Rail service seems to do OK when it can get you to a area that you don’t want the hassle of bringing a car, like NYC, Boston, Wash. DC. The tickets are expensive, but worth it to those who don’t want to deal with traffic, parking and the like.
Once you move from those areas your destination won’t have traffic and parking issues, and you need a car to get around once you arive. This combined with much less train service makes it a very unattractive option.
Blimey, you’re going to pick between the two safest modes of passenger transport on that spurious assumption? 
Mortality stats:
How safe is commercial flight?
Safety is a concern of everyone who flies or contemplates it. I can provide you with volumes of information about the attention to safety given by the airline industry. No other form of transportation is as scrutinized, investigated and monitored as commercial aviation.
Yet if you decide to hold onto the belief that flying is dangerous, then these reassuring safety facts are lost to you. Statistics and figures that prove airline transportation to be the safest way to travel relate to our logical, reasoning, rational mind. Worry about safety is an intrusion that seems to bypass those faculties of logic and go directly to our emotions. And you will always find another article about some “near miss” or “the crowded skies” that will reinforce your belief.
Even if you hold the belief, “Statistics about flying don’t help me,” give yourself another chance to reexamine your judgment as you read through this section. After all, your goal is to feel as comfortable as possible when you fly, and there are some very comforting numbers here.
Most passengers who have knowledge of the commercial airline industry believe that flying is safe. But when something occurs that we don’t understand, any of us can become quickly frightened. That’s why I encourage you to study as much as you need to reassure yourself about the industry and to take some of the mystery out of commercial flight.
However, some small thing may occur on one of your flights that you haven’t studied. If you become startled or frightened at that time, the statistics that I am about to present may come in handy. An airline accident is so rare, when some unfamiliar noise or bump occurs, your response need not be, “Oh, no! What’s wrong?!” Instead, it can be something like, “I’m not sure what that sound was, but there’s nothing to worry about.” Feel free to press your overhead call button to page a flight attendant whenever you want to ask about unfamiliar sights or sounds. But you needn’t jump to fearful conclusions.
Now, you may notice something a little morbid about this section: most of these statistics have to do with DEATH! This isn’t the most pleasant of subjects, I know. But many people who are worried about flying concentrate on the fear that something will go wrong during the flight, and that the outcome of that error would be their own death. So let’s put this possibility in perspective.
Dr. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done extensive research in the field of commercial flight safety. He found that over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was one in seven million. This statistic is the probability that someone who randomly selected one of the airline’s flights over the 19-year study period would be killed in route. That means that any time you board a flight on a major carrier in this country, your chance of being in a fatal accident is one in seven million. It doesn’t matter whether you fly once every three years or every day of the year.
In fact, based on this incredible safety record, if you did fly every day of your life, probability indicates that it would take you nineteen thousand years before you would succumb to a fatal accident. Nineteen thousand years!
Perhaps you have occasionally taken the train for your travels, believing that it would be safer. Think again. Based on train accidents over the past twenty years, your chances of dying on a transcontinental train journey are one in a million. Those are great odds, mind you. But flying coast-to-coast is ten times safer than making the trip by train.
How about driving, our typical form of transportation? There are approximately one hundred and thirty people killed daily in auto accidents. That’s every day – yesterday, today and tomorrow. And that’s forty-seven thousand killed per year.
In 1990, five hundred million airline passengers were transported an average distance of eight hundred miles, through more than seven million takeoffs and landings, in all kinds of weather conditions, with a loss of only thirty-nine lives. During that same year the National Transportation Safety Board’s report shows that over forty-six thousand people were killed in auto accidents. A sold-out 727 jet would have to crash every day of the week, with no survivors, to equal the highway deaths per year in this country.
Dr. Barnett of MIT compared the chance of dying from an airline accident versus a driving accident, after accounting for the greater number of people who drive each day. Can you guess what he found? You are nineteen times safer in a plane than in a car. Every single time you step on a plane, no matter how many times you fly, you are nineteen times less likely to die than in your car.
