Amtrak is pretty pricy though. I’d love nothing more than to pop on a train for a leisurely trip, but it was astonishingly expensive to cover the same distance as a four-hour drive.
I’ve been looking at it for a roughly 5 hour trip and it comes out to basically the same price as gas most days of the week. The annoying part is that the departure is 2:00 AM and returning trip gets in at 5:30 AM. Assuming no freight train shenanigans
Nice! I just checked Amtrak prices and it would be $180 for my wife and I to make a trip for probably $50-60 in gas.
More money is spent each month on maintaining the roads in the United States than has ever been spent on passenger rail. If tax funding were reallocated away from roads towards trains the costs would reverse.
Man, I’m not arguing for cars, I want trains to be a viable option! They just aren’t for a lot of people right now.
How is that possible? Trains are extremely cheap to run.
I would guess because Amtrak isn’t being subsidized enough. A lot of government money is spent on building and maintaining roads. If the consumer had to pay for that directly in the form of toll roads instead of through taxes then Amtrak would be much more competitive.
I believe part of it too is that much of the rail infrastructure is owned by companies, and so Amtrak is getting permission from them to use their tracks. Freight trains get priority over Amtrak trains, for example, and I assume Amtrak has to pay for permission to use those rails.
You also have to take into account that they are buying tickets for 2 people whereas they only need to get gas for one car. If I do end up using AmTrak, I’m just one person so the gas price to ticket price ratio is one to one
capitalism
Amtrak is government owned
The Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, which established Amtrak, specifically states that, “The Corporation will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government”
But indeed it is a special corporation that is not quite private, yet seeks profit. Subsidized by the government, it wouldn’t be the first capitalist enterprise to rely heavily on government funding.
The question is how you define capitalist then.
Correct me if I am wrong but isn’t like 100% of US rails owned by freight companies? And Amtrak must negotiate it’s prices for using them with each company whose track they want to use. This drives prices hella high.
Not 100%. Amtrak’s FY2022 fact sheet says that 72.6% of miles driven was on tracks owned by other railroads. That doesn’t tell us how much rail they own, but they do own some of their own rail.
Not only does it mean higher prices, but worse service because they have to rely on freight companies to maintain their rails properly and preference is given to freight leading to passenger delays.
Edit: Found a better source.
Ninety-seven percent of the route-miles traveled by Amtrak trains are on tracks owned by other railroads.
It shouldn’t be, but they’ve been handicapped on purpose so it costs more than it should, takes longer than it should, and goes fewer places than it should. It’s not that it’s rail that it has these problems, rather because the car and petroleum industries rule the US.
However, you do need to consider that taking a train prevents adding wear to your vehicle. You’re not only paying for gas when driving. You’re paying for gas, wear on your car, wear on tires, and also wear on the road, but that last one gets partially socialized across all people regardless of if they drive for some reason (some is covered by gas taxes).
We were shocked at the price of airline tickets recently, so we wondered if taking the train would be more affordable. It was actually MORE expensive. WTF?
I’m guessing this is comparing train ticket price fuel cost of driving?
Under ideal circumstances, trains can take you to enough places you need to go as to not need the car at all, at which the comparison actually works out to what it should be: TCO of a car vs total cost of taking trains everywhere.
The TCO of cars is astonishingly high, fwiw. Much higher than people often realise.
That’s the dream, but Amtrak makes that 4 hour drive into a 9 hour ride. It’s through the mountains and supposedly a gorgeous experience, but it is impractical if you need to semi-regularly make the drive.
I needed to go to LA last year from Sacramento
I could take:
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Amtrak: 8/9 hours for $150 per person, uncomfortable and a slave to the freight network (I’ve ridden Amtrak many times in my life)
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Drive a rental: 120 for the rental for the day + gas, but a 6 hour drive
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Drive my EV: Just the 20 or so bucks for fast charging a few times, maybe an 8 hour total trip
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Fly: 80 bucks per person round trip, sub 2 hours flight, 30 minutes pre flight, Uber to where I’m going for 10 bucks cuz its not far from LAX
I REALLY wanted to take the train but my god
You’re not expected to solve systemic issues on an individual level.
Please do make sure to vote for someone to build trains, of course.
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In the Northeast, it’s often cheaper, and pretty much always faster, to fly than to take Amtrak, unfortunately. My family tried to get me on a last minute family gathering over the holidays, for example, and Amtrak was going to be over $400 round trip, and a round trip flight was less than $200, and about 2h30 quicker each way. If I look up the same trip saying I want to go from NYC to Boston today and return Tuesday, taking Amtrak at crazy early or late hours would let me have an 8+ hour round-trip come out to $285. Round trip flights would run $427 pretty much any time of day and take 3 hours in total. For me, as a younger guy often travelling solo, it might make sense to just wake up stupid late and be on a 2am Amtrak train to save some money. For people with kids, elderly folks, or anyone who has time commitments that mean they can’t do that, the $427 flight at 10am sounds a lot more appealing.
