I guess I wouldn’t have thought that expensive for intercity travel. Certainly doesn’t strike me as such relative to shorter haul European trains I’ve taken.

And in the US, I’m a decent fraction of that ($13) just to take the commuter rail into the city one way.

Same here, I've taken the London to Edinburgh on LNER and Virgin East Coast multiple times and it runs about £40 each way.

And my 30 mile train into Manhattan is $14

$36 one way for a 5 hour train seems pretty cheap.

The problem is that the train has to compete with 3 hours by car... And then the ability to actually use a car at your destination. The transit systems in either Seattle, or Portland, are nowhere near as good as they are in New York.

If you factor in wear and tear, parking, etc. It’s probably still cheap.

You can also rent a car when you get there for something like the same amount for the day and not worry about the wear and tear part.

Much of my car's wear and tear is from age, so I can discount some amount of that that. Free parking is plentiful in 95% of both cities.

Driving 1 person is already close to the price of a train ticket. Driving 2 people is ~50% discounted. Driving 2 people, and then not having to rent a car/taxi, is something like a ~75% discount.

With a real carbon tax, these numbers would look a lot closer to eachother.

With a real carbon tax these numbers would actually be further apart. I was surprised to learn that in the real world trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius. In fact I'd be willing to bet that there are only a few of city/regional public transportations systems in the world that are more energy efficient than just taking your Prius.

https://theicct.org/blogs/staff/planes-trains-and-automobile...

Interestingly, the Swiss railway system publishes real-world figures on its Co2 efficiency per passenger-kilometer. [https://www.mobitool.ch/de/tools/vergleichsrechner-15.html, german-only, un nfortunately]

They report some 80 passenger-km per liter of Diesel equivalent energy, compared to 13 passenger-km in a modern hybrid. Both values include the energy production, utilization and energy expenditure for infrastructure.

This assumes a modern network with electric trains though. I'm not sure if the article you cited still uses diesel-powered trains to arrive at such extremely different figures.

But that's just looking at fuel efficiency. What about the carbon cost of manufacture? How long does a train car stay in service vs a prius? What is the cost to manufacture a train car vs individual prii for n passengers?

Depends where you want to go in the city and what you want to do. Portland has some hellish traffic at times, and free parking isn't as plentiful as you describe. The inner suburbs all have metered parking on 2+ lane streets, and extremely competitive side street parking. Plus, the west side suburbs have zoned parking to keep out non-locals: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/39277

Taking a bike is a much easier thing to do if you want easy access to the inner burbs and urban core of Portland.

An anytime return London Edinburgh £323, off peak £238, super off peak £147. Anytime first class return is £504.

Regardless of what you think of these fares (it is cheaper if you book in advance), considering HMRC allows you to write off 45p/mile and it is slightly over 800 miles, only the anytime return is really more expensive if travelling for work vs a car. Plus you'll have £30-40/day parking in central london on top, so apart from the first class return the train (even at its most eye wateringly expensive) is cheaper than a car.

Unfortunately, compared to Finland at least, that pricing seems pretty normal, maybe even on the cheap side. (It's apparently a roughly 5.5 h drive?)

Long-distance rail travel seems to be fairly expensive. Is that kind of trip cheaper somewhere comparable?

The thing in the US is that almost everyone already owns a car (so that’s considered sunk cost) and the cost of fuel is heavily subsidized.

So that’s the comparison I guess. It’s not fair, but it’s also sort of reasonable, given car ownership here.

Fuel in the US is subsidized? I thought it was heavily taxed (not compared to European countries but compared to other consumer goods).

The US spends more subsidizing fossil fuels than on defense, according to a report from the International Monetary Fund:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-f...

The "subsidy" is not straight-up tax dollars being given to Exxon & co, but computed against "prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution".

The total includes direct subsidies, such as tax incentives that reward fossil fuel investment, exploration, and extraction in addition to indirect ones you describe.

In the US, like many countries, these are very substantial:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/oil-tax-break.asp

There’s very little federal tax, its mostly state tax (which varies).

I add the cost of “development” financing/spying/regime change as part of the cost of oil, and the U.S. pays for all of that, which is a de facto subsidy.

> A one way train ticket for that route is $36. The same trip via car takes about the same amount of time and $20 in gas.

Don't forget wear and tear on the car, though.

The IRS sets mileage at 58 cents/mile. That's $100 for Seattle to Portland.

