Agreed - I used to take NY to Baltimore a few times a month. Typically I had a few co workers with me. So let’s do the math: if we shared a car and left at 8:30, we’d spend .. what $30 in tolls round trip? Another $50 in gas..one of us would drive and the other two could take calls or work on their computer. If we took Amtrak, we’d have to add an extra half hour to get the station and park, each one of us would spend $150 in round trip tickets, another $20 each in parking, etc and we’d be shushed the whole way down so calls were out and half the time the internet didn’t work. If it’s just one person going alone, I can see the case because you can actually focus on work... but ironically the more people in your party the worse the benefit of rail gets.
I've done the NYC to DC train numerous times. Penn Station (no parking, take the subway), hop onto the Acela, grab a 4 top. Now me and my coworkers can chat on the way to DC and work on our laptops with shoddy WiFi. There's no shushing unless you are in the quiet car, which you shouldn't do if you are expecting to have a working commute. This is much better than a car - can't work on your laptop unless you enjoy motion sickness. Or taking a flight - now you have real costs of time because of security and commute. Big fan of Amtrak in the NE corridor. Better than driving or flying for business trips.
There is more productivity by having four coworkers sit together on a train and travel together than to have people in a car. Psychologically it’s easier for most to work on a train then a car, even if it’s a perfectly fine medium for you. Those time and financial costs are minimal when compared to the productivity you create by working together uninterrupted on the train.
If I were a manager I would ban driving and insist on trains (if the work would benefit from the added collaboration)
This has been my frustration in Ontario trying to use VIA for family trips. Once you have two adults and a couple kids, the train is significantly more expensive than just driving, and only faster than the absolute worst case traffic conditions.
It's even worse for long-haul. I have family along the Canadian route (Toronto -> Vancouver), and taking the overnight sleeper train out there is about 4x the cost of flying.
Yeah long haul on Amtrak also has this annoying feature where connecting trains are often 1 day apart because the connecting train left an hour before the arriving train gets there. And forget about the cost. I’m about to fly to the west coast on frontier for $75/RT... go price that on Amtrak.. I’m guessing $400-$600 ... and easily 4-5 days of travel. We’ve also looked into NY to Orlando because you can bring your car... you might as well buy a car down there! I get the romance of rail travel - I’ve done Chicago to Minneapolis and LA to Santa Barbara.. it’s beautiful. But wildly impractical.
Well and in some ways the branding for it even leans into that, with promotions more akin to what you'd expect from a cruise line than from a transportation company.
I mean, maybe that's just the obvious path given what they're working with in terms of cost structure, but it's still annoying.
