No doubt? I have doubts.
Does America need to have better rails? I highly doubt it. If we can speed up existing rails without building new rails, that would be nice. Building new rails? Why don't we just improve air travel?
Does America need to have better mass transit? I am not sure. I know there are lots of people on NH love mass transit, but I am not a fan of it. And many Americans don't like it either, because mass transit has its disadvantages (1. do not directly bring you from point A to B, 2. difficult to travel with kids, 3. difficult to go to stations in bad weather, 4. can't bring lots of stuff with you, 5. have to check time schedule, etc. etc.). Maybe improve personal vehicle is the way to go?
Lots of people here are against Uber, but do you want to think about how to improve the taxi system, instead of blaming Uber?
I'm pretty sure my nephew's first ride on the subway was when he was 3. I don't recall how old I was when I first took the subway, but I think wasn't more than twice his age.
Transit is no harder than any other mode of transportation with kids. Sure, you might have to be schlepping around some duffel bags of supplies, but you'll have to do that anyways at your destination.
> 5. have to check time schedule
This is only true if your city has a bad transit system. And, yes, every city in the US (including NYC!) has bad transit. That's one of the main themes of the author--if you actually look at how transit works in other countries, you'll find that the American experience with transit is unusually bad.
> 1. do not directly bring you from point A to B
This is mostly a result of bad urban planning. When you have a transit system in place, you want to focus development around the accessibility of transit so that all of the desired origin and destination points are actually near enough to transit to you allow you to go directly from point A to B. When cities cross the hurdle and stop making every other block be a parking lot, then the nonavailability of parking means that it's driving that has the problem of not getting you directly from point A to B like transit would.
He said "difficult" not "impossible". And if you was travelling with 3 years old, you would know it is in fact more difficult and tiring. Not impossible. You can travel by public transport with 2 years old or baby too.
But, where public transport can be more or equally comfortable then going by car, if you have small kids you have to watch all the time, it is more difficult.
5 and 1 may be a planning issue, but the terrible situation in NYC could because the size of population and geography. It certainly can be improved, but the cost of change must have deterred the management.
I think people that think air travel is a replacement for rail haven't experienced good rail and transit based city planning. City center to city center travel can't be matched by air. Walk from your job to the train, then walk to the conference center in the city you're traveling to. Rail may be slower than air, but it picks you up and drops you off closer to where you want to be.
Maybe improve personal vehicle is the way to go
The problem is not the vehicle so much as the roads. I have a very nice car that I enjoy driving, but I prefer to the take train since I'm often stuck in stop-and-go traffic with the car (and the car will nearly drive itself in that traffic).
Yes. Roads can also be optimized.
Depends very much on where you are going. I live in a European city with pretty good transit so if I'm going to or around the city center, then sure there is a bus every few minutes[1]. However If I'm going to visit my in-laws a few suburbs out, that train leaves once an hour if traveling at off peak times (like Sunday afternoon when I normally go). If I'm going to visit my parents (3.5 hour drive away) that train leave twice a day.
[1] Although with COVID being what it is I haven't been on public transport for over a year and have to admit that driving everywhere is actually quicker and easier in almost every case at the moment.
Umm, just because American trains suck it doesn't mean all trains do.
In Finland all long-distance trains have a separate "kids car" with a playground, toddler/diaper change-compatible toilet and more open seating.[1]
I'd never subject other people to a 2-3 year old who hates cramped planes, nor do I want a screaming kid in the backseat of my car.
They can burn off their energy in the play area in the train. When they are sufficiently drained, we can walk to the restaurant car where I can get a beer and they can get some lunch.
Everyone arrives well-rested and relaxed.
[1] https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/travelling-with...
Unless you go electric, you'll never get anywhere near a carbon footprint of rail.
Part of what Alon is saying is that for USA we are ahead in most other stuff and so we don't have this expectation to learn from other countries but we are behind in this area.
The entirety of the article is a set of comparisons to European countries with 2 references to Japan thrown in.
