Why can't we have nice trains?

[feuervogel]

I'm aware of various reasons, like automakers in the early 20th century actively eliminating railways in the name of profit (thank you, capitalism), and preferential funding for highways over trains, as well as anti-state arguments that trains are too heavily subsidized by the government and Amtrak should be forced to compete on the open market (while conveniently ignoring the fact that gas taxes aren't the entire source of highway funds, or the massive subsidies on gas and cars (by tax breaks to carmakers)).

Notable conservative pundit George Will is against trains because they take away our individualism and are the first step to socialism. (I wish I were making that up.) Factor in a bit of projection (ie, liberals say they want trains because X, but really COMMUNISM) and a bit of hypocrisy, and you have the face of modern movement conservatism. (Note: if you don't know the difference between being conservative and movement conservatism, spend a few minutes with google before yelling at me.)

A nice piece on CNN fact checks a lot of these myths, and an operations engineer asks why so riled about rail?

Seriously, why do Americans flip their collective shit at the thought of TRAINS? Trains are awesome. Amtrak kind of sucks, but that's not completely Amtrak's fault. It's in large part due to the inevitable shit-flipping from Americans at the thought of building train tracks and having the government fund something that will let people get from point A to point B without putting 500,000 one-person-SUVs on I-95.

I'm going to Boston this July, and because I object to security theater, the war on liquids, and the option of submitting myself to probably-unsafe radiation levels/naked scanner or a pat-down that borders on sexual assault, I'm taking the train. It's a good 800 miles by train between here and there, and I can go direct, leaving here at 10 am and arriving in Boston at 8 am, or I can take the train to DC and stay with my sister overnight, then catch one of the regular morning trains to Boston, and repeat the process in reverse. Not a big deal, sort of inconvenient, but I'm the person who took an overnight train from Berlin to Vienna because that only cost 49 Euro and about 12 hours. (There were fancier trains with actual sleeping compartments (EuroCityNight), but they were a lot more expensive.)

Ben's going to Atlanta in a couple weeks for a concert, and he wondered if it would be possible to take the train down. Short answer: no. The train to Atlanta leaves from Greensboro at 12:30 am (midnight) and gets to ATL at 8:30 am. Annoying, sure, and I don't know many people who'd want to be in GSO at midnight because it's kind of dangerous. If he went to GSO by train, he'd have to leave Durham around 5:30 and wait in GSO for 6 hours. WONDERFUL, yes. Coming back, he'd leave ATL at 8:30 pm and get to GSO at 4 am. Which is also extremely convenient.

Now, if you were going from NYC to New Orleans, you'd have great departure and arrival times, and that 1400 miles only takes about 30 hours, assuming you don't have to wait for CTX trains to pass, since CTX owns the tracks and Amtrak only leases them, so CTX has the right of way.

Here are two people who would rather take the train, rather than be yet another one-occupant vehicle on the road, but American individual-über-alles culture and its worship of cars with the policy decisions that go along with this car-idolatry has made it inconvenient to impossible.

It's not possible to take the train from Raleigh, NC, to Memphis, TN. It's marginally possible to take the train from Raleigh to Detroit (which I looked into because there's a Gold Cup match between the US men and...Canada maybe? this summer).

Comments

[thady]

A post like this really puts my ranting about the Deutsche Bahn in perspective.
Trains are a normal part of my life. When I went to university I always went by train when I went home (unless a friend drove in the same direction) since I didn't have a car. In fact I never owned a car. The US-american obsession with cars is frankly baffling to me.

[feuervogel]

My junior year in Marburg, I never had a car. The Studiengebühren included a Semesterticket that was good on the entire RMV network, from the city buses to the regional buses, AND the train as far as Kassel and Frankfurt (up to IR only). Car? Who needs cars? Though I was glad my professor was kind enough to pick me up in his car because the bus from my assigned Wohnheim wouldn't get me to the mountaintop in time for the 7:30 lecture. (The 3 went up and the 2 went around. The 3 would have gotten me there around 8. The 2 got me to a bus stop on his way in, which was convenient and useful. Herr Doktor Professor Paul Knochel, fak Chemie. Nice guy.)

