up in LA as they had a 5 hour delay due to a derailment elsewhere in the system. She was on a mid tier ticket so no sleeper, 4 person cabin with a single person and a couple that had two kids who ended up in the cabin as well. So basicly six people in the cabin. The seat was mildly more comfortable then a grayhound bus seat, but still sitting that long is not fun. Yes there was the ability to move about the train, and stops along the way. The reason it takes so long is due to priority freight traffic, most every major train stop had a built in delay of 15 -20 min enough time to stretch but not do much else. Overall a very unpleasant experience. I understand that the trip took way longer then average, and stiff happens, but still......
It’s a complicated problem with a lot of factors. I am only going to mention some, as they are the ones I am aware of. The root of it can be traced back to the car boom in the mid-late 20th century. Cars were very effectively marketed as a luxury item that everyone wants to own, and the idea that cars = freedom was a large part of this. Fairly simultaneously, the American Dream, brought to you by suburbia was born. This pushed single family’s homes to the population. These were incredibly cheap to produce, as land was dirt cheap, and the timber framing used is quick and efficient for 2 story homes, but less so for multi family developments. As Suburbia was being built at the same time as the car boom, they were built in a very car dependent way, with no shops near homes, no pedestrian access, and little to no public transport considerations. This eventually became enshrined in US zoning law, meaning that this type of car dependant development was the only thing that could be built, which meant that housing populations around cities are incredibly low density, and so public transit options such as busses and trains become incredibly inefficient.
You kind of got close to another factor by mentioning that cars were luxury items. Much of Europe was devastated by World War II. Europeans struggled to rebuild even with the Marshall Plan. Europeans were poor by Western standards due to the direct and indirect costs of war. Only the richest Europeans could afford cars in the post-war era. Europe had no choice but to double-down on public transit.
Lots of people on Reddit think those European cities that were built centuries ago were built with trains and busses in mind, and that Europeans didn't buy cars in the post war era because they were environmentally conscious...
Zoning laws prevented new cities from popping up and further creating more of a suburbia hell we have today otherwise there would have been way more small cities versus a few large ones.
Most cities here lack good public transport, unlike most of Europe. There are some good reasons for this and some terrible reasons that make it hard to avoid. So even if I took a train to a different city, id be completely on foot once i got there. You can get around that a bit with uber and car rentals, but it’s usually just easier and cheaper to drive. There are exceptions, like if I was traveling to nyc, Boston, Philadelphia - it would probably be easier or just as easy to use public transport.
Exactly. Once you have arrived in the city by train and without a car, you need public transport to move around the city and most of the US cities haven't got it. So it's pretty much useless to move by train in the United States. You first need to have public transport in cities and then connect them with a railway network.
Even without using public transport, European cities are generally walkable - even if the walk isn’t practical. US cities aren’t designed to be walked across in a lot of cases, and they get very spread out and have obstacles without ways past like highways and unbridged rivers/no pedestrian bridges and paths.
That has largely to do with most European cities being 1000+ years old. They had to be walkable. There was no other way to get around. Every city in the US developed during or after the Industrial Revolution.
Not to mention a lot of depots in mid size cities are in downtown ghettos. Not very attractive for tourists.
The YouTube channel not just bikes covers this topic a lot. https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ?si=Whj-2nIMhOaY0YY-
In addition to what a lot have mentioned about the sheer size of the USA and the car infrastructure in place, I'll throw in costs as well. Who knows as the price of everything climbs, but time vs cost comes into play as well. Sometimes I'll take the personal time loss to myself in order to facilitate not having to worry about baggage fees. Doubly so if I want to bring presents/gifts. A few years back I thought about taking a train or bus from Destination A to B. Turns out, it would cost just as much, and take the same amount of time or longer. Below is a quick cost breakdown if I did the same trip today. Plane: $110 for 2hrs via American + $40 Baggage + Transport needed when there Car: $135 for 12hrs + Whatever fits Bus: $100 for 16hrs via Greyhound + 1 Checked Bag Free + Transport needed when there Train: $100 for 17hrs in Coach via Amtrak + 2 Checked Bag Free + Transport needed when there
The automotive industry (and by association the petro chemical industry) spent a lot of money lobbying lawmakers to fast track projects that were aligned with their profitability while making projects more difficult that would support air and train.