I agree that sentence is too strongly worded, but hell it might be entirely correct.
I use rail when I visit multiple European cities. It’s great. I also don’t see a reasonable path that is “we need better managers” but instead “we either need to pour gigantic piles of money into buying railroads, which is either an eminent domain taking or a massive giveaway to freight companies who own the rails now, only to find that no one wants to spend every bit of a whole damn day getting from Boston to Las Vegas and so will fly anyway.”
Except that the US isn't all that less dense than Europe. There's a great belt of land that approximately no one lives in, between the west coast and the Mississippi River. High-speed rail will never be cost-effective connecting anything across that region, and no one is seriously proposing such a thing. Take it out, and concentrate on the rest of the country, in regions where there are cities close each other and the numbers make more sense.
The Midwest, for example. Chicago-Minneapolis is 350 mi, Chicago-Cleveland 300 mi, and Chicago-St Louis and Chicago-Detroit each 250 mi. Paris-Lyon is 250 mi, Paris-Bordeaux 300 mi, and Paris-Marseille 400mi. As for population, all of these cities are larger than their French counterparts (the smallest, Cleveland is only a ~2m MSA, whereas the largest non-Paris French city is about a ~2.3m MSA). If HSR is tenable in France, then why would the distances in the Midwest make it untenable?
Without the airport security theater, with proper in-car restaurants and remote working facilities. Who wouldn't take that offer?
This was a nice anecdote that hiring actually-knowledgeable outsiders (not private sector dilettantes) can help.
Texas triangle would also be a viable region.
As my sibling comment points out, southeast US is marginally viable.
The Pacific Northwest (Portland-Vancouver) is also on the margin of viability.
The other parts of the northeast--Boston-Toronto and NYC-Montreal--are very definitely viable HSR routes. You might find some more strap-on routes to the main Northeast Corridor that I haven't included (Scranton, maybe?), simply because the NEC is such a phenomenally powerful generator of traffic.
Connecting the Midwest to the Northeast and the Southeast may also be viable, but again it's somewhat more marginal because the big city in the Midwest is on the wrong side of the region.
But after I've done the whole day on the train thing a few times I'll typically pick flying, also because it's much cheaper.
Overnight trains are great though.
Why waste a day in a train when I can drive for way less cost and stop wherever I please or fly and get there much faster?
Not to mention that if I drive some place Im not worried about transportation locally which would, in most places in the US, require renting a car or paying for ride shares.
I'm going to counterargument this.
Certain rail corridors are great--Naples to Rome, for example, was wonderful. But somehow when we were visiting Europe, we often found that air actually did better in both price and time.
The cheap rail fares often require quite a bit further advance purchase than air fares. This strikes me as ... odd.
> Amtrak can and should fully replace its senior management with people who know how to run a modern intercity railroads, who are not Americans. But then middle management will still think it knows better and refuse to learn what a tropical algebra is or how it is significant for rail schedule planning.
Are transit middle-managers in Europe really applying tropical algebra to rail problems? My understanding is that the mathematical field of tropical algebra didn’t really exist until the 80s, and the research application to control theory is a 2010-era development. It strikes me as very strange to expect anyone who isn’t a PhD in math or operations research to even understand the algebraic geometry required, let alone apply it to a real problem.
But I suppose 30 years ago people would have said the same thing about linear programming. So maybe I am behind the times.
The analogy states they don't need managers to learn the thing, just to have awareness of an alternative thing to the current thing. Implicit is a criticism of managers being didactic in specifying required tools/solutions, too often favoring "our way"/"the old way".
The former enables you to direct your learning towards learning the thing itself when you realize it's applicable (JIT for learning) if that's your role. And if you're in a leadership position it helps you to recognize the insights those you are in charge of are bringing to you and their relative applicability, or to direct them towards a line of work that may be useful. (Of course, there's a level of incompetent awareness that often happens as well, and that's how SAFe shops are born.)
