> I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha.

This premise feels wrong: The Swiss, German, Chinese, Spanish experience is that people pay to have high speed rail services, and the G20 economies in that list pay high marginal rates of taxes just fine, for this outcome.

The "you" here is conditionally the "you" of current social mores America. It by no means is the only recent experience of America, under presidents to Reagan, the top rate of marginal tax was significantly higher than at present, and people paid.

Perhaps, if Americans were made to pay more supertax they would discover sooner than you think, how few people it inconvenienced (Bezos) and how many it benefitted.

"you" might be surprised how low the increment was on your tax base, to fund the state investment your country needs, taking into account the superwealthy, and corporate tax evasion.

China high speed rail growth over 9 years. It's an excellent system and I much prefer it to domestic aviation.

https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*Jj_k4U1AwuB5Ia-9oHuJKQ.gi...

I had included China and edited it out: I am unsure what the effective tax rate is for their national capital investment projects. Since the primary story was about tax, I didn't want to cloud things without knowing what Chinese salary tax effects were.

In China you can zoom out and see that wages / household income is quite depressed, both to keep the exports flowing and power the reinvestment, so the larger point stands fine.

Major lines like the one between Beijing and Shanghai are profitable and publicly-traded, therefore doesn't require government subsidy.

Of course, Beijing-Shanghai line is the first and only to go public, just at the beginning of 2020, and we can get their financial numnbers easily.

Many other lines are not necesarrily profitable, but few of them require government subsidy besides the initial capital investment, that is their income is more than the operational cost.

That's a fair call, I'm not sure how you'd even try start comparing it to the West, I doubt western countries can even be compared to each other that well.

See people in here talk about land area and population while completely ignoring things like topography/zoning/protectionism. Building 100km of rail in Switzerland is never going to be comparable to building 100km on flat plains elsewhere.

Swiss taxes vary by location but are generally not higher than the US taxes. So it's not about paying more, it's about wasting less.

It's about priorities. Swiss defense spending as a percentage of GDP is 0.675%. US defense spending as a percentage of GDP is 3.2%. I just picked a simple example, but you will find similar disparities across the board.

FWIW, Switzerland has a higher GDP per capita at $82k as compared to $62k for the U.S. Swiss per capita defense expenditures are closer to ~1/4 (28%) of those of the U.S. as compared to ~1/5 (21%) when judging by GDP percentage. (Conversely, France and U.K. have GDPs of about $42k, so they compare much worse by that metric.)

But more importantly, Switzerland isn't a NATO member.

The defence spending isn't much compared to the social expenditures. Switzerland spends roughly 30% on social/welfare (and roughly 10% on transportation infra). US spends roughly 50% of its budget on social/welfare and it ain't getting better any time soon.

And part of US Defense spending helps defend countries like Switzerland. Maybe we still spend too much, but we also "defend" a lot more countries than ourselves, and a lot more territory than Switzerland.

Switzerland is a neutral country and not part of NATO. The US has no obligation to defend them. Almost every adult male Swiss citizen has received military training. The country may not spend as much as the US, but Swiss citizens are willing to pay for their freedom in a different way.

(..and yes, only men are conscripted. Switzerland is a great country, but there continue to be problems with sexism, even today)

Which is a political choice by the US and not about "defending" but influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

I’m failing to see how this makes it an OK justification for the grift/corruption.

Building such a network is less economically feasible in America compared to Europe or China because of America's suburban sprawl. First, it'll cost more to build because you'll need to clear out a route of suburban housing to get between any two cities. Second, the population density of the US is less concentrated, which makes getting to the station take longer, and improves the relative attractiveness of other transportation options such as cars/busses on shorter routes and planes on longer routes.

It's really disappointing to me as a transit enthusiast that the US doesn't have great high speed rail service in the Northeast Corridor, but to do so would involve clearing way for new, less curvy track, and that would be extremely expensive. Even if we did it I'm not sure it would get the usage rates that occur in Europe. The issue here is sadly more complicated that tax policy.