Most of the costs of a car are fixed once you own it. Wear and tears per mile is actually small. Insurance is the same for a car driven 7000 miles a year as one driven 30,000. there is a small discount for less than 7000 miles/year, but it is still fixed. Likewise the car payment doesn't change at all.

The IRS has to come up with a fair number that translates all those fixed costs into per/mile. It is a good financial number, but worthless for this discussion.

Not really.

Buying new tires are a thing. Even if you buy cheap tires and get good life out of them (and that combo is...rare, you get what you pay for), that's, say, $400 ever 40,000 miles, that's a cent a mile right there..and tires are usually more expensive than that and don't last that long.

The most obvious cost of wear and tear though is that eventually the car needs to be replaced. More miles = sooner replacement.

Any modern car that is well maintained will last far longer than you will own it. People give up on their cars because their self image needs an excuse to get a new one. A lot of the maintenance cost is time based as well: UV and ozone are destroying rubber parts even while the car is sitting.

It depends on the car, but typically you are looking at $.20/mile for fuel, and $.05 for all other maintenance (including tires).

The average new car payment is something like $550/month. The average used car is somewhat less of course. Most people are making payments. Insurance is $500/year if you have a perfect driving record, many people pay more. These costs have nothing to do with how far you drive.

A few years ago I calculated my actual per/mile cost for my car, it was $.15/month, even though I bought it new (I track every fill up, though at 46mpg my fuel costs are less than average). The car had 200,000 miles on it to spread all the fixed costs across, and had been paid off for a few years.

The point is the marginal cost to drive a car you already own is low.

Considering I was driving 30k/yr at one point while commuting, I can imagine quite a lot of miles, actually.

PS: Your insurance costs are fantasy land. The average US driver pays almost $1500/hr. I haven't had so much as a speeding ticket in a decade and live in a safe small town and am still over $1k/yr.

Lower mileage insurance can help reduce that cost by the way, if you tell your insurer your only adding 2k miles a year to the car rather than 10k miles, they will drop your rates commensurately.

Sub in an eBike for the commuting & errands, its quite doable to go car light or car free (esp. if Car2go, Lime pod or another service is available in your city).

It's only worthless to this discussion if you hold the basic assumption that everyone should own a car.

We've hit peak car in North America. This new generation will see car ownership go down.

Less car ownership on the horizon; 1)Cities are congested 2)The congestion in the suburbs is even worse than driving in downtown 3)For years the solution was to build more highways, but land for doing so is running out 4)Car ownership is no longer cool 5)Ride sharing and renting is become easier (GPS, Internet, Smartphones) 6)Cars have become safer, but the joy or riding in them has been killed. It's like being trapped in an egg carton.

I agree once someone doesn't own the car the numbers change. However if you already have a car the additional marginal cost to drive it on a trip is very low.

The trick would be not to own a car with its high fixed costs, and suddenly the train will be cheap.

That's fair. I do my own maintenance and drive cheap cars. YMMV.

Still, even at the full rate, two people back and forth, it's still cheaper to drive.

Which is pretty normal most places in the US and at least Western Europe unless maybe parking is especially expensive at the destination. Even so, if two of us go from the Boston area to NYC it’s almost certainly cheaper to drive although I almost always take the train because it’s a lot more pleasant. With a family the train would be a relatively expensive alternative.

No, this is awesome. All of that time is yours without having to worry about the road.

I wish we'd install more rail corridors. Especially outfitted with business and luxury amenities. I'd travel by train everywhere I could to avoid planes and long distance driving.

He's saying trains are awesome, but the implementation in America is insane.

But then I don’t have to focus on driving for several hours and can do my own thing.

In India you can go north to south and east to west for that much money in AC train.

Yeah but you better hope your constipation kicks in because I'm never going to a bathroom on any Indian train

It's this pricing model that makes west coast passenger rail so uncommon, none of my friends had heard of it until I looked it up (I live in LA).

Distance Seattle Portland is about 280 km. That's similar to the Distance of Munich to Würzburg in Germany. The Deutsche Bahn takes 75 Euros, about 85 USD from you in economy class.

The problem with the US is not that rail travel is expensive (it is not), but that gas is waaaaayyyyy too cheap. (In Germany you pay around 6.20 USD/gallon)

Amtrak offers 25% off fares on Cascades if you book more than 14 days in advance. Children are also discounted at 50%, infants are free.

i’ll pay that cost, not to drive.