When I traveled Boston to NY in the past, compare my flight experience vs Amtrak.
Flight: - Take $25 Uber to airport and get there 1 hour early to go through security and wait. - Fly to JFK (1h 20m) - land, wait to get off, go through terminal again, then take $50 Uber to Manhattan (or $20 via public transit but god forbid you are even slightly confused about transfers).
Train: - Take the Red Line to South Station, getting there 15 minutes early - Take a 4 hour train to Penn Station, with essentially a full desk, no real baggage limitation, freedom to walk around, and good wifi. - Walk outside into Manhattan
Admittedly, I took the Acela, which is business class, but almost all comparisons hold true for the NE Regional except you'd have to tether your own connection and it's a bit more crowded. The main thing is that this 4 hour chunk of time is uninterrupted by checkpoints and transfers and whatever else. It's relaxing rather than stressful.
People tell me the reasons that everything is more expensive than in Switzerland is because (a) the US is bigger, so infrastructure cost more [and flights scale easier], (b) the US is bigger, so city-to-city distances eat more of day up, or (c) labor unions make costs higher. But is (b) a real problem if you can work on the train? And I don't really get (c).
As an example, in 2016 I took the train from New York to Montreal. The distance is only about 600 km, but the train ride took almost 12 hours! Part of that was due to the border checks of course, but even during the part in the States the train tucked along really slowly and had to stop multiple times to let cargo trains pass (which have priority over passenger trains it seems). In Europe, I also regularly took the train from Saarbrücken to Paris, which is not that different in terms of distance (around 500-550 km depending how you count) and takes just 1 hour 45 minutes.
The great thing about Switzerland is their 30 minute schedule btw: Trains are scheduled so they arrive around 5 minutes before half in all major train stations, and depart around 5 minutes after half again, so that you can hop from one train to another with less than 10 minutes delay (and trains are on time in Switzerland). They're already planning to change those intervals to 15 minutes, which would basically turn Switzerland into one giant metropolitan area, with train schedules that feel more like subway connections.
Historical reason: the rails were built by freight companies and not by the government like in most of Europe. For them, passenger trains are, at best, an afterthought that doesn't matter.
I don't think you would be willing to pay the amount of taxes you would need to, to completely redo the railways haha.
Anyways Amtrak are barely turning a profit as it is and while it would be great to have Euro quality train lines, the economics aren't there. Even in Europe they're having a hard time competing with flixbus.
This premise feels wrong: The Swiss, German, Chinese, Spanish experience is that people pay to have high speed rail services, and the G20 economies in that list pay high marginal rates of taxes just fine, for this outcome.
The "you" here is conditionally the "you" of current social mores America. It by no means is the only recent experience of America, under presidents to Reagan, the top rate of marginal tax was significantly higher than at present, and people paid.
Perhaps, if Americans were made to pay more supertax they would discover sooner than you think, how few people it inconvenienced (Bezos) and how many it benefitted.
"you" might be surprised how low the increment was on your tax base, to fund the state investment your country needs, taking into account the superwealthy, and corporate tax evasion.
The Northeast Corridor, which the GP is talking about, is a bit of a special case. Amtrak owns the tracks from NY to DC (states own the CT/MA part) and they're good enough to go a bit faster than the otherwise-usual 79 mph speed limit. This part of Amtrak is, IIRC, fairly profitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor
In the rest of the country, Amtrak is indeed stuck on freight lines, and service is often slow and unprofitable, but it's not entirely on them either. Passenger traffic is supposed to be prioritized, but the freight lines are not great about it and have been fined for not doing so (though, not enough to make them do it either). There are also weird political considerations about routes.
I find public transport more expensive compared to minimum wage keeping other countries that I lived before, but the quality is high.
Trains are fast and reliable here and there's continuous improvements on the trains and their tracks. Every year they would announce that decrease in travel time due to improved tracks or higher frequency for some routes.
The only problem is that when something goes wrong extreme weather, signal failure, problem on the tracks in the rush hour, then that route stops working and all neighbouring routes become delayed or overcrowded. Luckily I only experience it every few months.
When something becomes a cultural priority, economic sectors shift to accommodate it. We are really good at trucking, for example. We have loads of highways. We also have excellent freight rail.
The reason that the passenger rail sector in the US sucks is because it is small at a national scale and so it doesn't benefit from access to the national market. If you model NYC as a small country building its own rail network in a high-cost area surrounded by countries with no transit and expensive labor, suddenly it makes sense. Passenger rail isn't a priority in the curriculum at most universities. People who might learn how to build subways instead learn to build highways. Companies that might specialize in subways specialize in airports. To use a coding analogy, building passenger rail does not follow the happy path for American construction organizations, be they unions or firms.
(In Latin America, the problem starts earlier: primary and secondary school math scores in LA trail the income quantile for, IIRC, all LA countries)
This is a situation that can be changed, but it won't happen in one place or at one time. Alternatively, the country could reduce taxes on foreign contractors building transit infrastructure and recruit more foreign investment, although that would certainly leave a bitter taste if it hurt the car industry.
This is true for most of the Amtrak mileage, but the Northeast Corridor rails are largely owned by Amtrak[0,pg4]:
Amtrak owns and operates 363 route-miles of the 457-route-mile Northeast Corridor (NEC) spine between Washington and Boston.
[0] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
Did taxpayers get slammed when we built the transcontinental RR?
So even if they redid the rails, they might have to redo the website as well.
There's no reason that the North Eastern commuter corridor that runs Washington D.C. to Boston couldn't be profitable if Amtrak were to operate as a series of independent regional entities though. The economics are certainly there. Instead Amtrak is a single entity which services large swathes of the country for which there is little demand for rail service.
We already pay the taxes, but unfortunately we spend a trillion dollars a year maintaining our global military empire instead of shoring up our crumbling domestic infrastructure. Priorities!
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-...
