Atrios Turf

We are very poorly served in this country by our rail service. An example is Amherst, MA. The station is open for 3 1/2 hours daily – from about 10:25am to 12:25pm and from 3:30 to 5 pm. There are no ticket office hours, no Quik-Trak hours, no checked baggage, no help with baggage. And no clue why it has open hours at all.The one train that serves Amherst daily – the Vermonter whose route goes from St. Albans, VT to Wash., DC. – departs Amherst at 1:19pm (note that this is NOT within the open hours of the station). It takes more than 5 hours to get to NYC – a drive that can be accomplished in less than 3 hrs, even with traffic, and includes an hour layover in Springfield, about 15 miles from Amherst!The Amherst station is surrounded by colleges – UMass, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire, Amherst, etc – with students who often travel on weekends, but if they can’t leave before 1:19 on a Friday or don’t want to spend all of Sat. afternoon on a train, they drive. Interstates 91 & 95 are some of the most heavily traveled roads in the northeast…I have wasted any number of hours sitting in traffic on southbound 91 on Sunday afternoons/evenings with the skiers returning home and the other parents returning their kids to college after week-end visits. Would I have paid $25 to get my kid back to college from Hartford to avoid that? you bet, but I couldn’t because there was no goddamn train!And Amtak complains that it loses money on that route. Gee, I wonder why? If I can see the problem so clearly, why can’t the people who run the trains see it??!

We are very poorly served in this country by our rail service. An example is Amherst, MA. The station is open for 3 1/2 hours daily – from about 10:25am to 12:25pm and from 3:30 to 5 pm. There are no ticket office hours, no Quik-Trak hours, no checked baggage, no help with baggage. And no clue why it has open hours at all.The one train that serves Amherst daily – the Vermonter whose route goes from St. Albans, VT to Wash., DC. – departs Amherst at 1:19pm (note that this is NOT within the open hours of the station). It takes more than 5 hours to get to NYC – a drive that can be accomplished in less than 3 hrs, even with traffic, and includes an hour layover in Springfield, about 15 miles from Amherst!The Amherst station is surrounded by colleges – UMass, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire, Amherst, etc – with students who often travel on weekends, but if they can’t leave before 1:19 on a Friday or don’t want to spend all of Sat. afternoon on a train, they drive. Interstates 91 & 95 are some of the most heavily traveled roads in the northeast…I have wasted any number of hours sitting in traffic on southbound 91 on Sunday afternoons/evenings with the skiers returning home and the other parents returning their kids to college after week-end visits. Would I have paid $25 to get my kid back to college from Hartford to avoid that? you bet, but I couldn’t because there was no goddamn train!And Amtak complains that it loses money on that route. Gee, I wonder why? If I can see the problem so clearly, why can’t the people who run the trains see it??!

Where did you find the Monopoly photo, Bob?Who in the name of sweet fuckin’ holy hell builds a house on Oriental Avenue??? It’s the Monopoly version of Detroit, for Chrissakes.

Where did you find the Monopoly photo, Bob?Who in the name of sweet fuckin’ holy hell builds a house on Oriental Avenue??? It’s the Monopoly version of Detroit, for Chrissakes.

Even when you get away from the urbanized east, passenger rail is a dicey proposition. Your train must pull over every fifteen minutes or so to let freight rumble past. It’s as if someone had designed Amtrak to make people WANT to drive…oh, wait, that explains it!

Even when you get away from the urbanized east, passenger rail is a dicey proposition. Your train must pull over every fifteen minutes or so to let freight rumble past. It’s as if someone had designed Amtrak to make people WANT to drive…oh, wait, that explains it!

There are several rail lines that pass through the area where I live, but not a single passenger service. 30 miles north in Louisville, which has a population of over a million, there are also several rail lines that pass through, but not a single passenger service. Infact, there is no passenger services in the entire state of kentucky. If you want to catch an Amtrak, you have to go to another state to get on it.

