When I traveled Boston to NY in the past, compare my flight experience vs Amtrak.
Flight: - Take $25 Uber to airport and get there 1 hour early to go through security and wait. - Fly to JFK (1h 20m) - land, wait to get off, go through terminal again, then take $50 Uber to Manhattan (or $20 via public transit but god forbid you are even slightly confused about transfers).
Train: - Take the Red Line to South Station, getting there 15 minutes early - Take a 4 hour train to Penn Station, with essentially a full desk, no real baggage limitation, freedom to walk around, and good wifi. - Walk outside into Manhattan
Admittedly, I took the Acela, which is business class, but almost all comparisons hold true for the NE Regional except you'd have to tether your own connection and it's a bit more crowded. The main thing is that this 4 hour chunk of time is uninterrupted by checkpoints and transfers and whatever else. It's relaxing rather than stressful.
People tell me the reasons that everything is more expensive than in Switzerland is because (a) the US is bigger, so infrastructure cost more [and flights scale easier], (b) the US is bigger, so city-to-city distances eat more of day up, or (c) labor unions make costs higher. But is (b) a real problem if you can work on the train? And I don't really get (c).
As an example, in 2016 I took the train from New York to Montreal. The distance is only about 600 km, but the train ride took almost 12 hours! Part of that was due to the border checks of course, but even during the part in the States the train tucked along really slowly and had to stop multiple times to let cargo trains pass (which have priority over passenger trains it seems). In Europe, I also regularly took the train from Saarbrücken to Paris, which is not that different in terms of distance (around 500-550 km depending how you count) and takes just 1 hour 45 minutes.
The great thing about Switzerland is their 30 minute schedule btw: Trains are scheduled so they arrive around 5 minutes before half in all major train stations, and depart around 5 minutes after half again, so that you can hop from one train to another with less than 10 minutes delay (and trains are on time in Switzerland). They're already planning to change those intervals to 15 minutes, which would basically turn Switzerland into one giant metropolitan area, with train schedules that feel more like subway connections.
Historical reason: the rails were built by freight companies and not by the government like in most of Europe. For them, passenger trains are, at best, an afterthought that doesn't matter.
I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha.
Anyways Amtrak are barely turning a profit as it is and while it would be great to have Euro quality train lines, the economics aren't there. Even in Europe they're having a hard time competing with flixbus.
This premise feels wrong: The Swiss, German, Chinese, Spanish experience is that people pay to have high speed rail services, and the G20 economies in that list pay high marginal rates of taxes just fine, for this outcome.
The "you" here is conditionally the "you" of current social mores America. It by no means is the only recent experience of America, under presidents to Reagan, the top rate of marginal tax was significantly higher than at present, and people paid.
Perhaps, if Americans were made to pay more supertax they would discover sooner than you think, how few people it inconvenienced (Bezos) and how many it benefitted.
"you" might be surprised how low the increment was on your tax base, to fund the state investment your country needs, taking into account the superwealthy, and corporate tax evasion.
The Northeast Corridor, which the GP is talking about, is a bit of a special case. Amtrak owns the tracks from NY to DC (states own the CT/MA part) and they're good enough to go a bit faster than the otherwise-usual 79 mph speed limit. This part of Amtrak is, IIRC, fairly profitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor
In the rest of the country, Amtrak is indeed stuck on freight lines, and service is often slow and unprofitable, but it's not entirely on them either. Passenger traffic is supposed to be prioritized, but the freight lines are not great about it and have been fined for not doing so (though, not enough to make them do it either). There are also weird political considerations about routes.
I find public transport more expensive compared to minimum wage keeping other countries that I lived before, but the quality is high.
Trains are fast and reliable here and there's continuous improvements on the trains and their tracks. Every year they would announce that decrease in travel time due to improved tracks or higher frequency for some routes.