US population density is hardly the issue for two reasons, first nobody wants high speed rail in Alaska. But secondly high speed rail is between cities not every little podunk town. Linking Richmond, DC, Baltimore, NYC, Boston is a single 550 mile high speed rail line, which connects over 10% of the entire Americana population.

I mentioned the Northeast Corridor because it is the most viable location to have passenger rail in the US. But even there presents some issues (which I may not have explained very well in my original post).

I disagree with your assessment because American density is very different than European density. If you look at Google Earth, there is almost continuous suburban development along the entire Northeast route. In Europe, populations are clustered in smaller urban centers. High speed rail can only stop so many times and because of this, it is more difficult for the average American to get to a train station.

This situation is obvious to people who have lived in suburban America but can be surprising to those who have not. Imagine driving up to an hour to a city center, finding a place to long term park your car near the station and then taking a mode of transportation that isn't significantly faster than your car would've been. Then needing to take an expensive taxi once you arrive because your destination city has a limited public transportation system.

Comparing region densities at face value misses the issue, the way cities and regions are designed present unique transit challenges around the world.

American cities are clustered as much as European and there's hardly a good reason why high speed rail is impossible. To the point that there literally is a private company that built a high speed link between Orlando and Miami.

As for the experience of driving to a train station, that's compounded x times by going to an airport.

But in the end the lack of use stems more from discomfort, than anything else. Having high speed connection from Poughkeepsie/Albany to NYC would open up Hudson Valley to commuters decades ago, not a boom of Zoomtowns today (Kingston, NY, Beacon, NY)

The overall infrastructure is crap in US and that is the primary reason for poor use of it. (I mean, FFS, old Tappan Zee Bridge didn't even have pedestrian walkway! While being the only available crossing for miles)

American cities are clustered differently than European ones, it's not something that can be easily quantified, it really takes some time looking at the maps to understand what I am talking about, as it doesn't seem like my explanations are doing the job. Looking at the footprints this way is simplistic but maybe helpful:

https://external-preview.redd.it/W-GAALExjeE8w0aXg7Kh0gOAHcl...

For example, Paris is one of Europe's largest cities and yet it has a footprint comparable to Cleveland, a city with less than 1/5 the population. Meanwhile, the population density of Ohio is over 5 times as high as France.

I never said high speed rail is impossible, just that there are a unique set of challenges in developing such a network in the US. I'm a huge fan of public transportation and HSR, we just need to be realistic and pair it with smart urban/regional development.

High speed rail needs a seed to start growing the network, but as soon as you have that adding other cities becomes increasingly viable. Initially you might build each of these city clusters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis#/media/F... Afterwards, running/maintaining the high rail is more economically viable due to network effects.

High speed rail is roughly double if not triple the speed of the car speed on a speedway, let alone car speed in city.

More importantly, just don't think of city as static, inanimatable object. Many american cities are created because of the rails if you remember the history, High speed rail may not create new cities, but can definitely reshape parts of the city.

Acela's average speed is 82 mph between NYC and Boston. 66 mph between NYC and DC. When you add the time to get to/from the stations my point makes a lot of sense.

If you remember the history, many of the existing rail lines were built before the suburban explosion post WWII. To make Acela go faster, the route would need straighter track which would require buying a lot of expensive, already developed, land.

That’s the basic assumption for any HSR plan. You can’t mingle 160+MPH passenger trains with freight, so you need to buy a lot of land anyway. However, getting out of the urban center at 80+MPH isn’t a major issue and that let’s you avoid buying the most expensive inner city land. Getting off in the center of a city like Penn Station vs Laguardia Airport more than makes up for a few miles of slower speeds especially as these trains take a while to accelerate.

Sounds good. Don’t make us over in California pay for it though.

Why not?

Because we get absolutely no benefit from it. If you want to have a massive government program that primarily benefits 3-4 states, don’t force Californians to shoulder that burden. That’s what state-level taxes are for.

I'm not from the US, so I guess that's why I asked. My country tends to be a tad more social and federalistic.