US is cheaper than Switzerland for pretty much any product. If you are talking about train service, then the reason for that is because US (and Canada) prioritize freight traffic. Freight traffic is much more efficient in North America than in Europe [1] and unfortunately (or fortunately) is prioritized over passenger traffic.
Honestly, I think America made the better decision.
[1]https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-...
"European railways had no incentive to take risks to re-engineer and spend billions of euros to increase clearances and rework tunnel heights for double-stacked railcars, because the European railway business model was about moving passengers and not freight – the opposite of how North America dealt with its railroad system. "
Also, Washington State is atypical for the US since they dont have a state income tax. In most other states, there is an added state income tax.
They're probably still lower than US taxes, but in Switzerland the difference between income after tax and actual take-home income can be significant.
The Swiss model seems to be to think of the consequences of policies before putting them in place, the lower taxes seem to be more of a result of that.
(I’ve lived in all three countries, this is my impression)
This is a very good point. I suspect that because decision making is very local, they have functioning feedback loops: so you decided to spend too much money on a new fire truck? Well now you can't pay for the sports field renovations. People eventually learn.
Outside of taxes, it is also a matter of political choices
The Swiss took the decision to develop the train as a first transport choice nationally... Even trucks transiting through Switzerland are loaded on trains.
And the result is there: They have a good network with a good service that unify the country.
That a strategy totally at the opposite of what USA and many European countries chose to do in the 90's: Close as many small train lines as possible and develop road transport.
The version I read for Germany was that when the mobile broadband spectrum was originally auctioned off, the purchase price for the spectrum was too high. So the pensioners and other investors who bought in demanded a juicy return on investment despite overpaying, resulting in high prices and presumably less money for investments in the network.
For the fixed line broadband network in Germany, its quite substandard despite the country being generally good at infrastructure. The reason can be traced back to corruption, where a decision was made to rollout copper backbone instead of fiber optic, which was the original decision. Article in German but copy and paste with Google translate:
https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/langsames-internet-i...
Give passenger rail priority.
No where in the Western world does a passenger train have to give way to a freight train. It' s always the other way around. Except in the US. In the US when freight companies are late they make passenger trains wait.
They can do this because they own the track. But with a presidential stroke of a pen many delays in Amtrak can be resolved in one go.
The other option is the train, it's 4.5 hours, comfortable, but costs £250. It's a much nicer journey, but regularly much more expensive.
You are comparing the price of a budget airline flight, booked at least several days, if not weeks, in advance, with a first class train ticket bought on the day of departure.
Departing tomorrow afternoon, an EasyJet flight is £115. I don't know if the morning flights are sold out, or are currently not running, but they presumably exist. The train is £77 off peak (which matches the flight arrival time), or £166 peak (assuming there are sold-out morning flights). Even this late the day before, it's still possible to book onto a particular train, which is about £60-70.
Train times and ticket costs for tomorrow: https://traintimes.org.uk/edinburgh/london/06:30/tomorrow
In the before times, it was pretty much the same price to get a last minute VIA train ticket or a Porter flight between Ottawa and Toronto. If you’re lucky, early, or a student, you can get a train ticket quite a bit cheaper.
"Does this country have a tradition of good rail services and take pride in them."
Establishing that is hard. It seems really hard to make the technical solutions work without it. Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and others, trains are great. USA, UK, Australia, Canada - not always terrible but not in the same class. It's not talent. It's not wealth, I doubt the English Language is a hinderance here...
Last time I rode on Amtrak it was absolutely depressing. Same with Caltrain and BART. The problem is not money -- other countries do more with less money. The problem is governance.
Amtrak’s annual revenue is less than 4B USD.
On that basis, I agree with you wholeheartedly. It would be nice to use some of that massive amount of money for infrastructure, versus funneling it to a dozen companies who exist solely to consume as much of it as possible.
Social security is often a lot, lot better in the US than Europe. Take the UK:
UK unemployment 'benefits' are around $100/week regardless of previous salary (so low compared to housing costs in many areas that it is almost pointless). US state unemployment benefits tend to be a lot higher than that.
UK pensions are low - around $10,000/yr, again regardless of salary. US Social Security pensions are vastly higher.
It's a density problem though. US is super sparsely populated. Outside of the northeast corridor (DC <> NYC <> Boston) the rest is too spread out with few exceptions to support train service.
The US highway system is like spaghetti for good reason.
In Tokyo, you get full signal strength, wherever you are (even in tunnels going underwater).
That's because they have mobile antennas everywhere, including lining all the railway lines.
I'll bet that their service ain't so cheap, though (I was roaming, when I was there, and that was definitely not cheap).
I paid for their 110Mbps plan and have worked remotely for many years. Video dropping all the time, router hanging. After upgrading all my equipment because they wouldn't admit fault, I got a tech to come out who was completely candid because I showed him my modem SNR and power levels and he knew I wasn't messing around.
Without fail, he pointed to the pole top node and said that's the problem. It was Sunday and the realtime congestion was near 80%. He said it was scheduled for upgrade but everything is delayed because of supply chain issue in China.
That was all I needed to hear. Canceled that day, got AT&T copper (no fiber here), and it's been solid so far.
Thankfully I have access to Monkeybrains. Our speed is 500mpbs down and up, no data cap, $35 a month. Unfortunately they're not widely available.
I ride Luzern-Zürich daily and there are major parts where its terrible, and I believe this is one of the densest lines. Even right in front of Zürich where there is lots of population.
And this not the only place by far, even basic low quality video doesn't really work well on my routes.
Edit: I'm using a different provider, but I am fairly certain you would have the same problem with that one.
only the first might if someone were streaming 8K video with 7.1 lossless audio, which wouldn't even come close to 1.2Gbps, but on a mobile device on public transport? no
I'm pretty certain 1.2Gbps would serve an entire train 720p video with 128kbps stereo audio, which for 99.9% of people would be adequate for a mobile device on public transport
it's a bit like breaking the land speed record, a bit pointless and you'll never get (nor need) to be the driver
ie. i get good 4g signal in most of the forests in bavaria but no signal at all in the lobby of my local hospital.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/musk-spacexs-starlink-internet-se...
