Well, as much as some of the (usual) points make sense about Amtrak sharing rail unreliably, the role of subsidies (hidden or overt) compared to other modes, I find that stories like this miss a fundamental truth / constraint that I have come to believe.
For better or worse, we have a country that is in its middle age of infrastructure and people. We are a rich country with established interests and property rights where land for railroads can no longer be just appropriated or bought cheaply to reconfigure a rail system. We have people who can pay to have individual transportation and not have to put up with the minor inconveniences of public transport. We have all the debt of a middle aged country, plus we need to think of our other healthcare expenses in middle age, and don't have the appetite to pay for another muscle car from our youth.
All these reasons make investing in rail a relatively expensive proposition compared to alternatives, and not only that, but it's especially expensive because of our high wages, standards of construction, environmental reviews, etc. So we stop investing in it.
By the way, what happens along with this? When you get into this phase of a country, your engineering capabilities change, and specifically, your ability to even build these systems even starts to degrade and fall out of practice.
Take rail, or any heavy construction/engineering industry. People working in such a field join it to have exciting careers, see growth, etc. Generally few people join just to maintain a static system. Unfortunately, there's much less excitement in being "maintenance" although some people are quite innovative even in such fields.
So where you used to have a cohort of thousands of people trained and skilled at all aspects of rail building (engineering, operations, finance, project management, etc), now those people have either consolidated to the few projects remaining in the US (traveling around, moving cities to where the work is), work for Parsons or others who can aggregate enough work to keep a team together, or aged out, attrited away, gone to where the actual business is booming: Asia.
You think about how in the US, if you had to get together the expert team to build a new rail connecting 2 cities, you would have to search far and wide to find the people qualified, and pay them huge contractor sums. Not only that, they would be out of practice of how to pitch such a deal to the cities and the people along the route. Everything would have to be done custom.
In China, just to take an example, there are (up until just recently) 10,000 rail engineers who stamp out such a rail every goddamn month. How can you compete with a country that's in such a growth phase, unless somehow your country has an active strategy about how to renew itself in middle age?
It's a problem. A very hard to solve problem, deeper than just rail schedules or simple subsidies.
US big infrastructure projects tend to be 2x or more expensive even compared to other developed nations, including ones much older than us.
There's definitely a cost disease at play, and that makes it vastly harder to build and maintain the infrastructure we need. Unfortunately, neither major party seems to care in the least: the Republicans just want to cut government spending in general rather than make it more efficient, and the Democrats are happy to intentionally balloon the cost of new buildings and infrastructure to satisfy allies in the labor movement*. Hardly anyone talks seriously about efficiency.
* It's common to have requirements to pay the 'prevailing union wage', which means no price pressure from the government, no negotiation to get a better deal is possible. Nothing against unions, but intentionally going, "we're going to ban ourselves from negotiating a good price when we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars" is ludicrous.
In 2012, Amtrak estimated that it would cost $150 billion to upgrade the Northeast Corridor for legitimate high speed rail. Almost $330 million per mile for a right of way that they already own. I'm sure that would be $250 billion today because why the hell not?
At prices like that, of course we'll never see a mile of new track ever laid again. We've decided that the whole thing is a grift, thrown our hands up and given up. Somehow the French can dig under central Paris for the same price that we can lay some rail on a plot of land that we already own.
> Almost $330 million per mile for a right of way that they already own.
Actually, no. That proposal included entirely new tunnels and city-center stations in Baltimore and Philadelphia, and an entirely new ROW that went from NYC out Long Island, a Long Island Sound crossing to New Haven, new ROW up to Springfield, and then east into Boston, rather than reusing any of the BOS-NYC right-of-way. All of which are expensive and relatively low value (although the CT corridor does need entirely new ROW suitable for HSR, the cost of building such a ROW largely parallel to the existing one--including the taking of expensive property in CT--is likely cheaper than building the Long Island Sound crossing by itself).
In a way, I think this is an example of where a large part of American cost disease comes from--projects are designed on the basis of large, flashy megaprojects rather than looking for how to make multiple small, incremental improvements that can be done on the cheap. For example, you could probably squeeze a half an hour or so out of BOS-NYC train time simply by fixing dispatching issues on the New Rochelle-New Haven stretch, which would require very little construction (turning Rye into a flying junction would be the biggest piece I could imagine)--$10s of millions at worst.
I also can’t help but think we Americans “democratize” construction too much. Whenever a project is announced dozens of people come out of the woodwork to protest any and all aspects of the plan. Things get delayed because the local busybodies bring up as much as they can to either halt the construction entirely or to demand concessions. Some of the regulations make sense for most new projects, but does an existing rail line they’re trying to allow passenger trains on need a new environmental impact study because the locals demanded a new 15 foot high sound wall? It’s already inside of a major city and it’s not like there are any endangered species it’s going to impact.
> We have people who can pay to have individual transportation and not have to put up with the minor inconveniences of public transport.
Air travel is public transport and Americans use it all the time. High speed rail has worked fabolous on 1-2h flight distances for decades in many parts of the world.
It is preferable in every way to flights: total time, comfort, leg space, security & check in hassle, window sizes & scenery, luggage space and so on.
In many areas there are good arguments for why US infrastructure can't be retrofitted into European, but for intercity travel (eg SF-LA-SD or Boston - NYC) all the prerequisites are there.
Obviously, I'm under no illusions that it would actually happen due to attitudes, culture, politics and so on.
For better or worse, we have a country that is in its middle age of infrastructure and people. We are a rich country with established interests and property rights where land for railroads can no longer be just appropriated or bought cheaply to reconfigure a rail system. We have people who can pay to have individual transportation and not have to put up with the minor inconveniences of public transport. We have all the debt of a middle aged country, plus we need to think of our other healthcare expenses in middle age, and don't have the appetite to pay for another muscle car from our youth.
All these reasons make investing in rail a relatively expensive proposition compared to alternatives, and not only that, but it's especially expensive because of our high wages, standards of construction, environmental reviews, etc. So we stop investing in it.
By the way, what happens along with this? When you get into this phase of a country, your engineering capabilities change, and specifically, your ability to even build these systems even starts to degrade and fall out of practice.
Take rail, or any heavy construction/engineering industry. People working in such a field join it to have exciting careers, see growth, etc. Generally few people join just to maintain a static system. Unfortunately, there's much less excitement in being "maintenance" although some people are quite innovative even in such fields.
So where you used to have a cohort of thousands of people trained and skilled at all aspects of rail building (engineering, operations, finance, project management, etc), now those people have either consolidated to the few projects remaining in the US (traveling around, moving cities to where the work is), work for Parsons or others who can aggregate enough work to keep a team together, or aged out, attrited away, gone to where the actual business is booming: Asia.
You think about how in the US, if you had to get together the expert team to build a new rail connecting 2 cities, you would have to search far and wide to find the people qualified, and pay them huge contractor sums. Not only that, they would be out of practice of how to pitch such a deal to the cities and the people along the route. Everything would have to be done custom.
In China, just to take an example, there are (up until just recently) 10,000 rail engineers who stamp out such a rail every goddamn month. How can you compete with a country that's in such a growth phase, unless somehow your country has an active strategy about how to renew itself in middle age?
It's a problem. A very hard to solve problem, deeper than just rail schedules or simple subsidies.