alt Hacker NewsListen, I'm the type of fella who'd gladly take the Amtrak from the East Bay to Portland, 18 hours each way, and I'm telling you even I'd do so only as a novelty. If I actually had somewhere to be, spending basically an entire day on a train would be a non-starter. And that's just on the same coast! If I had to take the Amtrak back east to see my family for the holidays I would probably just not go. My travel to the other coast (not to mention back to the country where I was born, an additional ocean's worth of distance) would only be worth the trip for like a life change or a death in the family.
I'm clearly not the only one who thinks so, judging by both Amtrak ridership statistics and the cost ineffective nature of my attempts to travel on it.
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I'd like to see a revival of trains in the US, but I agree their impacts will be limited. I think they make sense for regional travel (Texas triangle, New England area, West coast, Midwest, maybe NM/Colorado/South Wyoming, etc.) Hopping between these regions seem like planes are the obvious choice. The distances are just so high, with often very limited regional centers connecting them in between.
I'd love to take some HSR to Austin or Houston or San Antonio from DFW, but I just can't imagine the network to make a train work competitively to get from DFW to NYC or LAX.
I didn’t say anything about trains or Amtrak?
People and goods have travelled around the world long for thousands of years before air air travel and train travel. And people have made decisions above the trade-offs of travel to see family for thousands of years before air travel and train travel.
If air travel was unavailable or unsubsidized, people would continue to make those decisions and life would go on.