The US is better compared to the EU than any particular country, both in terms of size, population, and distinct governments.

So this is similar to a train being proposed from Amsterdam to Copenhagen that would be paid for by all of the member countries.

The Northeast has a density comparable to Europe. I do agree on the culture issue, however - Americans definitely prefer cars by default. Although in the Washington-Philadelphia-NYC-Boston corridor it may be possible, if there is ever a culture of large public works again.

Europeans prefers cars when the train options are poor too.

Improve the trains, and people will eventually wake up to them.

I don't know why Americans think that they are so special.

Yes - Europeans do prefer the optimal transport option (cost, speed, comfort, etc)

Americans aren't special and many European places rely on cars or busses for transport.

Surely having big train stations with massive car parks just outside towns will fit well with car culture.

My other idea is high speed trains where you can take your car with you, like eurotunnel but faster.

The US actually has this. It's called the Auto Train: https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train

Runs from just outside of DC to Florida.

In the Northeast, Amtrak has pretty much captured the NYC <-> DC market for business travel.

What's holding it back is a lack of capacity and slower speeds than you'd find in, say, Europe.

Why it's slow is a complex problem with many causes.

It's partly due to US regulations that cause trains to be heavier, slower and more expensive than overseas.

The infrastructure is also old, dating back to the 1800s in some cases, causing bottlenecks in key areas. One 1870s-era tunnel in Baltimore brings speeds down to 30mph for what feels like an eternity.

Amtrak is also not super great at running the NEC. The physical infrastructure could do more, and relatively cheap changes could have a large impact.

Putting cars on High Speed Trains would be uneconomical, a car easily weighs dozens of people, you wouldn't want to pay that kind of fare for a car.

Switzerland doesn't have any high speed rail services, defined conventionally. All trains in Switzerland are pretty slow, but it's a small country so it rarely matters.

Also, Swiss trains are pretty expensive. You don't notice because wages are high, but really, everything in this country is very expensive compared to neighbouring countries. In most countries inter-city rail is used by commuters so governments impose price caps, if there is any political pressure to lower prices here I've never seen it.

I personally would say it matters quite a bit. In most cases the train is not competitive with a car, both in term of time and money. Convenience is less clear: availability is good during peak time, but the trains are crowded so good luck taking your laptop out to work. The rest of the time, availability is still decent if you stick to the main lines and the ride is very confortable.

Also, cars are not expensive in Switzerland, especially when you take into account the high salaries.

California spends 10% of an amazon to not build a train between two cities.

I find that perplexing about US politics in general. Any proposal on taxes and social benefits, throws off people that at a first glance shouldn't. Maybe large part of the voting base are millionaires.

There are 11 million millionaires in the US which is approx 3.3% of the population. Polls show that many more people expect to become millionaires real soon. In fact, 60% expect to become wealthy during their lifetimes. The optimism that one sees in the US is commendable but it reflects itself in the resistance to taxing the rich. After all, why would you vote to increase taxes if it is going to negatively affect you in a few years. In reality, very few actually become rich.

Edit: link to a recent article on how many US persons expect to get rich/wealthy/millionaires ... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/how-much-money-americans-thi...

Ouf that survey is weak - being a millionaire in the US does not make one wealthy. A lot of people end up having more than 1mil in assets by the time they retire simply due to real estate, this isn't the case for everyone but being a millionaire doesn't mean you're not still somewhere around the midpoint of the middle class in terms of income.

That's why I used separate terms, ie millionaire and wealthy. Being a millionaire requires that you have more than 1m as assets after taking into account your debts. That is easy but being wealthy is more subjective. Polls have shown that people consider 'being wealthy' if you have a wealthy lifestyle or in excess of USD x million. Currently x is about 2.6.

There's the old quote misattributed to John Steinbeck:

> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

It's because corruption is so rife here.

It's blatant and widespread.

The only respite from corruption in US - the government is severely restricted.