It's true that the US is much less dense than any European country, because we have SO MUCH SPACE and wide swaths of nothing in parts of it, the desert southwest, for example. (Beautiful scenery, but so empty.) But the eastern seaboard, Richmond to DC to Boston, and Raleigh to Charlotte to Atlanta, is fairly dense, and would be served well by high speed trains. There's already Acela between DC and Boston, and it's comparable to the ICE in price (though not speed...), and there's a planned high speed corridor between DC and Raleigh, with plans to extend to Atlanta. So maybe by the time I'm moving to Germany (10 years? if I do) there'll be construction happening.

Cars have always been sold in America as the key to freedom, because you can hop in your car and go wherever you want. It's part of our cult of individuality. Europeans had pretty decent train systems long before cars were invented, and I guess it was a harder sell. Also, your gas prices are much higher than here, making there be even less incentive to drive.

[yvi]

Random aside: By now, I think most universities in NRW even let you travel throughout all of NRW on their ticket. Which was so, so awesome for the one semester I had that :) I think many univerities in other states are also doing something similar by now.

[feuervogel]

That's pretty awesome. I was in Marburg 15 years ago, so I don't know how it's changed since then.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

The auto industry has always done its best to quash local public transit, absolutely, and public subsidies aren't balanced at all. But isn't some of the trouble with trains in this country just that it's so dang big? I mean, sure, along the East Coast the cities and towns are fairly dense, but as soon as you head west the population becomes remarkably spread out. It takes a lot of track (and correspondingly, trains) to connect all those people; considerably more track-per-person (and trains-per-person) than in Europe, I'd wager. I strongly suspect that the economics really don't work out as well here.

That doesn't mean that trains shouldn't be more common where there are large population centers and zillions of small towns a stone's throw apart, of course, but perhaps once our society settled on the conclusion that trains weren't viable for most of the nation we gave up on them in the handful of places where they'd work well, too.

[feuervogel]

China has high-speed rail. It's possible to make it work in a country with as much landmass as the US.

There's no reason not to have a few good trunk lines, Atlanta to Boston, DC to Chicago to Minneapolis to Seattle, Seattle to San Diego, Atlanta to LA, with spokes and connectors to larger cities off the trunk. Deutsche Bahn doesn't offer ICE service from Füssen to Marburg, but you can take the Regionalbahn from Marburg to Frankfurt, the ICE from Frankfurt to Munich, and the Regionalbahn from Munich to Füssen.

Then again, those damn socialist communists in Germany have it written into their constitution that the government must fund rail transportation to every town. It doesn't say how often or how fast, and some of the outlying farm villages have slow trains (that stop at every. damn. station, and some of these stations look like bus stops) that run every 2-3 hours, and less on holidays.

Density

[beth_leonard]

The world population density appears to be much higher in Europe, China, and Japan. I found a map from 1994. The 2006 map is only by country, but displays the same trends. The major cities in the US are extremely spread out compared to Europe, China, India, and Japan. There's no reason not to have good public transit within major cities here, but between major cities it is less obvious.

--Beth

Re: Density

[feuervogel]

The Eastern Seaboard and California are fairly dense and have TERRIBLE traffic congestion and pollution problems. A high-speed train from Boston to Atlanta and from San Diego to San Francisco would help a lot of that, though fixing public transit within the cities would help even more.

I HATE driving on 95 to get to my family's place. There are always accidents, and once you hit Fredericksburg, VA, you're in slow or stopped traffic thanks to the DC-NoVa mess. If Amtrak weren't utter bollocks, I wouldn't have to.

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

Trains work well for certain kinds of loads. In terms of cost per ton-mile, they're astoundingly good.

But they work well when you have a lot of freight or people that are all going to the same place at the same time. For non-urgent freight, that's not a big deal (and part of why the container system works well), but unless an environment is really high-density, there's a significant amount of waiting for the trains to arrive, and scheduling costs if the available trains don't do the direct route you want to take.

That's the real advantage of the automobile: It's often much more convenient, and involves less waiting. In some environments you can get by without a car, and there's something of a phase change where there are enough train-users to make it worthwhile to build a really good train system. Cars are, fortunately or unfortunately, usually good enough.

[feuervogel]

My German and European friends are appalled at the state of our public transit system and find the American addiction and worship of cars mind-boggling. (See the comment discussion at dreamwidth.)