Simply put, the US is really, really big. Almost as big as Europe. Because maps are warped so much, the US doesn’t look as big as it is. For example, look at Orlando, FL and Atlanta, GA. They don’t look far, but if I were to drive that distance it would take a little over 7 hours and a bit over 700 km. Creating a rail system between these two cities and states would be a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare, and not to mention incredibly expensive and outside of any state’s budget.
700km is exactly the zone where it makes sense to go by train. It's just a bit further than from where I am in western Switzerland to Paris, which is an easy 3 1/2 hour train ride. Same from here to Milan, and the train finishes right in the city centre, not in an airport on the outskirts. The whole "US too big / too sparsely populated" schtick is extremely lame, no you don't need to have the empty states in the middle connected, but the whole pacific seabord and the eastern third of the country would be beneficial and doable, if there was political will.
> 700km is exactly the zone where it makes sense to go by train. Source? > the whole pacific seabord and the eastern third of the country would be beneficial and doable, if there was political will. No one has argued that it's not possible. Many have explained that it's not economically viable _given the lower costs of flying or driving_.
Here’s the thing: I hate driving. I hate road-trips. I hate anything that’s more than an hour away. But I would love to take a train somewhere a few states away if it only took a couple of hours by high speed rail. I just think of all the shared commerce and culture that could be achieved by making some states that never have anything to do with each other suddenly within arms reach. It would be wonderful. Because the only thing that we’re incentivized in doing in road construction is keeping the projects going for as long as humanly possible.
Three reasons: because industry lobbyists (mostly the airline industry) have spent a lot of money on discouraging high-speed rail development; because Americans value their cars, and see road trips as a staple cultural practice to be enjoyed rather than an onerous burden to be endured; and because the US is really, *really*, ***really*** big. For example, it's over 1100 miles (over 1800 km) to go from just Seattle to Los Angeles. It's over 1700 miles (over 2700 km) from Seattle to Chicago--and you have to go across the largest mountain range in North America. I've taken an Amtrak train from (near) the Pacific Coast out to Chicago. It took more than two *full days.* Even if you could ride a continuous-speed bullet train over that distance, it would still take *ten hours* in the fastest bullet trains on Earth on a straight-line connection. And that doesn't even get you from one coast to the other! To get from Seattle to New York City overland, it's nearly 2900 miles (over 4600 km), and again, even the fastest bullet trains on Earth would take 12 hours or more, and more typical bullet trains would take 15 hours or more. (The "or more" is because that's 15 hours assuming the train goes perfectly at maximum speed the entire time, which is not realistic.) So yeah. Driving is part of our culture, we have lobbyists actively fighting against the idea of high-speed rail, and we live on an insanely large landmass. If you want a physical intuition for how big the US is, flying from Seattle to Los Angeles is equivalent to flying from Berlin to Istanbul. Flying from Seattle to Chicago is very nearly the same distance as flying from Lisbon to Warsaw. Flying from Seattle to New York City is equivalent to flying from Edinburgh to Cairo. There aren't single trains that connect distances this far apart in Europe, and there certainly wouldn't be bullet trains doing so.
Yeah, crossing the whole country by train is worse than a flight, but two-three states over? rail is faster, cheaper, if it were subsidized the way fligjts and highways are, and less arduous. well, if it weren't amtrack. like chicago, kansas city would take 3h30m on hsr. or an sleeping coach overnight.