Or, you know, just spend 5% less on the military :)

From what I understand other countries (especially EU) essentially contract out defense to the US for economical reasons (i.e. so they can afford to spend more of their budget on social services and less on military). If US cuts military budget it means EU will have to increase military budget by more than the US cut to make up for it.

Yeah, so there’s some positive externalities too ;)

It’s not healthy for Europe to be so dependent on the US, as has been proven over the past 4 years.

Europe also does not stir up as much conflict in the world as the US does, isn't it? So they are less in need of defense.

The biggest EU defence needs are two: securing oil ingress from the Middle East and securing resource ingress from Africa. Without the US 5th fleet, Iran or any other regional power could shut down oil ingress, pitching the EU into a sizable (-30%) GDP recession. Instability, of which there is plenty in the Middle East, could do the same.

Same for Africa, with the added threat of Chinese competition for the same resources. Without those raw materials (minerals, uranium, some oil and gas) European manufacturing doesn't have a future. Hence the constant French and American interventions to stabilize various African states and their tight relations with their governments.

That state of affairs is because of the Post-WWII order the US constructed via alliances & multilateral organizations, in response to being repeatedly dragged into European wars.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/08/Europe-only-Armed...

The only reason they are not in need of defence is because the US umbrella still protects them from invasion by foreign powers. If the US were totally uninterested in Europe, Russia would likely make much bolder moves in the region.

If they feel they're making the US pay for their defense spending good on them. On the US side of things a good chunk of the country thinks we should be world police for patriotic reasons - another chunk of the country thinks we have a duty to defend the world... While the majority of people (who are underrepresented by special interest groups) think it's insane we get five F35s for a billion dollars.

President was throwing a big fit about that a couple years ago. Wanting EU to pay a higher share of defense spending.

What does the $375B in interest payments buy America?

The ability to keep borrowing.

...good credit, that's how lending works.

That's true if you consider all of Amtrak.

The Northeast Corridor, which the GP is talking about, is a bit of a special case. Amtrak owns the tracks from NY to DC (states own the CT/MA part) and they're good enough to go a bit faster than the otherwise-usual 79 mph speed limit. This part of Amtrak is, IIRC, fairly profitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor

In the rest of the country, Amtrak is indeed stuck on freight lines, and service is often slow and unprofitable, but it's not entirely on them either. Passenger traffic is supposed to be prioritized, but the freight lines are not great about it and have been fined for not doing so (though, not enough to make them do it either). There are also weird political considerations about routes.

This is 2014 profitability data per route: http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2014/11/amtrak-routes-by-2014...

Pretty much all routes lose money except the Acela and Northeast Regional routes.

Living in the Netherlands and Flixbus is no competition to the trains here. As for travel inside of country, most of the passengers are travelling for work and normally employers pay for travel costs and if not it would be tax deductible, so they would naturally take trains. A lot of lines are already at maximum capacity during rush hour. As for travel to outside of the country, trains move a lot more passengers than Flixbus. Cheap train tickets are always bought early for holiday season.

I find public transport more expensive compared to minimum wage keeping other countries that I lived before, but the quality is high.

Trains are fast and reliable here and there's continuous improvements on the trains and their tracks. Every year they would announce that decrease in travel time due to improved tracks or higher frequency for some routes.

The only problem is that when something goes wrong extreme weather, signal failure, problem on the tracks in the rush hour, then that route stops working and all neighbouring routes become delayed or overcrowded. Luckily I only experience it every few months.

Roads don't break even, why should we expect trains to?

I never understand this line of thought. We invest in infrastructure to enable people to move between places, commune with one another, and trade goods. We've invested a tremendous amount in roads. Why do we expect other things like the USPS, Amtrak, etc. to generate profits when they're an expenditure in infrastructure?

The argument goes that if nobody is willing to pay the price for something(passenger rail), and chooses another alternative(driving), then it means that the service is not worth having and subsiding it would just be a waste of taxpayer money.

Of course its not that simple, because driving is subsidized(I would prefer every road to be a toll road and get rid of the general taxes that used to go to roads)...but you get the point.

