E.g. even the old closed Amtrak corridor through Southern Montana would today serve more people than some perfectly viable routes in Norway, over a similar stretch (and there is work underway to try to resurrect it).
But flights are often cheaper in Europe too despite subsidies for rail. Outside of the busiest corridors trains works best in those places where it's competing with cars or buses, not planes.
That's because intra-EU flights are also highly subsidized, especially around taxes for fuel. Decades ago the EU punted on the complex topic of charging taxes on avgas and that is a key contributor to the existence of cheap airlines like ryanair.
okay, so by not taking money from them, we are... giving them money?
The reason passenger travel isn’t more popular has more to do with the trillions spent subsidizing private vehicle usage. People respond to economic incentives and for the last century the message has been that taxpayers will help you drive.
E.g. to take the North Coast Hiawatha route that they're hoping to resurrect through Souther Montana - it went from Chicago to Seattle. Very few people would be taking it all the way - it took ~47 hours.
But many of the stops only have road connections without it.
And as you point out the total time spent is not just the journey time anyway. But beyond the raw time spent, there's a difference in how. It's faster for me to fly to Paris, because I can get flights from an airport close enough to me to outweigh the security, and that's small enough to not usually be so bad. But I still have to go through security, wait around for my gate, walk to the gate and go through another round of waiting, and then I might have to wait for luggage at the other end. I'll happily spend the small amount of extra time to be able to just sit down in the Eurostar instead.
The biggest issue with respect to choosing trains in the UK is that the cost of train tickets relative to air travel in the UK is criminal compared to much of the rest of Europe.
But it's not a small amount of time. Planes travel 7-10 times faster than passenger rail (Amtrak runs at 50-70 mph, and can't go faster without track upgrades). If you're going to a city that's a 1 hour plane ride away that's still 7-10 hours of travel time just to skip security and baggage claim. Not exactly a good proposition.
Even St. Paul to Chicago is not viable by rail when the flight is only 90 minutes. Even with a two hour security line that's still 1/3 the total transit time.
"trains have the benefit of being able to serve lots of places in between better." Yes, but only when those places are fairly close and have enough population to fulfill travel demand. And the US doesn't have many regions with those conditions.
You're quoting a part where I gave a specific example where it is indeed a small amount of time difference, and use it to argue over an entirely different scenario.
The Eurostar takes <2h30 hours from London to Paris. The plane takes ca 1h. The plane will leave you ca. 40m travel from the city centre via the RER.
But the Eurostar terminal in London is further from me than the nearest airport, and so end-to-end travel time from me to the centre of Paris is marginally shorter with a plane.
If I lived on the other side of town, or wanted to go North of Paris CDG instead of to the city centre, the numbers might look entirely different. Hence the point of giving the specific example I did in order to make the point that WHEN they are roughly similar, I still prefer the train. The point you quoted had nothing to do about overall viability across all distances.
> Even St. Paul to Chicago is not viable by rail when the flight is only 90 minutes. Even with a two hour security line that's still 1/3 the total transit time.
That's fine, but a total strawman related to the argument you quoted.
> "trains have the benefit of being able to serve lots of places in between better." Yes, but only when those places are fairly close and have enough population to fulfill travel demand. And the US doesn't have many regions with those conditions.
As I've elaborated on at length elsewhere, even the lowest population density states in the US have only exceptionally tiny numbers of people in areas where that is true when compared to existing lines considered viable in Europe. To start with less than 5% of the US population live in states where the average population is lower than Norway, and like in Norway, and just like everywhere else, most of the population even in those states live along corridors that are dense enough - and indeed many of those corridors have existing rail and either do have or used to have passenger trains (e.g. South Montana used to be covered by the North Coast Hiawatha until the late 1970's; it's population density is higher now). Norway has a significant proportion of the population - not all, an entire low density region is without rail at all because it's considered too expensive - within reasonable distance of passenger rail.
The US could too - just providing rail cover to similar density stretches as in Norway would mean passenger rail covering the vast majority of the US population. Again, nobody is suggesting 100% coverage - just that far more coverage is entirely viable.
The US has areas not considered viable due to US political considerations. That's a choice for the US public to make, but this is not because US geography or demographics is exceptional, but because US politics is.
American railways cannot support those speeds, though. The American rail infrastructure was primarily built for cargo, and supports speeds of 50-70 miles per hour.
> That's fine, but a total strawman related to the argument you quoted.
The St. Paul to Chicago example was referencing the North Coast Hiawatha in your previous post. You mentioned that some people would only take a small segment of the line, not the entire Seattle to Chicago route. You wrote, "Very few people would be taking it all the way - it took ~47 hours." What specific destinations were you referring to here?
> As I've elaborated on at length elsewhere, even the lowest population density states in the US have only exceptionally tiny numbers of people in areas where that is true when compared to existing lines considered viable in Europe.
This is patently false. Take California, for instance. The vast majority of the state's 40 million people live in the San Francisco Bay Area and LA - San Diego metro areas. This would be 5-7 hours by rail, but only an hour long flight. Los Angeles to Seattle would be 10+ hours. These aren't places withs small populations. But the metro areas that do exist are far away from one another. Too far to make trains viable for passenger travel.