EDIT: minor clarifications
Anecdotally I believe the current 4g connection is best in the very front of the train, but gets worse if you're in the back.
'Cries manly Canadian tears"
I thought about it for a while, one conclusion I got is that, unless US significantly curb the capitalism freedom in business activities, there is no chance that one can revert the centralization of the global manufacturing inside mainland China. Simply put, the logistic networks for both goods and people, and many other investment, makes mainland China the best manufacturing hub. That's a straightforward economy outcome.
If you want to take a train to Idaho from Boston, sure, but nobody would do that. And for NY->Boston, it's plenty dense. Freight traffic is miles ahead in American than in Europe, and is always prioritized over passenger trains - that's the reason.
In Europe at least, it's quite densely populated (relative to the US), so the land costs for building new railways is incredibly expensive. In the UK, more and more miles of track are being buried in tunnels (the High Speed 1 line has 3 of the top ten longest tunnels in the UK), and HS2 add to that.
In the US, you have thousands of square miles of empty land where you can just run a straight line 200mph train through it.
I don't think US politicians realise how transformational it would be to the economy to join up East coast cities and West coast cities with high speed rail. I suppose the airline lobby groups are keeping a lid on it.
European example: the Eurostar train from London to the French Alps, door-to-door, is practically the same, if not quicker, than driving to the airport, going through customs, getting the 90 minute flight, then the transfer to the ski resort. At the same time, the train is carrying over 1000 people, vs. a plane with only 200.
The US lacks the required density. Trains are by far the most expensive mode of mass transport per mile, both because of infrastructure and labor cost. Labor costs are higher than eg a plane because trains go much slower! In a personal car, there are no other labor costs. The natural monopoly on the network and the ensuing lack of competition doesn't help either.
Planes and electric autonomous cars are the better alternative for the US.
Either you accept that civilisation needs infrastructure to function, or you live like a medieval peasant.
And per the IMF there are huge subsidies to fossil fuels in the US:
* https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-f...
I think if you want to pollute the air and cause climate change, you should pay for it without those of us who use public transit subsidizing it.
The thing is its not just the taxes you'll be paying for, its the fare on top of that. It gets really costly if its your only form of transportation, and even with a Halb-tax card it can be pretty expensive. I did it for a year while living and working in Switzerland, and the CHF was pegged to the EUR, so in certain places I just risked it and jumped the tram fare into the city, which I'm told by my friend who worked at the SBB is a bad idea as they have cameras everywhere and could 'in theory' compare it against your halbtax card ID.
The SBB is super convenient and punctual, though; going to Zurich airport from just about anywhere in Switzerland is possible with nothing more than just a tram or bus ride to the nearest Bahnhof. But Switzerland is a tiny country compared to the large sprawling US. And just look at the absurdity with the train that was supposed to connect LA and and SF at $77 Billion. But having dealt with plenty of phantom last trains and having to sleep at the bahnhofs makes me paranoid, I slept at Basel bahnhof like 5 times and at Bern I must have stayed 2 times overnight in the freezing cold with several layers on.
Its funny how all the youth had to have driver licensees, and no cars, and how most just got a halb-tax card from their employer or the Government to get to school or work. The costs to own and fuel a car are obscene by US standards in Switzerland too.
The California High Speed Rail line is supposed to be 1,300km long. That's more like Paris to Budapest in distance, or another way of thinking, it's 1/3rd of the total railway length in Switzerland - imagine building that from scratch, today. But with earthquakes (and presumably, now, fires). I'm not defending it, but it's a very big project, it was never going to be cheap.
Commercial flight, even with the risk of terrorism, is far safer than land travel. If it's acceptable to let people board the Acela without going through body scanners, then there's no reason we can't do the same with JetBlue.
Japan has the Shinkansen that gets you between the two major cities at 300kmph in slightly less than two hours. Nonetheless, they’re still trying to build a maglev that will do the same thing at 500kmph in 1.1 hours. I guess if you already have the convenience of working on the train, you want to do less of it.
I kind of forgot what my point was.
The problem with train investment is it starts to look really uninteresting for most people once the train travel time is 5+ hours. The investment in improving airport connectivity and flexibility has dramatically wider use cases and ROI versus train investment, which is notoriously expensive and realistically only going to serve a very limited set of use cases.
In Europe there are more cases for trains. Density and centralization is much higher. When you build a train line in central Switzerland you are going to reach a much higher percentage of the population, justifying the investment of national resources. That is simply not the case in the United States.
For trains, even large stations don't have that long a walk, since the tracks run parallel to one another. As long as one shows up before the train pulls into the station, it's all good.
As you point out, trains definitely don't replace all flights, but for some dense corridors in the US (eg. Washington-Philadelphia-NYC-Boston, Dallas-Houston, San Francisco-San Jose-Los Angeles-San Diego) high speed rail would offer a better experience (larger seats, more comfortable ride, more uninterrupted time for working) and a comparable door to door time.
The population density in America as a hole is far smaller than in Switzerland, but the population density in NY State is almost double that in Switzerland. In fact, the population density on the US coasts, where most of the infrastructure is, is in the same range as in Europe. The cost of laying and maintaining a few train tracks over the sparsely populated US interior is not the reason it's more expensive in the US.
Railroads in Switzerland are built in extremely mountainous terrain with lots of expensive tunnels etc. and in expensive urban areas.
But for family travel, we end up driving, as the cost for 4 people is just too high (even considering expensive NYC parking).
Call me naive but I think it’s better to keep those dollars and save for a flight.
I don’t think the « US is bigger do costs more » holds. Switzerland is incredibly mountainous and train go through countless tunnels that require significant engineering and time to build (look up the Gothard tunnel, one of the longest tunnels in the world through a mountain to connect Italian Switzerland with German Switzerland).
