Amtrak agrees and they've been trying to shut down a lot of those routes for some time now. The problem is that Congress won't allow them to.
Two good targets for this would be Upstate NY, where you could reduce travel time to Buffalo from 8 hours to 5 hours, and make travel to Chicago and Toronto much less painful. Improving the Philadelphia -- Pittsburgh route would also make a lot of sense too.
I'm also not sure what building out NE service does to make Chicago more accessible. Chicago is prohibitively far from all of the east coast cities to make NE rail meaningful.
Would that it were otherwise! I live in Chicago and have lots of friends and business associates in NYC. :|
Similar to what tptacek said below, why should a taxpayer in Arizona support a DC-NYC shuttle?
But the current Amtrak service is incredibly slow and inconvenient in both timing and destination. I just can't justify it, as much as I'd like to.
So I usually drive, occasionally fly. High speed rail (in 2099 or whenever they actually finish it) would be a nice choice. But if it's several times the cost of driving, not including the car I'd have to rent at the other end anyway, it will be a lot less appealing. The drive isn't that long, and even HSR won't be that much shorter.
I'd be a lot more likely to take HSR to Las Vegas, weirdly. There I don't need a car at the other end.
The Acela doesn't run in California and it doesn't run in Texas.
Trains in Eurpoe are going to 220mph.
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/take-a-look-at-europe-s-faste...
The average speed between NYC and Boston is something like 79mph. Saying you have a top speed 130mph, and doing it only for a small portion of the trip is quite misleading. At any rate, peak has little meaning. I've been on commuter trains that peaked at 90mph for 5 minutes.
I also don't understand your "peak versus average" speed thing. You're comparing apples-oranges, not me: I'm comparing peak-to-peak. Normal Amtrak trains also don't average 75MPH!
What these speed increases did was they made train travel roughly equal (well, probably within an hour or so) in time to plane for popular routes-BOS to NYP and NYP to points south. And given post-9/11 security, that made the train pretty attractive especially going downtown to downtown. I'd argue though that "faster" isn't an automatic win though. It has to be competitive with air.
The introduction of Acela also created a huge amount of publicity for taking the train rather than the plane
What higher speed rail could do in the Northeast is make the New England to the Pennsylvania/DC routes more attractive which don't really work for most cases today. But that's sort of a marginal and it doesn't address the more interesting cases where the economics and travel time math don't really work vs. air (e.g. NYC to Chicago).
I'm not sure, though, that the fact that a route loses money necessarily means that route is a pointless waste of money.
Is it not possible that running a government funded service has value even if it does not produce a profit?
What I'm getting at is that profit probably isn't the best way to measure the value of these routes.
As far as the renaissance, ridership is up considerably on most routes. Even if they aren't profitable, they're certainly serving a lot more people than they were.
This is a surprisingly common misconception in the United States. For public transport, the top three determinants of ridership are, in order, frequency, frequency and frequency.
As a simple example, here in the equally long-distance-transport benighted state of Australia, there's a shiny train line that goes from central Sydney to the nation's capital Canberra in a bit over 4 hours, which is quite competitive with driving (~3.5 hours pedal to the metal, realistically 5 with Sydney traffic and breaks etc) and flying (45 min in the air, but several hours of hassle to get to the airport, security, waiting around yadda yadda), and the cost of a return ticket is on the same order as the gas to drive back and forth, and around 3-4x cheaper than flying.
Yet I almost never take the train, opting to drive or fly instead. Why? Because there are three (3) trains a day, leaving at 6 AM (nope), 12 noon (meaning you spend the whole workday on the train) and 6 PM (well, this one's semi-decent, although it's past 10 PM by the time it arrives). And should you miss your train for any reason, you're completely screwed.
If, on the other hand, the trains ran hourly, none of this would be a problem: I could pick a time that suits me, instead of having to fit myself to the trains, and missing one would be an inconvenience, not a catastrophe.
Amtrak, outside the NE corridor[1], could not possibly be purely user-funded. Increasing fares would decrease ridership significantly enough to offset any added revenue. Whatever fare rates would maximize revenue couldn't pay for the system.
[1] And I'm skeptical about this, too: Gas taxes pay for the lion's share of capital expenditures to build and repair our interstate highways. Reports like this about Amtrak's "profitability" are limited to operating costs, which are all you need so long as your tracks and trains last forever.
This is mostly due to simple competition...the existence of passenger airliners, regardless of how competitive the train or airline offerings are, reduces market share. I guarantee you that the most profitable ticket sales on California's HSR fairy tale will be between (LA|SF) and (Fresno|Bakersfield|Modesto). Not between LA and SF.
I mean what's the point of running a train between San Francisco (which is actually on the OTHER side of the Bay) to Los Angeles only once a day, taking over 12 Hours!? That's not a real train service. That's a tourist attraction.
For long trips though, you're looking at a day of travel vs days of travel. For most people that's not hard to choose between.
* Add an hour on each side (getting to/through airport, getting from the airport).
* Assume a 2-hour minimum flight no matter what the route.
* Round up to nearest hour.
For routes with a flying time less than 2 hours, I prefer to drive. Amtrak, though, is never an option. My mental model for Amtrak would need to build in the time to complete the trip on a bus.
Another gigantic bite of Amtrak's ridership comes from short-hop California routes --- particularly LA to San Diego.
The sharp increase in Amtrak ridership that Brookings notice includes the zero riders to 3.3MM riders from the introduction of the Acela service, plus another 2+MM from other Northeast routes, presumably knock-on benefit from the Acela.
Most of Amtrak's route map seems, with this data, to be a pointless waste of money. The "renaissance" is the Acela, and not much more.