I had some vacation time and I’ve never ridden a train before, so I thought I’d look it up. I’d seen a few YouTube videos and it looked like something I’d like. I’m not a fan of air travel at all.
I went to look up tickets and was shocked at the price. I could drive for cheaper and faster including my own stops. I could fly for cheaper and faster and wouldn’t have to pay for a sleeper car or hotel. It seems like there’s no benefit to taking a train at all. Even the hassle of flying is worth the time and money saved.
Ps and why does a sleeper car (the thing that had me curious from YouTube) $1000/night?!
I sense you haven’t seen Canadian rail travel. Go look.
Even the hassle of flying is worth the time and money saved.
You’ve touched on the answer here. The answer is duration of travel. The same labor that is required to move one trainload of passengers on a long haul route can move many many times that number of passengers on an aircraft simply because the aircraft spends less time traveling. So the cost of the tickets must rise to cover the costs and eek out some profit.
That just isn’t true. It takes far more people to build, maintain, and service airplanes and the infrastructure to support them than to do the same for trains, and even when traveling a train requires fewer personnel per passenger-kilometer. Airplanes and cars are massively subsidized, and their uncovered externalities are much more costly to society too.
That just isn’t true.
If you want a well researched and referenced argument. Here is a good one.
It takes far more people to build, maintain, and service airplanes and the infrastructure to support them than to do the same for trains, and even when traveling a train requires fewer personnel per passenger-kilometer.
If you’re moving the goalposts to include all the infrastructure of air travel, then you must also include the infrastructure costs of long haul rail travel. Building out new rail travel for hundreds of miles of long haul service (which is what I think OP is looking at, and what I specifically replied to) is monstrously expensive.
Airplanes and cars are massively subsidized
Can you point me at examples unsubsidized financially self sustaining (profitable) long haul rail anywhere in the world?
and their uncovered externalities are much more costly to society too.
We’ve to enough moving parts in this conversation. Lets table this one to include actual costs paid and ticket prices please.
Yup. In basically all terms, rail is more efficient than airplanes.
The only thing that makes Amtrak less efficient in the US is the fact that it’s unused. And the reason it’s unused is because it’s an afterthought in government spending.
Amtrak is less efficient because it’s forced to operate on private rail lines owned by freight companies.
Complete rubbish.
It sucks because trains are great, but money and regulations are the general answer. Air travel gets tons of kickbacks from the government, and most airlines don’t even pay taxes on fuel. Also planes fly on the air but trains need rails, land to put it on and maintenance to keep it running.
Also planes fly on the air but trains need rails, land to put it on and maintenance to keep it running.
Thousands of airports, plane maintenance crews, airplane security crews and all the money put in general airplane infrastructure ceased to exist after reading that sentence
This is a good point but those are all analogous to train stations and what not. Planes are trains with out rails to maintain
Except for the whole shitload of jet fuel part.
Whats really sad is… genuinely every town I’ve -ever been to- had a train station. Most of them have been converted into other things, the rest torn down. But they were there.
We had the whole system of rail already spanning most of the country. And stopped maintaining it. 😭😭
I rode a train for the first time last year because it cut the worst part of the drive into/out of a big city off, and wasn’t -too- expensive. So instead of dealing with a car in a place I’m not comfortable driving, we parked where I was comfortable and took the train the rest of the way (appx 2 hrs, if there had been a closer station to board we’d have used it, but had to drive 1.5 hrs just to get to the train), then walked. Could have also used the local light rail once we got there but didn’t need to. I fucking loved everything about riding a train! From not driving, to not driving, to holy shit it’s a train, and even not driving! Best trip, and I wish it were practical to make all of them that way. I hate driving.
Other than city-owned trains like NYC subways or BART in the Bay Area, the only passenger rail I know of in this country is Amtrak. And Amtrak sucks. If there’s no other choice, of course they’re gonna be expensive AF.
Rail was owned by the wealthiest and they made their money shipping freight.
Lobbyists got the US government to “sell” them the actual railways, but they had to maintain it.
So if/when there’s a conflict on the rail, freight gets to go first. They’re giant heavy trains moving insanely slowly, so even tho passenger could get by faster, they sit for hours waiting.
Back to private companies maintaining the rails, they did cost/benefit analysis and decided since they pay insurance anyways, it’s not smart to fix anything till insurance rates go up.
The problem is when a wreck happens there’s public outcry, so the government uses taxpayer funds to fix it quickly.
They wait till an accident happens, insurances pays for just the cargo, and that’s insured by the supper so the train insurance never goes up. Taxpayers pay to clean up the wreck and put in new tracks.
With the current system, the wrecks will keep happening more and more frequently because stuff only gets fixed after it fails, and only that one spot.
Monopoly plus oil&gas buying out successful rail and shutting it down.
I’ve only taken the train a few times, I’ve flown even less, normally I just drive where I need to go. My preference is the tain. I’ve throughly enjoyed traveling everytime I’ve taken the train.
Where? In my experience, that’s not the case at all in most of Europe, especially for a solo trip; three or four people sharing a car might be possible.