Oh and Swiss trains go 120–200+ km/h on most of the network vs 90 tops (I think?) for US trains.
Not to mention additional perks like the FAIRTIQ app where you basically get on any form of public transport in Switzerland or Lichtenstein, slide a button on your phone when you get on the first transport of your journey, and again when you get off the last, and it will automatically charge you the most advantageous and cheapest fare it can find at the end of the day (and convert to a daily ticket if that’s better because you made several trips ins city you know nothing about the bus tickets)
SBB also offers services like picking up your luggage for you at home, putting them in your train for you, and delivering them to your destination. All you have to do is get on and off the train and not think about it.
Or the plan where you get unlimited train for a year (1st or 2nd class) and a Tesla in every city. As in drive a Tesla from home to the train station, leave the Tesla there, get on a train, pickup another Tesla at your destination, drive it around, and return it to the station when you’re done to go back home and pick the other one back up. It’s not cheap but it’s amazing when you think about it.
But any country that refuses to let the government coordinate the building and operating of the infrastructure (I.e. the network) won’t ever be able to get there. These projects are long term and cost a lot of money so it’s very hard for private companies with short term profitability horizons to make it happen.
SF-Sacramento
SF-Tahoe
SF-Napa
SEA-PDX
Austin-Dallas-Houston
LA-Las Vegas-Phoenix-Tucson
And I am not talking snail Amtrak 70 mph train. I am suggesting 150 mph that runs in most Europe. What is holding US back in public transport?
Who needs a train?
GSM-R was modification to the 2G mobile phone specification specifically to help with high speed handover, but being 2G it gives pretty awful data speeds (1mbit max iirc). If you google for LTE-R it seems there's special provisions to bring that fast handover ability to 4G & 5G networks.
As well as the actual radio layer, you've also got the mobility management side of things to consider, for example your IP address. If you've got a video streaming or a SIP call going then when you connect to the next radio tower your IP address has to move across as do any established data sessions - it's not just a case of getting a new DHCP lease and cracking on, there's some serious network orchestration and session management happening too.
(I'm convinced I read something a few years ago that one of the LTE design goals was to allow handover when moving at 200mph (that number seems stuck in my head), but I'm failing to find any mention of it outside of the LTE-R results).
That’s handled at a higher level though. If you manage to get the lower level handover running fast enough, the IP side of things shouldn’t be a problem (as all the traffic goes to the GGSN or whatever LTE’s equivalent of that is).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
[1] https://www.oui.sncf/tgv/services/internet-a-bord
[2] https://www.sncf.com/fr/offres-voyageurs/tgv-inoui/connectez...
It was faster than the max speed I'd ever recorded back in London.
Meanwhile when I was living in the US I had to put my phone next to the window to receive ANY signal at all. This was on a university campus.
I would love to know how Japan built their system (was it publicly funded/subsidised?).
Article (in Dutch): https://tweakers.net/nieuws/141195/mobiel-netwerk-met-leaky-...
Roaming prices are effectively set by your home network, not the foreign one. My network (Vodafone Ireland) charges a flat fee of 5 euro a day (with a fairly miserly 500MB/day data cap) for most non-European countries, for instance, but some other Irish networks have completely different pricing structures for it.
If you do not want to stop using your current SIM card or if you have an incompatible phone, you can rent an “egg”. It is a small mobile hotspot that your devices connect over WiFi. It is also useful if you are a group, because multiple people can connect to it, so you just get one.
Same network, same conditions, different label on the box, 3x the price, at a price point where it should matter to most people...
https://scmplc.begasoft.ch/plcapp/pages/gis/netzabdeckung.js...
The data rates my provider gave me in the message where ridiculous (10+ GBP per mb), but it's impressive I got it while on an airplane.
Mobile phone use is banned on planes because of the interference this could cause with ground based networks.
https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/swisscom-chef-zu-5g-man-h...
Meanwhile, in Europe you can take a train and have good coverage in the middle of nowhere through a base station that probably sees 20 minutes of heavy use per day...
Switzerland: 206/sqkm Germany: 240/sqkm Eurozone as a whole: ~100/sqkm Canada: ~4/sqkm USA: 35/sqkm
Put another way, what’s the point of downloading a terabyte of data in seconds when it takes your computer minutes to process it into something useful? Also, where are we storing all this data that we can download at super fast speeds? Most computers cap out at around 8 GB of RAM (though this does seem to be trending upwards) and SSDs read/write speeds are measured in megabytes (with most capping out at single digit gigabytes) so with terabit we are potentially downloading more data than computers can physically store per second.
Reducing latency though would be the real game changer. When Starlink finishes building out it’s fleet, we could see worldwide latency drop to he point that video games would no longer need to have regional game servers because of lag! But then the problem becomes “how to do you manage all those players on one server”? Annnd we’re back to our CPU limitations.
it will improve the situation for regions with poor wired infrastructure.
funny thou how 8gigs of ram seems to be good enough for a decade now.
Can you use the server you're connected to to compute some whatsits? Using part of the connection as RAM?
honestly, it's more than enough to have 50 TVs streaming Netflix or YouTube, the computers downloading stuff, phones being used and so on.
I am really not sure how 1Tbit would even matter for 99% of the population. Maybe if streaming (actual) 4k became a thing. Perhaps for remote-gaming, but latency would need to be very low. I cannot imagine the latency on a train.
VR cloud gaming to start with maybe.
want to transfer data at 1Tbps across the city?
just load a full truck with tapes and let it drive through the morning.
there you go, probably even higher than 1 Tbps
Pretty much all routes lose money except the Acela and Northeast Regional routes.
FRA crash safety standards are stricter because of Not Invented Here syndrome.
The AT&T internet plan seems sufficient for my usage. It's capped at 100Mbps, which I understand to be a limit, at least in part, of running over copper phone lines. I get about 20Mbps up pretty consistently, which is enough. Apparently fiber in my neighborhood is right around the corner (literally, my neighbors have it), but we probably won't live here when it arrives.
