Amtrak is pretty pricy though. I’d love nothing more than to pop on a train for a leisurely trip, but it was astonishingly expensive to cover the same distance as a four-hour drive.
I’ve been looking at it for a roughly 5 hour trip and it comes out to basically the same price as gas most days of the week. The annoying part is that the departure is 2:00 AM and returning trip gets in at 5:30 AM. Assuming no freight train shenanigans
Nice! I just checked Amtrak prices and it would be $180 for my wife and I to make a trip for probably $50-60 in gas.
More money is spent each month on maintaining the roads in the United States than has ever been spent on passenger rail. If tax funding were reallocated away from roads towards trains the costs would reverse.
It shouldn’t be, but they’ve been handicapped on purpose so it costs more than it should, takes longer than it should, and goes fewer places than it should. It’s not that it’s rail that it has these problems, rather because the car and petroleum industries rule the US.
However, you do need to consider that taking a train prevents adding wear to your vehicle. You’re not only paying for gas when driving. You’re paying for gas, wear on your car, wear on tires, and also wear on the road, but that last one gets partially socialized across all people regardless of if they drive for some reason (some is covered by gas taxes).
I’m guessing this is comparing train ticket price fuel cost of driving?
Under ideal circumstances, trains can take you to enough places you need to go as to not need the car at all, at which the comparison actually works out to what it should be: TCO of a car vs total cost of taking trains everywhere.
The TCO of cars is astonishingly high, fwiw. Much higher than people often realise.
I needed to go to LA last year from Sacramento
I could take:
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Amtrak: 8/9 hours for $150 per person, uncomfortable and a slave to the freight network (I’ve ridden Amtrak many times in my life)
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Drive a rental: 120 for the rental for the day + gas, but a 6 hour drive
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Drive my EV: Just the 20 or so bucks for fast charging a few times, maybe an 8 hour total trip
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Fly: 80 bucks per person round trip, sub 2 hours flight, 30 minutes pre flight, Uber to where I’m going for 10 bucks cuz its not far from LAX
I REALLY wanted to take the train but my god
In the Northeast, it’s often cheaper, and pretty much always faster, to fly than to take Amtrak, unfortunately. My family tried to get me on a last minute family gathering over the holidays, for example, and Amtrak was going to be over $400 round trip, and a round trip flight was less than $200, and about 2h30 quicker each way. If I look up the same trip saying I want to go from NYC to Boston today and return Tuesday, taking Amtrak at crazy early or late hours would let me have an 8+ hour round-trip come out to $285. Round trip flights would run $427 pretty much any time of day and take 3 hours in total. For me, as a younger guy often travelling solo, it might make sense to just wake up stupid late and be on a 2am Amtrak train to save some money. For people with kids, elderly folks, or anyone who has time commitments that mean they can’t do that, the $427 flight at 10am sounds a lot more appealing.
It only gets worse as the distance goes up. NYC to Montreal is only a $153 round trip on Amtrak if you book in advance to snag one of the cheap seats, but it takes 11h41m each way. Round trip flights going direct run $242, but going and coming take only a quarter of the time for going one-way on Amtrak.
Oddly enough, going south, Amtrak actually makes sense. Booked far enough in advance, I can go from NYC to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, DC. for between $30-$50ish, last time I looked. Flights are more expensive and only save me about 90 minutes on the longer legs. I have heard that outside of the NE Corridor, Amtrak is much more affordable, but I don’t know how true that is.
