America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There’s a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we’ve created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
True, my southern Illinois relatives are aware they can catch an Amtrak to the cities, but the trains suck really bad and the stations are often in a terrible place to leave anything of value (like your car) so they just drive when the occasionally need to go to the city for something like real healthcare
What cities? One of the high speed rail proposals is that it makes a lot of sense to build a Midwest passenger rail network with Chicago as the center. There’s already a huge freight rail network and huge underutilized right of way. Think of how many decent sized cities are within a couple hundred miles of Chicago, and all the business and personal reasons to travel among them. We just need to stop sending all our transportation money to yet more roads we can’t afford to maintain
The Amtrak station in St. Louis is not a great spot to leave anything of value. I live in St. Louis so I’m not one of these crazies that thinks my city is a war zone but that lot gets plenty of attention from thieves breaking windows looking for guns and money.
And SoIL folks don’t go to Chicago, remember there is a substantial number of Illinoisans calling for everything south of Springfield to be split into the 51st state. No it wouldn’t be sustainable or make sense but they hate being “controlled” by cook county
I just really hate flying and really like going places. Give me rails, I don’t want to drive either.
I love flying but hate everything to do with air travel from the airports to the seats and especially security.
Do Australia, Canada or India have the same problem?
USA: 9.53 Mio km² | 33.6 inhabitants per km² | $85,373 GDP (PPP) per capita | 32.5 Bn pkm (rail) | 1.98 Tn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
Canada: 9.98 Mio km² | 4.2 inhabitants per km² | $60,495 GDP (PPP) per capita | 1.44 Bn pkm (rail) (2007) | 198 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
Australia: 7.69 Mio km² | 3.6 inhabitants per km² | $66,627 GDP (PPP) per capita | 10.5 Bn pkm (rail) | 220 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
India: 3.29 Mio km² | 426.7 inhabitants per km² | $10,123 GDP (PPP) per capita | 1,157 Bn pkm (rail) | 233 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure))
This quick comparison misses international inbound tourism, infrastructure size and infrastructure cost per capita as well as an actually spatially differentiated interurban density-adjusted connectivity parameter (or whatever that’d be called), so take it with a grain of salt, but I’d argue that while having different markets, those English-language adjacent countries have similarities and relevant differences.
Australia and Canada, yes. India has a much more developed rail infrastructure.
The main driver for passenger rail success is population density–people per square mile or per square kilometer. The US, Canada, and Australia do not have enough population density in most areas to really support a passenger rail service.
There are parts or sections of the US that are starting to get the kind of density that supports trains, and trains do tend to appear when that happens.
I hear this argument often, but it perplexes me. Yeah, the US has large areas with little population density, but surprisingly, comparatively nobody lives there. The places with high population density have lots of people living there. We could have trains in places where people live, but for the most part, we don’t. Not even a single high-speed line to connect the Northeast Corridor, just the Acela. The Great Lakes region has higher population density than, and about the same size as, Spain, but Spain has a well-developed rail system.
It’s not really about population density.
Rural America is covered in local airports. No large commercial carriers, but the airports exist.
We need more rail. The argument starts from a bad premise.
Why not though? Honest question, I’ve been to an airport that had a terminal of around 30 square metres with decent passenger service in the EU.
I’d say it’s the flying that’s not scalable, not the airport footprints.
Flying is much more energy intensive, there are heightened security concerns and pilots are expensive
Most municipal airports can’t handle jet engine planes around here. They are all just small body, single engine aircraft on poorly maintained and non-level runways. They are fine for recreational flights, crop dusters, or flight instruction, but most rural airports here are little more than a few hangers and an administrative building with a runaway.
I’ve tried to use them and they’re generally not affordable for most people, since you’re comparing to cost of driving a relatively short distance.
- The town I grew up in had a small airport where you could buy a ticket on a prop plane to get you to a bigger airport to make your flight. But it was cheaper and easier to drive an hour, and buses are even cheaper
- similar to where I went to college
- now I live just outside a major city, but it’s possible to take a small plane to a nearby tourist destination. Sure it avoids traffic but you need a car there and it’s cheaper to pick an off time for travel and drive the two hours
Edit to add: yes it’s also the airport that’s not scalable. A small airport requires minimal infrastructure, mostly provided by businesses. But for passenger service, someone needs to build a terminal, make sure there’s parking, have security staff on duty, install scanners, etc. d you have enough business to support that?
Literally no idea how a regular person would actually use those for realistic transportation. I figured those places were for private jets, people learning to fly and cargo/farm/industrial flights.
Would booking a flight on somebody’s cesna even work and be affordable/safe?
It takes a high level license to be paid to fly people.
It is fairly applicable to learn enough to fly one self (in theory from reading). There are airplane clubs where one owns a tiny part of a plane. Fuel and maintenance are not free, but not horrible for a few hours travel.
A very cleverly designed club could work somewhat for weekend trips within a tank of gas distance. Maybe.
Coming from a more rural region, even if trains were available, when people go to the city they come back with their car filled up with stuff because it’s easier to find/cheaper in the city, most won’t take the train even if it’s available if they have their car they can rely on.
But cars are still more efficient (L/km/passenger) than planes so we don’t need more planes for rural regions either.
Yeah going to the grocery store was a 40 minute round trip growing up. You go there and buy as much as you can so you don’t have to go again for two more weeks. Having a train will not be suitable for this type of trip.
A 40 minute round trip would be average in most US cities, eg Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, suburban Chicago, etc
Those cities have grocery stores every exit off the highway. I’m in NW Ohio and while every town over 15,000 people has at least onc grocery store, lota of the surrounding villages do not. 30 miles each direction to a grocery store is rough. Growing up in suburbs of major cities, i cant remember a grocery store being further than 5 miles away. It’s a vastly different experience.
May I point out that this effect is killing small towns and living-wage jobs? Before the car, there had to be stores and groceries and doctors’ practices, et cetera, in small towns. Those provided local jobs for people, and community. Now, people drive into the city, or to the regional Walmart, and the small towns are decaying, mired in crippling poverty, isolation, and the diseases of despair that we see today. So the car might offer “freedom” to load up on a large selection of cheap consumer goods, but at the cost of dignity, connection, and meaning.
(Walmart, by the way, can be seen as predatory, killing small business with prices they can’t match, but also, it is successful largely because it is so well-adapted to a car-based lifestyle. It’s not the cause, it’s an effect.)
