Trains are nice on vacations since I don't care about the price and it's a novel experience. It doesn't make sense to do in America since it's more expensive than having people drive and it limits people's freedom to stations instead of where they need to get to.
This mentality is why rail is always destined to fail in the US. That mentality didn't stop China, which has a comparable land area to the continental United States and allows it to benefit from highly efficient cargo operations all over the country.
But if you want to keep the France comparison, let's compare a journey from Paris to Marseille with a journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles:
Paris to Marseille:
- by car: 7h30m (773km/480mi)
- by train: 3h11m direct for 94 EUR/103 USD with luggage and WiFi, amongst others
San Francisco to Los Angeles:
- by car: 6h (613km/381mi) - note that I'm checking the route times at 8:24 BST and so it's night time in the US - hence less traffic.
- by train (and bus): 8h30m with a change for 61 EUR/67 USD
The SF to LA route covers less distance and requires a change, so the passenger would travel 6h by train and then a further 2h on a bus - and when you compare that to driving it doesn't make any sense to ever pick public transport.
I do think there's more to it than just Americans not liking rail travel or preferring their cars. To build significant passenger rail infrastructure requires coordination at state government levels with all the stakeholders; funding; purcahsing land; technology to build modern and efficient railways etc. I don't believe the US has the capability to just build rail anymore - it would require significant investment in skills and manufacturing to increase capability to the point where it will be able to build the type of modern railway they would need to actually be a viable alternative.
It's agonizingly slow (I used to take it to college in SLO) but between SF and LA you could take the Coast Starlight (you'd BART to Oakland first). It's 12 hours though. https://www.amtrak.com/coast-starlight-train . I used to take the Chinatown busses and they were faster, or ride share on Craigslist (or, really aging myself here - remember Zimride?)
More expensive that driving? My public transport ticket for my whole state costs less than 400EUR, (whole country ~1000) while a car would run me around 6000/year, depending on how much I'm driving
Which ticket do you mean? If you're thinking of an adult GA it's actually now ~$4,700/yr :(
But, an adult GA is a premium ticket. That buys you unlimited travel on the entire network for a year. Not many travel patterns need that. If you just buy tickets as you need them and especially combined with a Halbtax it's not so bad. Where the crossover between car ownership and using public transport for everything occurs is going to depend a lot on your specific travel patterns and what kind of car you compare to.
That's a lot more than I remember, but doesn't surprise :)
You are right tho. If I would live near a bus station that has more than 3 rides a day (which 98% of all Swiss do, rough estimate) I would probably just use a halbtax and a Region specific subscription.
But if I use regular SBB tickets for like 10-15 short trips a year you are already getting closer to the GA. Depends on your patterns :)
Hmm what do you define as a short trip? 10 trips/yr at $4700/yr would be $470 per trip, I don't even know how to spend that much by crossing the country: Zurich to Geneva Airport without a halbtax is $114 CHF.
€6k/year is a crazy price for a car. For me insurance, tax, servicing and depreciation are about £1k/year. And also that's an extremely cheap train ticket. In the UK it would be 10x that easily.
That depreciation number is extremely suspicious, unless your car is very old/cheap in which case your service number is suspicious (or you value your time at close to 0 GBP per hour).
Also, your car has to park somewhere presumably, which uses land, and I assume your car uses fuel (or electricity, but unlikely if your car is that cheap)
I bought it for £12k when it was 3 years old (Skoda Octavia) and I'm hoping it will last 20 years at least. Service is like £200, insurance £230, MOT £50, tax £130 or something. Ok maybe more like £1.3k. Still waaaay less than €6k.
Park it on the drive. Yeah I wasn't including fuel costs because they depend on how much you drive. I'm probably about at about £500/year at most (I work from home).
When I commuted by car it would have been maybe £1k/year (£10/day but I lift shared).
Ah, okay, so the deprecation is more "this is what I imagine the deprecation to be" than anything else. You may expect maintenance costs to... increase as it gets older.
Yeah that is true, but even extremely pessimistically there's no way I'd get near €6k/year. My last car only cost £4.2k (in today's money) and that lasted for 10 years.
Fuel, mandatory insurance, yearly service (also mandatory here), highway tolls, parking fees, usually even the parking space at home, in apartments,...
It's absolutely not crazy, and I don't know how a car could only cost you 1k/year. This is just an example but has the average cost of motoring in Ireland in 2019 at almost 11k€/year : https://www.theaa.ie/motoring-advice/cost-of-motoring/.
One of the issues with trains is that people often severely underestimate the true total cost of car trips.
£5k/yr would be fairly typical for lease of an average family car in the UK I think. Quite low, even.
Maybe you can get it down to £1k/year by driving an old car that you’ve fully paid off (in which case you’re ignoring the amorted cost), never needs maintenance, has a low value to minimise depreciation and insurance etc., but even then 2-3x that wouldn’t be uncommon.
And the average EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state, along with the EU being more densely populated - public transit certainly has some artificial/political roadblocks in the US, but it’s also fundamentally more challenging and expensive here.
