[melling]

D.C. to Philly is 140 miles. Philly to NYC is 90 miles. NYC to Boston is 220 miles. Is it really necessary to spend $1000-$1500 a month to go that short of a distance? There's 50 year old technology that went into commercial use before man stepped foot on the moon. This is insane.

At some point America is going to realize that it needs a 21st century infrastructure. It's going to cost a lot more in 20-30 years, of course.

[equark]

Amtrak Acela, Boston - NYC is $173 one-way and takes 3 hours and 30 minutes. That quickly adds up.

[Retric]

For some reason Amtrak is by far the least subsidized form of transport in the US. If cars had so little subsidy gas tax would be 3 dollars a gallon to cover road construction, maintenance, and parking lots etc. Airplanes are less subsidized, but you would still see an extra 20-40% added to the ticket price.

It might not be rational, but we pay a lot more in taxes to make it seem like traveling is far less expensive than it actually is.

[twoodfin]

You're completely wrong about Federal highway spending: 90+% is funded by gas taxes and other user fee-like sources. In contrast, Amtrak is hugely subsidized on a passenger-miles basis.

[Retric]

I suggest you rethink the numbers.

Several states impose a fuel tax that's below their sales tax limit. They still need to pay for road maintenance.

"U.S. annual gasoline consumption is 140 billion gallons and growing." The federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon that's 25.76 billion a year but you need to subtract out the oil company subsidy's, NHTSA's billion a year for safety, federal reconstruction aid after a disaster etc, and not just the new federal construction costs.

While 'free parking' is available in large sections of the country it still takes land and someone needs to maintain it. However, it's vary unusual for federal, state, or local governments to pay for such parking as part of a gas tax, it's generally taken from the budget of the agency providing that parking space.

[patrickgzill]

You are very, very wrong, because not only are you not accounting for state fuel taxes, but toll roads, AND, the extra fees paid by truckers and other commercial vehicles. However I am not goint to write a dissertation for your sole benefit - suffice it to say, that each 18 wheeler you see, is a source of over $25K per year in taxes. Yes, over $2000 per month.

[Retric]

18 wheeler's do significantly more damage than cars or bridges to road surfaces. I could go into it, but I don't think you want to hear that the average 18 wheeler does more than 2k a month in damage to road surfaces. (It's vary weight and speed dependent, but when you look at the average it's well over 2k a month. http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf basically road damage from one 18-wheeler is equivalent to 9600 cars.)

Anyway, I responded to someone making a very specific claim about federal spending so I responded to that, state spending is a far more complex issue so here are some numbers:

http://www.taxadmin.org/fta/rate/mf.pdf

Do you really think Alaska magically get's by on 8 cents a gallon or are the diverting funds for somewhere else to pay for roads? They don't have a sales tax so the math is easy on that one.

But, now let's look at Wyoming it has a nice 4% general tax on everything and charges 14 cents a gallon for gas. Let's say gas is around 3.25 a gallon before taxes and at 4% would wait for it be 13 cents. Do you think that single extra cent is going to pay to maintain all their roads? Because if the tax was 12 cents a gallon clearly they would be subsidizing that relative to you buying say cheeseburgers and they don't exactly have a lot of toll roads. Then again, if they spent close to the same percentage on road maintenance as people did on gas then the numbers would work out just fine. But wait for it, they don't.

[bjoernw]

How do you know so much about federal and municipal taxes? HN is made up of people with such diverse backgrounds, I'm curious.

[a3camero]

That's almost exactly the distance between Shinjuku (Tokyo) and Sendai, Japan. $40 cheaper + an hour faster by train. I think that's the alternative. High speed rail.

If you happen to live by Omiya's station (about 30mi closer to Sendai), you'd be there in under 2 hours.

[excuse-me]

London Paris is 60mi further but under 3hours - and there is a sea in the way,

If even the English can do public projects better than you, you have a problem!

[DougWebb]

There aren't tens of millions of people living in the Channel blocking the path the train needs to take; digging the Channel tunnel was simple compared to putting straight rail lines between Boston, NYC, Philly, and DC.

[justincormack]

Dig a tunnel under the people if you think it is easier then.

[DougWebb]

Boston's Big Dig project was an incredibly expensive tunnel project. I'm not sure how much of the cost overrun was due to the terrain they were digging through. I think it'll be a long time before another major tunnel project will be approved though.

NYC always has several big tunnel projects going on. The problem here is the very hard granite and the depth of existing infrastructure. New tunnels have to be very deep. At the moment I believe there is a large east-side subway project and a water main project. There was supposed to be a new west side tunnel for Amtrak and NJ Transit trains coming into Penn Station from NJ, but unfortunately NJ's ahole governor killed the project.

I'm not familiar with tunnelling projects in Philly and DC, or the areas between them. I suspect the terrain is a lot more varied than below the Channel though. It'd be challenging to tunnel the whole way.

[vidarh]

The fun part is that it's now finally this fast after a lot of hurt British pride when the trains used to have to break when reaching the British side, because the tracks were of too poor quality compared to on the French side. It's taken years for them to upgrade the British side (and moving the terminal to another station where the trains could make am ore direct approach instead of going in a large semi-circle on crappy, congested suburban lines) to let the trains run at full speed.

[melling]

That's right the average speed between NYC and Boston is around 60 mph. It's not high-speed rail, which is 150mph+.

Beijing to Shanghai, for example, is currently averaging 186mph, and if they get back to initial goals, they'll average over 200mph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_High-S...

In short, NYC to Boston should be 90 minutes by train.

[martingordon]

You can get a monthly pass from NYP to BOS for $1700 or a ten-ride pass for $780. See here: http://tickets.amtrak.com/itd/amtrak/multiride

Taking into account travel time to and from the airports, plus time spent in security, you might be looking at longer than 3.5 hours.

Still, travel along the Northeast corridor would be a lot cheaper if those fares didn't have to subside ridiculous cross-country routes. A one-way ticket from New York to Los Angeles (changing trains in Chicago) costs $266 and takes 62 hours, not including the 5 hour layover. Why are these trains still running?

[blahedo]

There are relatively few people that take the cross-country trains end-to-end, and a lot of people that get on or off at some little town along the way. For many of the more rural parts of the country, this is their primary access to long-distance travel. (This is especially true since the various phases of airline deregulation have increasingly caused smaller airports to close.)

There are also strong network effects in play. NYP to BOS is great if you're just going from NYP to BOS. But if you're going from NYP up to Portland, or BOS to Trenton or Pittsburgh or something, the cheap NYP-BOS connection is useless to you unless there are also not-extremely-expensive links from NYP or BOS to your actual endpoints. Part of what makes NYP-BOS so cost-effective as a route is that it's also fed by other lines that A) exist and B) aren't prohibitively expensive.

[_delirium]

> Why are these trains still running?

A political reason is that the keep-Amtrak-alive coalition is basically a mixture of urban transit advocates and representatives from rural areas who want to keep their town's train stop. A system that only served the major cities wouldn't have broad enough support, especially if it were only the major coastal cities (e.g. if you cut the Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, etc. services).

[jimmybot]

How overbooked does Amtrak get? Maybe Amtrak should be selling subscriptions. Or bulk discounts, but the passes are per person and expire end of the month.

[martingordon]

Amtrak does sell monthly passes. See my post above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3813734