3.5 mil is pocket change to TXDOT. Ugh.
This is intentional.
Oh I know. The collective consciousness has been poisoned by the petro cabal’s carbrain virus.
Cheap transportation for low income people. Ofc it’s going away.
Amtrak is not transportation. You need a car on both ends anyway, if money is the issue driving your own car is cheaper (most of the costs of a car are fixed and already paid, the addition fuel and wear is minimal)
To be part of transportation you need great local transit on both ends of the trip. You also need to run a lot more than the once a day most Amtrak routes are running (though I’ll admit to not bothering to look it up for this route).
Amtrak needs to focus on making the DC-Boston route stronger, and then expand great service from there. Routes in OK will always be poor because few people live there, if there is a great network though they can do okay.
Totally a thing to take a train into Chicago for a day.
Chicago is one of the few cities you can reasonably go to and rely on local transit to get around to useful places. Most other US cities are lacking in destinations you would want to go to. This route doesn’t go to Chicago - even if it did the distance is such that fly is what reasonable people will do.
While it’s correct that the long distance routes will always be slower than flying so will get few end-to-end passengers, that’s not entirely their goal. Think of them more as a bunch of mid-range segments. Not a single long range route but dozens of middle range routes connected together
Most of those cities have such terrible transit you need to drive there anyway. At least if you fly the airport has rental cars.
Yeah, very made that argument in the past, but you have to start somewhere
- for Midwest passenger rail, the cities are big enough they ought to have transit, but also it’s appropriate for the federal govern invest in infrastructure to jumpstart their revival
- for smaller cities on long distance routes, their may not be scheduled air service and distances are too great for some to drive. There should be an option. A useful option
- and yes, the long distance routes are a “money saver”. If we ever want to have useful long distance service m, we need to keep the right of way alive. A huge part of the ridiculous cost of rail improvements is the land, and no one will pay for 1,000 miles of right of way
The majority if the routes are privately owned and not going anywhere.
To be fair, I don’t know the two cities in question, but many “lesser” cities have highly walkable downtowns with train stations.
They typically don’t have hotels in range of the train station, and since Amtrak is once a day service an overnight stay will happen. Stations are often in the run down part of town, so while you can walk and find things, there isn’t much (it looks unsafe, but I generally think it is safe)
Also many of those “lesser” cities are tiny - sure you can walk the downtown, but there isn’t much there. In my travels on Amtrak my impression is the majority of people are not going for the downtown - there are plenty of stores closer to home. You are going to visit family, or some attraction not close to the station.
Part of the infrastructure bill of 2022 was both studies for increased service and increased service in a variety of places. The goal was to increment next phases of building a better and more complete network.
I see your point about OK but there were several related baby steps toward extending the NEC and toward building Chicago as the hub of a useful Midwest train network. Passenger rail has never gotten sufficient funding so progress is in baby steps, but the best way to get support for more service is to improve enough to start being useful. There were several reputed increasing to half a dozen trains, which is starting to be useful
Spending for a Midwest hub is a waste when they can’t even make the DC to bostoin route good.
Yeah it’s quite painful- we need significant investments in intercity rail, yet the best we can do with the largest infrastructure bill ever is sprinkle around little baby steps in many places …… and too much of that was broken contracts, not happening
Yes there are some huge projects too, mostly on NEC, and desperately needed. But even there, we’re talking about barely scratching a century of deferred maintenance resulting in only incremental improvements.
There’s got to be a better and cheaper way of doing this.
Amtrak is transportation if you use a normal definition of what transportation is you fucking idiot
It’s not anything close to light or commuter rail like the northeast has near the coast. I can ride from Amtrak DC to Boston (Uber to south station ugh) and be on a commuter train going most eastern parts of the state. Same for CT, NY, and probably NJ but who goes there!?
But dare I take the Downeaster past Portland, I had better have a car waiting for me at the station because Brunswick Maine doesn’t even have a bus that I’m aware of. Probably have to Fiver some Bowdoin kid to get me the next hour home.
That sad I always wanted to take the train. Wish we had one that went from Tulsa to Oklahoma City.
eh, don’t be. Even though passenger rail legally has right of way, in practice they often get stuck behind freight, in the worst cases of my experience, leading to several hours of delay.
wish that the law would be enforced but that hasn’t been the case for decades, if ever.
That’s just an argument that we need to find rail sufficiently for Amtrak to own its rails. Freight is never in the way on the NEC.
It’s also an indictment for lack of regulation. Freight rail has been milking ancient infrastructure far beyond its useful life and without updating to new requirements.
Among their shortcuts that directly cause delays for both trains and cars are
- failure to maintain tracks to keep the speed they were designed for
- pulling up second rail for cheaper maintenance
- continuing to run ever larger trains without enlarging the sidings that are supposed to let them get out of the way
I don’t disagree, was looking for the youtube video talking about the privatization of the most profitable routes, which means those revenues couldn’t be applied to laggard routes but can’t come up with it.
edit: believe its this one
That’s from a couple years ago, and there was a recent one connected with that proposal. I know what you mean.
While I somewhat agree with the desire to facilitate this private passenger rail service, it seems like a really bad idea here and now. Maybe if we had healthy infrastructure and widely adopted service, that could take us to the next level, but passenger rail in the us is such a basket case that it would not serve anyone’s needs.
- no matter what, we have a century of deferred maintenance to catch up on. No private company could afford that and we shouldn’t spend that kind of money just so someone can extract profit
- no matter what, outside the NEC, intercity passenger service is horrible: it’s a welfare case now, is not in a useful state, and we shouldn’t be paying that kind of money just so someone can extract profit
- highways are supported by public funding: intercity passenger rail deserves similar. We need options where either s better than the other
While part of me wishes we could keep NEC profit to invest in all the improvements we need here, I generally think it’s a good investment to try to develop other locations. Transportation infrastructure is a public good to improve our society and our economy (and the network effect is a big deal), but taking some of our NEC profit to pay for some billionaires profit is very much NOT a public good
Yeah we need a west coast corridor and to build out one around Chicago
