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US airlines cancel flights after aviation agency directive to cut air traffic
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
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investigates
If one wants to travel from San Francisco to New York City starting on Friday, November 14th, as a single adult:
¹ Assuming ~8 hours a day driving time and Google Maps' estimate of 44 hours driving time. Does not include hotel fees and fuel.
For a lot of people, if they can't fly, they're probably going to be better off just skipping their travel.
How the fuck is a train slower than a bus over that distance?
And twice as expensive?
I would expect trains to be more expensive than buses. Maintaining rails, stations and trains is more expensive than maintaining roads, bus stops and buses. But in return I'd expect it to be quite a lot faster and more comfortable. A regular slow train where I live travels at 75mph - normal intercity trains travel at 125mph.
Slow trains here in the US generally don't go over 50, and the rails in a lot of the network don't support over 30MPH. Additionally, rail traffic gets prioritized to freight, because we don't actually do PST (Precision Scheduled Timetables), so you might be waiting for hours on a stopped train so a freight train 10 miles up can unload.
I had heard about the priority of freight traffic, but never heard that slower trains were so slow. Over here the rail companies don't own the track - I don't think that makes sense at all; a national body ought to own the track so that appropriate priority can be given to passenger and freight traffic.
It depends. If the train is faster then you have lower personnel hours. You can also fit many times more people on a train than a bus so you need fewer vehicles and drivers. For city transit, commuter trains are always cheaper per passenger than busses, assuming the train capacity is being well used.
I looked up the figures for tfl buses and underground, and buses are less expensive to run - in the last year they had almost identical operating costs but buses served a lot more passenger distance. (Former info on their budget, latter is here https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/travel-in-london-2024-trends-in-public-transport-demand-and-operational-performance-acc.pdf page 8)
I would expect long distance trains to have higher costs due to higher speeds causing higher wear and hence maintenance requirements, except for driver costs. But note that an intercity train also has a conductor and more station staff. Of course if you have a given rail network and can run the trains faster, you will save a lot on staff costs.
That's really interesting, I wouldn't have assumed that given the passenger counts on trains, the longer lifespan of the equipment, and the increased passenger/personnel ratio.
I guess train maintenance can be more expensive than bus maintenance, though bus engines require more complex maintenance as far as I know. I guess the capital costs of the vehicles and the rails maybe outweigh tee capital costs of the buses.
I would be interested to see a further breakdown. My guess is it's the track and associated equipment that makes the biggest difference but idk. Anyone who's been to London knows that there always delays due to "signal failure" so I'm guessing it's that...
I suppose for a fair comparison you need to count the contribution of buses to road wear but I have no idea how to do that properly
More direct route, compare a map of the Interstates to a map of just the rails and you'll see it pretty well, that's not even accounting for the non interstate highways and biways.
Imagine having a monopoly and only ever investing your profits into executive pay. Only investing in maintenance because the wheels will literally fall off and no preventative maintenance.
Decades of underinvestment.
It's great that they offer the service at all, but it's impossible to get reasonable service renting a freight rail line that goes the wrong way, while the freight company does everything they can to make Amtrak service worse to maximize shareholder value. Amtrak needs to own its own rails if we want trains to be faster than buses or flying.
Nice chart. Always good to note that you can’t possibly drive or take a train these distances for the price of flying. People complain about the level of service airlines offer and have some sort of nostalgic views regarding past air travel luxuries, but these are “cattle car” prices, so we get cattle car service.
considers
To be fair, one could get business class/first class service. Not worth it for me, but that'd improve the experience a bit.
Certainly would. But as you say, it has a price.