This isn't unique to the west coast. Take St. Louis as another example. The other big metros in its vicinity are Nashville, Kansas city, and Indianapolis. These are all 5+ hours by train but just a 1 hour flight. The cities are spaced out too far to compete with airlines. Few would opt for a 5+ hour plane ride instead of a 1 hour flight. And people who would choose the former are instead served by Greyhound buses that don't take much longer than passenger rail.
Again, the only place in America that does have a collection of large cities close together - the Northeast Corridor - has a widely used train line. The rest of America has cities spaced out further than the 100-200 miles where trains outcompete planes.
> The US has areas not considered viable due to US political considerations. That's a choice for the US public to make, but this is not because US geography or demographics is exceptional, but because US politics is.
False, it is absolutely due to geography and distance, not politics. This is one of the most clear-cut examples of geography influencing transportation choices.
I'd be very, very interested in where you found this claim that China's cities have the same average distance between them as US cities. Wouldn't be surprised if they used totally different criteria for a Chinese city and a US city. I would be astounded if the median distance between cities of >500k people is the same in China as in the USA.
The average distance isn't very important, as long as the cities are clustered enough to create viable lines.
The threshold where you exceed what is viable does. And hardly anyone in the US live in areas that have so low density that there aren't viable routes, on the basis of comparing with the density of routes that are served in other countries.
Even, say, Wyoming, with an average population density 1/5th of Norway, has half its population in its top 10 towns, most of which, unsurprisingly, has rail going between them because a sufficient number of them are close enough to each other to form viable clusters.
Or, as I mentioned elsewhere, we have Montana, with a similar population density and a size ~50% larger than the United Kingdom, but a population 1/70th, where the lines that used to be used by the North Coast Hiawatha goes through a range of towns and surrounding area that easily covers ~40% of the state population at a density easily comparable to e.g. continental Europe and well above areas of rural Europe that are well covered by train.
There are many pairs of cities in the US between which rail travel is not viable. But there are very few cities that are not within a viable distance of a set of other cities with higher density corridors (than their state averages) in between that combined makes travel viable between them. "Nobody" will travel the full North Coast Hiawatha route between Chicago and Seattle, as it'll take ~48 hours. Plenty of people will travel parts of it (and do travel parts of it, as many parts of that route are still covered by trains). Including through some of the lowest density parts of the route if it is reopened.
To again bring up Norway, because I know the rail network there having grown up there, consider the line from Hamar to Åndalsnes - a line where the two most significant towns on that stretch have populations of around 3k (Åndalsnes) and <30k (Hamar). Compare to e.g. Butte, MT (~34k) to Billings, MT (184k). Both again are within similar distances to several more cities that form similar viable pairs and that that similarly enhances the overall viability of the connecting segments. And that's part of why Hamar to Åndalsnes is viable too - it connects to a couple of other lines at Hamar and at Dombås.
Just like Butte is a viable distance from Spokane via Missoula, and Billings is a viable distance from Gilette, WY, or Buffalo, WY (still larger than Åndalsnes, and has rail) and onwards to Cheyenne, WY.
I'd actually love a map that visualizes which parts of the US are sufficient "islands" that there are towns of any reasonable size that are not within those kinds of travel distances along a reasonable rail corridor to make up a total population size along the route that is large enough to be considered viable plenty of other places.
I can't think of any.
The US as a whole is huge and dispersed and low-density, but almost nobody lives in the low-density places, almost by definition - even as large as they are, they're not large enough for the low-density population that lives in those places to add up to significant numbers. And the upside of a train over planes is that it's not the end-to-end distance that matters, but the population near enough to the stations along any given subset of the route.
This is just factually incorrect. The vast majority of people in the US live in places with large distances between population centers.
Of the remaining 20%, it seems unlikely that they’re evenly distributed in areas which are not suitable for rail travel because American history since the early 1800s followed rail lines (and prior to that, canals) because people followed transportation corridors - it was only with mid-20th century subsidies for car travel that people got so casual about ignoring the energy cost of travel.
> This small decline was largely the result of changes to the criteria for defining urban areas implemented by the Census Bureau, including raising the minimum population threshold for qualification from 2,500 to 5,000.
So even a small town of 5,000 people is considered "urban". Again, population density is far more important than "urban" population because a big city of 5 million people produces way more demand for travel than a town of 5,000 even if they're both categorized as "urban". Fast passenger rail has high overhead costs in terms of building high speed rial track, and is mostly viable between large population centers. But even the fastest high speed rail is usually 3-5 times slower than air travel. And in America, rail is powered by fossil fuels anyway so it's not like there's a huge climate win in terms of using passenger rail over Greyhound buses or planes.
What changed was the massive subsidies directed towards private vehicle usage. Those rail connections disappeared because they couldn’t compete with the heavily subsidized highway system on all but the busiest routes. This also means that things can change if we start taxing carbon or require vehicle users to pay for their infrastructure.