Comments on: Planes vs. trains: How they compare on green speed

By: Siel

Siel — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:04:41 +0000

M — Good point re: the company travel issue — though this also kinda makes me think that Americans should just take vacation days to do this sort of thing if they get vacation days from their jobs. I have so many friends who only take vacation days when they’ve accrued so many they can’t earn any more. Why don’t people take breaks in this country!?

But I realize that’s a rather off-topic rant :)

LisaNewton — I wonder if — once we get that bullet train to San Francisco — the situation would change quite a bit?

By: LisaNewton

LisaNewton — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:33:07 +0000

A few months ago, I wanted to take a trip from LA to Boise. During my research, I discovered that if I took the train, it would take 36 hours. Basically, I had to take a train from LA to Portland, then hop on a bus to Boise. Plus, the price was more expensive than the flight, which only took 1.5 hours.

I would have loved to take the train, but not at the cost of more money and more time.

By: Martin

Martin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:11:24 +0000

Here in northern Africa, there is another transportation option called a louage. This is a passenger van that sits at a station until it fills with passengers and then departs. As far as I can see, labor and insurance must be the disincentives for this model in the developed world.

By: M

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:16:30 +0000

My experiences with long distance travel with Amtrak has been rather inconsistent. I took a combo of buses and trains between LA and San Jose last year. One bus was one of the most jammed buses I’ve ever been on. It left around midnight on a wednesday and travelled between San Jose to Santa Barbara. Another bus during the day only had about 3 people in it the entire trip. Last year my friend was looking into traveling from San Francisco to Chicago and the available trains were incredibly limited. There was about a 2 week period between his 2 options to get out there because of how indirect the trip was. I’ve tried a couple times to buy Amtrak tickets to get to Palm Springs from LA to visit family and they are frequently sold out at least a month in advance!

Even with higher speed trains, it also seems like some help is needed from employers to account for longer vacation travel times that come with trains. Some companies are pretty resistant to this idea right now.