Why is US rail travel so expensive
op should have capitalized but
Thanks. Fixed
It’s nowhere near as expensive in the EU but it can be pretty close to the price of fuel in some countries. I regularly travel the same 700 kilometers through Germany and if you don’t book weeks in advance the fuel expenditure is often less than the price of the train ticket. Not to mention the comfort of a car is comparable to a first class seat which is even more expensive. But I guess you’d have to factor in maintenance as well.
You’re in the USA, if it’s $1000 a night.
Roads are subsidized. But the railways must pay for themselves!
It’s says US in the title.
I swear it didn’t say that but it’s equally likely I’m not paying attention.
The soul of the USA is rotten. We don’t believe in collective things like mass transit.
I truly don’t understand the railway network in the US. Living in China now and the high-speed railway is amazing here.
It takes 4 hours from the center of Shanghai to the center of Beijing and next year will be cut to under 3 hours.
And nothing to do with but the US is a big country. China actually has a larger landmass than the US and I can go from one side of the country to the other by high-speed train.
It’s cheaper, more comfortable than by plane. They even have high-speed sleeper trains now for these long journeys. Japan, South Korea, Europe, UK, and even African countries like Morocco have proper high-speed rail.
The lack of investment in infrastructure in the US puts it decades behind the rest of the world. I guess to money for infrastructure goes to worthy causes like invading Venezuela and Iran.
In China, your populations are mainly confined to a few large, major cities. With farms and farming communities nearby those same cities.
I live in an unincorporated area about 30 miles outside of the nearest city, which has a population of about 250k people: Mobile, AL
It’s about 150 miles in the other direction to a fairly large city, named New Orleans, LA.
Thing is, there’s not any real “country side” between those cities. It’s all houses and neighborhoods. All of it. It’s not quite heavy enough population density to be a city, but still higher than farmland.
That said there is a passenger train service that runs from New Orleans to Mobile, with two trains, one leaves New Orleans and the other Leaves Mobile at pretty much the same time. 2 engines, 4 cars on the Mobile-based train, and 2 engines 3 cars on the New Orleans based train.
Thing is, they each have multiple stops along the way, too.
It’s a 4 hour ride in the train from end to end, and another 4 hour ride back. Each train ends up where they started at the end of the day.
So to use that train, I must drive 30miles into town, find parking, leave my car there for 8 to 10 hours, and spend maybe an hour or two in New Orleans,
Or, I could just drive for 2 hours, and spend however long I want to, in New Orleans, and not have a set schedule.
There’s absolutely not enough demand for more than the two trains in either direction for that to make any sort of sense, either.
Ok but high speed rail isn’t for connecting you to New Orleans, it’s more for connecting New Orleans to Chicago.
We’re unlikely to wind up as train connected as Japan, but let’s look at the shinkansen. It goes between major population centers and sometimes stops at decent sized cities on the way. When I had to go to a smaller town in Japan I took high speed rail from Tokyo to the nearest major city, then I took their local rail to a town, then another line to the place I was going.
For comparison this is the equivalent of flying into New York from Europe, taking high speed rail to Chicago, taking an Illinois rail network to Peoria, then taking it again to say Lincoln. Northeastern states have the rail network to do that last mile stuff. But even just having the ability to drive into your nearest city and take a high speed rail to a city your friends live in or that you want to vacation or do business in would be huge. That’s why the main proposals for high speed rail are to connect New York to Chicago or San Diego to Seattle. The latter would make it convenient to go from any major city on the west coast to any other one, even if you have to take BART or a bus or whatever first and last mile transit you need to get there
Because in the US, freight and passengers share rail. Most of the civilized world segregated both to ensure massive transit priority. The USA did the opposite because freight brings in more profit. And all the railways are private owned, so profit overules public interest.
I used to be a freight conductor for BNSF. Amtrak always gets priority.
Also, unless you’re talking high-speed rail, freight and pax share track in most civilized world.
Most of the civilized world segregated both to ensure massive transit priority.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Lots of europe at least share tracks. But passenger trains get priority. In the US, freight gets priority.
Also, the freight companies own the track and the land its on.
I believe in Germany at least, freight gets priority at night, and passenger gets priority in daytime
Unfortunately it’s operated by Deutsche Bahn, so you won’t notice anything about daytime priority.
Well, that tracks…
Heyyyyoooo
Car travel is massively subsidised. The road maintenance, emergency services, new road construction, traffic light electricity, smart highway monitoring, snow ploughing and more are subsidised for roads.
Many railways are privately owned, so all costs are paid by the owner or anyone who uses it. If railways had similar subsidies to roads they would be far cheaper.
Or, we could go the other way, and stop those subsidies, too, and quit spending our kids’ future on today’s problems.
I went from SF to Chicago for a few hundred dollars for a couple nights where I got my own cabin (probably 450 total — that might have been the price all the way to New York or just to Chicago, don’t remember). But I only booked about a month in advance. That was around 2019 so maybe prices have gone up radically since then?
But the long distance train experience in the US felt closer to a cruise than a sleeper train in Europe which I’m used to (all meals included, lounge carriage and so on).
This is really dependent on how many people are taking the same trip you are.
There’s a rail line that goes very regularly between my state capital and my state’s eponymous megacity. (And more along the entire corridor on south to the national capital). If it’s just one or two adults doing that trip it’s cheaper to ride the rail, since the two round-trip tickets cover gas, fuel, tolls, parking, and depreciation. Not so if it’s enough people to fill the car.
