I don't understand the left's fascination with high-speed rail.
- As the article hints, the US has the best freight rail in the world, much better than Europe's. But you never see progressives championing the US freight system compared to Europe.
- Driving is faster for short distances and flying is faster for long distances.
- So high-speed rail's use case is perhaps a 200 - 400 mile range, and it requires heavy use of eminent domain and massive legal battles for every mile of track along that range.
- The Acela is actually slower than flying from Boston to New York City and it costs more.
- And if you take the train rather than drive, you now need to get a car on the other end. Is the speed boost for these middle-distance trips really worth it?
This piece does a good job describing the symptoms of America’s passenger-rail issues, especially the structural conflict between Amtrak and the freight railroads. But when you follow those symptoms all the way down to their source, you hit a deeper issue that almost never gets acknowledged.
The United States has no national strategic objectives for its three core transportation systems, roads, aviation, and rail, for either people or freight. We have infrastructure, agencies, and funding streams, but we do not have a clear statement of what each mode is supposed to do, what trips each should specialize in, or how the pieces are supposed to fit together into a coherent system. Without those objectives, it’s impossible to align regulation, investment, or political decision-making. Everyone optimizes locally, and the whole system goes where it will.
That’s the striking difference between the U.S. and places like France or China. They act from a national transportation strategy. They define what role trains play, what role highways play, what role aviation plays, and then their infrastructure, funding, and regulations follow from those choices. We don’t make those choices at all.
What’s ironic is that the U.S. actually could have a single point of accountability here. The Department of Transportation has both the legitimacy and the authority to create a unified national transportation strategy. Nothing stops DOT from doing the conceptual work: defining objectives, clarifying modal roles, outlining how people and freight should move in a 21st-century economy. For whatever reasons, political, institutional, or cultural, it has never done so.
And until that happens, the problems the author describes will remain trapped at the tactical level. You can’t fix passenger-freight conflicts, regulatory issues, or corridor inefficiencies when the nation hasn’t even articulated the purpose of its transportation system. Strategy has to come before implementation.
This article is right about what’s broken. But the reason nothing changes is that we’ve never taken the first step: defining what success looks like and giving the transportation system a clear aim.
And a final note is this is what is wrong with many of our national systems, we don’t have clear objectives set from need and then strategies set from capability.
Could it be any more obvious? Rail for freight and a touch of nostalgia, plus Bos-Wash. Roads for shorter distances. Air for longer distances. I realize that you need a Harvard dissertation to understand what's in front of your face, but I don't.
I don’t disagree with your basic breakdown, freight rail for freight, roads for short trips, aviation for long ones. In theory that structure is intuitive.
But the article wasn’t arguing that the modal roles are conceptually confusing. It was showing why the United States fails to execute even the obvious. The new Acela trains are a good example: we bought high-speed trains, but we don’t have a high-speed rail system. They can only use their full capability on a tiny fraction of the route because the underlying strategy, infrastructure, and governance were never aligned to support that objective.
That’s exactly what happens when a country never defines the purpose of each mode or how the pieces are meant to work together. Without national objectives, each actor optimizes locally,freight companies shape the constraints, Amtrak buys equipment it can’t fully use, and the public ends up paying for speed it never receives.
So the issue isn’t whether the modal breakdown is obvious.It’s that the U.S. has never articulated it, never aligned policy around it, and never given DOT or anyone else the mandate to enforce it. That missing architecture is why the problems in the article persist, and why investments fail to deliver what they promise.
This is high quality investigative journalism on an important topic. Thank you.
I am a MAGA type and support government spending on improved rail travel in the country. Maybe if we stopped paying benefits to so many immigrants and people that don’t work, we could afford more rail infrastructure spending. But government incompetence is also a barrier. Just look at California’s high speed rail mess.
As a Baby Boomer our family often took passenger trains.
I loved it. If there were still trains that's how we would travel.
The gentle rocking, the scenery we passed through. Towns we passed through. Such a different emotional experience than crowded flying with rude people and airlines people telling us how valuable we are.
Yes, if I had plenty of time and money and want to have an emotional experience, rail would probably work. But when I want to get from my town to L.A., air is the only practical option. Passenger rail is a years long money pit, both upfront and ongoing maintenance. There aren't enough people interested in riding it for long distance.
If you ask me, the deregulation that mattered most for Amtrak was the deregulation of the airlines in 1978. This caused airfares to collapse, and rail travel to become out of favor.