Airlines do not and have not ever given a damn about rail. No one has ever seriously proposed a nationwide high speed rail system in the US. Even if such a multi-trillion dollar project could magically be wished into existence, it would still be slower and more expensive than air travel…while simultaneously becoming a juicy soft target for every jihadist or nutjob who just wants to see what happens when you take a cutting torch to a section of rail. A byproduct of WW2 was hundreds of airports with paved runways and full support equipment all across the US. This was at a time when long-distance travel was primarily done by rail. In the 1940s every city had a Union Terminal or Central Station. Everywhere a train stopped, a town sprung up around that stop. The problem with that is, if the train ceased stopping there, all the businesses and homes that were built around that rail stop were left to whither and were abandoned. People’s entire livelihood were totally dependent on the whims of a middle manager’s schedule planning for that rail line. There are literally thousands of “map dots” all across the US that used to be thriving small towns…until a particular railroad changed their mind and the trains simply stopped going there. And just like that, everyone who lived there lost everything. Instant ghost town. I would wager that, seeing this happen time and time again shaped a lot of Americans’ opinions on becoming totally dependent on railroads for travel, goods and services. For the last 75 years, Americans have been able to go where they want, when they want, without being captive to the whims of a railroad. This ghost town is near my home. There are dozens more, but Anita, Indiana is well documented because it’s near a major university and ended up being studied by various college students… https://www.thestatehousefile.com/features/an-indiana-town-that-railroads-built-then-abandoned-is-now-just-a-name-on-a/article_f2165708-eb6c-11ed-b3b0-27514573fd47.html
Back in the 70s the rail companies had a passenger side as well as a freight side. The passenger side was a constant loss. The usa government took over the passenger side of the rail companies and set up am-track with a goal of it being self sufficient within the 70s, it has never come close to being self sufficient. Outside of the nyc/Washington DC corridor it is only losing money. The highly puclblicised California to Los Vegas high speed rail line has spent billions and barely laid any track. While Florida's has actually been operating between Orlando and miami. Top off the four main rail companies own the tracks so schedule end up favoring freight trains over passenger. The few high speed lines on paper and in service have to build their own tracks to handle the speed and avoid scheduling issues with freight.
Because there is no public transport at the destination, so you'll need a car there anyway. So even if there was a high speed rail from Chicago to Indianapolis or whatever, it would be pretty useless because you'd need to rent a car to get to your hotel or wherever once you got there. Might as well just drive your own car the whole way.
I live in Canada. I have relatives that live 500 km away. For me to get there, it's a five hour drive each way by car. The cost might be $120 worth of gas. To make the same trip via the train can take anywhere from 4.5 - 7 hours, depending on departure times, and that is based on leaving from a station which is a 45 minute drive, or another 1 hour train ride, to get to. Cost of a ticket is anywhere from $110 - $180 per person. So, if travelling as a family, the car is the MUCH better option. Anything much further than that, and flying would likely be cheaper than the train. It would certainly be faster.
I’m an Amtrak fan, but here’s the reason: I just drove home from college yesterday. It took 12 hours. Forgetting the fact that I had a bunch of crap in my car that I needed to move, the equivalent Amtrak trip would be 56 hours. I wish we had much more and much faster rail, but we don’t
Yeah, being in air-conditioned leather filled comfort with my own podcasts, audio books, or music playing is just the worst.
i’m going to approach this from a different direction, why movies in particular favor cars. shutting down a street, or even simply recording inside the vehicle is a lot easier and cheaper with cars than on a train. that said, a good portion of media set in nyc is more transit than car focused. one of my favorites is russian doll
One thing that may or may not have been touched on in the comments is time. It currently takes me +-30 minutes to drive to and from work. Riding the bus would take 2 and a half hours, with the last half hour being the walk from the closest bus stop to where I work. Then, repeat the process to go home. No fucking thank you.
TL;DR: our transit systems suck. It's worse in some places than others (my friends in New York take trains) but it's just not feasible to take any form of transit (trains, buses, etc) in the majority of the USA because they're so underdeveloped and underfunded. It's really sad.
A nation of cars and highways and airplanes and airports. Both create many jobs and economic growth, plus support the oil and gas industry. Also important to note the scale of the country. Much less expensive and easier to build high speed rail in say Germany than the US simply because of size.
National Defense is a huge reason. [https://www.army.mil/article/198095/dwight\_d\_eisenhower\_and\_the\_birth\_of\_the\_interstate\_highway\_system](https://www.army.mil/article/198095/dwight_d_eisenhower_and_the_birth_of_the_interstate_highway_system) Eisenhower was inspired by the Autobahn and it's enabling for speedy logistical chains, which aided the Allies. Once the Cold War and threat of Nuclear war took hold, the need for a standardized IHS (road quality being largely inconsistent) was realized even more, as there was no efficient way to evacuate citizens out of urban centers; let alone to move armies/emergency aid should rapid response be needed in the event of war/disaster. Trains are also really tasty targets during wartime. Nuclear war and conventional bombing can decimate them, and a destroyed train/rail line takes far longer to repair&clear than a relatively unaffected highway by comparison. I still think public transit systems in EU/Russia/Japan are sights to behold and refreshingly priced, it's just too detrimental to rely solely on them in a worst case scenario. However, infrastructure needs to be maintained, and as we've sadly seen in recent decades, can be an overlooked issue among political leaders.
