> The fundamental reason why people would rather fly between DC and
> NYC than take Acela is the price.
Well, let's not drift too far off-topic. I think the world experience shows that some people want to fly while others want to take a train. There's no clear winner, except for the case of fast trains below, I'd say, 150 miles. This is the sweet spot for fast trains in Europe and Japan, and it would be in the US as well.
In the particular case of DC-NYC (about 230mi?), it's just about at the fringe: both ways make sense for different reasons at different times. Acela is getting there (and can get better with a little bit of capital investment), but there's not much more to go to actually _beat_ airlines. And like I've shown, even when the train clearly beats it (there are a handful of such routes in the world, like Paris-Lyon) it still doesn't knock the airline out of the picture -- in fact, it often solidifies the airline because the route itself got more important. Germany seems to have had the best luck with forcing this change: there are a few routes now where a Lufthansa ticket gets you a seat on a train ... but it does take longer in some cases. Cologne and Stuttgart, each about 100 miles from Frankfurt, have integrated Fly-Rail stations: check in for your flight at the train station, then enjoy the ~1 hour ride (a little less from Cologne, a little more from Stuttgart).
Acela can be expensive, but advance-purchase non-Acela can be pretty cheap (as low as $67 each way?). Conversely, the walk-up fare today on the Delta Shuttle from LGA-DCA is $309; Acela is "only" $179.
> the main reason behind those price differences is how government
> subsidies
> are allocated. If that is not politics, I do not know what is.
I don't think that's the way Acela is priced. I think Acela is, unique within the Amtrak system, value-priced. That is: if you want to go today, you'll pay $179. Acela is as low as $123 with advance purchases, etc.
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Doug writes:
> there's lots of travel like Miami-Atlanta, NY-DC, Boston-Portland
> (ME, not OR), SF-Seattle, Milwaukee-Chicago, Houston-Dallas, etc.,
> that would be perfect for high-speed trains.
I think you're exagerating. Have you looked at a map about this?
Miami to Atlanta is over 600 miles as the crow flies. 600 miles is longer than *any* fast train route in the world, if you don't include connections through Tokyo. Ok, let's include one: Hachinohe to Osaka, about 600 miles, is over 6 hours by Shinkansen with only a 15 minute connection in Tokyo. That is: this is the best case. That's just about 100mph average.
Seattle-SF is nearly 700 miles (see above) and has a SIGNIFICANT geographic issue: Grant's Pass. Houston-Dallas is about the same distance as NYC-DC, but neither has a dense urban core: when you get to the train station, you _must_ rent a car and drive wherever it is you're going, thus losing any advantage you might have had on a train.
In the ~200 mile distance, trains don't compete with planes, they compete with cars.
Note that Acela doesn't help someone who lives in Princeton who needs to go to Gaithersburg either: a car is the clear winner there. Chicago-Milwaukee (only about 80 miles) HAS pretty decent train service with a bunch of departures daily and a < 1:30 running time, for cheap ($20?). I think a lot of people who grumble about the possibility for "fast trains" are too glitzed out to realize that there's plenty of good train service in the US already. Capitol Corridor; Surfliner; NJ Transit; LIRR; MARC;
I like your ", etc." because it really begs it: what ARE the routes where there should be a significant investment in high speed rail? I can only think of a few:
- Seattle - Portland
This is about 150 miles. There's a train today that takes about 3.5 hours; dropping this to 2 hours would be a big deal.
- Bay Area to Sacramento
This is less than 100 miles, so it might not be that big of a deal. And the big target -- San Francisco -- is a geographic nightmare. But: they built a tunnel for BART, they could build one for a fast train. It would also be an easier chunk to swallow than trying to do the whole thing at once. But it would have to be a TGV-style train and it would have to be non-stop, or maybe 1-stop (Richmond for a link to BART?).
IMHO, this would be a much bigger deal than the currently proposed SF-LA connection, which I think is too far to be that useful. If you could park your car in Tracy -- or take BART there -- and hop on a fast train to Palmdale where you could transfer to a rental car or something else, that MIGHT be worth it ... but the details at either end of this proposed line (say, the last 50 miles) are just going to be a nightmare.
- Los Angeles - Las Vegas
No one drives in Vegas anyway, and if you ran the train all the way to LAX you could get _significant_ traction with connections from foreign airlines (something like 40% of connecting traffic at LAX was up until recently headed to/from Vegas ... that's gone down since new flights are going non-stop there, but it's still a big piece of the pie). Unfortunately, there's a lot of bread buttered in that corridor, and it would be difficult politically.
- New York - Boston
Clearly a big engineering effort could close the current 3.5 hours down to ~2, and it'd be worth it. One problem with this corridor is that it's a megalopolis: you're not going through farmland between two big cities, you're going through some of the most built up land in the country. Big interests will want the train to stop at every little nook and cranny. This was something that helped Paris-Lyon: there's basically nothing in between except a long, lonely road.
That's pretty much it. Portland, ME needs an infusion of a few hundred million to fix the right-of-way, but otherwise is too close to Boston -- you can't even fly there from BOS.
> If carbon were priced properly, plane travel would not be so cheap ...
Can anyone else finish the sentence? I'll try:
... and the working poor in the US cities would become extinct. I think we've been over this before: raising gas prices is no way to effectively shape transportation policy.
Anyway, trains aren't very energy efficient, so I think you're looking at the wrong symptom.
If you ask me, the biggest thing holding back new fast train projects in the US isn't the subsidy game as Wojtek would have you believe; it's (as someone mentioned the other day) the electric-third-rail of nuclear power for all the electricity that's required. That's something that's going to have to get dealt with for far more than just transportation policy, so maybe we'll get some trains as a result.
I noticed recently that my PG&E "power mix" is about 23% nuclear now.
And as far as the Northeast Corridor, what's holding it back is Amtrak: their management has no credibility with Congress anymore. They should IPO the NEC!
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But back to the start of the thread: where did Gar go? I want to know how trains are going to be competitive with flying "in the 2-3000 mile range" ...
/jordan