Urban Cartography

why cheap airlines are so cheap: a breakdown of costs

talk about adaptation! I love this picture. the retractable awnings are terrific. can anyone tell me where this is, or who took the photo?

courtesy of the New York Times.

burning fuel: car vs. human, from Good magazine

This was difficult for me to write, as I am an enormous booster of alternative modes of transportation and rail especially. It's especially painful because so many other Amtrak lines are so successful - the San Diego / LA Surfliner, for example, and over a dozen well-used regular lines on the eastern seaboard. Even some of the tourist trains, such as those along the California coast and throughout the southwest, offer better value and are more pleasant to use, but after yet another disappointment with the Capitol Corridor - this one a 5-hour train delay without explanation by station staff, who after enough customer asked actually closed their windows and refused to take additional questions - it was time to write this:

I have ridden California's Capitol Corridor line well over 200 times, beginning the month it began regular operations in 1991. Even though I had a car, I continued to use it until the last few years. I've finally stopped riding the train, because Amtrak California (the state-supported subsidiary / joint organization that operates the line, which is fully supported by public dollars) has gone so far out of their way to make it difficult, expensive and generally impossible to use that I couldn't justify the expense or unpleasantness any longer.

The monumentally anti-consumer stance held by Amtrak California is seen, quite easily, in its staff: in 17 years of regular ridership, I have never, not a single time, seen a station agent smile. Never, no matter how much I encouraged a friendly response, has an agent been friendly with me, even when I was the only person in line - a very frequent occurrence. The agents are unhappy, and that unhappiness, unfortunately, tinges the entire riding experience from there onwards. The train conductors do their best to be friendly, kind, and accommodating, but even they cannot erase the unpleasantness that begins at the station. But the unpleasantness can actually start well before your trip: just try to get a price quote for a specific ticket via email - Amtrak staff will not do it. They simply refuse: you'll be told to check online, when the various websites are often down and inaccurate; at a station, which may be miles away; or on the phone, which might cost you quite a bit of time as you wait on interminable hold. I'm serious: in a 7-email back-and-forth, the email contact refused every single time to give me a price quote for a single scheduled train, no matter how I asked. Certainly getting accurate information to the consumer is not a high priority for the organization. And don't expect a telephone operator, when you finally get through, to know about any of the special discounts or promotions that are occasionally offered - you'll be lucky if you even get the correct price that day, although of course even if it is correct that day it might not be on another day, or the rate might jump between your phone call and your departure date.

So many other things make the ride an unpleasant experience. Certainly it's not economical; the current 91-mile round trip from Berkeley to Sacramento, which takes an advertised 1 hour and 30 minutes but which actually averaged 2 hours and 5 minutes in my most recent 8 round trips, costs $22 each way (a $44 roundtrip - there is no discount for the round-trip fare, as such discounts were eliminated close to a decade ago). Yes, that's roughly double the per mile cost of most east coast Amtrak trains, and roughly 3.5x the per-mile cost of most German trains, which enjoy a substantially larger ridership. And it's just less than triple the cost of trains in Korea, which have the most helpful, multi-lingual staff I've ever encountered on any rail line I've ever traveled. $44 is also quite a bit more than a Hummer, even, would rack up in gasoline cost on a similar route. And despite the incredibly high relative cost of this train, it still relies on far more public money than other Amtrak lines. The mediocre food - wilted greens, stale bread, hard cheese and cookies, chemical-tasting ice and a wide array of packaged junk food - is merely icing on the cake, and pales in comparison to other problems; I suppose riders should be thankful that there's a single staffperson serving the barely-edible junk, and that they even have the freedom to wait in a 30-minute line for a tuna salad sandwich.