The only problem is that when something goes wrong extreme weather, signal failure, problem on the tracks in the rush hour, then that route stops working and all neighbouring routes become delayed or overcrowded. Luckily I only experience it every few months.
When something becomes a cultural priority, economic sectors shift to accommodate it. We are really good at trucking, for example. We have loads of highways. We also have excellent freight rail.
The reason that the passenger rail sector in the US sucks is because it is small at a national scale and so it doesn't benefit from access to the national market. If you model NYC as a small country building its own rail network in a high-cost area surrounded by countries with no transit and expensive labor, suddenly it makes sense. Passenger rail isn't a priority in the curriculum at most universities. People who might learn how to build subways instead learn to build highways. Companies that might specialize in subways specialize in airports. To use a coding analogy, building passenger rail does not follow the happy path for American construction organizations, be they unions or firms.
(In Latin America, the problem starts earlier: primary and secondary school math scores in LA trail the income quantile for, IIRC, all LA countries)
This is a situation that can be changed, but it won't happen in one place or at one time. Alternatively, the country could reduce taxes on foreign contractors building transit infrastructure and recruit more foreign investment, although that would certainly leave a bitter taste if it hurt the car industry.
This is true for most of the Amtrak mileage, but the Northeast Corridor rails are largely owned by Amtrak[0,pg4]:
Amtrak owns and operates 363 route-miles of the 457-route-mile Northeast Corridor (NEC) spine between Washington and Boston.
[0] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR?
So even if they redid the rails, they might have to redo the website as well.
There's no reason that the North Eastern commuter corridor that runs Washington D.C. to Boston couldn't be profitable if Amtrak were to operate as a series of independent regional entities though. The economics are certainly there. Instead Amtrak is a single entity which services large swathes of the country for which there is little demand for rail service.
We already pay the taxes, but unfortunately we spend a trillion dollars a year maintaining our global military empire instead of shoring up our crumbling domestic infrastructure. Priorities!
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-...
US is cheaper than Switzerland for pretty much any product. If you are talking about train service, then the reason for that is because US (and Canada) prioritize freight traffic. Freight traffic is much more efficient in North America than in Europe [1] and unfortunately (or fortunately) is prioritized over passenger traffic.
Honestly, I think America made the better decision.
[1]https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-...
"European railways had no incentive to take risks to re-engineer and spend billions of euros to increase clearances and rework tunnel heights for double-stacked railcars, because the European railway business model was about moving passengers and not freight – the opposite of how North America dealt with its railroad system. "
Also, Washington State is atypical for the US since they dont have a state income tax. In most other states, there is an added state income tax.
They're probably still lower than US taxes, but in Switzerland the difference between income after tax and actual take-home income can be significant.
The Swiss model seems to be to think of the consequences of policies before putting them in place, the lower taxes seem to be more of a result of that.
(I’ve lived in all three countries, this is my impression)
This is a very good point. I suspect that because decision making is very local, they have functioning feedback loops: so you decided to spend too much money on a new fire truck? Well now you can't pay for the sports field renovations. People eventually learn.
Outside of taxes, it is also a matter of political choices
The Swiss took the decision to develop the train as a first transport choice nationally... Even trucks transiting through Switzerland are loaded on trains.
And the result is there: They have a good network with a good service that unify the country.
That a strategy totally at the opposite of what USA and many European countries chose to do in the 90's: Close as many small train lines as possible and develop road transport.
The version I read for Germany was that when the mobile broadband spectrum was originally auctioned off, the purchase price for the spectrum was too high. So the pensioners and other investors who bought in demanded a juicy return on investment despite overpaying, resulting in high prices and presumably less money for investments in the network.
For the fixed line broadband network in Germany, its quite substandard despite the country being generally good at infrastructure. The reason can be traced back to corruption, where a decision was made to rollout copper backbone instead of fiber optic, which was the original decision. Article in German but copy and paste with Google translate:
https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/langsames-internet-i...
Give passenger rail priority.