The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 permitted the airlines to be competitive both in the routes they flew and the fares they charged. When the price of air travel decreased, the number who flew increased. In 1977, two hundred and seventy million passengers flew on U.S. scheduled airlines. In 1987 four hundred and fifty million flew. For passengers, that resulted in the frustration of crowded terminals and delayed boardings and takeoffs. But did deregulation cause safety to be compromised? Definitely not!
Accident statistics provided by the National Transportation Safety Board show that – despite a fifty percent increase in passengers during the ten years after deregulation – there was a forty percent decrease in the number of fatal accidents and a twenty-five percent decrease in the number of fatalities, compared to the ten years before deregulation.
If you are going to worry about dying, there are many more probable ways to die than on a commercial jet. Take a look at the chart below, which shows the chance of fatalities on a commercial flight compared to other causes of death in the United States. Notice that you are more likely to die from a bee sting than from a commercial flight. The number one killer in the United States is cardiovascular disease, with about eight hundred and eighty-five thousand deaths per year. Each of us has about a fifty percent (50%) chance of dying of cardiovascular disease. Whenever we fly, we have a one one-hundred-thousandth of one percent (.000014%) chance of dying!
Odds of Death
DEATH BY: YOUR ODDS
* Cardiovascular disease: 1 in 2
* Smoking (by/before age 35): 1 in 600
* Car trip, coast-to-coast: 1 in 14,000
* Bicycle accident: 1 in 88,000
* Tornado: 1 in 450,000
* Train, coast-to-coast: 1 in 1,000,000
* Lightning: 1 in 1.9 million
* Bee sting: 1 in 5.5 million
* U.S. commercial jet airline: 1 in 7 million
Sources: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley
---- URL: Fear of Flying – Anxieties.com
Here’s another reason–despite the pathetic “service” you get when you fly today, it’s still better than taking the train here in the U.S.
Back in 2002 (following 9/11), my wife decided to take the train from New Haven, CT to Baltimore, MD for a two-week-long conference. This is in the much-vaunted Northeast corridor everyone keeps talking about. She took the “high-speed” Acela train.
It was a complete hassle. The train station was old, dark, and had hardly any staff. There supposedly was a service to check her bags, but when we arrived at the station, we were told that they had recently discontinued that service.
I had to help my wife wheel/carry all of her bags down the stairs leading to the tracks. Once in the train, there was no place to stow her bags, so she had to just lay them on the floor and seats around her. (There were no assigned seats, of course.) Once the train started to fill up, she got glares from the commuter passengers traveling with her for taking up so much room. The conductor was completely indifferent, and was no help at all. To top it off, my wife was terrified of getting up to go to the restroom for fear that someone would take her seat or steal her luggage.
My wife has flown numerous times, and never had this kind of trouble when flying.
She had to haul all of her luggage off the train by herself when she arrived in Baltimore, and later, load it all back on for the return trip. The trip took something like 6 hours (longer than driving would have taken), and cost much more than driving or flying.
After this experience, she told me in no uncertain terms that she would never take the train again.
For comparison, my son and I flew down to visit with her over the weekend during the middle of her conference. We had absolutely no trouble at all. The flight took less than an hour, and was half the cost of my wife’s train fare.
Oops,
Mods, that last post may or may not be fair use. I had only intended to post the last little box of statistics, not all those paragraphs. My goof.
P.S. For comparison, I took the train numerous times in Europe. The stations were clean and modern. The trains were fast and on-time. Most cities were only an hour or two apart.
Most importantly, air travel was so expensive in comparison, there was no question of flying instead.
As for driving, it was often a hassle due to the multi-hour traffic jams you’d run into (on the German Autobahn, anyway). Also, gasoline cost a fortune.
