Edit: if you’re referring to Brightline West, construction hasn’t even started.

I think "passenger rail" implies passenger trains running on the "full/main" railroad lines that run all over the US. Something like light rail or local transit typically have their own discrete lines, in my experience.

Again, could be wrong, that's just how I interpret it.

you misspelled "union"

In a sane world Amtrak would shut down most of the long-distance routes, fix the northeast corridor, and focus on gradually expanding that, but the politics of that are unattractive so it bumbles on with trains that only train nerds would ever consider actually riding on.

By the time I left the company several years ago that data was being restricted to only certain employees. As noted below, hasmat is likely the reason this kind of data is not publicly accessible. It is shared in a limited fashion with shippers, etc.

and tracking trains ain't like tracking planes, where they're easy to see up in the sky and constantly transmitting -- train X takes a turn around a mountain and it's in a radio/cell deadzone and that's it.

plus unless you have high-end SAMs you're not able to impact most planes overhead, but shady individuals could certainly impact trains.

I think you could go a little lighter, pretty sure the actual trains have a lighter more saturated blue on them. Something closer to the blue you're using for the Mass Bay Trans Authority would be fine, and there's no overlap in service areas to make that confusing.

Or maybe different marker size/shape for regional vs national trains.

Also saw the South Shore Line is there now. Nice!

Thank you so much for the feedback! I agree it would make sense to highlight the train a bit more !

Funny thing, is that Chicago has direct rail access from downtown to 4 airports in 3 states - Chicago O'Hare and Chicago Midway via the CTA, Milwaukee Mitchell (via Amtrak), and South Bend Regional (via the South Shore).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Shore_Line

Anyway, according to [1,2]: US: Ridership 549,631,632 UK: Ridership 1.738 billion

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_Uni... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britai...

[0] - https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/passenger-rai...

[1] - https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

Also, in what world can you reliably get from central LA/SF to LAX/SFO and through checkin & TSA in 45 min each?

Flying has huge friction to engage in, as OP indicated Japanese trains have almost none.

I highly doubt that, since you have to board 20 minutes before take off, plus the time it takes to get through security, as well as getting to the airport which won't be in the city center.

The current airfare also doesn't include any sort of fee to ease the ecological impact of burning jet fuel.

And that’s before even considering induced demand.

The attempt at analysis here is just nonsensical. Not even wrong.

I would also add in a cost for carbon. I realize that’s more controversial but it seems like we will have to pay to remove co2 at some point.

I don’t know what the numbers look like when you do that.

Regardless, I do agree the amount per traveler to make a train work seems depressingly high.

In other words, I think $95 one way on an extremely punctual bullet train with high availability is a steal.

If not, it’s not a fair comparison.

In the country of individualism, options that are better but would also help other people who haven't directly contributed to it aren't very popular.

Right now in North America on an enormous amount of routes there's pretty much no real alternative to driving or flying and on many others where a train does exist it's so poor in quality that few use it.

If rail was a real option then more people would use it, and that would be transferring people from a relatively much higher CO2 emission form of transport to a lower emission one. That's a win.

Every where I look I see data that shows that the CO2 emissions per user are dramatically lower for train than air travel.

Now clearly on some big routes flying is a must and train would be so incredibly lengthly that it would be a misery, but there's tons and tons of shorter routes where train would work really well, competing well against car/bus and air travel.

If one wanted to get aggressive about it, once the infrastructure as in place, one could do what France has done and to ban short haul flights.

This sort of solution doesn't require any sort of technological breakthroughs, or technologies that do not exist.

Trying to solve climate change based on working on new technologies that don't currently exist and may not ever exist seems harder to me, and yet remarkably we see people pointing to this approach instead of well understood solutions we already have.

Accordingly I'd call implementing proven technology relatively easy. One could get started on it tomorrow.

I got caught in probably the 2nd worst traffic driving to/from my parents (70mi away) this weekend I've had in 20 years. And yet it was still about 30min faster, each way, than if I took Metro North.

But I'd also love if we could go faster than 50mph. TGV in France, which launched 41 years ago, travel between 167mph and 198mph [1].

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV

The LIRR Today has a great article, that I cannot for the life of me find, where the author used train speed data between stations to figure out what speed "most trains" accomplished (so accounting for curves, station stops, etc.) and redid the schedules according to that data. Without padding, everyone that uses the LIRR would save hours a week in commuting.

Incidentally, the LIRR has been moving away from higher train speeds and better connections to reduce travel time in favor of arriving at terminals within 6 minutes of the scheduled time. Schedule padding, replacing 80mph switches with 60mph switches (for the Elmont work), and removing all scheduled connections at Jamaica. I think it's crazy and I'm glad I don't commute to the city from Long Island. The connections at Jamaica disappearing is the most sad to me; that station has a really unique setup where 3 trains arrive at once, and you can transfer through the middle train to get to the other two destinations. It used to work like clockwork, but obviously if the middle train is late, the OTP for 3 trains decreases. Since that's the metric they care about, and not "can I get from any city terminal to any destination easily", that's what gets optimized out. I don't think it's good. It's nice if the trains run on time, but I'd rather be 20 minutes late once a week than spend an extra 5 hours on the train every week. But, not what the agency values.

They already own most of the necessary land anyway: https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2023-07/BLM-Adm...

High speed rail wouldn’t be all that competitive for going coast to coast in the US, definitely.