One would expect that accessible and affordable parking would be one of the most important things Amtrak would want to make available at its stations, in order to lure people into leaving their cars behind and taking the train - after all, that overpriced ticket might just be worth it if it included parking, right? Well, sure, I'd expect the same thing - and I was very, very wrong. Not only is parking outrageously expensive at the Sacramento station, the city's "pay-by-space" plan is more expensive at this lot than ANY OTHER PUBLICLY-ADMINISTERED PARKING LOT IN SACRAMENTO COUNTY. But that's because it's downtown, right, and would be otherwise abused by the federal courthouse immediately next door. That makes sense. In which case you'd expect Amtrak to offer discounts for customers. Which they do (although on last week's 2 visits, in preparation for this article, local staff were unaware of the discounts offered by Amtrak).

Parking Discounts for Passengers

The City of Sacramento offers parking discounts for Capitol Corridor passengers. Discounted parking options are listed below, however, restrictions may apply to some options.

Park All-Day for only $4

The Commuter Special is available Monday through Friday at the Old Sacramento Parking Facility, located at 200 I Street (between 2nd and 3rd). Passengers must be "IN" by 7:30 AM and "OUT" after 5:30 PM. The rate is $4.00 all day.

Now, if you're a commuter - and you can be absolutely sure you are going to leave before 7:30 and you won't get sick or come home early for any other reason - this might work for you. But if you're taking Amtrak to the Bay Area to visit friends or see museums, you're out of luck - you probably won't match those hours exactly, and besides they are only available on weekdays. And what if you had to stay overnight, or couldn't make it back? Most train station parking lots in Germany, Poland, France, England, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Italy, Japan, Korea, China and Morocco - the only countries I could get reliable data for - don't charge for parking at all - they consider it (and rightly so) the best way to get people to use the trains over their automobiles. Germany has "express lots" that are closer in and have better security, and England's inner-city stations - the few with parking lots at all - do charge. But both countries allow riders to check, online or via their cell phone, how much time they have left on the meter and pay more should they not be able to get back in time to avoid a ticket. The fantastically high daily cost at Sacramento's lot - which will certainly include a ticket and impound fee should you decide to stay in the Bay Area overnight - doesn't even cover security; I sat in my car for 1.5 hours waiting for a friend (who was on the typically-delayed Saturday morning train from Oakland) recently in the front parking lot and never saw a single security officer or Amtrak employee deign to even peek into the main parking lot. So, to sum up, your round trip to the bay area, for a single person, with 2 days of parking at the lot, will run you well over $600, because as of last weekend the option to pay for multiple days at the lot machines was unavailable: your car will be towed, and you'll need to pay a lot more to get it out of hock. Finally: many other Amtrak parking lots US-wide do offer free parking, and those that don't offer special deals for the weekend for folks using the train for a weekend in the city, etc. - but that's when Amtrak runs the show; the City of Sacramento, of course, has no interest in anything outside of Sacramento, and therefore no impetus to help Amtrak be successful in this regard, and it shows through their deliberate attempts to make Capitol Corridor riding unattractive.

In the end, for a single person, it might be very, very slightly easier and more cost-effective to take a train between, to use my earlier example, Sacramento and the East Bay. But if you are traveling with family members or friends, you'd save yourself plenty of aggravation - even sitting in traffic isn't as bad as dealing with Amtrak's unfriendly and generally anti-customer staff - by taking a car instead. Until Amtrak makes it cost-effective to be green, this particular route will remain underused. Speaking of underused: the last time I saw a Capitol Corridor passenger car anywhere near full was a Friday evening during the school year, with several hundred UC Davis students - most who do not own cars and who are thus forced to use this mode of transit - on their way to the Bay Area and San Jose to spend the weekend with their families. From what I have heard from regular riders today, those Friday evenings - and Sunday afternoons when the students return - remain the only time the trains are effectively full.

a nice visualization of BART routes by frequency / use and transit connectivity

a plan for public transit development in the san francisco bay area

The Second Rail Revolution, for The Independent newspaper

Another excellent Paul Horn map/infographic for the San Diego Union-Tribune; made with data from SANDAG and typeset with Fontbureau Interstate, the typeface used for highway signs.

comparing the US military's ground transport vehicles, from the New York Times