The Sad State of US Passenger Rail: A Top 10 List That May Make You Cry (Or Enrage You)

you may have noticed the world's most economically Advanced countries outside of North America have great passenger rail service usually high speed but even if it's just a regular Intercity service it's something that's frequent and reliable well today we're going to shine a light on the sad state of Intercity rail in the U.S and it is going to be in the form of a top 10 list just not really when we can be proud of all about the travesty that is Intercity passenger rail in the U.S coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome down in the comments kind of doing my own thing this week though and it'll be clear why later in the video so here are some sample City pairs from the Nations that comprise the G7 these are sort of cherry-picked but I wanted cities that aren't mega cities that are close enough together where you should see a lot of Intercity travel note I'm not even talking specifically about High-Speed Rail today the numbers I'm showing here are all trains except in the case of Japan where I just gave up after I counted all the shinkans and trains in the timetable the thing I want to stress today is high speed rail is great and we should be building it but just plain old vanilla Intercity rail that's frequent and reliable is extremely useful too and yeah that frequent and reliable part is not a given in most of the US this is partly because so many passenger Rail lines operate on track that's owned and maintained by the freight railroads the freight operators are supposed to give preference to passenger trains but as a frequent Amtrak Cascades Rider who's had the experience of being delayed for hours behind a freight train more times than I can probably count the freight railroads just don't always play nice anyway I'm not going to do a whole methodology section here the idea is deceptively simple this is the 10 passenger Rail lines with the most weekday departures and I'll explain as I go through because this wasn't that straightforward to put together and I'm just going to get right into it with the very obvious number one which is the Northeast Corridor and yeah I'm doing corridors today I could have done City pairs but then I think we just would have ended up with 10 City pairs that are along the Northeast Corridor which I think is a boring top 10 list but I do have some interesting Northeast Corridor ideas on my topic list so stay tuned anyway this one's complicated so what I'm gonna do is talk about the segment with the most frequency which is New York to Philadelphia and that is as it should be given the analysis I did in my video on expanding a seller you've got all kinds of services using this segment the acella and the northeast regional of course but also the Keystone the Palmetto the Carolinian the Silver Star the silver meteor the Cardinal and the Crescent I'm sure I have a lot of foamers who watch this channel so let me know if you think I missed anything but this is about 50 trains a day in each Direction this is a good time to talk a bit about methodology there's a sense in which Metro North's New Haven line is Intercity because New Haven is a separate metro area from New York and if you added up all the Northeast Corridor services and the New Haven line you'd actually have a ton of frequency the thing is though I covered Regional Rail in a different video and I just don't want to duplicate so for this list I made a judgment call to leave out services like the New Haven line and other Regional Rail lines that connect two different Metro areas like Caltrain for San Francisco and San Jose and Metrolink which connects all the different Metro areas that make up the Greater polycentric La region okay so let's go to number 10 now and start counting down this is actually a tie between three different corridors that run five trains a day I've got the Pacific surfliner between LA and San Diego the Lincoln Corridor between Chicago and St Louis and the Downeaster between Boston North Station and Portland Maine and other Points North number nine six trains on the San joaquin's line between Stockton and Bakersfield it really does blow my mind that there are more trains between Stockton and Bakersfield than there are between La Union Station and San Diego Santa Fe Depot I mean I guess you can take the Metrolink Orange County Line to Oceanside it's like five trains a day and transfer to the coaster but that's ridiculous California what are we doing number eight the Amtrak Hiawatha between Chicago and Milwaukee seven trains each weekday this is another one that just doesn't make that much sense to me I mean outside the Northeast Corridor this seems like it should be just about the busiest conventional passenger rail line in the U.S just based on city size and proximity maybe La San Diego should have more man I'm just struggling to get over that I've got a two-way tie for sixth with 10 trains a day I've got the Empire service which connects America's largest city to its state capital so yeah that would make sense and then I've got also with 10 trains each weekday the New Mexico Rail Runner between Albuquerque and Santa Fe so here's where you're going to get a deep dive because I was actually in New Mexico this week so I could ride this beauty myself and just gonna walk through it first of all if you're a legit Transportation nerd you'll catch the bus from the airport to Alvarado Transportation Center which is where the rail runners downtown Albuquerque platform is it's Bus 50 and it runs every 30 mins minutes in other words the same frequency is the SEPTA airport line in Philly please make it make sense I guess the difference here is Route 50 only takes 15 minutes to get downtown and it's free as is all transit in Albuquerque right now okay so you get to the platform and these are either two or three car double decker trains so we aren't talking high capacity but it's 10 trains a day and how much capacity do you need between a metro area of 900 000 and a metro area of 150 000. yahapa board the train departs right on the minute which I'll talk about in a bit and it makes the Road Runner sounds when the doors are closing so cute so you've got these two level Bombardier coaches and you definitely want the upper deck for the scenery Albuquerque can be a little gritty but gritty is okay and the scenery is you start gaining elevation towards Santa Fe it's pretty spectacular and the weather conditions can change pretty dramatically glad I wasn't driving in this stuff the interior is well it's a train but to me this is why rail is good even if it isn't high speed I mean look at it I can get a crapload of work done because there's plenty of Elbow Room and the ride is smooth I can walk around and stretch my legs I can spread out because the train is probably never going to be full you hear arguments why not just run buses on the highway instead of using all this expensive infrastructure well none of the things I just mentioned are things I can do on a bus the run time is about an hour 40 although they do run