Suburban sprawl happened thanks to the automobile. Until recently when city living became popular again in the US, the “American Dream” consisted in getting a single family home miles from a city which was only accessible by car. So public transit like trams became just that annoying thing blocking traffic which the middle and upper classes had little sympathy for. There’s also the “GM conspiracy” that some people like to bring up which involved GM aggressively promoting buses (which they made) instead of trams, but that was really after the heyday of trams anyway.
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Most of the trains that I have travelled on in the last 30 years have got me to my destination within a couple of minutes of the scheduled time, generally early rather than late (Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain) sometimes within seconds (Switzerland’s trains really are good most of the time).
And it was 80% business travel.
So the problems are not inherent in railways but in the specific implementation.
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Not sure about adults but it used to work with children http://boingboing.net/2015/11/08/it-was-once-socially-acceptabl.html 
It has been done at least once by an adult: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31700049.
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It’s so funny, I was just looking the other day at how much it would be to take the train to visit some relatives half way across the country. Round trip it would cost more than twice as much compared to flying and take two and a half days to get there.
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I hear you. Even here in Tram-friendly Europe, there are a lot of people who want to live in their cottages in tiny towns with zero jobs or businesses, so they depend on their cars to get to the nearby mega-malls, which in turn kill the few remaining smalltown businesses. It’s a death cycle.
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We’re gonna make America Great Again by killing off Amtrak!
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The outrigger is unique, I must say.
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600 km won’t even get you out of the state if you’re heading north or south from the Bay area of California. Europeans forget how large the USA is.
Seattle to San Francisco is 1299 km.
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Good point. Americans tend to forget how compact Europe is (without Russia), and we in turn forget how huge the US are, especially with all those kinda empty boxy states in the middle.
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Seattle to San Diego, which is north to south down our west coast is just over 2,000 km. This isn’t even heading east towards the east coast. Los Angeles to New York City is 4,489 km (that’s just about the same distance is Lisbon to Moscow).
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It’s owned and policed by San Francisco.
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That was unnecessarily sharp.
Amtrak is notorious for being many hours, even over a day late. This means missed connections, missed events, if something has been guaranteed by a credit card (hotel, restaurant, etc.) then the charge goes through despite not being there, etc. I’m not complaining about the possibility of a train being 10 minutes late.
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Which isn’t a refutation. SFO is basically in redwood City
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We do the same calculus heading into town. Round trip PATH & Subway train fare for family of 4 is >$40, about equal to tunnel & parking with a fraction of the time and hassle, assuming traffic isn’t awful.
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There are many reasons why I think certain services should be provided by the government.
But cost is rarely one of them, even factoring a significant profit margin.
(That said, if part of the reason to nationalize a service is to provide a steady source of reasonably-paid, secure jobs with excellent pensions for lower middle-class workers, then nationalization makes a reasonable option - but don’t expect it to bring total costs down.)
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How about Half Moon Bay to SF?
A lady I used to work with did that one for years…
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West Berlin was basically in East Germany.
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I’m not sure what argument you think you’re making.
Mark is complaining that round trip fares for people commuting to SF are over $20 a day. That’s a lie. People don’t commute from Oakland to the SFO airport as their daily commute as average folks. So saying “but SFO is run by San Francisco and is expensive” doesn’t really prove or argue anything. It proves even less if people look at a map and realize SFO is on the other side of at least one legal city from SF itself and basically Redwood City.
So, please, tell me more about SFO and what it has to do with his blog post…
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Take your reefers and your weekly pagan gay sex orgies back to Yurp, you rail-hugging commie-pinko degenerates! Your lack of pork makes supply-side Jesus cry!
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