[leora.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that trains make it easier to live in urban areas, benefit urban areas more, and encourage a more urban lifestyle with easy transportation, and that that actually does encourage a more liberal viewpoint. So, it kind of is political. It's not that it encourages communism, but much like education and reality, it does have a liberal bias.

[feuervogel]

I think there's a marginal refutation of that in the CNN piece, in that having trains serving "flyover country" is good for them, because it's good for industry, and infrastructure brings money and jobs.

That aside, trains haven't stopped the Bavarians from consistently electing the center-right CSU, which has similar positions as our Republicans on immigration. Being German, they're all wary of hyper-patriotism.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I don't think benefiting rural areas doesn't mean it doesn't benefit urban areas more. I think trains, much like education, benefits everyone. But it can still benefit people unequally.

[feuervogel]

If they want to be that way about it, we can point out that cities subsidize rural areas.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Has that ever worked? That's been true for ages. Has that ever worked? Conservatives regularly complain about tax burdens, and yet regularly blue states pay more and get less. And people point this out. And it changes nothing.

[feuervogel]

Because conservatives are disingenuous assholes.

[a-nightengale.livejournal.com]

Paul and I once looked into taking the train down to see his parents in Tallahassee, and found out that you actually can't get there from here via train. We were stunned.

And when I got my invitation to be a program participant at Renovation this year and we boggled at airline prices, I investigated what it would take to get to Reno by train and... bleah. It can be done, but it's massively inconvenient.

It reminds me of the way that I *can* take a bus to work from Durham to Wake Forest, if I really and truly want to. I could get up at 5:30am to catch a 6:30am bus (and its attendant 3 transfers) TO work, which would put me into the office around 10am (e.g., LATE), then I could go *back* to drop-off point, wait for over an hour for the bus, do all the transfers in reverse, and get home after 10pm. For an 8-hour workday, I'd be in transit for 7 hours.

[feuervogel]

Yeah, I'd like to go to WorldCon, but I can't afford airfare to Reno, especially a week before Dragon*Con.

I looked into taking the bus from Hillsborough to downtown Durham when I worked at the health department, and it would have been similarly ludicrous, though I think it would have only taken an hour and a half and two transfers (CH bus-TTA-DATA). I can drive it in 20 minutes. Ben works in RTP and has considered the bus, but he'd also have an hour+ bus trip instead of a 20-minute drive.

It's fucking ridiculous.

[pharna.livejournal.com]

You can blame some resistance to rails from The Robber Barons, like this jackass:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Crocker

They were pretty major assholes back then.

I also wonder about electrical power supply. I'd like to see all the so-called waste in Yucca Mountain used as fuel. It's not going anywhere, so FFS make use of it. The 3rd and 4th reactors in Fukushima do and that power plant is old as dung.

Scheduling my life around the train can suck at times, especially when it comes to partying. Why Tokyo's subways aren't 24/7 is beyond me.

[feuervogel]

Fuck the Robber Barons, and fuck the libertarian wankstains who want them to come back.

When I was in Marburg, the bus back to my dorm only ran until about 12:30 am, but Marburg isn't exactly a happening party town. Berlin has night transit (reduced service, but still pretty useful), and presumably other larger cities would, too. That Tokyo doesn't is sort of mind-boggling.

[pharna.livejournal.com]

The JR loop line in Osaka goes til almost 2am, making it the latest running train I know of in Japan save a few overnight trains.

Subway goes til almost midnight.

I'd REALLY kill for the trains to run til 2-3.

[anacoluthon.livejournal.com]

It's kind of sad that taking the train from Rome to Naples and then Naples to Palermo was so exciting for me when I was on a vacation with my family in the 90s. I'd never been on a train and never even lived in a city with any sort of rail service. Trains seemed very magical and exotic to me.

I'm not saying BART is amazing, but it's incredibly convenient for most of my transportation needs in the area. I only ever use the car for trips out of the city that BART can't get me to, or times when I need to transport something large. I haven't used Caltrain but I'm excited that it exists. It would be even better if the local rail system extended farther outside of the Bay, but still I'm happy to live in a place where trains at least exist and are useful.