P.P.S. We do still take the train here in Connectict for day trips into New York City. There’s no hassle with luggage, and it beats trying to drive or park in the city.
That’s really a commuter rail (Metro-North), not an inner-city railroad like Amtrak.
At least until winter time or they encounter one of the constant delays. After many hours of debate with my coworkers on the merits of Amtrak Acela vs the shuttle to DC or Boston, I have concluded that the train, while taking longer (about 4 hours vs 1 hour flight), is more reliable, more comfortible isn’t that much longer once you consider airport travel time and security.
I doubt this could ever be financially viable. The cost of infrastructure alone would be prohibitive, never mind the technological issues, and I don’t know that there is anything like the ridership to support it, even with subsidy. That being said, I’d love to ride it, especially if it runs along Hwy 1. I just don’t see it happening in the foreseeable future.
Commuter and interurban train systems continue to make modest headway in many US cities, but results are mostly disappointing in service and are often opposed powerful NIMBY factions. (See the attempts to extend the LA Metro Red Line under Beverly Hills and out to Santa Monica. “Gas pockets” indeed!)
Stranger
The heck of it is that there’s already a railroad right-of-way into Santa Monica. I used to live on the corner (more or less) of Clarington and Palms. There is a train bridge over Palms where it turns into National. For most of the time I lived there, there were tracks crossing Westwood Blvd. The rails were taken up around 2001 or thereabouts. But the ‘way’ is still there, and it should be a fairly easy matter to re-lay the rails.
Here is an aerial view of the tracks near my old apartment. As can be seen, part of the area has been paved over.
Moving west, it appears there has been a lot of building going on in the last few years. But it looks as if a rail line might extend as far as Bundy without too much demolition.
Looking at the current NE Corridor schedule, I see that:
The NE Corridor management has apparently concluded that their main target public is people on a one-day business trip, merely toting along a carry-on with presentation materials and a change of clothes in order to attend a meeting and be back overnight, who want to ride something nicer and faster than the “local”; and that not enough people do actual serious rail travel to/from a number of locations to justify the expense of a checked luggage setup there. Mrs. Robby represented, to them, an utter anomaly.
Of course, when it comes to the actual city-pairings of NY/DC and NY/Boston, Amtrak gets its licks in by competing with the* Air Shuttle* on the basis of doing downtown-to-downtown, which does make sense on that routing for the sake of those businesspeople on one-day meeting trips, who have to commute downtown every morning anyway.
People can be lured out of their cars and away from airlines if their trip falls into the “sweet spot” for traveling distance in which trains are faster than both cars and airlines for door-to-door service.
IOW, if you consider the amount of time to either:
(a) drive from your house directly to your destination, or
(b) arrange for a ride to the airport, suffer through the security delays, finally board the plane and fly to your destination, collect your luggage, go to your rental car, and drive to your hotel,
then there is a range of distances in which high-speed rail is quicker than either of those two options. These tend to be 100 miles or so on the low side, which is low enough to make this a feasible commuting option. The high side is around 400 or so miles with basic 180mph HSRT; Maglev trains, at 300mph, extend this bubble to about 600 miles.
Of course, we’re not just talking about distance here that makes HSRT feasible; there has to be enough demand for travel between the two points to justify the cost. Essentially, we’re talking about travel between city centers.
So there is a place for rail travel in the US. But it is viable only for certain travel corridors, not for nationwide travel. I think some of those corridors include:
San Francisco-Los Angeles
Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington DC
Milwaukee-Chicago-St Louis; also Chicago-Indianapolis-Detroit
Memphis-New Orleans-Birmingham-Atlanta-Jacksonville
Cleveland-Columbus-Pittsburgh
The biggest hurdle here is the political one. Obviously, voters have to be persuaded to vote for a given system. The tracks would have to be exclusive to HSRT and couldn’t be shared with a freight system, as is currently the case pretty much everywhere in the US. They also would have to be grade-separated. And HSRT has opponents; apparently the first stab at a Texas system was torpedoed by Southwest Airlines. (However, earlier this year American and Continental Airlines announced their support for Texas High-Speed Rail as a feeder system for the Dallas and Houston airports. See a PDF newsrelease here.)