I mean, the issue is I can't choose to pay for quality rail service because it doesn't exist here. I can't take HSR from e.g., Boston to NYC, SF to LA, or Seattle to Portland/Vancouver. These are all trips I would have gladly made at 100-400 dollar ticket prices in the last year.

Yes but you're exceptionally rare, and might discover you're wrong about your preferences if someone were to take the big gamble of building such a service. Also the whole era of passenger rail may have been killed off by lockdowns.

Train services are basically always hugely subsidised by governments. They could not survive against cars, buses and trucks if they weren't. The subsidies in Switzerland are eye-wateringly high for example. It's effectively a form of government planning designed to boost city/worker density as governments and others believe offices full of workers yields large benefits, and trains are the highest density/capacity form of passenger transport by far. So if you want ultra-dense urban cores you need a lot of trains.

But do we actually need those? Governments sure haven't acted like it this year. Now big corps are eyeing their expensive city centre HQs and wondering if the real estate is worth it, the workers are seeing how much they save when they aren't being forced to pay for the very expensive rail tickets, the managers are seeing that many (but not all) workers are happier without the time sucking, cattle-car commutes ... and governments are basically having to give up on the fiction that rail companies were private in order to keep them from going completely bust. But how long can that be sustained, if travel patterns have been permanently altered? No dense urban cores = few commuters paying business rates for rush hour travel = even worse economics for trains.

> I would prefer every road to be a toll road and get rid of the general taxes that used to go to roads

Off-topic I know, but I'd only like to see this if the tolls were reasonable with respect to the maintenance of the affected stretches of road. $0.50 per car per mile more than pays off a typical 4-lane interstate in a year, yet tolls are often an order of magnitude larger and drawn out for 20+ years.

A fair toll road system would basically ban semi trucks, since they’re the ones that do the overwhelming majority of the damage.

That's an interesting idea. I wonder how workable it would be to automate tolling based on axle weight.

Germany has a toll system for trucks only:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LKW-Maut

From Wikipedia:

> Germany's LKW-Maut is a toll for goods vehicles based on the distance driven in kilometres, the emission category of the vehicle and the number of axles.

It's meant to compensate some of these damages caused by high weight. If I remember correctly, road damage scales at a power of four of axle weight. It's billed semi-automatically (wireless stations along the road + device in the truck) and you don't even notice it as a normal driver.

Legal side note: Germany also has a vehicle tax that roughly scales with the size of the vehicle. But this only applies to vehicles registered in Germany. Because of the European Single Market, a lot of trucks running on German highways are registered in foreign countries (esp. Eastern Europe since drivers from those countries draw smaller salaries). The toll was enacted specifically to ensure that those foreign trucks contribute towards road maintenance as well. It does apply to German trucks, too, because the EU has rules against laws that discriminate against foreign EU citizens.

It's incredibly easy for trucks; they're already licensed and weighed. Most trucks in the US already have something in the cab to handle signaling the driver to pull in to the weigh station, implying that adding tracking & billing wouldn't be too hard. We're also starting to see GPS & LTE in the trailers too, to fight theft, so that's an easy integration point.

It's a bit harder with cars, since there's a lot less infrastructure to track usage, and people would rightfully balk at the invasion of privacy.

Just wanted to point out that carbon taxes are effectively per-mile tolls, but just on vehicles with ICE engines.

It's hard to justify investing in rail. At best, in most parts of the US it is slower, more expensive, and less convenient. There are some edge cases that it makes real sense for, but everywhere else is better served by cars and airplanes.

>> It's hard to justify investing in rail. At best, in most parts of the US it is slower, more expensive, and less convenient

But that's because we haven't invested in it! Before the 1960s most roads in the US were also terrible, so by that logic we shouldn't have invested in the Highway/Freeway Interstate system.

Seriously.

Here's the Amtrak network: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Am...

Here's the US freight rail network: https://i.imgur.com/4TYsU_d.webp?maxwidth=1024&fidelity=medi...

You can't tell me we can't do better.