No where in the Western world does a passenger train have to give way to a freight train. It' s always the other way around. Except in the US. In the US when freight companies are late they make passenger trains wait.
They can do this because they own the track. But with a presidential stroke of a pen many delays in Amtrak can be resolved in one go.
The other option is the train, it's 4.5 hours, comfortable, but costs £250. It's a much nicer journey, but regularly much more expensive.
You are comparing the price of a budget airline flight, booked at least several days, if not weeks, in advance, with a first class train ticket bought on the day of departure.
Departing tomorrow afternoon, an EasyJet flight is £115. I don't know if the morning flights are sold out, or are currently not running, but they presumably exist. The train is £77 off peak (which matches the flight arrival time), or £166 peak (assuming there are sold-out morning flights). Even this late the day before, it's still possible to book onto a particular train, which is about £60-70.
Train times and ticket costs for tomorrow: https://traintimes.org.uk/edinburgh/london/06:30/tomorrow
In the before times, it was pretty much the same price to get a last minute VIA train ticket or a Porter flight between Ottawa and Toronto. If you’re lucky, early, or a student, you can get a train ticket quite a bit cheaper.
"Does this country have a tradition of good rail services and take pride in them."
Establishing that is hard. It seems really hard to make the technical solutions work without it. Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and others, trains are great. USA, UK, Australia, Canada - not always terrible but not in the same class. It's not talent. It's not wealth, I doubt the English Language is a hinderance here...
Last time I rode on Amtrak it was absolutely depressing. Same with Caltrain and BART. The problem is not money -- other countries do more with less money. The problem is governance.
Amtrak’s annual revenue is less than 4B USD.
On that basis, I agree with you wholeheartedly. It would be nice to use some of that massive amount of money for infrastructure, versus funneling it to a dozen companies who exist solely to consume as much of it as possible.
Social security is often a lot, lot better in the US than Europe. Take the UK:
UK unemployment 'benefits' are around $100/week regardless of previous salary (so low compared to housing costs in many areas that it is almost pointless). US state unemployment benefits tend to be a lot higher than that.
UK pensions are low - around $10,000/yr, again regardless of salary. US Social Security pensions are vastly higher.
It's a density problem though. US is super sparsely populated. Outside of the northeast corridor (DC <> NYC <> Boston) the rest is too spread out with few exceptions to support train service.
The US highway system is like spaghetti for good reason.
If you want to take a train to Idaho from Boston, sure, but nobody would do that. And for NY->Boston, it's plenty dense. Freight traffic is miles ahead in American than in Europe, and is always prioritized over passenger trains - that's the reason.
In Europe at least, it's quite densely populated (relative to the US), so the land costs for building new railways is incredibly expensive. In the UK, more and more miles of track are being buried in tunnels (the High Speed 1 line has 3 of the top ten longest tunnels in the UK), and HS2 add to that.
In the US, you have thousands of square miles of empty land where you can just run a straight line 200mph train through it.
I don't think US politicians realise how transformational it would be to the economy to join up East coast cities and West coast cities with high speed rail. I suppose the airline lobby groups are keeping a lid on it.
European example: the Eurostar train from London to the French Alps, door-to-door, is practically the same, if not quicker, than driving to the airport, going through customs, getting the 90 minute flight, then the transfer to the ski resort. At the same time, the train is carrying over 1000 people, vs. a plane with only 200.
The US lacks the required density. Trains are by far the most expensive mode of mass transport per mile, both because of infrastructure and labor cost. Labor costs are higher than eg a plane because trains go much slower! In a personal car, there are no other labor costs. The natural monopoly on the network and the ensuing lack of competition doesn't help either.
Planes and electric autonomous cars are the better alternative for the US.
Either you accept that civilisation needs infrastructure to function, or you live like a medieval peasant.
And per the IMF there are huge subsidies to fossil fuels in the US:
* https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-f...