It’s like saying that middle managers need not know how to use git or Docker, but they should know that they exist and what they can be used for.
I'm tired of being called the expert yet somehow reporting to someone that is many levels below me in knowledge. Why exactly do you need to know this if you're not going to be able to influence the direction? Why are leaders not required to be better than who they lead in whatever it is they do (in order to have foresight)? I don't know but here's to hoping it will be automated in some future.
I shared a co-working space with a guy who did this for a few years.
My point was that the specific field is very cutting edge, and my understanding is that any 2021 application of tropical algebra to a real transit network would be a high-risk speculative research project, not a well-tested optimization methodology.
My familiarity with tropical geometry is mostly conversational :) and entirely on the pure math side. The basic definitions use obviously lend themselves to optimization problems (and I think the field is in many ways an algebraic generalization of classical variational calculus) but I don’t really know of anything specific.
Critical thinking is a core skill that needs to be nurtured for sure. However, critical thinking is useless without basic facts… which means there needs to be some emphasis on wrote memorization. Sometimes those two things can feel at odds; Why memorize anything when it can just be derived?
In a country that simultaneously fights over reciting a pledge because it has “under God” while also fighting against teaching evolution, it’s pretty amazing that we function at all.
Speaking as someone who went through French school... nope, it's a brutal hellscape where they try to fit you in tidy little boxes and what they teach you is decided on the basis of how easy it is to grade, just like everywhere else.
Though multiple-choice question tests are a lot less common than in the US, I think.
I wish everyone just did Montessori or something similar.
Stephen Colbert in 2005 was disturbingly prescient with this [1].
As for anything regarding public transit (intercity or intracity) in the US, sadly I think it's pretty much a lost cause. People just don't want it. They want their 1-2 acre lots within a city (which I still find crazy) and their cars.
The US is more than twice the land area of the EU. The EU has people concentrated in fewer cities (just look at how many airports and flights there are between the two). Barring some historical exceptions in the Northeast, American cities are generally much less dense. All these factors work against public transit. It's not impossible but it's harder.
As for Amtrak... it's pretty much a victim of a fairly disastrous nationalization. Amtrak shares the lines with freight that can often delay it. Just having the track and the rights-of-way doesn't mean it's easy or cheap to upgrade or replace it for high-speed rail. There's lots of opposition to this for of public infrastructure spending. And so on.
[1]: https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word-...
I live hundreds of miles from a prospective endpoint of a massively expanded Amtrak, in a region about the size of the Netherlands, with 1/50th the population. There's not even a reasonable comparison to be made.
Its not viable to just import EU and Asian transportation planning here ... it doesn't work because we lack density.
I would be happy enough to fund the transport networks before the density exists, as long as the zoning allows density, as the density would follow as a natural course once the transportation links are established. But that can't happen if the local regulations forbid density.
So this author is completely clueless.
Uber is engaged in making transportation more efficient in an environment where we have screwed ourselves. The public planners have no choice but to figure out how to do microtransport, because we lack the density.
Anyone who doesn't understand this is completely clueless, and demonizing Uber is popular, but ultimately idiotic.
I'm a big fan of trains and I think Uber is a dead end evolution. But America needs to identify the right cause of our problems. Its not Uber.
Is it? There isn't anything efficient about an Uber. They might be easier than a taxi in some cases due to their app UX, but that's about it - they're very inefficient in ecological and congestion terms.
Why is the same logic not leveled against other institutions, like teacher's unions? Their tenure-based worker protections, unwillingness to be measured on performance, and other negative behavior is exactly what deserves a full workplace replacement. American K-12 schools are funded exorbitantly but the quality of education is absolutely terrible.
At least the other systems have a history of performance, leading to worker pride. Like just about everything else in the US, the Amtrak workers are basically corporate drones who have been stripped of their craftsman pride.
Federal US agencies OTOH, only know how to keep existing. They're also very good at that.
What is missing is the proposal to replace All Americans with better future Americans. Perhaps thats the next post.
