Of Amtrak, AI, and Arguing About Trains on the Interwebs
Graphic generated with Gemini Imagur 3
Every once in a while, two of my niche interests find each other on the interwebs and cause a trainwreck.
The chatbot for Amtrak’s Twitter account wasn’t built for trying to respond to the public dogpiling response to the choo-choo train taking a shot at Southwest Airline’s recent announcement of no more free bags.
One of the more SFW responses:
Now, the viral responses are part of the point; the old tv/radio adage about “hate watch and love watch is the same ratings number” applies to clicks. Plus, thanks to Elon’s ridiculous mismanagement idea that forces folks to slide links into the replies so the ads auto populate, this is how this must be done. But unsmart moves is the feature the head of X-turned Grand Potentate of All Things wanted. His sandbox, his sand piles, his gritty sand in all the wrong places.
Anyhoo, Amtrak and AI…
There are many discourses on social media that quickly go from educational visit to the zoo to poo throwing in the monkey cage. Trains be one of them. Specifically, trains in America, the moderately functional but financially suspect Amtrak, and the unicorn humping of a bright shiny future of unlimited, omnipresent high-speed rail. Similarly, AI is pitched on a spectrum from the very useful souped up search engine most of what is called “AI” is to promises that all our troubles will be cured by just asking ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini/Copilot/widgadigit/whatever.
Just the way I framed that train sentence, if put in front of train Twitter, would bring accusations of being a “train hater” or worse. It is a ridiculous charge. When I lived in Europe, both times, I paid for, used, and enjoyed my Eurail Pass. Especially the first time, since I was still under 26 and could get the discounted “student” one. The last few times I’ve travelled to Washington, D.C. I’ve taken Amtrak and will do so just about every time I need to.
Thing is, having a professional background in transportation and quite a bit of travel experience, I see trains as what they are, not what the internet claims they can be if there was just unlimited money, no such things as interstates or airlines, no geographical or ecological restrictions, and America was the same size and population density of (insert country with the train system utopia du jour here.) Tracks have to go places, and be built, and maintained. Folks have to want to ride X train to Y destination in Z amount of time for $ amount of money. That’s how transportation works. This person/thing to this place in this amount of time, what will it cost?
Train utopians, especially the high-speed rail subsection, hate that discussion. “Why do you hate progress, puppies, and all things that are good by bringing up icky money?” they will wail. “Why don’t people understand how giggity awesome spending 2 days on a train to get somewhere is” they’ll mope. “Of course, there will be a huge demand for people to drive multiple hours to get on a train that takes multiple days to get where they don’t want to go in the first place, why can’t you understand this is a GOOD THING, PROGRESS HATER?”
And the only thing that makes that discourse worse is smart aleck social media person who fires off a one-liner, then turns on the chat bot and relinquishes control of public branding for a moment of viral attention. Always a good plan. It is Amtrak, so your tax dollars at work. AI plus train discourse was always going to end up in a digital train wreck of real people getting their online snark jollies off not fitting into the created AI’s search parameters.
Trains can be wonderful modes of transportation. Trains also have to follow the laws of physics and the realities of economics, politics, and public sentiment. Rail travel works when you have dense population centers with good local transit, connected to regional rail, connected to intercity rail. High speed rail can only, and will only, work in conjunction with that infrastructure already in place. The formula is always a group of people in one place that have a pressing need to get to another place where there is also a group of people need the reverse trip, in numbers and regularity enough to make it viable. Everything else is wish casting trains to nowhere.
That’s the beauty of the internet, of course. Keyboard train warriors don’t need to understand HSR has grade requirements that mean mountain travel is out, or that there are only a handful of densely populated regions that can support the hub part of a hub-and-spoke transit system. There is the refusal to understand folks with driving and flying options will take both over rail that is more expensive, less reliable, has really weird schedule times, and is more time consuming. When rail is the cheaper, easier, faster option, rail will do just fine. Choo Choo sine qua non, and so forth.
And no amount of internet snark will change that.
But that’s the fun part of being in a niche online dogpile policy cult. Real trains have never been tried, or something, hope springs eternal, and the railroad dream will never die.
Unless you actually have to take train from St Louis to Orlando. In which case, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”, which is Dante for “there be a high-speed rail discussion ahead.”
