alt Hacker NewsWhy? Isn't Amtrak that, but just geographically-scoped? Isn't Caltrain workable? Subways also function fine in NYC, DC, Boston, and even LA
(to be clear, I don't think the other poster is correct that having trains would satisfy the desire of the guy who wants a self-driving Rivian. I consider his want/need there to be fundamentally different)
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Amtrak (where it exists) is often deprioritized for freight travel, and other times is often limited to extremely low speeds, resulting in extremely slow travel. Your road trips are only possible if you have extremely relaxed time constraints and specific destinations in mind.
Fees are also very high for such a slow option.
As for the future, well... it is bleak. This administration is actively trying to block transit expansion, presumably due to their undying affection for the fossil fuel industry, going so far as to withhold funding from already awarded grants to regional rail.
So while the northeast can sort-of pull it off due to its relatively compact nature and history of more progressive policies, this leaves the vast majority of the country in a no-mans land.
Amtrak started out as a holding company for private passenger rail companies that went bankrupt. It's never had a static amount of funding (until the Biden admin, Amtrak had to renegotiate its budget regularly) and many of its stations are just pet projects for rural Congress reps who want to give their district a way to leave their area, so Amtrak runs many trains at a loss.
Building new rail projects in the US is very hard because of capital costs and regulations like NEPA (and CEQA in California) which require environmental review for everything. Brightline in Florida was able to get around this by working in an existing highway ROW.
The remaining dregs of Amtrak are the result of the nationalization of the failing private passenger lines in the US.
We used to have passenger rail. Even the desolate nowhere of semi-rural Ohio was well-served. Street cars to get around town, inter-urbans to get between nearby towns, and proper passenger trains to get to points far-away.
It didn't work out. There's reasons why it didn't work, like the literal conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire that deliberately sought to destroy it.
Whatever those reasons were, they are are behind us. So it may seem superficially easy to just put it all back... but it isn't.
When the lines stopped being used, we tore them out. They're gone. And where the lines are gone, old stations are also mostly gone. Cities had once been built around (and because of) rail, but were subsequently built for cars as time marched forward and things continued to expand.
In some cases, whole communities have disappeared in the transition away from rail. In many other cases, we let our central stations decay and rot or demolished them to make space for things like convention centers.
So what's left is what we have: We have cars.
It's easy for me to see a future where I can buy a car and curl up in the back seat with a movie (and maybe a cocktail) while it ferries me from A to B.
That's a future I might actually live long enough to see, and it appears to be inevitable.
And I'd love to be freed of the chains of having to drive myself from A to B.
But I'll be dead and buried before we get passenger rail to be even 1/10th of what it once was.
So I choose to dream practical dreams. I can only play the hand I'm dealt.
It's comically (and extremely variably) priced. A trip from DC to NYC and back would be ~$25 in electric costs with a typical electric car versus Amtrak could easily be $300+ though possibly as cheap as $50 if you are flexible to awful hours like depart at 4:30am or something.