The problem in the US though is that once you get to your destination you are probably in a city dependent on cars because of such poor walkability and public transport, so now you have to rent a car as well.

Looking at travel from Austin to SF, taking a train is a longer duration trip and costs more.

One way on Oct 20th, Kayak has a flight for $119 and Wanderu has a train trip for $662 that is 3 days and 8 hours in duration.

If I could take my car on this train it might be worth it, from a cost and logistics standpoint train pretty much always loses.

I say this as someone who grew up enjoying the metro in dc and ny and use rail and ferry's when overseas.

Until infrastructure, subsidies and other externalities are addressed train travel will not be competitive, I have far more hope for level 3 self driving cars than I do for walkable cities and train travel parity.

Amtrak has an auto train route from ~DC to ~Orlando.

It was (and may still be) Amtraks only profitable long distance line.

> ... you are probably in a city dependent on cars because of such poor walkability and public transport [ .... ] If I could take my car on this train it might be worth it ...

Take your bike!

Yeah so I'm not going to take my 2 year old and 1 year old and all associated baggage to the hotel on my bike.

Would you try to do that on public transit, if it was better?

Europe here, and yes, that's what people do.

France here. I do take my bike everywhere (RER, TER, TGV… I've never had a car and rented <10x in my life, at 37 y-o). But it's getting difficult to find/book a place in most fast trains, especially between Paris and Loire Valley as there are too few racks available and biking is becoming more popular. I wish all major train stations had 24/7 bike renting service, including for bikepacking.

I am actually aware of that. I was trying to discern whether or not the person I was replying to is actually criticizing public transit infrastructure in US cities or has just accepted that you need a car (easy to understand why that might be, even if it is not necessarily true).

My kids could travel on public transit easily when it’s a good day.

There have been numerous times when I’ve been very glad that I had a vehicle to load them all into to contain the current detonations occuring.

I have no objection to using a train, if it's actually point-to-point.

(but like, actually point to point. not, get to downtown and walk another 1.5 miles or wait 45 minutes for a bus transfer).

Give it a couple of years and you can put them on a Tern GSD or similar.

(Don’t know if Amtrak would carry that. You can just about get away with taking them on UK trains.)

For routes where the bike area is first come first serve, how common is it for them to run out of space?

I’ve never seen it be a problem the few times I’ve noticed, but the conductors also bend the rules (hopefully not the bikes!) to make it work.

But (outside of the NEC) you do have to worry about 10+ hour delays (the most extreme delay I had an interaction with was being delayed by 2 hours because yesterday's train was in front of us and delayed by about 24 hours.

If you’ve ridden any long distance trains you’ll die on the rails eventually where they just give up, put everyone in a bus, and you go to the other direction train which they just turn around.