However, there are advantages to HSRT which can woo voters. One source of additional revenue would be if freight is allowed on a rail line. Rail lines are less polluting and not dependant on petroleum. And as I said before, these lines can be used for long-distance commuting.
Myself, I’m obviously a fan of rail travel. I’m hopeful that the California High-Speed Rail initiative makes it to the November 2008 ballot. Right now, there are too many obstacles to make the current types of rail travel useful in the US.
One of the definitions of modern high-speed rail is, pretty much, that it’s on a dedicated passenger-only line.
That’s one of the definitions. These guys have another.
I am NOT challenging your veracity, or your wife’s, but I have questions about a number of points in this post.
I suspect she wasn’t on the high-speed train now known as the Acela Express, but rather an ordinary-speed Regional train that around that time was called the Acela Regional. This suspicion is supported by your statement, later on, that “There were no assigned seats, of course.” AFAIK, the high-speed Acela Express has always been all-reserved seating. Only the regional trains are unreserved.
I don’t understand this at all. All Amtrak trains have overhead storage racks, and most have some additional space at the end of the car as well. Here’s a picture of the interior an Acela express car. Here’s one of a standard coach. I’ve never been on a train in which all the overhead space was full, especially since you say that later…
Frankly, I don’t blame them, since I can’t imagine why she wasn’t able to stow them somewhere. Is your wife disabled or otherwise unable to lift the bags into the overhead racks?
IME, this is unusual. I’ve seen conductors (and other passengers) help elderly, short, or weak people stow their bags.
It’s only longer than driving under ideal conditions. It’s only 270 miles, but unless you’re driving in the middle of the night, you have to count on delays in or near NYC. Also, if six hours was the scheduled time, it must have been a regional train, not a high-speed. The Acela Express (which is admittedly much pricier than the regional trains) takes only four hours, but there are some regionals that take only four and a half hours.
It’s probably pointless to try to change her mind, but for the benefit of others who may not have ridden on Amtrak, IMHO her experience was not typical. I’ll grant that if you’re traveling with more baggage than you can comfortably handle on your own, train travel can be a pain, since there is no a bag check service. But most big stations have redcaps to help you on and off, and your fellow passengers will often help out if you ask nicely or just look like you need help.
Why didn’t she fly?
I’d be interested to know how significant the population of ~25 million Americans with aerophobia/aviophobia is to the Amtrak market. I used to love to fly, but due to an unfortunate incident with a hot dog 6 years ago, I will never board a plane again. I occasionally take Amtrak to travel the East Coast, but I would use it much more often if it were as it should be: cheaper, faster and having stations in better parts of town.
Aww man, you can’t just throw that out there without an explanation. 
[QUOTE=robby]
Back in 2002 (following 9/11), my wife decided to take the train from New Haven, CT to Baltimore, MD for a two-week-long conference. This is in the much-vaunted Northeast corridor everyone keeps talking about. She took the “high-speed” Acela train.
QUOTE]
I agree with **commasense ** that your story doesn’t check out and that you were likely on a “Regional Express”, not the high speed Acela.
I travel quite extensively for business and constantly take the train from NYC to Philly, DC, Baltimore or Boston. The difference between the Acela and Acela Regional Express are like night and day. The Acela is usually filled with clean cut business people dragging their rollarsuitcases behind them. You have room to plug in your laptop and eat a nice breakfast while relaxing in the spacious business class seating.
By comparison, the RE is crowded, cramped and dirty. There’s always a lot of weirdos. I boarded the train and apparently two guys had just gotten into a fistfight at the last station.
Do U.S. trains have compartments? Or are they set up like airline seats?