There are several rail lines that pass through the area where I live, but not a single passenger service. 30 miles north in Louisville, which has a population of over a million, there are also several rail lines that pass through, but not a single passenger service. Infact, there is no passenger services in the entire state of kentucky. If you want to catch an Amtrak, you have to go to another state to get on it.

Adding… it wasn’t always this way. There used to be passenger services around here up until the 80s. Then they all dissapeared.

Adding… it wasn’t always this way. There used to be passenger services around here up until the 80s. Then they all dissapeared.

I rode AMTRACK from Harrisburg to Manhattan once. It was a great experience. Beat the hell out of taking the Jersey Turnpike. Sorry to hear that Reading has no passenger rail.What would kill for here in Harrisburg is a light rail service from the burbs to downtown. The Harrisburg “beltway” of I-83/I-81 wasn’t designed for the level of traffic it gets today. And parking downtown is ridiculous. I park on an Island in the middle of the Susquehanna river and then walk 1/2 a mile over a bridge and then walk another 5 blocks to get to an office that’s right across from the train station. I also happen to live within walking distance of a spot on those same tracks that would be perfect for a light rail station.I live for the day I could walk down to the station, catch the train downtown and avoid all the traffic and parking hassle I put up with today.

I rode AMTRACK from Harrisburg to Manhattan once. It was a great experience. Beat the hell out of taking the Jersey Turnpike. Sorry to hear that Reading has no passenger rail.What would kill for here in Harrisburg is a light rail service from the burbs to downtown. The Harrisburg “beltway” of I-83/I-81 wasn’t designed for the level of traffic it gets today. And parking downtown is ridiculous. I park on an Island in the middle of the Susquehanna river and then walk 1/2 a mile over a bridge and then walk another 5 blocks to get to an office that’s right across from the train station. I also happen to live within walking distance of a spot on those same tracks that would be perfect for a light rail station.I live for the day I could walk down to the station, catch the train downtown and avoid all the traffic and parking hassle I put up with today.

Looks like Bob’s tears fell on the board.Avi, I’m with you on the don’t buy Oriental Ave, however, people relieved to miss Boardwalk and Park Place tend to land on that group.We need a real passenger rail system in this country. If we had one we would drive less. Or I hope we would.

Looks like Bob’s tears fell on the board.Avi, I’m with you on the don’t buy Oriental Ave, however, people relieved to miss Boardwalk and Park Place tend to land on that group.We need a real passenger rail system in this country. If we had one we would drive less. Or I hope we would.

I grew up in the car-dystopia of suburban Dallas. For the longest time, the whole notion of trains as a principle form of transportation seemed truly, deeply weird to me. How would people get groceries to their house? To school? They can’t build a train line to everywhere a person wants to go, so how could trains be better than cars?Then I moved to New York City and as a daily public transit user, I have slowly come to understand how it is about land-use patterns and over-lapping, varigated transportation networks: light rail, heavy rail, high-speed rail, jitney cabs, trolley cars, street cars.In my sprawling, car-dependent suburban upbringing, over-sized, spread-out houses connected by a grid of street that feed into freeways that connect far-flung bedroom communities seemed like the only way humans could live. But with trains and other overlapping transportation networks, the size, scale and shape of buildings becomes different, the way those buildings connect to each other and to goods and services for people who live and work amid them changes.Not every city has to be like Manhattan — Atrios and Matt Yglesias both make this point all the time — but smart land-use policy does mean compact, walkable cities and towns and neighborhoods with lots-n-lots of mixed-use buildings so that people are far less car-dependent. Hell, even some smarter conservatives (they actually do exist) think rail is a good idea: http://thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.04.17.001.pdartSadly, the combined power of the oil industry (no accident that since WW2 3 of our 11 presidents have been from Texas, more than any other state) and the automobile industry worked overtime to undermine and kill rail in the U.S. New York City — until last year — hadn’t laid a single foot of new subway track since 1950. In 1997, in Gingrich’s post-Contract-on-America-Congress, they actually passed a law requiring Amtrak to be self-sufficient, because America’s Happy Motoring car culture isn’t subsidized in any way. So much money was being sucked out of rail and pumped into roads that the rail industry decided it was more profitable to rip up track and sell the steel for scrap. Hence, since 1970 America’s rail infrastructure — once the envy of the world — has declined by almost 30%, the only industrialized nation on earth to have negative growth of rail infrastructure in the last four decades.BTW, for the curious who like to read such things, the text of that law requiring Amtrak to be independently solvent is here: http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloads/Counsel/legislation/105-134.pdfI write about this topic a lot over at Broadway Carl’s place, so much so that he recently told me to dial it back a little. He’s a frequent commenter here, so I hope you guys can check out some of my stuff at his place.My rail-specific posts are here:http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=246815172385311622&searchType=ALL&txtKeywords=&label=SUPERTRAINS