We could definitely have a beautiful, big, fast train network. But most people still wouldn't use it.

Evidence from Europe and Asia shows that this is probably wrong. People in those areas strongly prefer high speed rail for trips that are less than 3-4 hours long, and begin to switch over to airplanes beyond that.

We're right back to "remember how big and sparsely populated the US is." 150mph in three hours is good for inter-city transportation in the Northeast, but a lot of other places would have trouble justifying the cost.

And that's nothing compared with what a truly high speed train would cost to implement here.

Again, that's a great reason not to build HSR in Iowa or the Dakotas. But if you look where the population centers of America, this excuse begins to fall down. A huge percentage of America lives on the coasts in fairly dense pockets, far denser than many countries with existing HSR.

High speed rail generally goes a bit faster than 300km/h. At that speed a lot of things are less than 4 hours away. Chicago is a bit less than 4 hours from NYC at that speed, as is Seattle from San Francisco. San Francisco to Seattle is obviously not a great candidate for a high speed rail line because it doesn't pass through much of interest, but it gives a good sense of the scale.

Why not?

There's tons of routes in the US that could make sense if there wasn't so much NIMBYism, corruption and the oil and auto lobby, let's be honest.

SF-Sacramento, SF-LA, LA-San Diego, LA-Vegas, Seattle-Portland, the whole Northeast Corridor (a better truly high speed Acela), Houston-Dallas, Orlando-Miami, Pittsburg-DC and and and. There's lots of large cities in the US in the high speed rail sweetspot of 400-800 miles (2-4h travel time) apart

Trains are like 3 times faster than cars if built properly, and have no luggage issues like planes do

Your point could be correct overall, but to say "rail is more expensive than road transport" you've got to do cirque-de-solei level acrobatics.

You seem to be presenting this as a false dichotomy. The road network can't go away even if we have excellent rail travel. If you look at the incremental costs of additional traffic capacity, road transport is pretty competitive.

Roads could easily break even with gas taxes or other fees that users would complain about but still pay. Federal gas taxes cover the majority of highway operational and capital expenses, even with ~1/6 diverted to mass transit. Double the gas tax and interstate highways are entirely user-funded at fuel prices lower than prevailed a few years ago.

Passenger rail outside of the Northeast corridor can’t even fund its current operating cost through ticket sales, let alone the massive capital needed to build more.

I dont know where you are but in NYC the port authority makes billions from bridge and tunnels to use to subsidize the PATH train system.

>I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha.

When something becomes a cultural priority, economic sectors shift to accommodate it. We are really good at trucking, for example. We have loads of highways. We also have excellent freight rail.

The reason that the passenger rail sector in the US sucks is because it is small at a national scale and so it doesn't benefit from access to the national market. If you model NYC as a small country building its own rail network in a high-cost area surrounded by countries with no transit and expensive labor, suddenly it makes sense. Passenger rail isn't a priority in the curriculum at most universities. People who might learn how to build subways instead learn to build highways. Companies that might specialize in subways specialize in airports. To use a coding analogy, building passenger rail does not follow the happy path for American construction organizations, be they unions or firms.

(In Latin America, the problem starts earlier: primary and secondary school math scores in LA trail the income quantile for, IIRC, all LA countries)

This is a situation that can be changed, but it won't happen in one place or at one time. Alternatively, the country could reduce taxes on foreign contractors building transit infrastructure and recruit more foreign investment, although that would certainly leave a bitter taste if it hurt the car industry.

> Amtrak and Acela do not actually own the railway they use...

This is true for most of the Amtrak mileage, but the Northeast Corridor rails are largely owned by Amtrak[0,pg4]:

Amtrak owns and operates 363 route-miles of the 457-route-mile Northeast Corridor (NEC) spine between Washington and Boston.

[0] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

The US is willing to run at a $3T deficit so the concept of needing tax money or fiscal viability to build things is tenuous at best.

Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR?

No, but the early railroads of this country were built when there were no property rights of competing owners to defend (or respect), few comparable alternative modes of transportation, and practically no safety or regulatory measures to govern how it was built.

