Morgan Clendaniel, the author, is a high-speed rail advocate. He argues that Amtrak can be saved by high-speed rail. He asks, at the end of his piece, ". . . imagine if the trains went 300 miles per hour."
I have to ask him, if people aren't travelling somewhere now, why would they start if only it took several hours less time? If I don't need or want to go to Los Angeles, why would getting there in three hours or less compel me to go? If I could beam myself to Los Angeles instantaneously, I still wouldn't be interested in going. I'm assuming that I'm not the only person who feels this way. My point is that just because Amtrak will run much faster trains, will not, by itself, increase their ridership by any significant numbers.
Amtrak, as Clendaniel points out, has declined. The included animated map makes that crystal clear. That is, passenger rail in the United States has declined. Trains, at the height of the golden age of passenger rail in the US, could go 100 mph and even faster. So, why didn't they continue to make the trains go even faster than that? Was there not enough demand? Did demand for rail diminish as flying became more time effective? And if you needed a car at the other end, wouldn't you consider driving shorter distances?
Is it not the case that the HSR advocates now claim that once their trains are operating, it will be faster to travel by trains than by planes. I would challenge that claim on a door-to-door basis. Even if true for a small minority of frequent flyers, it's certainly not true for most. Even 300 mph trains won't do the job.
Take SFO to LAX. You have to get to and leave from both air terminals. Ditto the railroad stations; Union Station in LA and the TBT in San Francisco. All those home or office transit connections will be challenging unless you take a limo to and from each take-off point. Once the train leaves the station and the plane takes off from the runway, clearly the over-500 mph plane will be faster; it will be a shorter trip.
So where does the claim for train advantage come from? Time for security processing at airports. Now we read in the news that there will be more rail security steps taken, since the now deceased Osama Bin Laden has threatened terror on the trains in the US. In other words, the much claimed advantage of hopping on and off trains over planes is quickly diminishing. Seducing people out of planes to take trains is a highly misconceived business proposition, as any businessman or woman will tell you.
Where does that leave Amtrak? Exactly as Clendaniel describes it in his article, dying a slow death. Trains are good where planes don't fly and cars are impractical. That's pretty much the urban and regional public mass transit domain. And that's where improvements could and should be made. But, inter-city rail, which Amtrak represents, continues to lose routes, even as their ridership numbers improve. There's a reason for that, and it's called the "marketplace."
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Amtrak's Incredible Shrinking Service
BY MORGAN CLENDANIEL
America's passenger rail is the sad, neglected stepchild of passenger transportation in America. In recent years, there has been growing support to reinvest in trains, especially high-speed ones, as a cheaper and less polluting mode of intercity transportation than driving or flying. The constant argument against more investment is simple: no one takes the train, so why pour more money into it? But perhaps no one takes the train because there are no trains to take? Look at this little animation (via Grist), that shows the creeping death that budget cuts have brought to Amtrak service:
You need to down-load the web-site to see the time-line which I couldn't paste into this blog.
Check out this time-line of passenger rail usage over time.
These historical maps of Amtrak service show the slow death of America's passenger trains. The only cure: high-speed rail. [That's what he thinks!]
As you can see, service is robust in the '60s, covering nearly the entire country--that's before Amtrak even started. In 1971, with many of those lines going bankrupt, Amtrak took over with a much more limited portfolio of routes. Even those limited routes have been cut ever since, except for a little recent uptick. It's like watching a sick person slowly wasting away.
The economics of riding the train are different now than they were when the advent of the passenger car--and then short-haul flights between cities--started eating away at rail travel's market share. It's now grossly inconvenient and annoying to board an airplane; you can walk on a train with no hassle (though the discovery of Al Qaeda plans to target American passenger trains might change that). And driving no longer has quite the same open-road sense of freedom; there are no traffic jams on rail lines. Though technically, that's not quite true. In many parts of the country, passenger trains lose the right of way to freight trains, which can cause them to wait interminably. But that's just another example of how we've diminished rail travel through a death of a thousand cuts, and if we devoted money and resources to it, it could be a viable form of travel.
If rail travel was cheap, and convenient and fast, there is no telling what the market might be. In the Northeast corridor, where the trains run fast and frequently and between closely situated cities, ridership and profits are up. Now imagine if the trains went 300 miles per hour. Then you might see crowded trains everywhere.
[Homepage image: Flickr user Slideshow Bruce. Above image: Flickr user The Holy Hand Grenade!]
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