On a side note, AT&T threw in free install, $150 in gift cards, and a free 24" Samsung LCD. All for $45/mo no contract service. Made it real easy to switch, though I would've anyway.
The US build ever bigger highways (I recall a summit at Stanford on clean energy in 2014 where some guy from McKinsey claimed that the solution to all problems is to increase highway throughout by having self driving cars closer to each other - never would it have occurred to him or anyone on the panel to replace cars with a train or bus) and Germany somehow tries to deal with their bad infrastructure choices after deciding to be car centric in favor of their car industry for many years.
Edit: fun little note: I actually wanted to ask the McKinsey guy what his take on public transportation was, but wasn’t chosen for the q&a since I was sitting in the very back after I arrived late due to some issue on the Caltrain.
In Vietnam, even in smaller cities, there are at least three different ISPs with citywide GPON FTTH. The fact that they weren’t forced to share a government lowest-common-denominator physical layer means that we are now seeing some competition around improvements to that physical layer, with one ISP offering much faster speeds made possible by incrementally improving their physical network. The others will be encouraged by competitive pressure to do the same, or maybe even do better.
(japanese) https://k-tai.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/592635.html
(photo for just cable) https://k-tai.watch.impress.co.jp/img/ktw/docs/592/635/html/...
The auction could have easily been fixed, by imposing and enforcing strict rules on maximum prices, minimum coverage and mandating in-country roaming. After all the frequencies should benefit the whole public. With such rules the outcome would have been a much better network, allowing for growth in other regions.
The article you've shared is very interesting, would be helpful if more Germans were informed about this.
Gross salary: 100k
Family allowance: ~300 x 3 x 12 = ~10.8k
Salary deductions (unemployment, retirement, social insurances): ~11k
Taxes: ~8kSide note: Including the significant deductions for payments into your retirement fund seems problematic to me, as you will get that money back at some point. And then there are more factors that have a big impact, like church and wealth tax.
Besides, much more energy is wasted heating old, leaky homes that are an eauivalent of a wet dump. Landlords have no incentive to fix them because the tenants are the ones that pay for heating. If we fixed crappy housing im UK, allegendly worst in europe if yoy consider price, we would save a lot more CO2 and a lot more people would be happy.
Back to work, peasants!
Once you tax it markets will immediately respond by finding efficient, low carbon footprint alternatives to everything. That is, if people can get into their heads that capitalism is a system (to be tweaked for the benefit of everyone), not a religion.
By the way rich people will be the least affected global warming.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple. One of the things LTE started (and 5G continues) is to push more and more of this to the edge of the network. Traffic from the UE does get tunnelled through the Serving Gateway (S-GW), but there can be multiple SGW's on a network. Mobility management is also a big enough issue that the Mobility Management Entity (MME) is an entity unto itself on the block diagram.
It's also worth pointing out that eNodeB's (the radios) can now talk directly to each other via X2 and can actually hand over a subscriber without particularly involving the core network.
tldr: I think it's enough of a problem for it to be not entirely trivial.
For information MIP is used between S-GW and P-GW (PMIP IIRC), so there can be IP addresses changes when the HO is such that the S-GW changes. Still, this is transparent to the UE: it's a change at the tunnel level, and the UE traffic flowing inside this tunnel is not affected.
BTW what "anchor" means here is that the IP address the UE gets is routed to the P-GW. From then on the traffic is tunneled to the UE across the cellular network core and radio access networks, but all this is transparent for the end device. There's a first leg from P-GW to S-GW, then from S-GW to the eNB (the base station), then the over-the-air and last leg to the mobile device. That's 3 tunnels joined together to transport data seamlessly from P-GW to UE. During a HO the radio one always changes, the S-GW to P-GW rarely changes. And the P-GW is fixed to provide IP session continuity.
That said, the cost of building things in the US is a major problem.
Heh, I don't know much about the history of the transcontinental railroad in the US, but up here in Canada it was relatively cheap because... well... to be blunt, we used primarily Chinese labour and did not give a single crap about whether or not they died building it.
But I'd probably take the commuter train instead if they ran more often -- if we ever go back to offices.
Admittedly this was a couple years ago, so it's possible COVID or budget cuts have changed things for the worse.
Underappreciated these days: web is not always the priority method of interaction for people.
The web is great, but for historical or practical reasons a lot of people and businesses prefer other solutions.
E.g. construction workers and phones
Germany has a different issue, you have multiple providers and those combined have pretty good coverage. I visit germany frequently by train and roam and it kicks me from provider to provider.
Iirc your providers are mandated by the gov to also service these rather unprofitable areas, which they do. They split up the uninhabited regions, build a few antennas there. So if you have a plan with a national provider you get shitty coverage. If you roam and can use any provider, it's actually mostly fine (in my experience).
I don't understand why they don't do national roaming in these areas.
As an aside, the train schedule and prices seem substantially cheaper than this time last year. I don't ever recall there being availability on the super off peak trains if travelling within a week or so.
There's no such thing as 'availability' on trains, you can buy a ticket from the ticket machine without booking in advance. You may not get a seat for the whole journey, but it's better IMO than not being able to board at all (like when flights sell out).
The problem with flying is if you want to do it very last minute it can cost an absolute fortune, whereas the train is capped by the walk on ticket prices. Plus with the train you don't need to book it if you don't want, and can literally buy a ticket minutes from departure with a known maximum price, so you don't need to worry about getting a refund or changing the booking if your plans change.
I was caught out with this when I visited Toledo from Madrid. I bought a ticket for the next train to Toledo from a machine, which was fine. When I tried to return, there were no available tickets for several hours. I took a bus instead.
A seat reservation is also compulsory on the TGV in France, but not the ICE in Germany.
https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/leaves-on-the-...
They use high pressure (1500 Bar!) water jets instead, and apply sand to the rails: https://www.networkrail.co.uk/stories/leaf-busting-trains-pr...
