United, Southwest and Delta have announced they will be reducing flights amid continuing government shutdown
United, Southwest and Delta airlines began cancelling flights for Friday in compliance with the Federal Aviation Administration’s directive that will see reductions in flights at 40 major airports from Friday to help address air traffic controller shortage safety concerns as a result of the government shutdown.
The Associated Press published the list after airline regulators identified “high-volume markets” where the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says air traffic must be reduced by 4% by 6am ET on Friday, a move that would force airlines to cancel thousands of flights and create a cascade of scheduling issues and delays at some of the nation’s largest airports. The FAA is also imposing restrictions on space launches but not imposing any cuts on international flights.
How the fuck is a train slower than a bus over that distance?
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.
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.
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.
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.