On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Scott Loveless <[email protected]> wrote: > On 5/24/09, P. J. Alling <[email protected]> wrote: >> Intercity passenger rail is expensive. It's estimated that Amtrak would >> save the taxpayers money, (and in fact on some runs actually make a profit), >> if every time someone bought a train ticket they simply issued them a plane >> ticket to the same destination. Australia is a mostly low population >> density place, much like most of the US so I expect the same economics would >> apply. > > Allow me to rant. I know that I can get from Harrisburg, Pa to St. > Louis, Mo (a trip I make by car about twice a year) on the train. The > Amtrak map confirms it. But if I go to the Amtrak site and try to > book a train ride it tells me that I can't get there from here. So I > click the little multi-city trip link and start telling it where I > want to go. The Keystone takes me from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. The > Capitol takes me from Pittsburgh to Chicago. And the Illinois takes > me from Chicago to St. Louis. I can't just say that I'd like go from > place to place, I have to tell it when I want to leave from each city > along the way. Since I don't know the train schedules I space them > out over 2 days. But there's not a daily Capitol from Pittsburgh, so > I get a 26 hour layover 2 hours from home. Does it take that into > account when showing me fares from Chicago? Noooo! I have to hit the > back button and start over, trying to remember exactly which train > leaves when so that I can make the trip as short as possible. > > Furthermore, there is no checked baggage service on the Keystone. I > also can't bring my bike. I can check baggage from Pittsburgh to > Chicago, but still can't bring a bike. From Chicago to St. Louis I > can bring my bike, but there's no checked baggage. Gah! > > Contrast this with the airlines. I can get from any airport in the > world to just about any other. As you all know, I can go to Expedia > or some similar site, plug in points A and B and it will show me a > variety of options, consisting of different airlines, different > layovers and different connections. And they all get from A to B. I > can check my bags. I can pay a few bucks extra and bring my bike. > And since I have a credit card I can arrange for all of this within a > few minutes and it's cheaper than the train. > > Amtrak, however, makes me spend an hour on their site only to find out > that train tickets from Harrisburg to St. Louis, for me alone, costs > more than airfare for my whole family. One company, one web site, > they own the tracks (or lease them or whatever) and they can't figure > out how to get me to where they can supposedly take me. > > Spending 18 hours in the car over two days and paying for gas and food > and a hotel for the family is the least expensive option, even with > last summer's fuel prices. > > Are you still bitching about rail travel in the UK, Bob? > > ;-) > > -- > Scott Loveless
Rail makes significant sense for medium-haul service in the more dense areas of North America. Unfortunately since both Amtrak and Via are government-run organizations they have little incentive to actually make their service work outside of the handful of routes that the Government actually cares about (Toronto-Montreal and the tourist routes for Via, the Eastern Corridor routes for Amtrak). But services like GO and the large-scale commuter service in California prove that rail can be a viable choice if run by people who aren't utterly care-free. It also doesn't help that they share the trackage with the freight lines for the most part, and the freight lines don't care about maintaining the tracks to handle the sort of service they did 60 years ago (since the lines they do run high-speed freight on are rarely also used for passenger service). High speed rail isn't really needed, they just need to be able to provide the sort of medium-haul service that they used to. -- M. Adam Maas http://www.mawz.ca Explorations of the City Around Us. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