The biggest problem that the rail-lovers have is that we can’t build new tracks at all.
I’d be interested in some high speed rail myself… The ability to go from Frisco to LA in a couple of hours would be pretty sweet. LA to Vegas would be pretty sweet.
But we can’t even drop a proof of concept. *EUROPE* is our proof of concept.Report
Right? Intercity rail would be awesome. From Chicago, where I live, there are any number of cities I’d love to take the train to, even if it was only as fast as driving.
I’m planning a trip to the UK as I write, and one of the cities I’m going to visit is Exeter, which has a population just slightly smaller than Rockford. There are 38 trains running today between London and Exeter.Report
The ambition is two hours and forty minutes non-stop btw/ LA and SF, which I understand would make it the fasted high speed train in the world. Hold my triple IPA Euroweenies. The skeptical prediction is four hours and forty minutes once you take into account slower speeds and shared track usage in the metros at the start and finish that are now contemplated. In the abstract I think having more transportation alternatives are great, but particularly if you think self-driving cars are coming quicker than rail lines can be built/updated, then most people will probably find driving on the interstate cheaper and more convenient.Report
One of the reasons, at least in the American West, is that 150 years ago we gave the desirable routes for right-of-way to private rail companies and allowed them to maintain control, without even extracting requirements of good behavior, through innumerable mergers/acquisitions and multiple bankruptcies.
To pick an example I know… RTD’s commuter rail system was always intended to have Denver-to-Boulder and Boulder-to-Longmont lines. There’s an almost-never-used BNSF loop that is ideally positioned. It’s almost never used because it’s old (as in laid out in the 1890s old). Contemporary freight has to crawl on it because there are too many curves that are substandard. RTD offered to fix the curves, double-track where necessary, and upgrade all the crossings in exchange for usage and priority for commuter trains. BNSF’s counteroffer was, “You pay for all the upgrades, you also give us $8B upfront, freight gets priority no matter what we do to the commuter schedule, and then we can talk about the annual lease amount.” Because neither the state nor local governments can force BNSF to do anything, we have no commuter trains to Boulder and a right-of-way that is slowly disintegrating through neglect.
Post-WWII Europe had the sense to have the government own the rights-of-way and any private rail companies had to lease usage. When France wants to extend high-speed rail, they tell the freight companies how things are going to work.Report
I admit that I’m primarily thinking about Merced to Bakersfield.Report
How much faster and easier would things proceed (have proceeded) on Bakersfield to Merced if the State of California owned the rail corridor properties used by UP and BNSF that already connected Bakersfield to Merced and leased them to the railroads? If 65 years ago when the feds were the muscle behind the interstate highway property acquisition — property now owned by the states, not the feds, by the way — they had included rail and built a public transportation corridor? If California had electrified the corridor 40 years ago as part of cleaning up the Central Valley air?Report
I honestly don’t know.
I just know the timeline that starts with Jerry Brown and ends up somewhere around where the engineers explained that it still can’t do it on schedule.
This guy explains that the 2008 plan that got approved was pretty much unattainable pie-in-the-sky stuff:
The conclusion talks about how plain bagels are better than no bagels after enough failed promises of everything bagels.
I don’t know what would have been possible if California did it smarter instead of how they did it. But it seems like doing it dumber might have worked too.Report
One of the things that occurs to me is that the kind of people who say they don’t mind a two-day train trip are the same kind of people who consider “sit on the couch browsing social media for eighteen hours” to be a useful day spent.Report
I think of trains in the US (outside of mass transit like in nyc) as similar to the train I took in Switzerland to the top of the countries highest mountain. I nice scenic pleasure, not to commute, not to “just get there”. There are some of those trains in the US/Canada/Alaska. Otherwise, I’m flying or driving.Report
We made a decision during the Cold War that individual vehicles driven by one or a few people was a better way to move goods an population across our vast geography. Then we build a road systems with car dealers and mechanics and gas stations to accommodate that mode. Then when private railroads abandoned passenger service as less profitable we scooped or all up into a quasi-governmental organization that we mistakenly try to force to be profitable.