> 4730 m – United States — The Kansas City Southern Railway regularly runs between Kansas City, MO and Shreveport, LA
> 3658 m – United States – Trains are limited by air brake capability. electronically controlled pneumatic braked (180 wagons) – AAR Standard S-4200.[15]
Meanwhile, ordinary German trains are limited to 740m (Europe wide/UIC limit: 750m) and single-stack operation because of overhead power lines.
On the other side, the US has a lot of space that can be devoted to something like classification yards - the longer the train, the longer the yards have to be.
The other thing to note is that the freights are shorter and more frequent, rather than the 200+-car monstrosities we have in the States (made possible by remotely-controlled diesels mid-train or pushing).
The main differentiation is support.
> The main differentiation is support.
Might be a case of decoy effect in action. Swisscom (the expensive option) gets more customers by introducing a cheaper option with worse support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoy_effect
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
For the US it is 0.3%.
Given that CH is land-locked, it's not surprising that freight modal share is 46%, because it has to get inland from a port in some way:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
This is higher than the US, but give that 127M Americans (40%) live in counties that are on the coast, it's probably not too hard to get things to them:
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
* https://www.livescience.com/18997-population-coastal-areas-i...
Heck, Los Angeles county has a population (10M) larger than CH (8.5M), and would be the 10th largest state (between NC and MI):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
So a good number of Americans can get goods pretty direct without long distance inland shipping.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Panamax_ports#Pacific_...
And from any of those it's probably not that far to any major population centre.
Compare to Switzerland, which has precisely zero ports, and so of course needs rail (and trucks) to get things delivered.
Note that ships are much more used in Europe.
Of course its not that simple, because driving is subsidized(I would prefer every road to be a toll road and get rid of the general taxes that used to go to roads)...but you get the point.
Off-topic I know, but I'd only like to see this if the tolls were reasonable with respect to the maintenance of the affected stretches of road. $0.50 per car per mile more than pays off a typical 4-lane interstate in a year, yet tolls are often an order of magnitude larger and drawn out for 20+ years.
But that's because we haven't invested in it! Before the 1960s most roads in the US were also terrible, so by that logic we shouldn't have invested in the Highway/Freeway Interstate system.
Even some quite long -- for Europe -- flights, like 4½ hours for Dublin to Athens, are just €20. Some shorter ones are €10.
(This only includes a fairly small cabin bag, put under the seat in front. The service level is roughly equivalent to a cheap intercity bus.)
Well, they are for some tickets. Ryanair (like any airline, and indeed train line) is heavily dependent on people booking late and paying much, much more.
Canada, as a whole, is an absolute rip-off. There is virtually nothing you can point to in the country and remark that it's a good deal when compared to the prices offered in America or most areas of Europe.
High food costs, high booze costs, high communications costs, high transport costs, high taxes etc., combined with low salaries, is incredibly bleak.
* https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/overall-rankings
And consistently in the Top 10 for happiest:
Passenger rail outside of the Northeast corridor can’t even fund its current operating cost through ticket sales, let alone the massive capital needed to build more.
America, I understand. But aren't prices in Canada generally lower than Europe when you include taxes? Sales taxes are 5-15% in Canada. They are generally 20% or higher in EU. Car insurance is perhaps more expensive in Canada, but vehicle registration/taxes are lower than Europe, so the total cost of ownership is lower.
I fell like a lot of the perception of things being more expensive in Canada is that CAD is values lower than EUR/USD/CHF/GBP. So looking at raw numbers, things feel more expensive. If you do the currency conversion, they become more comparable. Do you have any data showing things are generally more expensive in Canada compared to Europe, when accounting for currency conversion?
I recall a pitch to Amazon for their headquarters that they could get away outsourcing for cheaper over there.
Switzerland moved all trucks to the rails to get more capacity on the streets (successfully). So this investments paid out. Fewer traffic = fewer stressed people = more productivity = fewer lost hours
Source (only in german): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizerische_Rheinh%C3%A4fen
Train services are basically always hugely subsidised by governments. They could not survive against cars, buses and trucks if they weren't. The subsidies in Switzerland are eye-wateringly high for example. It's effectively a form of government planning designed to boost city/worker density as governments and others believe offices full of workers yields large benefits, and trains are the highest density/capacity form of passenger transport by far. So if you want ultra-dense urban cores you need a lot of trains.
But do we actually need those? Governments sure haven't acted like it this year. Now big corps are eyeing their expensive city centre HQs and wondering if the real estate is worth it, the workers are seeing how much they save when they aren't being forced to pay for the very expensive rail tickets, the managers are seeing that many (but not all) workers are happier without the time sucking, cattle-car commutes ... and governments are basically having to give up on the fiction that rail companies were private in order to keep them from going completely bust. But how long can that be sustained, if travel patterns have been permanently altered? No dense urban cores = few commuters paying business rates for rush hour travel = even worse economics for trains.
I think the value of CAD depends on BoC decisions, not politicians. They can increase its value, for example by increasing interest rates, but that would cause an increase in unemployment. I don't think there is a mechanism to increase value of CAD without also messing up some other part of the economy, e.g. employment or inflation.
Rail freight transport.
What is holding Europe in rail freight transport? Passenger rail. You choose one or the other. Personally I think America made (or fell into) the correct decision.
: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-f....
After living next to train tracks in SF (for 7 yrs) and in PDX for (over 2 yrs) I can tell you that train tracks traffic is not even 10% of Euro cities like Stuttgart, Rotterdam let alone Berlin or Paris.
If traffic(freight+passenger)US is roughly equal to traffic(freight+passenger)EU then, the tracks should be equally busy no?
Your article notes that rail freight costs are much lower in the US (for shippers), while profitability is high. That suggests that the US rail network is... good for freight?
I don't know about Portland, but SF has almost no freight traffic. The caltrain tracks don't go anywhere (what are you going to do with a thousand containers at 4th and King?)
