phatj wrote:swishnicholson wrote:28 million people rode Amtrak last year. 250,000 people commute on the Northeast Corridor every day, and it's not because they find trains "neat". It's because the vector of time, money and convenience works for them. It's not part of your lifestyle,fine, but it's still out there and being used, and saving you time if you're driving up the turnpike or waiting at the airport.
I wanted to revisit this.
These numbers seem so small as to be utterly insignificant in the commuting big picture. I have no actual numbers to support this, but I would imagine that the number of automobile passengers exceeds both those by a couple orders of magnitude. So in order for Amtrak or whoever to actually make a dent in road and/or airport congestion they would have to make massive increases in ridership, which would presumably require a huge drop in price and/or a huge increase in fuel costs (the latter of which might affect Amtrak's prices, of course, though economies of scale help here).
It's not apples to apples, but 50,000 cars enter NYC by the Lincoln Tunnel every day. I can't say how many of those 250,000 northeast corridor commuters would join the line at the Lincoln tunnel, but I can certainly say that it would not be "utterly insignificant", nor can you consider the current train usage to be so. I mean, that figure doesn't even take into account commuter lines other than Amtrak. So unlike your assertion that there would have to be a vast cultural shift for people to use the train, people are using it every day because they find it affordable and convenient. In a commuter corridor that is already stressed, to provide an alternative to even 5-10% of commuters is very significant, and my guess is that it's actually a bit more than this. Wander into 30th Street sometime and perhaps you'll be surprised at the number of people who do this and don't regardit as some sort of adventure.
The initial question was more about high speed rail, and as other people have pointed out, there's a lot of reasons to believe that if you get the routes, time and price right, than you will definitely find a market for this. And it's absolutely true that airports are getting stressed in terms of capacity, particularly on regional flights. Acquiring additional land for airports is expensive and has other costs and expanding time to accommodate additional flights is impossible. While perhaps not at the crisis point yet, I believe it will be soon and high speed rail is probably the best way to alleviate it in a number of situations.
Constructing or adapting a line is not something that can be done quickly however, which is why I'm in support of thoughtfully planned projects being embarked on now. This isn't some plan to get people to give up their cars and go hug a train. It's a plan to provide alternatives to allow for growth, rather than have it stifled by inadequate transportation facilities.