Meanwhile our European understudies rebuilt their destroyed continent to expand their rail network for both intercity travel and intra-city commuting. They iterated; they went fast. And they mostly do so in an environmental friendly way. Which is why their trains are mostly full. What they don’t do is demand profit margin to just keep it all running.
We could have been Europe. Now it would be a heavy lift which we seem to not want to do.Report
We also don’t have Europe’s geography or population density.Report
I think that’s a lot of it. Could we have done this better and greater vision? 100%. But it’s hard to imagine a country this big and low density turning out the way a geographically small, high density country does. There’s also the decrease in cost of short haul passenger flights over the last decades. Crappy for climate change but sensible enough from a consumer cost and efficiency perspective.Report
As someone who hates the process of flying, I think a lot of people ignore the door to door time cost of flying. I have a radius inside of which I’ll drive.
(Outside maybe, too, because I love seeing what 2 lane America has to offer, but that’s not germane to the discussion.)Report
That strikes me as more an argument for revisiting security theater at airports now that OBL is crab food and Islamic Terror in general is a fear from twenty years ago than it does an argument that America should, somehow, try and build more intracity train services. Who knows, maybe President Musk and his Mango sidekick will defund the TSA next.Report
The one good thing they could do!Report
Just because inter-city passenger rail in the United States might not have made sense like it did in Europe, doesn’t mean that we should have totally ignored intra-city transit. Like the gigantic sprawling cities create a lot of miserable driving experiences and road rage. Even with dispersed work destinations rather than everybody going downtown or to a few industrial areas for work, having everybody have to drive everywhere causes problems.Report
Sure, but that all the arguments for long distance passenger rail came generally later and now the boom has dropped on building rail lines. The land is all bought up. Could you imagine trying to buy right of ways in the densely developed, and therefore economically sensible, parts of the country? And that’s without even discussing the regulatory obstacles. We can’t even get around the enviro and local groups to build power lines, wind and solar plants and adequate housing let along trains.Report
I don’t think this is accurate on how America abandoned public transportation and inter-city rail transportation. A lot of transit systems like BART, the DC metro, and MARTA were built during the height of the Cold War because it was clear everybody driving everywhere did not work. Other systems were planned but got nowhere. Plus, transit and rail transit was in decline long before the Cold War started and only the Great Depression and WWII rationing saved it a little. Transit ridership peaked around WWI and started crashing down fast after that.
By the mid-1930s, over one out of three American households had cars. In contrast, I think only around 4% of British households had cars at the time. Americans were wealthy enough to afford cars and the car also fitted our cultural self image as free wheeling and dealing people who went where we wanted when we wanted. So Americans took to the car in vast numbers and government policy followed them because of a combination that is what the people wanted, overall cultural love for the car that effected officials too, and a reluctance to give a tough no to a public that loved cars plus some other stuff like a belief dispersal is better defense policy in case of nuclear attack and a love for the single family home. A lot of the transit and rail companies were also hated during the early to mid-20th century.
Europeans also promoted the car a lot after WWII and Europeans took to the car when they could afford it. Britain, France, Italy, and other countries ripped up many of their tram networks and replaced them with buses just like the cities of the Western hemisphere. The reason why transit and rail was invested in was because fewer Europeans could afford cars until the 1960s and 1970s. Italy invested a lot more in roads than cars. Same with the United Kingdom. Only France really invested in rail like the United States did.Report
There’s also a bit of a crime problem that nobody wants to talk about.
Ride on Bart? Maybe you have to deal with unpleasantness. The worst thing you have to deal with in your car is a bad DJ.Report
I take BART everyday. There was a problem with disorderly conduct but that has been cleared up.Report
It has? I’m asking skeptically because I have not heard about any particular increase in policing disproportionately targeting people athletic enough to jump stiles.Report
SF has been adding fair gate barriers that people can’t jump over to the system. I haven’t seen any bad behavior in months.Report
Huh.
Was that all it’d take?
How tough would that be to set up in NYC?Report
After environmental impact reviews, community review, labor mandates and assorted everything bagel requirements probably a million dollars per gate installed.Report
The gates are being put up fast.Report
Was more tongue in cheek than anything. I have a vague feeling like the West Coast liberal zone is somewhat more nimble than the East Coast liberal zone in adapting so it doesn’t surprise me that San Fran is moving faster.Report