You can fly from DC to Boston for about the same price as an Acela and get there much faster, usually on-time.
The HSR fascination never made sense to me. There is no way in hell that HSR can be cost-competitive with air and break even without massive government intervention (either subsidies for rail or penalties for air / cars).
Heck, the permitting to build a high speed rail line through Westchester NY and Fairfield CT would probably take a century.
Former US DOT official here. Passenger rail only works in the populous northeast corridor, where it is marginally profitable, despite incompentent leadership and cronyism on Amtrak's governing board (Hunter Biden once served as vice chair, nominated by George W. Bush, no less), congressional meddling (see: Hunter's father), and the success of deregulation (Carter Administration) and more profitable and popular market-based solutions (intercity bus, air travel, and highways). It is faster, more convenient, and less expensive to travel either by personal auto or air. Romanticism is a poor incentive.
Contrast these two statements taken from the article:
1) "[A]n analysis from Open Secrets found that freight companies spent $654 million dollars over the past 20 years lobbying Congress against safety regulations, antitrust, and track preference enforcement."
2) "Further, after nearly breaking even in 2019, Amtrak is once again nearing profitability for the first time in history with a $700 million net loss in 2024"
So Amtrak blew $700 million in a single year and that's good; the profitable railroads spent $654 million over twenty years to fight off pointless and expensive regulations and that's bad.
It all makes sense to me now -- and I'm a longtime train nut who has studied them in every aspect for more than seventy years.
I like riding on trains, especially for the views. The food on Amtrak in the 1970's was quite nice, especially on the Coast Starlight, along California's coast, and the Denver & Rio Grand railroad. Today, the sleeper cars are nice, the food is forgettable.
Passenger rail is so inadequate because traveling by air is faster, cheaper, and more convenient. If you look at the United States, there are only a handful of places were rail matters. Given that most of those places are controlled by Democrats who make a point of touting rail, one must ask just how stupid, incompetent, and dishonest they are. Will the intrepid "independent" media ask Newsom in 2028? Doubt it.
I don't understand the left's fascination with high-speed rail.
- As the article hints, the US has the best freight rail in the world, much better than Europe's. But you never see progressives championing the US freight system compared to Europe.
- Driving is faster for short distances and flying is faster for long distances.
- So high-speed rail's use case is perhaps a 200 - 400 mile range, and it requires heavy use of eminent domain and massive legal battles for every mile of track along that range.
- The Acela is actually slower than flying from Boston to New York City and it costs more.
- And if you take the train rather than drive, you now need to get a car on the other end. Is the speed boost for these middle-distance trips really worth it?
I'm not a leftie but I wish the U.S. had massive high-speed rail (that works) so I could drive less.
Get on a plane then.
This piece does a good job describing the symptoms of America’s passenger-rail issues, especially the structural conflict between Amtrak and the freight railroads. But when you follow those symptoms all the way down to their source, you hit a deeper issue that almost never gets acknowledged.
The United States has no national strategic objectives for its three core transportation systems, roads, aviation, and rail, for either people or freight. We have infrastructure, agencies, and funding streams, but we do not have a clear statement of what each mode is supposed to do, what trips each should specialize in, or how the pieces are supposed to fit together into a coherent system. Without those objectives, it’s impossible to align regulation, investment, or political decision-making. Everyone optimizes locally, and the whole system goes where it will.
That’s the striking difference between the U.S. and places like France or China. They act from a national transportation strategy. They define what role trains play, what role highways play, what role aviation plays, and then their infrastructure, funding, and regulations follow from those choices. We don’t make those choices at all.
What’s ironic is that the U.S. actually could have a single point of accountability here. The Department of Transportation has both the legitimacy and the authority to create a unified national transportation strategy. Nothing stops DOT from doing the conceptual work: defining objectives, clarifying modal roles, outlining how people and freight should move in a 21st-century economy. For whatever reasons, political, institutional, or cultural, it has never done so.
And until that happens, the problems the author describes will remain trapped at the tactical level. You can’t fix passenger-freight conflicts, regulatory issues, or corridor inefficiencies when the nation hasn’t even articulated the purpose of its transportation system. Strategy has to come before implementation.
This article is right about what’s broken. But the reason nothing changes is that we’ve never taken the first step: defining what success looks like and giving the transportation system a clear aim.
And a final note is this is what is wrong with many of our national systems, we don’t have clear objectives set from need and then strategies set from capability.