It only gets worse as the distance goes up. NYC to Montreal is only a $153 round trip on Amtrak if you book in advance to snag one of the cheap seats, but it takes 11h41m each way. Round trip flights going direct run $242, but going and coming take only a quarter of the time for going one-way on Amtrak.
Oddly enough, going south, Amtrak actually makes sense. Booked far enough in advance, I can go from NYC to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, DC. for between $30-$50ish, last time I looked. Flights are more expensive and only save me about 90 minutes on the longer legs. I have heard that outside of the NE Corridor, Amtrak is much more affordable, but I don’t know how true that is.
While that is ideal, that’s not the reality in the USA. There are only like 3 parts of the US where that’s true. Everywhere else requires a car to have reasonable mobility.
I thought Amtrak was known for maintaining passenger rail with extreme reluctance?
Nah Amtrak is awesome. They are just hamstrung by govt
Privatisation isn’t the answer.
Oh I immediately thought hamstrung like how the education, healthcare, and mail systems are hamstrung by a government that refuses to invest in them
Yeah exactly, that’s what I meant! Everyone is ignoring the context of what I’m replying to. Amtrak needs more funding. But they do pretty good with what they got.
They also need to be given priority over freight rail, instead of the other way around like it is now. Plus the super-long freight trains they’re using unsafely mean they can’t use existing sidings.
My understanding is that passenger trains always had priority over freight. The long freight trains are their way around giving priority. Can’t give priority if you’re too long to give it
Yeah, I’m 90% sure you’re right. Legally Amtrak gets priority when possible, so freight companies just make it impossible to sidetrack so Amtrak has to. It’s bullshit, but it’s not like our government is going to stop them.
yeah this is an easy fix to improve the service 100x, almost overnight. outside of the northwest the main reason people give me for not using the train as legit transportation is the fact that they are often egregiously late.
That’s not what I said.
Okay! Seemed a little ambiguous. I hear people still claim that rail should be privatised because “the government doesn’t know how to run a business”.
More like deliberately crippled by the private freight railroads that own the tracks. Ones that the government bailed out multiple times mind you, yet they’re shamelessly resisting the government’s attempts to provide a public service.
…You think they’ll choose to keep passenger lines running if they aren’t forced to?
I think they’ll expand in a heartbeat with more government funding
Sad that we have the most wealth in the world but lost it all to corruption in politicians and company lobbying.
“we”
“We” didn’t lose it. We never had it. Boomers gave away our futures for us.
We’d love it better if it didn’t have to give rail priority to freight trains.
And I’d personally like to be able to put our (modified for wheelchair) car on it so we’d have it when we get as far as the train can take us.
For the first part, I’m 90% sure that’s already the case when possible, but the freight companies just make their trains too long for the sidings so Amtrak has to sidetrack instead of them.
For the second part, that is sometimes an option, but it isn’t cheap. I know there’s an Amtrak train that runs on the east coast that does that. It’s from DC to Orlando, FL. I don’t know if there are any other routes for this yet though.
Yeah that’s the only one, and I’m on the Left Coast. Looked into it when our kid was graduating in Minnesota and it was impossible. I wound up driving the whole way and back.
Yeah, sadly passenger rail connecting the two coasts is fairly poor. I’m sure a coast-to-coast passenger rail with car transportation could do really well. It has to be expensive, because a car is about the size of a cabin so you essentially need to pay for two cabin spaces plus anything else involved in it. Still, it beats that long drive by car and all the miles you’d put on your car. We really need to get rail moving to where it should have been decades ago.
I actually have it on good authority that what women want is pockets.
Gimme that NARN
Rooting for Amtrak is rooting for an underdog. Ride the train, Murica. It’s cool AF.
I’m sure someone has some articles of why Amtrak is cancelled or corrupt or something. Spare me, please.
I wish I didn’t have to drive two hours just to pick someone up from a train station lol. I’d love to have a serious passenger rail here in the states. It would mean I might could travel a little here and there, but mostly because of the benefits across the board for everyone.
I doubt our trains are half as fast, reliable, nor frequent as Japan or China
Well, sure, because we’re not trying. Can you imagine what it would be like if we gave half as much of a shit about it as the interstate system? Or just full on fucking wasted half as much cash on it as we spend bailing out the airlines every other year?
Hot take! An afterthought of our transportation system sucks? WHAT?!
Something we spend basically no money on is worse when compared to a country that actively invests in it? What a bizarre coincidence.