an Express that saves you 10 or 15 minutes so it's not necessarily competitive with driving but say you're an Albuquerque based lawyer working on a Case up in Santa Fe man you could get a lot of billable work done I could never figure out why this train didn't feature more in the Breaking Bad Universe just a big misstep by the New Mexico tourism board as you get North there's some density around the Santa Fe stations and the rail yard District around the end of the line at Santa Fe Depot is a lot of fun if you're into like craft beer or distilleries or movies or hiking equipment or say Game of Thrones this district has you covered The Rail Runner literally pulls in right next to the George RR Martin dragon train so you might ask why are we spending money on 10 trains a day day between cities that are this modestly sized when there are so many more promising City pairs all over the country well it's because New Mexico got its politics together and decided to spend the money and your state didn't in 2003 Governor Richardson and the state legislature passed a transportation funding package that included The Rail Runner and construction of the line into Santa Fe was completed in 2008 and my understanding is the state literally bought the trackage from BNSF so it could ensure the rail runner's priority and reliability and that's a huge deal the pandemic hit Rail Runner hard and after a brief shutdown they slashed fares by 75 percent ridership increased about 88 percent and then citing high gas prices Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the reduced fares would be extended until the end of 22 22 the upside is I paid 2.25 cents each way for a train ride to Santa Fe and back which is all I paid for transportation on my entire trip I mentioned all the transit in Albuquerque is free and that does include the art possibly the best brt line in the US and probably the subject of a future video what I'm saying is and this is also probably the subject of a future video this is a great destination if you're looking for a car free vacation and that includes biking too which is not bad in Albuquerque or Santa Fe there's been a lot of criticism that the Rail Runner doesn't pay for itself it runs at the deficit maybe 10 million dollars a year and you hear criticisms that it's some kind of Albatross that hamstrings the state Dot's ability to construct roadway projects which last I checked also don't pay for themselves do people really think through this stuff before they talk about it building a cool rail service and foregoing roadway expansion at the same time sounds kind of win-win to Me Maybe New Mexico just has it all figured out okay and Durant on the economic feasibility of rail number five is the capital Corridor between Sacramento and Oakland 11 trains a day this one isn't a surprise I'll give a kind of an honorable mention to the Altamonte Corridor Express between Stockton and San Jose just four trains a day number four is the Keystone between Philadelphia and Harrisburg kind of double dipping here because the Keystone is also part of the Northeast Corridor segment I already talked about but Philly to Harrisburg is a completely separate Corridor there's definitely a theme here with Sacramento and Albany and Santa Fe connections to state capitals which there is a perverse logic to it if you think about the politics of how a service gets funded okay while you're pondering where we're going for numbers two and three I do have some dishonorable mentions and other Errata but first brief pause to ask you to drop a like on the video and subscribe if you think trains are cool connect on the apps I'm not quite ready to include a mastodon link yet but I'm getting there direct support via patreon is super appreciated and sub count check the channel now has enough subscribers to fill Bryant Denny's stadium in Tuscaloosa home of the Alabama football team yeah they got a name for the winners in the world but the state of Alabama isn't winning any urbanism awards from this channel just a thought though you could honestly fund a high-speed rail network all over the southern us just from the massive gate receipts and broadcast revenues from these amateur sporting events where the athletes don't even get paid sort of an honorable mention to South Florida where brightline runs like 16 trains a day and Tri-Rail runs 25 or so on a different alignment it's just the even though West Palm Beach and Miami are like 70 miles apart they're in the same Metropolitan statistical area so I couldn't put them on this list still good Services though at least for the US dishonorable mention I already mentioned LA to San Diego which I'm just never gonna get over it's like a whopping five trains a day and I made passing reference to San Antonio to Austin I'm also going to give you Phoenix to Tucson Phoenix doesn't really have Intercity rail at all I'll give you Las Vegas to anywhere definitely La there used to be the desert wind and maybe we'll get brightline West at some point and I'd throw in things like Atlanta to Athens and Columbus Ohio to basically anywhere it's amazing the cities we have that just don't have any kind of Intercity rail service at all okay back to it number three is the Hartford line 18 trains a day between Hartford and New Haven including things like the valley flyer and the vermonter and guess what another connection to a state capitol anyway Alan Fisher did a recent video on electrifying the Hartford line and the Empire line and I encourage you to check that out if you haven't already it's good stuff and number two is Sonoma Marin area rail transit or smart this is a weird one that probably calls into question the validity of this entire list but you know what that's okay the whole point of this video was really share Cool footage from New Mexico anyway is this a commuter line or an Intercity line I don't know I mean if you're commuting from Sonoma County to San Francisco it dumps you at Larkspur and then you still have to take a ferry if you want to get into the city in a way this one's even more amazing than the New Mexico Rail Runner Express people who know this line let me know what's going on here is this wine country tourism or is it super commuters both maybe you know for me the more ridership generators you have in both directions the better there is no bad Rail and that's all I got thanks for tuning in this week and thanks to the patrons for helping to fund New Mexico Expedition which included a truly inadvisable number of chili pepper based dishes I swear I'm gonna start a Food Channel next year I do hope to get out to more cities in 2023 and and the support really helps keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new installment next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 128,948

Keywords: urbanist, urbanism, urban, high speed rail, albuquerque, santa fe, high speed rail usa, high speed rail california, high speed rail us, where to live in america, best cities to live in, top 10, top 10 trains in the us

Id: 4miYK7m2-JU

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022