I think if you want to pollute the air and cause climate change, you should pay for it without those of us who use public transit subsidizing it.
The thing is its not just the taxes you'll be paying for, its the fare on top of that. It gets really costly if its your only form of transportation, and even with a Halb-tax card it can be pretty expensive. I did it for a year while living and working in Switzerland, and the CHF was pegged to the EUR, so in certain places I just risked it and jumped the tram fare into the city, which I'm told by my friend who worked at the SBB is a bad idea as they have cameras everywhere and could 'in theory' compare it against your halbtax card ID.
The SBB is super convenient and punctual, though; going to Zurich airport from just about anywhere in Switzerland is possible with nothing more than just a tram or bus ride to the nearest Bahnhof. But Switzerland is a tiny country compared to the large sprawling US. And just look at the absurdity with the train that was supposed to connect LA and and SF at $77 Billion. But having dealt with plenty of phantom last trains and having to sleep at the bahnhofs makes me paranoid, I slept at Basel bahnhof like 5 times and at Bern I must have stayed 2 times overnight in the freezing cold with several layers on.
Its funny how all the youth had to have driver licensees, and no cars, and how most just got a halb-tax card from their employer or the Government to get to school or work. The costs to own and fuel a car are obscene by US standards in Switzerland too.
The California High Speed Rail line is supposed to be 1,300km long. That's more like Paris to Budapest in distance, or another way of thinking, it's 1/3rd of the total railway length in Switzerland - imagine building that from scratch, today. But with earthquakes (and presumably, now, fires). I'm not defending it, but it's a very big project, it was never going to be cheap.
Commercial flight, even with the risk of terrorism, is far safer than land travel. If it's acceptable to let people board the Acela without going through body scanners, then there's no reason we can't do the same with JetBlue.
Japan has the Shinkansen that gets you between the two major cities at 300kmph in slightly less than two hours. Nonetheless, they’re still trying to build a maglev that will do the same thing at 500kmph in 1.1 hours. I guess if you already have the convenience of working on the train, you want to do less of it.
I kind of forgot what my point was.
The problem with train investment is it starts to look really uninteresting for most people once the train travel time is 5+ hours. The investment in improving airport connectivity and flexibility has dramatically wider use cases and ROI versus train investment, which is notoriously expensive and realistically only going to serve a very limited set of use cases.
In Europe there are more cases for trains. Density and centralization is much higher. When you build a train line in central Switzerland you are going to reach a much higher percentage of the population, justifying the investment of national resources. That is simply not the case in the United States.
For trains, even large stations don't have that long a walk, since the tracks run parallel to one another. As long as one shows up before the train pulls into the station, it's all good.
As you point out, trains definitely don't replace all flights, but for some dense corridors in the US (eg. Washington-Philadelphia-NYC-Boston, Dallas-Houston, San Francisco-San Jose-Los Angeles-San Diego) high speed rail would offer a better experience (larger seats, more comfortable ride, more uninterrupted time for working) and a comparable door to door time.
The population density in America as a hole is far smaller than in Switzerland, but the population density in NY State is almost double that in Switzerland. In fact, the population density on the US coasts, where most of the infrastructure is, is in the same range as in Europe. The cost of laying and maintaining a few train tracks over the sparsely populated US interior is not the reason it's more expensive in the US.
Railroads in Switzerland are built in extremely mountainous terrain with lots of expensive tunnels etc. and in expensive urban areas.
But for family travel, we end up driving, as the cost for 4 people is just too high (even considering expensive NYC parking).
Call me naive but I think it’s better to keep those dollars and save for a flight.
I don’t think the « US is bigger do costs more » holds. Switzerland is incredibly mountainous and train go through countless tunnels that require significant engineering and time to build (look up the Gothard tunnel, one of the longest tunnels in the world through a mountain to connect Italian Switzerland with German Switzerland).
Oh and Swiss trains go 120–200+ km/h on most of the network vs 90 tops (I think?) for US trains.