It must depend on the cities and how far in advance you can book.
I just checked on Amtrak and you can get a train from Seattle to Spokane for $37 in July. This website suggests a comparable cost for driving: https://www.travelmath.com/cost-of-driving/from/Seattle,+WA/... . That seems to be based purely on fuel costs, not counting the marginal costs of insurance and maintenance.
Using the same method, I can get Amtrak from Seattle to Chicago at $169, vs $300 drivings costs.
Yeah, I can also take a plane from Germany to England and pay less than what it costs me for the taxi that I will need to get to the airport. Does that mean that flying EasyJet should be considered the most efficient means of transportation?
What exactly are you trying to argue, here?
- That the cost of one train ticket is higher than the cost of a car trip?
I'm arguing that in America the only reason to take a train for me is for the novelty factor. Novelty isn't enough to garner a ton of investment to get rail built.
> The only reason to take a train for me is for the novelty factor.
Sure, if you are willing to disregard all of the environmental and health costs associated with car-centric development, then there is no reason to invest in rail.
If you are willing to ignore the more than 40 thousand people that die on car crashes per year in the US, then there is no reason to invest in rail.
If you are willing to ignore the fact that all cities are going bankrupt because they don't get enough in property taxes to maintain the roads and basic infrastructure in the suburbs, then there is no reason to invest in rail.
If you don't care about the fact that your kids are growing completely isolated because they can't go anywhere unless they have someone driving them around, then there is no reason to invest in rail.
There are so many examples in the US where this isn’t true. Examples of where lines make economic sense but have not been built: Ohio (Cleveland/Columbus/Cincinnati possible extension to Detroit ), Texas (Dallas/Houston), Cross-state lines like Detroit/Chicago and Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago. There are others. The problem is a lack of will to do it, a century of demonization by the auto industry, and seventy years of deep pocketed sponsorship of the interstate freeways by the federal government to the exclusion of railways.
- most travel is within the local polity, e.g. suburbs to work & back, social activities, etc. The radius for these is not hugely different between the US and the EU.
- it's the European train network at this point, not one country's, and it needs to be one US system too, not one state's.
Yes, trains are hard in the US Midwest. But not on the west coast, and not in the larger east coast area either.
Even so, at least in France, only major cities have an OK-ish public transit network (when it actually runs). But if you live on the outskirts 'cause you can't afford an apartment in the center? You're SoL. You maybe get a couple buses around rush hour.
Hell, even in the Paris region, outside the closest suburbs, there are only a few train lines going into Paris. At best you'll need to ride a bus or two to grab one, but most often you'll take your car.
Nonsense. First, the money is pretaken from your salary under several categories (taxes, social changes, public transportation tax, and occasional taxes for specific lines).
Then, a metro monthly pass is around $100 in Paris and $130 in NYC. In other words, after paying through taxes, you have to pay for tickets at market rates. That’s $1200 for city transport, not covering outer zones or intercity travel (unless you live in densely populated cities that have sufficient transportation, in which case you pay in rent).
Then, you pay through wasting time, and other factors I mentioned in my other comment.
The best is still to not have to commute. Work from Home when your job allows it should be the norm, not the exception.
No time lost commuting, no fuel / electricity used to move and roads are less congested for people who have to commute due to their jobs requiring their physical presence.
as someone that just started using Waymo I can take a car without having to give it any attention. I love trains and public transportation in cities with good systems in place and lived without a car for 15 years. but, in areas without that already in place, my prediction would be that self driving cars are going to win. they are already functioning today and the experience is amazing. A good public transit system will take 50 to 70 years here with all the red tape but self driving cars are already here and will expand much faster
I’m not judging them as better. I’m just predicting they’ll come first and make it even more challenging to get public transportation funded and approved
For people who are interested in the question whether self-driving cars are the solution to commuting: an video essay of why self-driving cars are worse for a city than public transport: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?t=1684
Even for inter-city trips, though? Some quick googling suggests that Waymo costs around $3 per mile. That would have to come way down if you wanted to compete with trains over a thousand or more miles. And you'd still be way slower, and have less ability to stretch your legs, go to the bathroom etc... .
These arguments also apply to planes, which remain popular.
Also, not sure how it's more expensive than having people drive. I save 10k+ a year by not owning a car. And I can sit in the train and get work done, have a drink, sleep, whatever - can't do that while driving.
The first argument is BS as you have no idea what a non-existing service would be priced at.
Your second argument on the other hand rings true and is the main reason high speed train service in the US makes less sense. Many cities have near-zero infrastructure locally to transport passengers to their final destination.
Same goes for airports too though.
It's very different for Paris - London where both cities have excellent subway networks or Tokyo - Osaka (ditto) or anywhere within China. The Taiwan HSR is also very successful since it got better connected to local trains including Taoyuan airport.
For the first point I'm comparing against existing rail. It makes 0 sense for me to use the existing rail. Even when it is being subsidized it's still more expensive than driving.
