I’ve been down in the dumps lately, so I decided I’d try to cheer myself up by fantasizing about what would probably be my last trip on Amtrak. This would just be a joyride since, now that I’m an old fart who’s retired, I no longer have a reason to travel.
Planning complicated Amtrak trips can be “interesting” because of horrible timekeeping and the possibility of missing connections. The WordPress editor that this blog uses won’t do HTML tables, so I put some ideas out on my VPS if anybody cares. (You won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t care. 😎)
Here’s one drawback of public transporation, and I’m not sure if there’s a good work-around:
Recently my son and his wife were invited to travel overseas with his in-laws and BIL and SIL. There were a total of 6 people traveling from City A to City B, where the cheapest airline fare was to travel to Other Country. They could have flown from City A to City B (roughly 30 minutes in the air), but it would have added an extra $600 for all 6 of them to travel (plus all the idiocies of air travel). They could have taken Amtrak from City A to City B (roughly 4 hours), but that would have been over $900 for 6 people to travel.
Instead, they rented a car in City A for $50 and drove 4 hours to City B (same time as Amtrak would have taken assuming all was on time), where they dropped off the rental car at the airport and caught a free shuttle from the car rental place to the airport (approximately half a mile).
Moral of the story: in the USA, it’s not economically feasible to take public transportation to get multiple people from one place to another. Likewise, in this case, it’s cheaper and faster for a single person to fly or drive than to take Amtrak.
I really wish this wasn’t so, and I’m hoping in your case you get a fun fantasy trip.
Amtrak is expensive mainly because they are running at the wrong end of the economy of scale equation in many cases. The difference in costs between running a train with two passenger cars and ten passenger cars is not that much. Unfortunately, except for certain commuter lines on the East Coast, Amtrak is sharing the rails with very long and very slow freight trains, and the rails belong to the freight lines, so the Amtrak trains have no priority. Thus, they can almost never perform according to schedule and this really restricts their passenger pool, which means they have to charge each passenger a lot to try to recoup some of their costs, which results in even fewer people willing to buy tickets. So it’s Catch-22.
If Congress wasn’t controlled by morons and grifters, they could declare passenger rail service a vital infrastructure and demand that the freight railroads give it higher priority. In exchange, Congress could recognize that the fuel efficiency of rail freight is also a good thing, and that semi-trucks cause a lot of damage to our interstate highways. So, they could look into incentives to ship by rail and perhaps use the savings in highway maintenance to fund those. But, that would require driving a stake into the heart of the fairy tale called Trickle-Down Economics. Another thing is that it is much easier to electrify trains than it is a fleet of heavy trucks, so we could have much of our freight traveling via trains powered by wind and solar, except we have a senile old fool in the White House who has a irrational hatred of windmills.