Ah, the quality of reddit conversation vs specialized forums

I linked in a previous post to an amtraktrains thread about car rental and amtrak. It had just a _hideously_ long, detailed list of specific, personal experiences doing this. A _lot_ of times people had to somehow get from the train station to the airport to rent a car. A _lot_. People who figure out how to rent cars after getting off a train and then return them before getting on the train make use of all kinds of other transportation AND build extra overnight(s) in to make it all work out.

Meanwhile, here’s the reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/comments/174qxdc/somebody_needs_to_incentivize_more_availability/

Someone suggests enterprise pickup / drop off, which is a major feature over on the amtraktrains thead, but completely fails to notice the limited hours problem OR the fact that Enterprise is wicked expensive compared to other rental car options (not that there are competitors in this environment, just expect some sticker shock).

Then people start showing up saying, well, there isn’t enough volume of passengers. True! And also, _probably related at this point_. As in, if you notice when planning a vacation that you are going to be standing on a platform at 10 pm with no way to get anywhere else, well, you won’t go on that vacation. You’ll fly instead. They go on to add, but most cities only have two trains a day (one going each direction), and then if you are Seattle maybe you have four. Uh, but Seattle has 6 Cascades and a Coast Starlight. At least. And the Empire Builder. King St Station also has the Sounder (and light rail connections, but I figured we’re just talking heavy rail here). Anyway. There are actually at this point numerous similar regional Amtrak trains with multiple trains per day (Hartford Line, Capitol Corridor, Downeaster, Empire Service, etc.). There are an absolutely astonishing number of trains that run through Albany-Rensselaer. This poster then goes on to assert that there’s no reason to go to state capitols in most cities and really do you even need a rental car. Honestly, I’m kinda starting to feel like this redditor is wired up a helluva lot like my sister, far more interested in blaming the victim than making the situation better for everyone. Or, honestly, anyone.

Another helpful respondent suggests bringing a bike. Many, many, many Amtrak trains do not allow you to bring a bike on, unless it is a folder, folded and in its case. I checked.

Someone else wants to incentivize TOD near Amtrak stations. I don’t really know how I feel about this other than that it seems kind of off topic.

I mean, _the good news_ here is that someone on Reddit created the original Cry in the Wilderness for Rental Car options associated with Amtrak. The responses were really depressing, since so many of them basically assume that if you go somewhere on a train, and you get off in a city, you have no intention of going anywhere other than that city. That’s fine, except when we get on planes, we don’t assume we’re going to do everything within walking / taxi / uberlyft / bus / public transportation distance of the airport. We assume we’re gonna get off that plane, rent a car and drive to do whatever the hell we flew all that fucking ways to do. If we didn’t fly that far, we would have driven. Trains have the chance to get the cars off the road for the annoyingly longer than we really want to drive distance, and potentially encroach on the shorter end of the flying distance (basically, trips less than 500 miles, say). But they are not going to get those planes out of the air if you wildly inconvenience the fliers. The vast majority of fliers drive around at home, and they drive around at their destination, and on at least one end of that, they need to rent (on the other hand, they need to park, probably, altho you might con them into uberlyft/carservice/public transportation).

ETA:

In a different Reddit thread on roughly this topic, someone noted that some of the few Amtrak stations with rental car counters are in Glacier. I noticed this also, and I agree with the commenter who said that probably is significant. I suspect that the rental car agencies used to have counters in train stations, but gave up on them because a bunch of people didn’t like the train station rate and did things to avoid it, and now everyone has to do those things to avoid the train station rate, and then hours and goddess only knows what all else.

OK, FINALLY! This is a group of kind people who are genuinely trying to figure this out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/comments/tww6l6/newbie_transportation_at_destination/

I loved every single comment on it when I read it. And it gives me a little hope — not a lot! Just a little — that if we get enough new people trying trains, especially long distance trains to weird little places around the country, we’ll get some meaningful pressure to fix some things.

This was probably my favorite: “ I had to deal with this at Savannah & Charleston (honestly, no clue what the planners were thinking with those stations; no transit conn, can’t walk to town safely even if you wanted). I took uber/lyft to/from my hotels (was able to get them at 4-5am).”

It’s this energy that we need a whole lot more of.

Warning: Still More Whining About Train Station Connectivity

First off, I’ve now read a ton of threads and the _expectation_ is that you go from the train station to the airport by cab if you want to rent a car, and you prefer Hertz because they will reimburse the cab fare (no idea if this is still true, but it really does seem to have been the case in the past at least) and Amtrak’s affiliated credit card has some Hertz related benefits as well.