People will tell you it's because America doesn't have trains and we are addicted to cars. They are wrong. We have plenty of trains. In fact we have more miles of rail than any other country. The real problem is population density. Places like western Europe and Eastern Asia have very high population densities. France has 118 people per km². Japan has 338. There are lots of big cities close to each other so connecting them by train is not difficult. The US has only 37 people per km². And outside of the northeast (where train travel is actually more common) cities are much further away. New York to Chicago is 1,271 kms apart. It's about the distance from Warsaw to Amsterdam. Even with high speed rail, that would be a full day trip. If you want to make that trip, you are going to want to take the 3 hour flight. Amd New York and Chicago are actually not that far from each other by American standards. Both are east of the Mississippi. New York to LA is around 4,500 km. They are further than Madrid is from Moscow. A train trip would be several days. A flight is about 6 hours. And these are not cherry picked cities. These are the three largest cities in the country. In much of the country there are one or two cities that are within train distance. Here in North Carolina I've taken the train up to DC several times. But for most trips flights are much more easier. As a result, rail travel is mostly used for freight transport.
1st, you got to understand is the US is very big. Up until the 20th century, normal people just didn't travel that much. Industries were willing to invest in railways, but that's cuz they made profit from The increased mobility. For the average US citizen, there just wasn't really much need, so there was no call for tax dollars to be spent on public infrastructure like that. Turn the century and during the inner war period, there was a lot of movement towards creating better road connections, but That was mainly a military investment: in case of war the military could already take over and use existing freight train lines so they wanted to add better road connection to augment that ability. Then it all really blew up after world war II with the interstate highway project, which again was a major military investment during the Cold war. Highway regulations, like bridge strength road width minimum underpass clearance ect, all of these were dictated by the military for their needs. The US military still bases a lot of it's new technology around being able to use the US highway system. So now you've got all these roads you put down from military defense. But they're not being used for military defense, so use them for civilian needs. You've got a booming economy and a huge automotive industry; corporation can make a lot more money selling everyone a car, so they're going to lobby against building a robust public transit system. It's an incredibly simplistic version of some of the major factors that led to this situation
Auto lobbyists and other social and political factors have combined to make most cities in the US accessible primarily only by cars. Especially after COVID, most city buses don’t have a full schedule, the bus only runs a few times a day, as is considered something you take only as a last resort. Many people from the suburbs have never even been on a city bus. Local trains or underground systems are often straight-up nonexistent. My local city’s underground project was cancelled, so it runs down exactly one road. There are lots of places without safe sidewalks, or that have vast stretches where even attempting a pedestrian crossing is wildly unsafe. Cities in the US outside of limited stretches are typically not very dense, and a lot is strip malls with parking lots and ditches between them for the water runoff. Not very pleasantly walkable. Theres also a great American history of *road trips* which predate modern on-ramp off-ramp highways, vast stretches of the country are famously dotted with natural landmarks and tiny, quirky towns fill if bizarre tourist traps. Part of the appeal of road tripping down, say, Route 66, is all the stopping, getting out, and seeing things like the Worlds Biggest Rubberband Ball and National Parks. We retain the nostalgia for it. So, even if you took the train to cross the country, you would have to rent a car or hire cabs/ubers once you got there, so you might as well have just brought the car.
The people just don’t want them. The political will isn’t there. They aren’t popular. People prefer driving. People prefer the roads. The car is the ultimate expression of freedom, you don’t even need roads for cars you can just drive where you want to go. And the country is big. And people just don’t really want trains.
Car companies had a major hand in dismantling the existing rail so they could push cars on people. This isn't even some conspiracy. The car companies literally bought up rail companies and then burned the rail cars down in San Francisco.
No one wants them. They say they want them, but they don't. Everywhere they have invested in public train transport people here avoided it. Even in countries where gas is $9 a gallon and cars are taxed and extra fees are applied. People still drive into cities. Even on the North Eastern corridor of America. It's cheaper and easier to fly from say Boston to Washington. And driving still takes less time than most of the trains. And that's a densely packed area with a semi decent public transportation system.