Amtrak is only somewhat successful when it is essentially a regional carrier, like LIRR in New York or Metra in Chicago. When it is a long distance train, it is a miserable failure from the financial side and customer experience. The Northeast corridor acts like a regional route, focusing on commuters, and that's what saves it. People in America refuse to use Amtrak for travel.
Living in DC as a consultant, reliable Amtrak service meant I could make a 9:30AM meeting just about anywhere between DC and NY. 2-4 trips per month.
Those early morning / early evening trips are packed with other business people doing the same thing you're doing. Full train of people quietly working/reading, maybe talking to a colleague. Very civilized.
The few times I had to travel mid-day on the same routes? Shit shows of confused tourists, kids who don't want to sit still for 3 hours (don't blame 'em), and all manner of "what can go wrong will" (delays, issues with the heat/ac, issues with passengers, etc).
Its like there's two parallel dimensions of Amtrak out there.
I'd choose Amtrak 100% of the time for business travel if its an option, 0% of the time for pleasure.
Why should New Yorkers subsidize ethanol production in Iowa?
Why should anyone in the society give a fuck about anyone else in society? Maybe the answer is because people think it's better for the society, as a whole, when various things are supported by all.
I’m not advocating “everyone for themselves.” But I don’t see why the national government needs to subsidize a service that overwhelmingly benefits just a single region. It’s not like Medicare or social security that can be used by anyone. Trains only go to a well defined set of places. We could have an interstate compact approach instead, like we do for things like WMATA.
Because the eastern corridor drives a huge chunk of the wealth and innovation of the entire country...
It’s not like we are federally funding a rail between Nowhere and Whocares. It’s the business and academic districts of Boston, NYC, Philly, DC.
And those gains are ultimately, you know ... taxed.
Considering net tax spending heavily goes from the eastern corridor to places like Iowa, though, they’re welcome to cut off their contributions as soon as they cut off their acceptances as well.
He edited his original two word comment after I posted mine.
I think my basic point stands up pretty well though.
The entire class of arguments along the lines of “why should we do X when only some of the people need/want X” just has no value at all.
There’s no coast guard in Iowa either. Or avalanche prevention.
Why is geography the privileged metric here? It only matters if things are segregated by location, but not if they are segregated by age? Medicare is a subset of Americans too. So are people of school age.
You can argue the programs on the merits of course, and say that it’s too niche, or panders to special interests in a way that’s harmful.
But to just make the facile point that a government program contains an element of some people subsidizing something that benefits other people adds literally zero to any discussion. That’s a characteristic of literally all government actions.
Yeah and those states created a federal government.
We’re talking about interstate transportation here. If you envision even the absolutely shortest list of things for a federal government to be involved in that’s going to be on it.
This is a reductio ad absurdum. The meaningful issue is the essentiality of the service and government's involvement in it. Do we really need the service? Do we need it enough to force everyone to pay for it at gunpoint? (That is what taxes are, if you don't pay, you eventually get arrested by armed civil servants and go to jail, and if that's the only way you can get people to pay for your idea, we should at least be questioning the validity of the idea.)
Almost everybody agrees in funding the court system because it's an essential function of government that's required for society to function, even if you're not using it now, you want it to be there for you if you're assaulted, defrauded, your kid gets kidnapped, your spouse gets murdered, etc.
The same cannot be said about having a good train system. That's surely nice to have but society can get along fine without it (as it does today). Thus it's not obvious that the government and its monopoly on violence need to get involved at all. Opinions other than yours are perfectly legitimate on this issue.
My point is that subsidizing a train system should be argued on the merits.
The question we ask should be something like “should we subsidize these trains” or similar. You’re making merits based arguments in your reply. I strongly disagree with you, as interstate transportation is a core government function in my opinion, but those are differing opinions.
The commenter I’m replying to says the question we should ask is “why should people in Iowa pay for this”
I think that question is meaningless, because literally all government functions involve all people paying for something that only benefits some of the people.
As such, pointing out that fact adds nothing to the conversation, because it fails to distinguish between valid and invalid ideas for government programs.
Less than half of college students say they want kids, and yet something like 80% of Americans end up reproducing at some point in their lives.
Personally I try to assume that I'm not magic and different because of my generation. It's lazy thinking. Yes, Millennials might be unicorns. But it's also possible that humans just find kids more attractive as they get older.
Since the latter seems to have been the case in American society up until now, I think the policy of making people fund schools even when they claim they're not interested in kids is reasonable.
Thanks for the downvote and the one liner though, I didn't feel like I was getting enough Twitter in my diet today.
That's not really true, is it? I rarely have any reason to personally drive the highways of Iowa (despite living in Illinois next door), but presumably benefit directly and in a variety of ways from their availability to trucks. Amtrak can make no such claim.
I don't know if it's 100% true that Amtrak benefits only the areas it's in. People who take the train instead of flying (less carbon emissions) or driving (less interstate maintenance, paid for out of the federal budget, less gasoline consumed) are providing benefits to everyone.
Movement of people has economic benefits just as movement of goods does. If anything, in a service-based economy like that of developed countries, movement of people is more important.
I know you've already gone around on this post for a while, but it is worth saying that the people of Iowa don't really subsidize those trips. Iowa draws more in federal funds than it contributes in federal tax.
