I think it's safe to say that anyone who doesn't absolutely positively have to use land transport, would not take a two night trip with two transfers to and from two busses.
Why, as a national transportation policy, should we be subsidizing anyone
other than those people? We already subsidize rural infrastructure and society to a huge extent through road spending, agricultural subsidies, healthcare spending, etc. Why is it prudent spending to fling more money at long distance trains, which are completely redundant and in almost all cases nowhere near essential transportation? Insofar as the federal government has an obligation to ensure that a its citizens have access to mobility--which I do believe that it does--why should it be obligated to provide that service in the form of trains, when other modes of transport are more cost effective and in many cases more reliable?
The fundamental advantage of railroads is that they have an extremely high throughput capacity, at the cost of an extremely high physical investment. The only way the investment can be justified is if the capacity is utilized, and there is no scenario in which long distance trains do that. The capacity is paid for and used by private freight operators, in which case as we see happens across the country passenger trains become horribly tardy and of complete uselessness to anyone who wants reliable transportation, which I assume would be everybody. Or, the investment is made publicly, but for the purpose of only an extremely limited use of the infrastructure, ie Raton Pass, in which case the subsidy per passenger becomes spectacularly, and I would argue unjustifiably, high.
I am speaking from the point of view of someone who has lived in rural Vermont, New York, and now Colorado, all of which have been served by single daily passenger trains, and all of which I used extremely infrequently in favor of either buses or personal vehicles. Almost universally I found it more efficient to drive or use a bus to Northeast Corridor points for transportation within the region. Trains are horrible as a feeder service. Either you do it cheaply with one train a day, which appeals to a tiny subset of the market that can afford to have extremely flexible schedules, or you use multiple frequencies that cost more, carry few people at a time, and could be replaced at great savings by buses.
Look at what happened to the Downeaster when it was extended to Brunswick--there are about 20 passengers on each train east of Brunswick (calculated from the three roundtrips daily that previously operated). With 306 seats (4x 72 seat coaches and 18 BC seats), that is a 6.5% load factor. 6.5%!!! They spent $35 million on the project, then another $9 million to get two more round trips to Brunswick this fall. The entire train generated $8.6 million in revenue last year. How can you possibly justify expenditures like that for so few people?
Trains are just an awful fiscal decision for low density traffic. So what is the point of long distance trains as a public service? What is the justification for subsidizing the segment of travelers who are riding for the experience, or because they have time to kill and choose trains as personal preference? Why are they not paying full freight? And why is a train so critically important for the remainder of passengers, those who do require ground transportation for a certain city pair that the train serves, that we should pay for such an inefficient mode of transport? There is nothing inherent about long distance train service that supports towns and cities, certainly not more than an effective highway network, which the United States just so happens to already have across a much larger area of the country than the Amtrak network.