Various things, surely, but things like property rights and an unwillingness to accept wholesale use of eminent domain. A 150mph train requires shallow curves and therefore won't run on an existing freight right-of-way. If not for that, it would be pretty straightforward to build.
Meanwhile, a plane ride from Portland to Seattle is 30 minutes and cheaper anyway. There's no incentive to invest in high speed rail.
SEA airport is 30 mins by taxi, PDX is 45 mins away by taxi and for airport check-in you gotta arrive 1 hr early and then 30 mins travel time.
A high speed transit is just 1.5 hr train ride (city center to city center).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_California_High-S...
Ideology.
Canada's population is tightly clustered into a small number of urban areas that have population densities comparable to places like Philadelphia or Vienna.
Despite this, Canada's population centers have nowhere near the quality of public infrastructure of Vienna.
Much like Australia, this means providers build the infrastructure to supply those areas but then the cost is recovered from the dense population areas.
Theres also some capatilism nonsense oligopolies thrown in there, but that's the core issue.
Why doesn't the consumer have a choice? I'd be willing to sacrifice coverage in rural areas in exchange for 50-80% discounted tariffs, for instance.
I've always wondered why no big international player tried to enter that market, it's ripe for disruption, and the local operators sound like they are far behind.
https://www.railfreightforward.eu/sites/default/files/userco...
"Maintaining its current modal share of 18% will pose a challenge for the rail freight sector due to three main factors: an expected change of goods structure, general logistic trends and the high intensity of road innovation."
Railways are poor at moving freight in Europe due to:
a) Sharing tracks with high speed passenger trains, which makes scheduling complicated
b) Lack of agility compared to trucks which can go anywhere, change their routes at the drop of a hat, can turn up and leave at any time you wish.
c) Being government subsidised, often nationalised, there's no innovation anywhere, nobody cares, all the usual problems of socialised infrastructure. Trucking is entirely privatised with many small firms instead of a tiny number of government run firms, so is more customer focused.
1) our train length is limited - see the parallel comment. UIC limits our trains to 750m top, we don't have the space required for train yards that can handle longer trains, and the signal blocks are too short apart to handle trains longer than that (basic railway safety, a train must always have enough free space in front so that it can brake from full speed to zero in case of crossing a red light without crashing into the train in front). US trains run in multiple kilometers of length, so they have vastly greater capacity.
2) our car height is limited because our networks are largely electrified which means you can't double stack containers on them
3) our infrastructure is densely packed which means that you can't just run a train uplink to a random warehouse, and for those industries that do have a train uplink, the shunting required is expensive (need to maintain locomotives and trained drivers, which are in rare supply compared to truck drivers).
> Being government subsidised, often nationalised, there's no innovation anywhere, nobody cares, all the usual problems of socialised infrastructure
WTF? That's just flat out wrong and ideological. There is no real innovation anywhere in railways, the only thing that the US makes different is that freight trains are prioritized and longer, but that's hardly innovative (and again, as Europe is smaller and denser, impossible to replicate).
With smaller innovations (I'd call these "improvements") the situation looks different - e.g. the digitalization of train control aka ETCS, automated couplers, more efficient/silent braking systems... the tech exists, vendors exist - but good luck getting all the private freight companies to on-board to that new tech, as they don't want to bear the cost of progress! That, and solely that, is why Europe is still stuck with screw couplers and dumb freight carriages.
As for the innovation thing, the report I quoted literally says they can't keep up with road innovation. It doesn't say there are no new ideas in railways ever, but, who in SBB or DB is really going to go the extra mile to fight for some cool new idea? Truck firms are far smaller and there are way more of them, so people can conceivably get ahead by doing things differently (doesn't need to be tech innovation).
This not a last-minute delivery, takes days to arrive, and presumably they know their material demans many days in advance. Whats a few extra hours going to do?
Is my understanding of the system wrong?
Here's the Amtrak network: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Am...
Here's the US freight rail network: https://i.imgur.com/4TYsU_d.webp?maxwidth=1024&fidelity=medi...
You can't tell me we can't do better.
There's tons of routes in the US that could make sense if there wasn't so much NIMBYism, corruption and the oil and auto lobby, let's be honest.
SF-Sacramento, SF-LA, LA-San Diego, LA-Vegas, Seattle-Portland, the whole Northeast Corridor (a better truly high speed Acela), Houston-Dallas, Orlando-Miami, Pittsburg-DC and and and. There's lots of large cities in the US in the high speed rail sweetspot of 400-800 miles (2-4h travel time) apart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LKW-Maut
From Wikipedia:
> Germany's LKW-Maut is a toll for goods vehicles based on the distance driven in kilometres, the emission category of the vehicle and the number of axles.
It's meant to compensate some of these damages caused by high weight. If I remember correctly, road damage scales at a power of four of axle weight. It's billed semi-automatically (wireless stations along the road + device in the truck) and you don't even notice it as a normal driver.
It's a bit harder with cars, since there's a lot less infrastructure to track usage, and people would rightfully balk at the invasion of privacy.
The Canadian situation is bad-to-zero coverage in rural areas and the world's most expensive cell phone service (think of plans that charge $10 CAD per GB of data) in developed regions.
The money that Canada's two cell phone networks didn't spend covering rural areas didn't reduce prices; it disappeared into shareholder pockets.
Oh no, a control system to install on a locomotives and tracks that already costs millions of dollars, how could they afford that?
> Most of all they fret that the spending of federal money on upgrading their tracks will lead the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the industry watchdog, to impose tough conditions on them
Are you kidding me?
These excuses are pathetic.
> Add the fact that freight trains do not stick to a regular timetable, but run variable services at short notice to meet demand, and the scope for congestion grows.
You were just bragging about having 2.5x the productivity, I would happily trade competent consumer rail for you "only" having 2x productivity.
Germany has enough of them to fill a couple pages: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Eisenbahngesel...