Not to mention additional perks like the FAIRTIQ app where you basically get on any form of public transport in Switzerland or Lichtenstein, slide a button on your phone when you get on the first transport of your journey, and again when you get off the last, and it will automatically charge you the most advantageous and cheapest fare it can find at the end of the day (and convert to a daily ticket if that’s better because you made several trips ins city you know nothing about the bus tickets)
SBB also offers services like picking up your luggage for you at home, putting them in your train for you, and delivering them to your destination. All you have to do is get on and off the train and not think about it.
Or the plan where you get unlimited train for a year (1st or 2nd class) and a Tesla in every city. As in drive a Tesla from home to the train station, leave the Tesla there, get on a train, pickup another Tesla at your destination, drive it around, and return it to the station when you’re done to go back home and pick the other one back up. It’s not cheap but it’s amazing when you think about it.
But any country that refuses to let the government coordinate the building and operating of the infrastructure (I.e. the network) won’t ever be able to get there. These projects are long term and cost a lot of money so it’s very hard for private companies with short term profitability horizons to make it happen.
SF-Sacramento
SF-Tahoe
SF-Napa
SEA-PDX
Austin-Dallas-Houston
LA-Las Vegas-Phoenix-Tucson
And I am not talking snail Amtrak 70 mph train. I am suggesting 150 mph that runs in most Europe. What is holding US back in public transport?
Who needs a train?
GSM-R was modification to the 2G mobile phone specification specifically to help with high speed handover, but being 2G it gives pretty awful data speeds (1mbit max iirc). If you google for LTE-R it seems there's special provisions to bring that fast handover ability to 4G & 5G networks.
As well as the actual radio layer, you've also got the mobility management side of things to consider, for example your IP address. If you've got a video streaming or a SIP call going then when you connect to the next radio tower your IP address has to move across as do any established data sessions - it's not just a case of getting a new DHCP lease and cracking on, there's some serious network orchestration and session management happening too.
(I'm convinced I read something a few years ago that one of the LTE design goals was to allow handover when moving at 200mph (that number seems stuck in my head), but I'm failing to find any mention of it outside of the LTE-R results).
That’s handled at a higher level though. If you manage to get the lower level handover running fast enough, the IP side of things shouldn’t be a problem (as all the traffic goes to the GGSN or whatever LTE’s equivalent of that is).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
[1] https://www.oui.sncf/tgv/services/internet-a-bord
[2] https://www.sncf.com/fr/offres-voyageurs/tgv-inoui/connectez...
In Tokyo, you get full signal strength, wherever you are (even in tunnels going underwater).
That's because they have mobile antennas everywhere, including lining all the railway lines.
I'll bet that their service ain't so cheap, though (I was roaming, when I was there, and that was definitely not cheap).
It was faster than the max speed I'd ever recorded back in London.
Meanwhile when I was living in the US I had to put my phone next to the window to receive ANY signal at all. This was on a university campus.
I would love to know how Japan built their system (was it publicly funded/subsidised?).
Article (in Dutch): https://tweakers.net/nieuws/141195/mobiel-netwerk-met-leaky-...
Roaming prices are effectively set by your home network, not the foreign one. My network (Vodafone Ireland) charges a flat fee of 5 euro a day (with a fairly miserly 500MB/day data cap) for most non-European countries, for instance, but some other Irish networks have completely different pricing structures for it.
If you do not want to stop using your current SIM card or if you have an incompatible phone, you can rent an “egg”. It is a small mobile hotspot that your devices connect over WiFi. It is also useful if you are a group, because multiple people can connect to it, so you just get one.
Same network, same conditions, different label on the box, 3x the price, at a price point where it should matter to most people...
I paid for their 110Mbps plan and have worked remotely for many years. Video dropping all the time, router hanging. After upgrading all my equipment because they wouldn't admit fault, I got a tech to come out who was completely candid because I showed him my modem SNR and power levels and he knew I wasn't messing around.