Could it be any more obvious? Rail for freight and a touch of nostalgia, plus Bos-Wash. Roads for shorter distances. Air for longer distances. I realize that you need a Harvard dissertation to understand what's in front of your face, but I don't.
I don’t disagree with your basic breakdown, freight rail for freight, roads for short trips, aviation for long ones. In theory that structure is intuitive.
But the article wasn’t arguing that the modal roles are conceptually confusing. It was showing why the United States fails to execute even the obvious. The new Acela trains are a good example: we bought high-speed trains, but we don’t have a high-speed rail system. They can only use their full capability on a tiny fraction of the route because the underlying strategy, infrastructure, and governance were never aligned to support that objective.
That’s exactly what happens when a country never defines the purpose of each mode or how the pieces are meant to work together. Without national objectives, each actor optimizes locally,freight companies shape the constraints, Amtrak buys equipment it can’t fully use, and the public ends up paying for speed it never receives.
So the issue isn’t whether the modal breakdown is obvious.It’s that the U.S. has never articulated it, never aligned policy around it, and never given DOT or anyone else the mandate to enforce it. That missing architecture is why the problems in the article persist, and why investments fail to deliver what they promise.
This is high quality investigative journalism on an important topic. Thank you.
I am a MAGA type and support government spending on improved rail travel in the country. Maybe if we stopped paying benefits to so many immigrants and people that don’t work, we could afford more rail infrastructure spending. But government incompetence is also a barrier. Just look at California’s high speed rail mess.
As a Baby Boomer our family often took passenger trains.
I loved it. If there were still trains that's how we would travel.
The gentle rocking, the scenery we passed through. Towns we passed through. Such a different emotional experience than crowded flying with rude people and airlines people telling us how valuable we are.
Yes, if I had plenty of time and money and want to have an emotional experience, rail would probably work. But when I want to get from my town to L.A., air is the only practical option. Passenger rail is a years long money pit, both upfront and ongoing maintenance. There aren't enough people interested in riding it for long distance.
The federal government and the taxpayers who fund it have NO OBLIGATION to feed your nostalgia trip, period.
Boy, nice guy. Where did I ever say they should? Get control over your temper.
If you ask me, the deregulation that mattered most for Amtrak was the deregulation of the airlines in 1978. This caused airfares to collapse, and rail travel to become out of favor.
You can fly from DC to Boston for about the same price as an Acela and get there much faster, usually on-time.
The HSR fascination never made sense to me. There is no way in hell that HSR can be cost-competitive with air and break even without massive government intervention (either subsidies for rail or penalties for air / cars).
Heck, the permitting to build a high speed rail line through Westchester NY and Fairfield CT would probably take a century.
Rail was out of favor long before 1978.
Former US DOT official here. Passenger rail only works in the populous northeast corridor, where it is marginally profitable, despite incompentent leadership and cronyism on Amtrak's governing board (Hunter Biden once served as vice chair, nominated by George W. Bush, no less), congressional meddling (see: Hunter's father), and the success of deregulation (Carter Administration) and more profitable and popular market-based solutions (intercity bus, air travel, and highways). It is faster, more convenient, and less expensive to travel either by personal auto or air. Romanticism is a poor incentive.
BINGO!
Contrast these two statements taken from the article:
1) "[A]n analysis from Open Secrets found that freight companies spent $654 million dollars over the past 20 years lobbying Congress against safety regulations, antitrust, and track preference enforcement."
2) "Further, after nearly breaking even in 2019, Amtrak is once again nearing profitability for the first time in history with a $700 million net loss in 2024"
So Amtrak blew $700 million in a single year and that's good; the profitable railroads spent $654 million over twenty years to fight off pointless and expensive regulations and that's bad.
It all makes sense to me now -- and I'm a longtime train nut who has studied them in every aspect for more than seventy years.
National policy should not be dictated by romantics like you.
What part of "Amtrak spends too much money for too little service" is romantic?
Mea culpa. My apologies.
I like riding on trains, especially for the views. The food on Amtrak in the 1970's was quite nice, especially on the Coast Starlight, along California's coast, and the Denver & Rio Grand railroad. Today, the sleeper cars are nice, the food is forgettable.
Passenger rail is so inadequate because traveling by air is faster, cheaper, and more convenient. If you look at the United States, there are only a handful of places were rail matters. Given that most of those places are controlled by Democrats who make a point of touting rail, one must ask just how stupid, incompetent, and dishonest they are. Will the intrepid "independent" media ask Newsom in 2028? Doubt it.