I read something that said these tickets will be mad expensive (not even sure if it includes the non-bullet train leg). It was projected $400 round trip per person and it’s way cheaper to fly to Vegas from L.A. than that. You also have to get to Union Station, then take that to Rancho Cucamonga, which then puts you on the bullet train to Vegas from my understanding. That’s a lot of logistics for the kind of cost they’re presenting to take it. I think a lot of Hollywood types were thinking of working in Vegas and living in L.A. or vice versa, but I think those price will put a big halt on that idea. At those prices, it’s destined to fail. We’ll see if their minds change on pricing when it becomes reality.
It’s difficult to believe that after spending years building the service they’re then going to price themselves out of business.
Nah, people will pay. The traffic back to LA is soul crushing.
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That was the number the Brightline CEO gave. Maybe he had an aneurysm and meant $40 round trip per person.
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So excited for the right to amplify this as a clear sign of senility while hand waving away cofefe shtase of America word salads.
Yeah but once you get old/sane/not-poor enough to stop driving to Vegas from LA, why would you spend $400 on a train when you could spend $150 or less on a plane ticket?
Because people like the feel of being on top of wheels and pointing and laughing at the poors who have to drive to spend their hundreds in 7 hour traffic, when the bullet train from end to end probably got them there in 4. Beat that planeairs.
That’s pretty much in line with Japan’s bullet train fees.
For reference, it’s about $150 round trip for the two-hour trip from where I live to Tokyo. But I’m opting for this every time over a cheaper flight due to the convenience.
And from Tokyo Station to Kyoto Station, also about two hours, the fee is about $90 one way at current exchange rates (about 13,000 yen each way).
This is exactly how it works everywhere else and it’s fine. Metro to train to metro and you’re there.
If you’re talking about a culture shift and the current lack of decent metros, sure, I agree. Everyone in America is so conditioned to default to cars that metro to train to metro probably does seem like a hassle. As a country we need to make it safer, cheaper, and as little of a hassle as possible. I don’t like our odds but I dream of a day when the major hubs are reliably connected by train and people default to that rather than default to cars.
I did SD to LA last week. Trolley to train to metro, then back again. My fiancée dropped off and picked me up at the trolley stop, a 10 minute drive from my house. In LA I was talking to someone who made the exact same trip via car and never even considered the train. My total trip was 3 hours each way, hers was 2.5 hours each way thanks to a tiny bit of traffic. It’s easily worth the extra hour round trip to not deal with driving, yet so many people never think about it as an option.
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I try to use public transit when viable. I have gone from Fredericksburg VA via the VRE and then linked up to Amtrak all the way to Atlantic City. Of course the last time I did that route there was an earthquake that stranded me in Philly But there’s no reason there shouldn’t be high speed rail between most major metro areas. Chicago to Detroit would be great also IMO.
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Taking the trains between cities in Europe and then flying between cities in North America is painful. The real reason that the US doesn’t have good rail travel is that Americans thing CARS = MASCULINE FREEDOM and TRAINS = FEMININE SOCIALISM. It’s purely ignorant cultural preference.
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Not true, it’s just that nobody walks in L.A.
“Nobody walks” is a manifestation of car addiction / car dependency. It’s a cultural choice, it’s not like people in NYC are born with legs and people in LA aren’t, so people in LA don’t walk.
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It’s obviously a total abomination not to have real high speed rail from DC up the northeast corridor to Boston, and from San Diego up to Seattle, but for most of the rest of America the country is just too damn big.
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Yes, that’s generally true. You don’t need to build passenger rail between cities that people don’t have a lot of motivation to travel between.
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Right, I don’t think anyone is asking for HSR between, like, LA and Chicago or something. There are plenty of city clusters that could benefit from it, though. West coast, east coast, southeast, Texas, maybe some Midwest like Chicago / STL / KC or something. There’s a proposal to add decent rail between Colorado cities iirc.
And they don’t all have to be true high speed. We took the train from Chicago to STL a couple years ago and it was perfectly fine, just a little slow. Speed it up and change the culture and ta-da.
You just dated yourself by not knowing that reference
That’s an SSC level take if there ever was one.
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It’s also a manifestation of LA being like 1000 square miles where NY is like 10 sq miles or whatever.