• My Amtrak; or, Why Smug Urbanist Youtubers Don't Take the Train
• This past August my partner and I took a trip to San Francisco; we left the car at home, denied ourselves the convenience and atrocious carbon footprint of taking an airplane, and loaded our bags, snacks and ourselves onto the train at Union Station in Portland one sunny afternoon. What followed was an interesting look at an attempt to travel in a responsible, low-emissions way— you know, the way Europeans and the Chinese and Japanese are able to do all the time.
• Here’s how we did. These figures take into account all the traveling we both did (i.e. two train trips, but I took a car to the BART and back and he didn’t go with me… etc.)
• Miles travelled by train: 2528 (over 38 hours… that’s less than 33 miles an hour.)
• Miles travelled by public transit: 150.2 (Although San Francisco has several forms of public transit, including their famous streetcars, we only took the BART.)
• Miles travelled by walking: 43
• Miles travelled by car: 35 (We took 8 Lyft rides, but mostly for short distances, and were driven by friends or family on 2 different occasions)
• Emissions we produced over the course of this trip (all figures approximate):
• Car: 33.6 (0.964 lb/CO2 per passenger mile)
• Public Transit (light rail): 54.1 (0.36 lb/CO2 per passenger mile)
• Train (heavy rail): 556.16 (0.22 lb/CO2 per passenger mile)
• Total: 643.86 lbs of CO2
• Potential airplane emissions: 1386 (198 lb/CO2 per hour) (based on the assumption that the flight from PDX to Oakland is 1 hour 45 minutes one way).
• Altogether this trip produced 643.86 pounds of CO2; if we flew, our impact from that alone would be 1,386 pounds of CO2, with an overall impact of 1473.7 pounds of CO2, assuming we Lyfted and took public transit the same amount. Since our goal was reducing our climate impact from travel, we achieved our goal! But our trip also made me realize why all those urbanist YouTubers, despite heaping tons of praise on the idea of rail transit, never seem to take trains: taking the train sucks.
• Here’s what I mean:
• For the sake of comparison, I attempted to book both plane tickets and train tickets for two people, departing October 12th and returning October 19th. The train tickets would cost $352 (I think we actually paid more); the total travel time would be about 36 hours for a round trip. Plane tickets were more than $100 less at $245 (don’t tell my partner); the total travel time would be about 4 hours.
• Based on these numbers, it’s clear that taking the train is a dumb idea, based on personal convenience— who would want to pay more to travel for longer? Trying to get comfortable in your seat, because the $352 tickets don’t include sleeper accommodations (sleeper car tickets are triple the price), for 19 hours one-way is essentially an exercise in sanctimonious misery. After 10 or so hours, I stopped caring about my climate impact— and this is why nobody takes the train. Who would?
• Well, the people in the small communities we passed through, who aren’t serviced by an airport; sight-seers, people who can’t fly, people who don’t want to fly, tourists, commuters, parents with young children. The train could truly be a wonderful way to travel, but currently it’s caught in a Catch-22— ridership won’t improve unless the train becomes faster and cheaper, but the train won’t become faster and cheaper until it increases ridership.
• There were positive signs: when we boarded at Portland, we saw a huge queue of people waiting for the Coast Starlight north; we were part of another hundred-person line. There were people boarding or exiting at most stations we passed through; by the time we departed at Oakland’s Jack London station, the train was pretty full. I heard multiple people discussing how it was their first time riding the train, although at least one person followed it up with an assertion that they were never going to take the train again. Being on a train is charming; purchasing a microwaved grilled cheese and cup noodles and a Moscow mule and consuming them in the dining car is novel; the train goes approximately 33 miles an hour (on average), giving you ample time to admire the sights. But the train isn’t a very efficient way to get from point A to point 6— both in terms of time and cost. The train needs to be cheaper and go faster. If every other modern country can achieve it, we should be able to achieve it too.
• Sources:
• U.S. Department of Transportation. (2010). Public Transportation’s Role in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions (January 2010). https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/docs/PublicTransportationsRoleInRespondingToClimateChange2010.pdf
• Carbon Independent . (2019). Aviation. Carbonindependent.org. https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html