To the extent a particular neighborhood can be identified as especially wealthy, it would seem fine to require them to pay for private maintenance of roads constructed by the subdivision developer in the first instance.
Or, instead of privatizing roads, the maintenance of roads could be paid for by taxes and the wealthy could be made to pay higher taxes. Crazy, I know.
Why would you deny needy people, people trying to make ends meet and move up the ladder, people with revoked licenses, etc. the opportunity to partake and contribute in society? Wouldn't you agree that if we take this away, it would cost the economy more by causing more crime and reducing gains these folks might have had to offer?
Amtrak's long distance service is more akin to the Essential Air Service, in that it connects lots of small, otherwise unconnected rural areas and is not expected to make a profit.
Amtrak has always been a company with two halves, and Congress really should just split it to stop this Jekyll and Hyde tug of war about what exactly the company is supposed to do.
A nice statistic would be some kind of report about travel times, densities and total populations. Looking at the map, there's some people that live at lower density that have a nearby station and then most people that live in metros have a nearby station.
> Amtrak's long distance service is more akin to the Essential Air Service, in that it connects lots of small, otherwise unconnected rural areas and is not expected to make a profit.
If that's true, it seems like those communities would be better served by subsidized long distance bus travel instead.
I understand that doesn't make a whit of difference to congress, though.
It doesn't sound like you've taken either a train or a bus long distance. Even four hours on a bus can be downright nauseating. Amtrak coach class beats flying for comfort. Never mind the people who have some money, but are adverse to flying, so they book sleeper cabins.
> People in America refuse to use Amtrak for travel.
People in America are diverse, with diverse preferences and needs.
I love taking Amtrak, and happen to live on one of the cross-country routes. I prefer it to airline travel in all ways. Clearly, the routes are sparse, so it does not always work out for me. But as a remote software engineer, I can work from the train, I can relax and read a book, and watch the scenery go by. The extra time it takes is not a problem. It is a great change of pace to sitting in my home office.
There certainly are people who disagree, but generalizing that the whole country refuses to use the service is simply incorrect.
People refuse to use Amtrak because they’ve been conditioned to learn that a ticket is often more expensive than a plane ticket to the same destination, even at the last minute.
Personally for Boston to NYC, I prefer the bus. It’s $15, faster than the train, more reliable and plenty comfortable for a few hours. Boston to DC I’d probably fly.
The comfort discrepancy between buses and trains isn't even close for me. Buses make me nauseous; reading a book on grayhound/bolt/etc is impossible for me and sleeping is only possible with drugs (e.g. dramamine.) Long bus trips make me feel ill, bored and tired all at the same time. I find the experience thoroughly unpleasant.
Trains by contrast are actually a pleasure to be on; I'd rather be on a train than my own couch at home. Compared to buses, Amtrak trains have less shaking, less unexpected accelerations, more space to walk around, better scenery, and fresher air. In my opinion the only form of transit better than train is a ferry.
As a long distance commuter, that was my experience as well.
For my commute, there is a bus, an regional rail and Amtrak. (And driving.)
The bus is potentially the fastest, about 2 hours door to door, but for about half the trip I'm unable to do anything but stare straight ahead and focus on keeping my stomach settled, and about 1 in 10 trips there is a traffic delay that makes it take 3+ hours.
The regional train varies between 2.5 and 3 hours, depending on how many stops that particular train makes, but it leaves me on the wrong side of town and the last fast train is at 7am.
Amtrak is best for me, more coincidentally, because it happens to stop near my workplace, and because it makes few stops it's as fast as the fastest regional trains, for an average door to door of 2.2 hours.
Both the regional and Amtrak trains tend to have delays about 1 in 50 rides or so, usually about 30-60 minutes.
(Driving is about 2.5 hours door to door, parking under my workplace, and costs as much as a bus or train just in tolls and parking.)
Can you not get a ticket for $5 anymore? In the post-FungWa vacuum it seemed like everybody and their brother was running a bus line that charged $5 for a 1-way to NYC.
I think you still can, but it’s kind of gimmicky. Like you need to be one of the first people to buy a ticket or something. I haven’t paid $5 since the FungWa era.
I went to visit my friend in Virginia. I took the AmTrak from Minneapolis out to the East Coast. It was basically hell until we got into Philly. Then it was just commuter rides and few switch overs until I was in DC. Then my friend picked me up and promptly got lost and dropped us into one of the worst neighborhoods in DC, but that's a story for another day.
Basically the long haul was horrendous. Bumpy and loud and people constantly bothering me for one thing or another. I didn't get a wink of sleep until we hit Philly. The commuter trains I took were like a library. Quiet, smooth and nobody bothered me at all. I figured if I lived on the East Coast, I would probably use the train to commute, but those long rides across the country were painful - I'll never do that again.
Having taken Amtrack from NY to DC and Boston several times, I made the mistake of doing a NY to Raleigh, NC and back. South of around Richmond the service really deteriorates on single track competing with freight trains. The roadbed is old and bumpy from heavy freight usage. Turned out that there was a bad storm as well and the train slowed because they were uncertain about bridges, etc. It was 30 mph for hours and hours. Who would have thought that heavy rain would be a problem for a train?
Having taken a few cross country trips and talked to fellow passengers, I don't think "refuse" is the right word - more like "reluctant". Many people take Amtrak long-distance out of necessity, especially in areas not served by airports.
