[bombcar]

Los Angeles to San Diego is 120 miles, and the Pacific Surfliner serves it - and it only has 9 trains a day (round trip). (I notice that they've added a early morning service getting to LA at working time).

The key with these kinds of service is you have to run them consistently for 10-20 years before they start seeing the kind of ridership that can support the train density. People don't start building their lives around a transport option that they can't rely on.

[antisthenes]

> The key with these kinds of service is you have to run them consistently for 10-20 years before they start seeing the kind of ridership that can support the train density.

That's a good point. Whenever I've had the misfortune of using public transport in the US, it ended up being extremely unreliable.

Commuter bus at 6:30PM on a weekday? Just doesn't show up. Have to wait 40 minutes instead of 10.

NY to DC bus? Breaks down midway, have to wait an extra 2 hours for a relief bus to arrive.

DC to NY amtrak? Union station shut down for 3 hours due to weather-related power outage.

Now maybe I'm just super unlucky, but I've never heard of weather straight up shutting down an entire train station in other countries, especially in a nation's capital.

[yakireev]

> I've never heard of weather straight up shutting down an entire train station in other countries, especially in a nation's capital.

How about shutting down the entire network? Happens after any snowstorm in the NL.

That being said, it's amazing to have a reliable and fast passenger railroad network, which functions like an intercity metro and reliably and predictably brings you where you want to be in those 363 days out of 365 when there's no snowstorm, or a system failure, or a general strike.