The vast majority is handled by state-owned DB Cargo though: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/568662/umfrag...
> It doesn't say there are no new ideas in railways ever, but, who in SBB or DB is really going to go the extra mile to fight for some cool new idea?
And... what should these be, ETCS and automated couplers aside? The vast majority of truck innovation are related to electrification (which most major European rail corridors are already, and the last mile can be handled by the new dual power locomotives) and driver assistance (autonomous driving, dead spot detectors, emergency automated brakes, driver cab comfort).
> Truck firms are far smaller and there are way more of them, so people can conceivably get ahead by doing things differently
Yeah, they cheat on the safety rules, and enjoy that every business has a road connection while very few businesses have a rail connection so it's easier to do computer assisted magic in scheduling.
In US rail companies aren't exactly known for innovation either, because of extreme distances they haul and already efficient diesel-electric locomotives - there's no practical pressures to innovate at all.
There are multiple reasons why rail traffic in Europe and US is different, but none of it is because "socialism".
And that's nothing compared with what a truly high speed train would cost to implement here.
https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*Jj_k4U1AwuB5Ia-9oHuJKQ.gi...
Of course, Beijing-Shanghai line is the first and only to go public, just at the beginning of 2020, and we can get their financial numnbers easily.
Many other lines are not necesarrily profitable, but few of them require government subsidy besides the initial capital investment, that is their income is more than the operational cost.
See people in here talk about land area and population while completely ignoring things like topography/zoning/protectionism. Building 100km of rail in Switzerland is never going to be comparable to building 100km on flat plains elsewhere.
But more importantly, Switzerland isn't a NATO member.
It's really disappointing to me as a transit enthusiast that the US doesn't have great high speed rail service in the Northeast Corridor, but to do so would involve clearing way for new, less curvy track, and that would be extremely expensive. Even if we did it I'm not sure it would get the usage rates that occur in Europe. The issue here is sadly more complicated that tax policy.
Also, Swiss trains are pretty expensive. You don't notice because wages are high, but really, everything in this country is very expensive compared to neighbouring countries. In most countries inter-city rail is used by commuters so governments impose price caps, if there is any political pressure to lower prices here I've never seen it.
Also, cars are not expensive in Switzerland, especially when you take into account the high salaries.
Edit: link to a recent article on how many US persons expect to get rich/wealthy/millionaires ... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/how-much-money-americans-thi...
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
It's blatant and widespread.
The only respite from corruption in US - the government is severely restricted.
It’s not healthy for Europe to be so dependent on the US, as has been proven over the past 4 years.
I disagree with your assessment because American density is very different than European density. If you look at Google Earth, there is almost continuous suburban development along the entire Northeast route. In Europe, populations are clustered in smaller urban centers. High speed rail can only stop so many times and because of this, it is more difficult for the average American to get to a train station.
This situation is obvious to people who have lived in suburban America but can be surprising to those who have not. Imagine driving up to an hour to a city center, finding a place to long term park your car near the station and then taking a mode of transportation that isn't significantly faster than your car would've been. Then needing to take an expensive taxi once you arrive because your destination city has a limited public transportation system.
Comparing region densities at face value misses the issue, the way cities and regions are designed present unique transit challenges around the world.
Improve the trains, and people will eventually wake up to them.
My other idea is high speed trains where you can take your car with you, like eurotunnel but faster.
Yes - Europeans do prefer the optimal transport option (cost, speed, comfort, etc)
Americans aren't special and many European places rely on cars or busses for transport.
Runs from just outside of DC to Florida.
In the Northeast, Amtrak has pretty much captured the NYC <-> DC market for business travel.
What's holding it back is a lack of capacity and slower speeds than you'd find in, say, Europe.
Why it's slow is a complex problem with many causes.
It's partly due to US regulations that cause trains to be heavier, slower and more expensive than overseas.
The infrastructure is also old, dating back to the 1800s in some cases, causing bottlenecks in key areas. One 1870s-era tunnel in Baltimore brings speeds down to 30mph for what feels like an eternity.
Amtrak is also not super great at running the NEC. The physical infrastructure could do more, and relatively cheap changes could have a large impact.
Same for Africa, with the added threat of Chinese competition for the same resources. Without those raw materials (minerals, uranium, some oil and gas) European manufacturing doesn't have a future. Hence the constant French and American interventions to stabilize various African states and their tight relations with their governments.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/08/Europe-only-Armed...
(..and yes, only men are conscripted. Switzerland is a great country, but there continue to be problems with sexism, even today)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
So this is similar to a train being proposed from Amsterdam to Copenhagen that would be paid for by all of the member countries.
As for the experience of driving to a train station, that's compounded x times by going to an airport.
But in the end the lack of use stems more from discomfort, than anything else. Having high speed connection from Poughkeepsie/Albany to NYC would open up Hudson Valley to commuters decades ago, not a boom of Zoomtowns today (Kingston, NY, Beacon, NY)
The overall infrastructure is crap in US and that is the primary reason for poor use of it. (I mean, FFS, old Tappan Zee Bridge didn't even have pedestrian walkway! While being the only available crossing for miles)
https://external-preview.redd.it/W-GAALExjeE8w0aXg7Kh0gOAHcl...
For example, Paris is one of Europe's largest cities and yet it has a footprint comparable to Cleveland, a city with less than 1/5 the population. Meanwhile, the population density of Ohio is over 5 times as high as France.
I never said high speed rail is impossible, just that there are a unique set of challenges in developing such a network in the US. I'm a huge fan of public transportation and HSR, we just need to be realistic and pair it with smart urban/regional development.
More importantly, just don't think of city as static, inanimatable object. Many american cities are created because of the rails if you remember the history, High speed rail may not create new cities, but can definitely reshape parts of the city.
If you remember the history, many of the existing rail lines were built before the suburban explosion post WWII. To make Acela go faster, the route would need straighter track which would require buying a lot of expensive, already developed, land.
