Destroying the airlines in order to save them
My friend Dave writes about trains vs. planes:
On that topic, it’s not hard to make a point that train travel is really not far behind airline travel. For me, it was 45 minutes to the station, only 10 minutes to checkin and board, 7.5 hours to DC in a comfy seat (with 120v power for the laptop!), then 1/2 hour through Union Station + the Metro to the hotel.
If I were to take a plane, it would be an hour to the airport, an hour checkin / security, 2 hours to DC, 1/2 hour out of the airport, 1.5 hours various trains to the hotel.
9 hours in comfort for the train vs 6 hours running and sitting in painful seating. On the train, it’s basically a work day, just in a different location.
(I usually give myself extra time flying to DC because of the extra love and attention they give everyone. And I haven’t flown Independence because I don’t want the hassle. Who decided to hub in DC? Must be really cheap these days.)
My main point, however, is that the ease and convenience of air travel is suffering under a mighty burden that TSA imposes, but do not themselves bear. More and more people are choosing not to fly. (See my archives for some of the horror stories.) TSA is probably fine with that, it makes their job easier. I’m not I can’t see how destroying fast, cheap, easy travel can be distinguished from the terrorists winning.
Over here in in Europe many people feel that cheap and easy air travel is a bad waste of earth’s fuel resources. I’m not sure it that is correct but at a glance planes seem to be as a environmentally unfriendly means of transportation.
But the travel situation is really so different here: we have no TSA, our trains go 300km/h and everything is within 1000km radius.
So, for example for going to the CCC Congress in Berlin I can take a plane (45m to the airport, 1h waiting, 1h flying, 1h to the city center) or by train (20m to the station, 3.5h by train and 2m to the city center). Guess what I’ll choose ….
Just out of curiousity, I looked up travel from New Orleans to San Francisco. The only route I saw on Amtrack was via Chicago, and ignoring any wait between the two trains, is 70 hours of travel. So, feel free to call it inefficient use of fuel, but the US is too large and spread out to travel efficiently by car or train.
> I looked up travel from New Orleans to San
> Francisco. The only route I saw on Amtrack was
> via Chicago, and ignoring any wait between the
> two trains, is 70 hours of travel.
Actually, the Amtrak (note spelling) route between New Orleans and San Francisco would probably be the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles, then the Coast Starlight to San Francisco. (Actually Oakland/Emeryville, with bus connection to SF; if you want to go to San Francisco proper by train, you’d need to transfer at San Jose to a local Caltrain commuter train.) However, it’s still several days’ trip no matter which route you take.
> So, feel free to call it inefficient use of
> fuel, but the US is too large and spread out
> to travel efficiently by car or train.
I think you misunderstand — and possibly don’t realize how compact Europe is compared to the USA. Proper rail transport, such as the high-speed systems in which Europe and Japan have invested, is IMO a better mode of transport for trips up to around 500 miles/800 km or so. Beyond that, air travel starts getting more efficient than the train. (The exact breakover point depends on how good the train is.) So, for instance, a good high-speed rail system between the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles would be a better use of resources than the short-distance air flights currently dominating that pairing — moreover, it would serve the intermediate cities much better than the current system here does.
The USA as a whole cannot be effectively served for intercity transportation solely by rail, although the existing network of long-distance trains still serve a socially valuable niche market, particularly in the relatively sparsely populated rural areas through which they run. (Unless you think that everyone who lives outside of big cities should move to a big city.) But there are about a dozen identified regions in the USA within which a good high-speed rail system would be effective. For example, Dallas-Houston-San Antonio; Pacific Northwest; a Chicago-centered network; and the existing Northeast Corridor (Washington-New York-Boston).
Thanks for your comments Kevin!
I had to manually route myself because Amtrak’s web site didn’t make it easy to figure out that I needed to enter “Emeryville” as my destination when I meant San Francisco. I entered 4 or 5 of the 7 San Francisco stations in the list, and then gave up, and routed myself manually by reading the routes lists. I’m not suprised that I was wrong, but the lesson to learn is that Amtrak’s web site is a joke, especially compared to most of Eurail.
Your other points say clearly what I incoherently attempted to imply with 2 sentences.