Without fail, he pointed to the pole top node and said that's the problem. It was Sunday and the realtime congestion was near 80%. He said it was scheduled for upgrade but everything is delayed because of supply chain issue in China.
That was all I needed to hear. Canceled that day, got AT&T copper (no fiber here), and it's been solid so far.
Thankfully I have access to Monkeybrains. Our speed is 500mpbs down and up, no data cap, $35 a month. Unfortunately they're not widely available.
I ride Luzern-Zürich daily and there are major parts where its terrible, and I believe this is one of the densest lines. Even right in front of Zürich where there is lots of population.
And this not the only place by far, even basic low quality video doesn't really work well on my routes.
Edit: I'm using a different provider, but I am fairly certain you would have the same problem with that one.
https://scmplc.begasoft.ch/plcapp/pages/gis/netzabdeckung.js...
The data rates my provider gave me in the message where ridiculous (10+ GBP per mb), but it's impressive I got it while on an airplane.
Mobile phone use is banned on planes because of the interference this could cause with ground based networks.
https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/swisscom-chef-zu-5g-man-h...
Meanwhile, in Europe you can take a train and have good coverage in the middle of nowhere through a base station that probably sees 20 minutes of heavy use per day...
Switzerland: 206/sqkm Germany: 240/sqkm Eurozone as a whole: ~100/sqkm Canada: ~4/sqkm USA: 35/sqkm
only the first might if someone were streaming 8K video with 7.1 lossless audio, which wouldn't even come close to 1.2Gbps, but on a mobile device on public transport? no
I'm pretty certain 1.2Gbps would serve an entire train 720p video with 128kbps stereo audio, which for 99.9% of people would be adequate for a mobile device on public transport
it's a bit like breaking the land speed record, a bit pointless and you'll never get (nor need) to be the driver
Put another way, what’s the point of downloading a terabyte of data in seconds when it takes your computer minutes to process it into something useful? Also, where are we storing all this data that we can download at super fast speeds? Most computers cap out at around 8 GB of RAM (though this does seem to be trending upwards) and SSDs read/write speeds are measured in megabytes (with most capping out at single digit gigabytes) so with terabit we are potentially downloading more data than computers can physically store per second.
Reducing latency though would be the real game changer. When Starlink finishes building out it’s fleet, we could see worldwide latency drop to he point that video games would no longer need to have regional game servers because of lag! But then the problem becomes “how to do you manage all those players on one server”? Annnd we’re back to our CPU limitations.
it will improve the situation for regions with poor wired infrastructure.
funny thou how 8gigs of ram seems to be good enough for a decade now.
Can you use the server you're connected to to compute some whatsits? Using part of the connection as RAM?
honestly, it's more than enough to have 50 TVs streaming Netflix or YouTube, the computers downloading stuff, phones being used and so on.
I am really not sure how 1Tbit would even matter for 99% of the population. Maybe if streaming (actual) 4k became a thing. Perhaps for remote-gaming, but latency would need to be very low. I cannot imagine the latency on a train.
VR cloud gaming to start with maybe.
want to transfer data at 1Tbps across the city?
just load a full truck with tapes and let it drive through the morning.
there you go, probably even higher than 1 Tbps
ie. i get good 4g signal in most of the forests in bavaria but no signal at all in the lobby of my local hospital.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/musk-spacexs-starlink-internet-se...
EDIT: minor clarifications
Anecdotally I believe the current 4g connection is best in the very front of the train, but gets worse if you're in the back.
'Cries manly Canadian tears"
I thought about it for a while, one conclusion I got is that, unless US significantly curb the capitalism freedom in business activities, there is no chance that one can revert the centralization of the global manufacturing inside mainland China. Simply put, the logistic networks for both goods and people, and many other investment, makes mainland China the best manufacturing hub. That's a straightforward economy outcome.