Second, I noticed a zipcar at the Worcester train station on google maps. And then I noticed zipcars at some other train stations. Circa 2010, this existed and was an expanding program and may _still_ exist? This is _super_ unclear, but it may revive or may fall over and die in the future. It is essentially the organized, app version of the pick up the cars after hours solution to the problem — instead of hiding the key under the gas flap or whatever, you use your app.

I was pretty incensed by the idea that you should have to go into Back Back station in order to rent a car, however, apparently that car rental operation (Avis) is _in_ the garage next to the station. This is actually very close to both the Union Station DC solution, the general Brightline solution, the Schiphol solution, etc. Altho Schiphol actually has train stations, rental cars and airport all kinda stacked, which is ludicrously convenient and I love it so much altho it can be painful when crowded and even with the moving walkways it is a ways on foot with luggage to go from your gate to your car — and there are also pickup in the arrival/departure car lane services as well which work great, which is roughly comparable to Kyte, I believe, altho I never did actually use Kyte, I signed up and went through the process when I was planning a trip to DC Union Station that would arrive after the in garage rental car operation was closed.

I truly have run up against this problem multiple times, and so has everyone else, for decades.

None of this is helpful for those many Amtrak stations that are platforms in the middle of “nowhere”, whether that means “suburbs” or rural, but far from an airport and no rental car options and often these stations are served only once a day in the middle of the night. I understand that is reflective of decades of deregulated air travel in which everyone who could possibly fly did fly, leaving only the poor, the Amish, the railfans and similar on the long-distance trains. The ICCT article a few posts back confirms that other people are thinking about this from a climate perspective — which is what really got me going here — but it’s not clear from the ICCT article whether anyone at the policy level has figured out just how important it is to solve the rental car conundrum. There is an admirable degree of effort devoted to intermodal planes / trains, trains / trains, trains / bus. But the rental car gap is extensive and weird and clearly deterring people with resources (time and money) from taking the train. So today’s project is: find policy papers about train intermodal and look for references to rental cars.

Oh, and the Back Bay Station Avis closes hours before the Lake Shore Limited arrives. So.

I’m kind of tickled to have figured this out. First of all, this looks like one of the most straightforward to solve of all the intermodal issues, once you have wifi/cellular data at all train stations. Second, it’s a network problem! Absolutely the thing I love best about trains is the network problems. This is 100% my jam.

ETA: R. just compared Amtrak to the cheese shop sketch in Monty Python. He’s not wrong.

I am still _struck_ by how I’d worked out what needed to change to make long distance trains work for more people and come up with three items: sleeping accommodations, schedule and wifi. But no. No, the biggest fucking problem is lack of access to rental cars.

ETAYA:


https://www.amtrak.com/track-your-train.html

I had been wondering if Amtrak even knows where all of its trains were in real time and if they were willing to share that and YES, yes, they do know and they do share and so that makes it possible to set up some kind of “will probably arrive in n minutes so get up now and go over to the station to do the thing to help people along to their next destination” alert.

Papers, we have papers (warning: this is still about train stations and rental cars or lack thereof)

https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/america_on_the_go/long_distance_transportation_patterns/entire

Basically, this paper from 2011 confirms what we all know. Everyone gets _to_ the airport (or train station or whatever) in a private vehicle (their own or someone who is dropping them off or whatever) (not everyone, I know, but big majority). But on arrival, how you get from the airport varies. It’s still a lot of private vehicle (because they include rental car in that), but a mix of other things. _At no point do they look at what options are available_. I will note that people who leave a train station in a cab to go to the airport to rent a car will not show as left the train station in a private vehicle but may show up as left the airport in a private vehicle.

They asked the wrong questions. *sigh* Surprise.

R. tells a story of going to France (decades ago now), flying into Paris, renting a car, driving to the Loire Valley and then doing a bunch of day trips over the course of a week-ish with his dad, and finally returning to Paris (with very expensive tolls clearly trying to discourage driving into Paris). They did this, rather than take the train to the Loire Valley, because they could rent a car a the airport, and they couldn’t at the train station. So, you know, that’s four hours of driving each way that could have been avoided by having rental car at the train station.

