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Only about 15% of the US population smokes, why should Amtrak do anything more to accomodate them? I would much rather there be tavern cars on Amtrak than smoke lounges. Tavern cars would at least make money, whereas attracting only 15% of the population with an equal or greater loss from...

The average winter temperature in Chicago is generally colder than the average winter temperatures in the Pacific Northwest. It snows in Washington and Oregon, but its not polar vortex cold. Vienna is also not Chicago levels of cold either. Questionable maintenance may also be a play, but the...

Some of how badly local transportation works is dependent on the state and how the agencies are set up. When I lived in Nevada, Washoe County has a county wide agency with a sales tax dedicated to public transit. Which has led to them having a system of about 20 routes where all but 2 have at...

I personally don't think COVID has forever changed the way we travel. We might expect things to be cleaner than we have accepted before, but outside of that I doubt much if anything will change. On the first point, as one of these illusive Millennials destroying the transportation world, I may...

One of the many "quirks" of history classes in the US, at least when it involves the railroads that I find a bit suspicious is how history classes tend to ignore the contributions of the Pullman Porters to the Civil Rights and Labor Movements of the early 20th century. US history pretty much...

The Transcontinental trains do have a numbering pattern, the Sunset Limited is 1 and 2, The Chief is 3 and 4, The Zephyr is 5 and 6, and the Empire Builder is 7 and 8. The Sunset Limited did keep its SP numbers, I'm not sure how many other trains in the Amtrak system kept their numbers. Like the...

Getting more freight and passengers onto the rails is something we need to work on, but I personally don't see that happening given the situation the railways are in. Either the government is going to need to take the rights of way into public ownership and manage the market to some extent or...

Yes and the public has been convinced that cars cause most road damage and we pay taxes based on that. Like in California the tax on gas is 82 cents per gallon and $1.13 for diesel. Or diesel pays just a little more despite diesel powered vehicles tending to do a disproportionate amount of road...

The damage between a car like a Prius and the damage from a semi has been quoted as 410 times more damage. So if you charge a Prius 1 cent per mile, you'd have to charge a semi $4.10 per mile. At least this is the rate I heard quoted on a podcast about traffic engineering. If we charged trucks a...

I for one don't use Amtrak on long distance trips because it is cost prohibitive. For example, for me and my partner to go visit his parents in Denver on the Zephyr, the one way cost of a roomette is the same as round trip on Southwest. Same thing with visiting my dad in Oregon. The one way cost...

Highways generally don't pay for themselves with extra development. If anything they tend to cause suburban sprawl which can't even maintain itself on its "extra" tax revenue. Most suburban cities need constant cycles of growth just to bring in enough money to pay for street repaving. Also...

I have looked into the costs of what it would cost to replace the Superliners and $4-$5 million per car is a very likely number. The capacity ratio of Superliners to Viewliners is 2:3 so $10 million in Superliner capacity would be about $12 million in roughly equivalent Viewliner capacity. The...

Cheap food and near Amtrak are two phrases that don't go together in Martinez. I live in the area and the cheapest thing in Martinez that is good is a few miles from downtown where the Amtrak station is. Sacramento is kind of in the same boat, anything near downtown (assuming things survived)...

I will give him props for bringing up rail's lack of a federal trust fund and that the most growth is coming from stretches of 500 miles. Its almost like the average long distance trip is between 200 and 300 miles instead of the 750 miles Amtrak was saddled with. If he can get some substantive...

I would say do it all in one go for more than just expanding passenger service. Getting freight off the highways is needed given how much damage 1 semi does to a highway compared to 1 car...well ~400 cars. Nationalizing the ROWs, upgrading and managing them as a public good would enable this...

Buying the ROWs of the Class 1s wouldn't be horribly expensive. Looking over their balance sheets, they own about $193 billion collectively in "property" that I am mostly sure is in the US and isn't their rolling stock. The math gets dodgy with KCS, CN and CP since they don't separate US...

You explain to people what the costs of building highways actually is compared to rail. 1 mile of rehabbed double track can cost between $2.5 and $2.7 million on average. Compared to highway construction which costs $3 to $11 million per mile to build depending on where you are building and what...

I would say HSR is not something we need at the present moment beyond the current projects that are currently in motion. Given how useless Amtrak is for a lot of city connections, selling Congress or any of the states on a TGV style system would be justifiably a hard sell. It would be a better...

If we could get limitless money for non road transportation out of Congress, I would agree, lets go hog wild and build as much as we can. The reality that we live in is that we need a win and right now Brightline is our best example of a "high speed" project and its still just a conventional...

I also see that a lack of understanding of transportation from my generation as a problem. They tend to think all we need to do is build a bunch of TGVs and everything will be good, costs be damned. They are willfully ignorant of other parts of the rail network, like the need to speed up freight...