That said, the cost of building things in the US is a major problem.

It was also built by Chinese immigrants slaves at essentially no cost to the builders, wasn’t it?

Depends on the region. Out West it was mostly Chinese workers. Back East it was the Irish.

> Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR?

Heh, I don't know much about the history of the transcontinental railroad in the US, but up here in Canada it was relatively cheap because... well... to be blunt, we used primarily Chinese labour and did not give a single crap about whether or not they died building it.

The US government gave railroad companies 175 million acres of free land, 10% of the nation (ex. Alaska), to get those railroads built. It was an incredibly costly endeavor.

I understand that Acalea still suffered an unusual problem. Because the tracks are connected to freight tracks, regulation required it to do well in a collision with a heavier freight train. This means that it has to be much heavier than true HSTs are in other countries. That's why it goes much slower than HSTs elsewhere and is still pricey.

High speed trains in other countries also share tracks with freight- even if there are no freight services on dedicated high-speed lines, they won't necessarily be on such lines all the time.

FRA crash safety standards are stricter because of Not Invented Here syndrome.

I'll probably always take the train into Boston. Even though it's a little more expensive than taking a greyhound or driving (if I can find parking), I don't like to drive in Boston. However, if I needed to go much further I'd be in a bind. The website is really difficult to use at times. I was trying to get to Maryland(?) at one point to buy a used car, but I couldn't find a page that would show me stations near where I needed to go. I ended up finding one nearby using Google, and though the Amtrak website allowed it as a destination, it seemed there were never trains headed there. After 15 minutes of confusion, I checked wikipedia and it turned out the station had been closed to trains for years and only operated as a museum.

So even if they redid the rails, they might have to redo the website as well.

If you can drive in Boston, you can drive almost anywhere -- e.g. I didn't find driving round the Arc de Triomphe in Paris particularly difficult. Who needs lines? :-)

But I'd probably take the commuter train instead if they ran more often -- if we ever go back to offices.

The UI of the Amtrak fare / ticket finding website is terrible.

The website is bad, but phoning Amtrak actually worked pretty well for me! There wasn't much of a wait, the staff were friendly and knowledgeable, and they were able to really quickly plan out complicated routes with multiple transfers and compare different options. (One wonders if they could make whatever fancy planning/booking system they use available to the public.)

Admittedly this was a couple years ago, so it's possible COVID or budget cuts have changed things for the worse.

> The website is bad, but phoning Amtrak actually worked pretty well for me!

Underappreciated these days: web is not always the priority method of interaction for people.

The web is great, but for historical or practical reasons a lot of people and businesses prefer other solutions.

E.g. construction workers and phones

When we built the interstate highway system the top income tax rate was 87%.

>"Anyways Amtrak are barely turning a profit as it is and while it would be great to have Euro quality train lines, ..."

There's no reason that the North Eastern commuter corridor that runs Washington D.C. to Boston couldn't be profitable if Amtrak were to operate as a series of independent regional entities though. The economics are certainly there. Instead Amtrak is a single entity which services large swathes of the country for which there is little demand for rail service.

>I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha.

We already pay the taxes, but unfortunately we spend a trillion dollars a year maintaining our global military empire instead of shoring up our crumbling domestic infrastructure. Priorities!

We are supposedly building a Shinkansen-like train in Texas:

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-...

Amtrak does turn a profit on the Northeast corridor. It's just that it has mandates to provide a lot of service outside the Northeast Corridor that is unprofitable.

They own the Northeast corridor.

Of course I'd be willing to pay for new train tracks. I've wasted days of my life in northern virginia waiting for the track to free up. And they wonder why nobody uses the train!

Amtrak has never turned a profit. Ever. They have never even broken even.

Is this the metric we should be grading everything on? My kid hasn’t either but I love her nonetheless.

I think it’s a pretty reasonable metric for a business whose stated goal is to be profitable. I don’t know what that has to do with your kid, but I’m glad you love her.