It’s easy to second guess this and say, oh, but you could have. I don’t really know what the alternate rental car options were in the Loire Valley or points along the way or what the train schedule and plane schedule and so forth might have been. What I _can_ say is that there are absolutely people taking the train into Boston and NYC and other major cities, _renting a car there because you can_ and then driving right back out of the city. These are avoidable trips, if you could get off the train in a more compatible to your journey location, get your car there, and proceed. All these forum posts indicate this is a super common issue, and a lot of the policy papers are so hyper-focused on getting people _out of_ their private vehicles, that it doesn’t occur to them that making it nearly impossible to navigate from a train station to where you want to go and do the things you want to do without backtracking to the airport is actually the snarl preventing our future, less congested and less climate impacted world.

I ran into this kind of crazy-making calculation when looking at health care provision years ago. When you have preventative care paid for by one entity, primary care by others, and more complex care by others, it’s pretty easy for someone to “save” money while shunting massively increase cost onto other parts of the system. Operations like Medicare, VA and KaiserPermanente by being end-to-end operations can sometimes give us a glimpse into how that is happening. Similarly, if you try to make train systems some perfect mechanism where everyone arrives at the train station by walking, biking, or taking other public transportation, you may well succeed in that. But if you succeeded by having people take public transportation to the airport where they rented a car, rather than renting a car at the train station, how much of a win was that really? If you succeeded by people planning a train trip, realizing they’d be stuck at a train station with only bad choices, bailed on that in favor of a cheaper flight, you may never know that happened and your statistics will be beautiful but it is not a great outcome.

OK, I’ve been poking around at US, Washington State and Oregon policy papers on passenger rail. Rental cars are consistently categorized as “private vehicles”, and are strongly deprecated every step of the way, which, I _get_ and also, does not currently work in a way that routinely shunts people who want to make rail work back to air travel. I decided to look at a different level of advocacy instead.

https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/20-reasons-why-you-should-ditch-the-plane-and-ride-the-train

The _first_ argument here in favor of the train is: Avoid the Airport. Which, as we have seen, you can’t really do if you need to rent a car at your destination. But also this:

“The unpredictability and endless shenanigans encountered at the airport can be avoided altogether by taking the train. Train travel is far more predictable than flying, with fewer steps required from inception to completion, fewer encounters with people and protocols, and the freedom to bring along that life-giving bottle of water.”

You can avoid going through security when you go to the airport to rent a car, it is true. And yet, these two sentences feel exceptionally cruel.

The second argument is superior service:

“ On the train, the mood tends to be lighter and more laidback. The illusion of safety is not at the forefront, the dining car serves drinks, and the restroom is always open for business.”

No dining cars in a lot of trains. The point about the restroom is fair — no seatbelt sign on the train. I’m not sure what to say about the mood, other than to observe that a lot of that comes down to whether or not everyone showed up to work the car and shift you are riding on. Because if they didn’t the people who are there will be stressed, exactly as you would expect.

Third argument: “First class is attainable.” Well, it is on short-haul domestic flights too, and first class in a train means nothing on an overnight if you don’t get sleeping accommodations and those are more expensive than first class on the much shorter duration flight equivalent. Third argument is just a lie.

Better views, fewer fees, more leg room: all true. Less pre-travel time: true, but misleading.

“Less post travel time.” Again, cruel!

“Airports tend to be located far outside of a city, therefore additional transport is required to complete your journey. One huge perk of the train is that it stops right in the city center, cutting down, or eliminating the need for subsequent time and money to reach your final destination.”

I agree, if your goal is to go to a city and not drive around at all while on your trip, then a train to your city is better in terms of post-travel time. That’s a lot of ifs.

#11 is an absolute lie: “stay on schedule”. Weird paragraph backing it up, too.

A bunch of stuff about the restrooms being bigger, being able to walk around, less turbulence or at least you are still on the ground and similar. The stuff about train stations being better than airports, really? That’s a short list of train stations that can be said about.

Next!

National Transit Map and the General Transit Feed Specification Standard

I promise you nothing about rental cars here!

https://www.bts.gov/national-transit-map

You can get to the map here, read about it, and also learn about the General Transit Feed Specification Standard. The feds are _actually_ working on making it possible to interconnect systems for long distance travel. Up until today, I figured stuff like rome2rio, google maps, moovit and similar were the best we were ever going to see, but this suggests the future could be much better.

Also!

https://geodata.bts.gov/

The national transportation atlas database! I’m pretty sure that the national transit map is a visualization of data in the atlas database, but I’m new to all this so I could easily be wrong.