I grew up in the car-dystopia of suburban Dallas. For the longest time, the whole notion of trains as a principle form of transportation seemed truly, deeply weird to me. How would people get groceries to their house? To school? They can’t build a train line to everywhere a person wants to go, so how could trains be better than cars?Then I moved to New York City and as a daily public transit user, I have slowly come to understand how it is about land-use patterns and over-lapping, varigated transportation networks: light rail, heavy rail, high-speed rail, jitney cabs, trolley cars, street cars.In my sprawling, car-dependent suburban upbringing, over-sized, spread-out houses connected by a grid of street that feed into freeways that connect far-flung bedroom communities seemed like the only way humans could live. But with trains and other overlapping transportation networks, the size, scale and shape of buildings becomes different, the way those buildings connect to each other and to goods and services for people who live and work amid them changes.Not every city has to be like Manhattan — Atrios and Matt Yglesias both make this point all the time — but smart land-use policy does mean compact, walkable cities and towns and neighborhoods with lots-n-lots of mixed-use buildings so that people are far less car-dependent. Hell, even some smarter conservatives (they actually do exist) think rail is a good idea: http://thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.04.17.001.pdartSadly, the combined power of the oil industry (no accident that since WW2 3 of our 11 presidents have been from Texas, more than any other state) and the automobile industry worked overtime to undermine and kill rail in the U.S. New York City — until last year — hadn’t laid a single foot of new subway track since 1950. In 1997, in Gingrich’s post-Contract-on-America-Congress, they actually passed a law requiring Amtrak to be self-sufficient, because America’s Happy Motoring car culture isn’t subsidized in any way. So much money was being sucked out of rail and pumped into roads that the rail industry decided it was more profitable to rip up track and sell the steel for scrap. Hence, since 1970 America’s rail infrastructure — once the envy of the world — has declined by almost 30%, the only industrialized nation on earth to have negative growth of rail infrastructure in the last four decades.BTW, for the curious who like to read such things, the text of that law requiring Amtrak to be independently solvent is here: http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloads/Counsel/legislation/105-134.pdfI write about this topic a lot over at Broadway Carl’s place, so much so that he recently told me to dial it back a little. He’s a frequent commenter here, so I hope you guys can check out some of my stuff at his place.My rail-specific posts are here:http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=246815172385311622&searchType=ALL&txtKeywords=&label=SUPERTRAINS

>> The nearest rail service to Manhattan is Trenton, NJ.You don’t count Philadelphia?Not that I’m arguing with your general point. Trains are great when they work and are on time, and there definitely aren’t enough of them.Atlanta’s MARTA and SF’s BART systems make me so envious. I want Septa’s regional rails to have signs saying when the next train is coming too!

>> The nearest rail service to Manhattan is Trenton, NJ.You don’t count Philadelphia?Not that I’m arguing with your general point. Trains are great when they work and are on time, and there definitely aren’t enough of them.Atlanta’s MARTA and SF’s BART systems make me so envious. I want Septa’s regional rails to have signs saying when the next train is coming too!