Awesome.

If there is any doubt "Build it, they will come", I present the following...

Cool! Where's the picture from. I'm guessing CalTrain Baby Bullet...

Prejudice against buses exists in many other places too. Our own dear Maggie effectively said that if you were still using the bus in your thirties (?) you had failed. Trains are different.. anyone can use those. Trams get lumped with trains, so those are ok too.

One major problem with trains is that you need to be able to get from the station to your ultimate destination. That works best if you can rely on transport when you get there. The more you roll back or impoverish the network, the worse it works until you reach a thresh hold where it becomes too bad. The Beeching report in the UK would have done this, but was foiled (to an extent).

Incidentally, does anyone else find it amusing that the last 2 major government papers on overhauling the railways in the UK were written by an oil man and by the former CEO of British Airways?

It is a shame.

We recently got back from a trip to St. Louis to visit my inlaws. We flew. I thought it would be interesting to look at the options

4 passengers.

Fly(southwest) $900, travel time 2.5 hours
Drive $400, travel time 13 hours
Train $1400, travel time 24 hours
Bus $600, travel time 19 hours

Train would be cool with kids, but no thanks.

-D

Shame.

It is a shame.

We recently got back from a trip to St. Louis to visit my inlaws. We flew. I thought it would be interesting to look at the options

4 passengers.

Fly(southwest) $900, travel time 2.5 hours
Drive $400, travel time 13 hours
Train $1400, travel time 24 hours
Bus $600, travel time 19 hours

Train would be cool with kids, but no thanks.

-D

Shame.
Unfortunately they don't go very many places anymore... I have lucked up and my home and jobsite happen to be on a good run. If I had to go a hundred miles further west I would be screwed. Currently the train is 30 minutes faster, costs half as much as fuel for the trip and is working.

I have had my fill of flying unless it is for anything over about 8 hours of driving. And I gave up on buses after the defacto merger of Trailways and Greyhound. There schedules just plain suck! I can bike most places faster.

Aaron:)

I'm sure this is true where you live, but the situation is just the opposite here. Buses are new and clean. Most are hybrids that use ultra-low sulfur diesel, so they're quiet and odor-free. Behavior codes are strictly enforced and the drivers are friendly and service-oriented.

Nevertheless, buses here have a bad reputation that's totally undeserved. People don't like buses just because they're buses--even if they've never actually ridden on a bus to know what it is like. They're low status, only for those who don't have cars and probably "don't deserve cars." I think this is due in part to billions of dollars of automobile advertising over the last hundred years. Bus companies don't have the ad budget to compete with cars, so they'll always be viewed as second class transportation.

As one (car-free) friend of mine puts it... "Buses are what the poor people take downtown to pick up their welfare checks. Light rail is what middle-class people take to their jobs" (note - he's being sarcastic). He's right, though... much of the prejudice against buses is inherently classist, if not racist. Light rail is seen as "better" through classist eyes than those run-down buses full of undesirables. But here in Minnesota, even light rail is seen as some sort of descent into Heck by the suburbanites. We have to fight tooth and nail for light rail funding, much less buses.

Someday, though, the invisible hand of the market will come along and slap some sense into America.