Because trams have to pay to maintain there own tracks whereas buses use the taxpayer maintained roads.
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O_o
While the San Francisco airport is the property of the city and county of SF; it’s not physically located in SF proper, and that’a a fact.
It costs more to travel to and from the airport on Bart than it does for any regular round trip excursion between any point in Oakland and the SF city limits; also a fact.
And I dunno what Berlin or any of that has to do with anything, other than the fact that they were a pretty decent band in 80’s…
Which is an opinion…
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In Europe air travel is often cheaper than train too. Recently there was a story from someone who had to travel from one town in southern England to another town in southern England, and he discovered that flying to Berlin was cheaper (though slower) than a direct train. There are often budget flights to nearby countries for €30. Not as comfortable as a train, but quick and cheap are hard to argue with. A shame, because I love trains a lot more than planes.
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Cost can be a big factor. Part of the reason why US healthcare is so expensive, is because it’s privatized and fairly unregulated. The big question is whether it can be a free market at all, and whether competition is possible.
In any case, bringing cost down is not the primary concern of privatized services. They’re about maximized profits, and if maximizing profit means increasing prices, then they will. And when competition is hard and few other options exist, then maximizing profits very likely means increasing prices.
If instead to see public transport as vital infrastructure where the main gain is the mobility of the people, rather than mere profit, then it might be worth a financial loss to the community. Public transport is even good for people who don’t use it, because more people in public transport means less people in cars filling up the roads with traffic jams. Running them for profit very likely hurts the entire community, and not just the people actually using it.
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Is it really that bad? That sounds completely unusable. Well, I know trains in Africa or South Asia can be hours or even a day late, but I would expect the US to be better than that. In western Europe, people complain when a train is 10 minutes late.
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Those people don’t control city infrastructure, though. Most people still prefer to live in cities, making cities hideously expensive, but also with pretty good public infrastructure.
Maybe the options are either suburban sprawl and neglecting city infrastructure, or gentrification?
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Maybe he got it confused with riding on the metro.
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They can be that late outside the northeast corridor. The host freight railroads have paired down their trackage to the minimum for their needs thereby eliminating redundancy which could be used for rerouting due to flooding and other track problems. It’s good for them because it eliminates the cost of maintaining the extra track and paying property taxes on the land. If a load of crude oil is hours or a day late nobody really cares.
In the modern era passenger railroads and freight railroads have different requirements for infrastructure.
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Trump’s budget does indeed recommend completely defunding all Amtrak long distance rail.
http://www.progressiverailroading.com/amtrak/news/Trump-budget-ends-funding-of-Amtrak-long-distance-trains-TIGER-grants--51091
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I think I see your mistake!
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I agree that public transportation is a good candidate for nationalization, as minimum service levels and limited competition tend to be a bad match for a profit-making agenda.
As for medical costs in the US, you save a bucket load of money by simply preventing people from attempting saving their loved one’s by spending a boatload of money on treatments that are unlikely to work.
As a parent, I’d be prepared to beggar the family for a small chance of saving my child’s life. In Canada, I don’t have that choice, and we’re all richer for it. (Especially since in 20 years, the tech will have gotten cheap enough through those expensive US purchases that it will make it to Canada.)
Bringing costs down is not directly part of anyone’s agenda. It is a secondary effect of the primary agenda of both government and business. Depending on circumstance, either government or business may pursue cost-cutting more effectively.
Anyway, in this particular case, I fear that despite my particular love for them, trains are not a great fit for most of North America’s long-distance passenger traffic. We’re just too decentralized for passenger trains (with the large separate infrastructure needs) to make much sense over buses (which piggyback on the infrastructure investments that are going to be made anyway in the car-centric culture of North America).
Obviously, commuting is a totally different beast, but even there, bus-ways seem to be far more “in” with current urban planners than my beloved subways for exactly the same suburban density reasons.
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Now their Metro song is stuck in my head!
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Sorry. I knew amtrack was not timely. i did not know it was that untimely. However, I still say better to arrive a day late than bloody and beaten and a day late.
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Think of it this way: the longer the trip, the later the train is likely to be, because many small delays will add up. For my trip down the west coast this summer, I’m leaving on Friday afternoon and am scheduled to arrive in the very wee hours of Sunday morning . . . but who knows when we’ll actually arrive? I made the same trip in reverse many years ago, and I forget how late the train was by the time it got to Seattle, but it was pretty late. I remember the train sitting motionless on a siding for a good while, more than once, waiting for a cargo train to go by. The freight must get through!
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Yes. Freight gets priority. If a passenger train is behind schedule and will block a freight train’s schedule, the passenger train can sit idle on the track and wait until things clear.
The trip to and from Seattle to the Bay Area, a regular Amtrak passenger route, is often five to twelve hours late (I had a friend who is legally blind who often took it) and much of that lateness involves the train not even moving.
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Amtrak provides generalized historical performance data on their website, breaking down causes of delay both by area and by responsibility, including track ownership. Unfortunately it doesn’t include day-by-day data, nor actual delay time. You can get that information on a route by route basis for the last three or four days by checking individual train status on the Amtrak website.
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Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit…
When I was first introduced to the real cost of gas it was a real eye opener.
For anyone interested, here is a good, if a little old, primer-
In Padua they have trams that are a little like that but bang up to date. They have rubber tyres like buses with a single rail ground connection and an overhead pickup. So they are totally electric and quieter than normal trams because they don’t have steel wheels on steel tracks.
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yes but.
rail freight transport in the US: ~ 40 %
rail freight transport in Germany: ~ 15 %
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