In the US, 900 miles was just from
where I was in DC, north to
Pennsylvania, west to
Ohio, across Ohio to Indiana,
south to the town Fort Wayne in
NE Indiana, west to Warsaw, IN,
and then south 15 miles to the
farm of the family of my
girlfriend and, later, wife.
So, before we were married,
I drove the 900 miles often,
commonly mostly at 90+ MPH,
and after we were married
drove it usually at least once
a year, at Christmas.

When we went for Christmas, we
were carrying
way too much stuff to fly or take
a train! And when we got there, we
stayed for a few days and still wanted
our car to get around, to restaurants,
movies, friends, more shopping, etc.

In Europe, they think that a car engine
with 3.0 liters of displacement is
large. The engine I was using had
either 5.7 liters of displacement
or, in two cases,
6.5 liters of displacement.

US and Europe do some things in
different ways!

That part of Indiana is sparsely
populated. So, from the farm, the
nearest airport with much in
service is at Fort Wayne
about 50 miles away.

Let's see: The 6.5 liter car I used
most often had a 2.56 rear axle ratio
and at 90+ MPH got about 18 MPG.
Gas cost about $0.25 a gallon.
Then the cost of gas for the 900 miles was

900 * 0.25 / 18 = 12.50

dollars, $25 round trip. Heck
just the taxi fare from the
Fort Wayne airport to the
farm would have been about that.
To use a plane or train, round
trip, would have meant four long
taxi trips, total cost much more
than the gasoline for driving
my car.

For trains, actually at one time
the US had one heck of a rail network
with relatively good passenger service.
Mostly the rails are still in the ground.
Actually the little cross road town
three miles from the farm did have
a rail line and a station -- not
used by passengers, if at all,
in years. Sure, at one time
could have caught a train at that station
and, with
lots of transfers, gone to
Chicago, New York, San Francisco, etc.
Lots of transfers and then
waiting between trains.

In simple terms, in the US, by about 1955 or so,
cars put the passenger trains out of
business. The US still has one
heck of a good freight rail network.

While Indiana is sparsely populated,
keep going west to
Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota,
Wyoming, Montana, Idaho,
etc., and we're talking miles and miles
and miles of hardly
a person in sight.

In the US, there's density enough
for trains to have a shot
between, say, Richmond, VA north
to DC, Baltimore, Newark, NYC,
Greenwich, Stamford,
Hartford, and Boston. And we do
have such trains; spent a lot of money
on the trains; our VP Biden spent
a lot of time on those trains
between Baltimore and DC;
but those trains lose money.
And parallel to those tracks we
have airplanes -- maybe they
make money, but the TSA has
made airplanes a little less
comfortable than either an
unanesthetized root canal procedure or
a barbed wire enema.
"Open wide, look at the birdie,
and then grab your ankles and
back up to the officer ....
Have a pleasant trip."

"Next time it's my car;
even for 2000 miles."

In the US there
are lots of other efforts
to spend big bucks to have
trains across the Midwest,
north and south along the west
coast, e.g., LA to SF and maybe
up to Seattle, maybe
between Houston and Dallas in
TX, etc. Lots of efforts. For
decades.

For commuters to NYC, NY has
trains north to Poughkeepsie
and NE to Greenwich, Stamford,
Hartford, or some such.
At least the one to Poughkeepsie
has been losing money, and now
when register a car in that area
have to pay a special tax to
support the trains.

How do we pay for roads, bridges, etc. for cars?
We're supposed
to be covering that out of gasoline
taxes, which are not trivial.
The result is called the Highway Trust Fund;
it may have a stack of IOUs from
loans for other purposes.

I live 70 miles north of
the Wall Street area which is at the southern
tip of Manhattan in NYC
and for a while worked
in that area. I found that
except in the worst of the rush hour,
my car was, door to door, faster
than the trains. And I was not
using a high performance car.

Apparently the NYC subways work
well -- I can believe that.
But Baltimore put in a subway,
and while I was at Johns Hopkins University
there in Baltimore, once was in a lecture
that analyzed the welfare economics
of the Baltimore subway; welfare economics
is where
add up all the costs and all the
benefits and see for what projects
the total of the benefits
is greater than the total of the costs.
The lecture reported the totals of the
costs and the benefits,
and the costs were higher than
the benefits. So, from the
point of view of welfare economics,
the optimal decision, given
that the subway construction was
done, was just to brick up the
entrances and f'get about it.
Or, if there were some really
good benefits for that subway,
adding up the value of the
benefits still didn't have the
benefits exceed the costs.
That's what happened in that
case; just why I don't know.

Drawing from several decades of
recent history, broadly,
passenger trains don't work
very well in the US. There are
lots and lots and lots of
people who very much want
passenger trains to work well
here, but the golden age
of US passenger trains was
from, say, 1930 to 1955 or so.
E.g., there are several Hollywood
movies, North by Northwest,
The Sting, that show something about what
train travel was like then.
Basically in the US, the long distances,
low population density,
Interstate highway system
(Ike regarded as crucial for
military logistics for
US national security),
etc. shot the passenger trains
between the eyes. One biggie
reason: People already owned
a car, say, just to get to
the grocery store, the coin
laundry (people commonly
had cars before they had
washer/driers at home),
schools, friends, etc.

Another factor was that
trains had a bad
reputation because at one
time they were seen as
exploitative monopolies.
To push back, we got the
Interstate Commerce Commission
(ICC) with a lot of economic
regulation of the trains.
If a road needed a bridge over some
train tracks, then maybe the
train company was asked to pay for it.
The unions saw the train companies
as soft targets and, with the
help of Congress, took advantage.
So, by 1955 or so, many people
in the US regarded passenger trains
as something they would like never
to see again.

So, for the 900 miles to
Grandma's for Christmas,
with lots of luggage,
presents, camera equipment,
and on and on, and the
desire for a car when get there,
the cost was really just the
direct marginal operating cost, so I and
nearly everyone else with a car
took their car.
E.g., when I drove that 900 miles,
it was less than five miles from
my apartment to an Interstate highway,
and then I was on Interstate highways
or similar for all but the
last 15 miles where the
traffic was very light and the
roads fine.

Yes, people have thought of the
idea of having a car drive onto
a special car of a train and then let the
train do the driving while the
people sat in the car, listened
to the radio, now watched
a movie on a laptop with a DVD,
talked, etc. Didn't work --
not enough people came.

Since the 1950s, the US has
had a love affair with
cars.

Europe and the US
have some significant differences.

Actually, for shorter distances,
there are good intercity bus
lines in the US. Typically
can get to/from a smaller
city easier on bus than
train or plane.

As I recall, all of Germany
is smaller than just the
smaller US state of Oregon.

There are a lot of places in the
world where distances are
large and population density low;
we will see what they do about
passenger transportation --
Mongolia, Siberia, Alaska,
most of Africa, most of Canada,
most of South America,
much of South Asia around, say,
Afghanistan, etc.