why is it so much cheaper to fly long distances than to take the train (in the US)?
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You can travel 3000 miles (coast to coast) in 6 hours, and it would take 4 days to do that by rail.
Rail right-of-way (train tracks) are owned almost exclusively by freight transportation companies in the US that have no interest in passenger transport. The US passenger train service (Amtrak) is a government administrated corporation that must pay private corporations for the right to use their tracks. Neither the government nor the private corporations really gives a shit about Amtrak, so it pretty constantly gets minimal help from the government, and high prices from the private corps. Which makes service expensive and low quality outside of a few places where the government cares enough to actually pay.
Jet fuel gets more efficient the higher in the atmosphere you are (it has much less air to push the plane through than at ground level). Also if you’re taking a multiday train trip your basically paying for a very small mobile hotel room, vs an airplane where you’re just renting a seat for a few hours which may or may not include food/drink. Longer travel times mean more hours worked by employees (say 48 hours of work for an attendant on a train vs say 3 hours for a flight attendant for the same distance trip). Aircraft can also generally travel in a straight line to their destination vs a train that may have to go around obstacles such as mountains, lakes etc. It really comes down to the variable or periodic costs associated with the trip itself, which generally increase with the time length of the trip.
In terms of the cost to deliver the service, passenger rail is almost universally more expensive than the alternatives. For short distances, roads – and busses – are significantly cheaper than rails. For long distances, the lack of need for infrastructure except at the end points makes air a superior option.
The reason you see rail prevalent in other developed nations is a combination of subsidies – many related to the fact that rail provides good union jobs – and high taxes on aviation fuel. The U.S. does subsidize rail, but not nearly to the same extent. Likewise, while the U.S. does tax aviation fuel, it’s not nearly as severe. So the inherent efficiency of air wins out.
Trains? We have those?
Train networks in the US are extremely underdeveloped and underused compared to europe. This is the real main reason its so costly.
Trains have a high base cost (machinery/rails) but extremely low operating costs so are expensive if volume is low and rail isnt already existing. In the us’s case most especially they never developed high speed rail so speed is also low.
In europe trains are cheap because rail is well developed and maintained everywhere and volume of use is high. Thus operating costs are exceedingly low and speed is fast enough to compete with air (especially considering all the delays within an airport).
The US is really really big. “Long distance” in the US is mind boggling compared to Japan. Also there are many population centers and they are evenly distributed. Again, using Japan as an example, You can draw an arc from Sendai to Tokyo to Osaka and hit the major population centers. Try doing that with Boston to Chicago to LA … what happened to Houston? New York? Miami?
There is a big counterexample: Washington (Norfolk) to Boston. And if you are traveling city center to city center rail is cheaper. But Amtrak isn’t dumb and prices the good trains just below air. BTW Japan Rail isn’t dumb either and Bullet Train tickets can reach airfare levels.
Tokyo to Osaka is about 500 km. That is the same as the distance from Boston to Philadelphia. And that is not “long distance” in the US. In addition that corridor of Japan has a much larger share of Japan’s economy than the Boston-Philadelphia corridor.
There are some historical reason we don’t have bullet trains even where they make sense. But overlaying scaled maps can help you understand a lot.
I use Japan because I know the country well. I travel for business in the US. And I am forever explaining to my Japanese colleagues why we can’t “just visit” a customer when something goes wrong.
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