I've taken multiple Amtrak routes, all out of the Northeast Corridor but eventually crossing the country West or South.
You don't take Amtrak because you want to get there fast, and you don't really take it because it's cheaper than flying. You take it because you can, and because it's more important to you to be (comparatively) comfortable instead of rushing from A to B. You take it because of the sights, the people, the chance encounters, the proximity to city centers that airplanes can never hope to match. It's an experience in and of itself that's distinctly foreign to many Americans, and one I wholeheartedly recommend.
Sitting in a roomette, crossing from Boston to LA over a long weekend, sharing delicious meals with total strangers as the countryside whizzed by (or we sat on a siding waiting on a freight train).
For what it's worth, I love trains, and the romance of them, but I ALSO love taking it from Oakland or Richmond to Sacramento and sipping a beer while I look through the window at all the poor saps stuck on I-80. I've had that drive take 4+ hours before on a Friday, especially when people are headed to Tahoe.
This is not really true, at least for the northeast corridor. Amtrak is the fastest way to get from DC to NYC for example due to traffic in the city if driving or taking the bus, and the distance from the airport (LGA or JFK) to the final destination in the city if you're flying. I take Amtrak somewhat begrudgingly because it often can be way more expensive than flights which are subsidized generally speaking over passenger rail these days, because it's simply faster.
And I honestly don't know what adventures people are talking about, most people keep to themselves. I've had more stranger experiences on flights than I have on Amtrak but maybe it's different in the West Coast.
Many many years ago I took the train from San Luis Obispo to Sacramento and enjoyed a meal in the dining car, with set times and seating assignments. It was a really interesting conversation with my randomly chosen tablemates. Sadly I don't think they do that anymore.
This only applies to sleeper car routes. You're on the traib for 2-3 days, mostly with no cell service. If you eat in the restaurant car, they will seat you with strangers. If you sit in the observation car, there's a bunch of other people sitting there too.
I spent the entire trip on the Acela Express first class (work was paying) from NYC to Boston talking to an absolutely fascinating man headed to his 60th MIT reunion.
I spent the entire trip (including a 4 hour delay where we didn’t move) in the cheap seats from Atlanta to New Orleans smelling the farts of someone with serious GI issues while a college kid walked up and down the aisle spraying axe body spray to drown out the smell.
Well, you can take it because it's cheaper than flying. Prices are comparable to the dirtiest, cheapiest dirt cheap flights with no checked baggage, carry-ons etc., but with more space, free wifi + (often) functional mobile data, better amenities, no TSA, and all the luggage you can carry. It's amazing being able to bring a whole guitar in a gig bag without having to worry about it at all.
The romance of it is wonderful too, but even from a purely practical standpoint the only real downsides are the slow speed and inconsistent arrival times.
Agree except for the meals. They are just OK. The experience of talking to other people on the train can be nice but the food itself is not “delicious”.
If you really like to have good food when you travel, the dining car wears thin quite quickly. I lament the lack of options for better food (I would happily pay more).
> The train is still longer, and time is money, we are taught. But certainty has value, too, even if it means at 11:29 p.m. departure.
Unfortunately this is misleading. Outside of the Northeast Acela corridor, there is no certainty in train travel in the U.S..
Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case. So a 14.5 hr train journey can easily be delayed by several hours.
So I took a consulting job in a small town in Illinois called Quincy. I couldn't fly there without connecting in St. Louis, but I could take the train from Chicago. It was billed at 6 hours.
It absolutely left on time but had to wait for three freight trains on the way. 9 hours later we got to the "station". One of the other passengers said that their previous trip was cancelled and Amtrak bought everyone bus tickets.
In the Midwest, there are no guarantees with trains other than you'll get there. Eventually.
I was looking at Tucson to Seattle trip on a relatively short notice - all sleeping tickets were sold out multiple weeks in advance. And due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat.
For fun, I just got prices for taking my family to Tucson from Portland, a trip we took last week by airplane. It was relatively expensive from what I'm used to for a trip between two cities on the same end of the country, about $2500 total. Nonstop, just under 3 hours flight time. Amtrak would be about half that for a coach ticket. But as you point out, a coach ticket for a 40-45 hour trip is impractical. So I picked a family room (when possible, which was not on every segment). $7000. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I could waste money on first class plane tickets and still pay less than half that.
Haha hours. There is no upper bound. The average Amtrak delay on Norfolk Southern is 19 minutes per 100 miles. And the worst cases are all horror stories. A freight operator sidetracks Amtrak while a miles-long coal train rolls through at a jogging pace. The coal train breaks down. The Amtrak crew can't legally operate any more because of federal time limits. You are 1000 miles from a city in the middle of nowhere and by the time they dispatch another crew to your train you've been surviving on Fritos for days.
It does not, but it has a sane scheduling agreement with the railroad which the railroad actually respects.
This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.
A lot of people here talking about the northeastern routes, but there's another good one that is kinda worth it: San Jose to Santa Barbara on the Coast Starlight, on account of SBA being very expensive to fly through. It's about 8 hours (driving is 5-6) and comparable in price to a bus (and it is probably beating gas right now, to be honest). And the tracks go by some of the prettiest coastline in the United States, usually around sunset too.
This also includes some images that aren't part of the netscape.com version... which is probably part of the point of it: "A view of America from the tracks" has some pictures of Amtrak stations and Virginia countryside.
I’ve taken this line - as many have and do all the time. Ride it once and you’ll realize why it’s the better way to travel in every way but cost and time - and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.
As the author states traveling by train just a more pleasant experience.
I should note that even though there is technically wifi on every Amtrak train, it’s cellular based. You’ll find that at least from atlanta to NY, the train somehow threads the needle between cellular ranges. Both your phone and of course the train will often be either out of range of fast cellular service or out of range altogether. Supposedly Amtrak is getting starlink but we’ll see. So, don’t expect to be getting on any video calls.
> and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.
What kind of funding are we looking at? Is the issue that this is cost-prohibitive for reasons of scale that make this non-competitive for businesses themselves to fund as compared to elsewhere?
Amtrak was created to preserve the last vestiges of passenger rail when private businesses pulled out. It has conflicting missions so it's never going to be competitive in service.
Amtrak does not own its own rail network. It has priority over cargo trains de jure but in practice cargo takes priority. Many areas only have one set of tracks and trains can only pull over onto sidings when they exist. Class 1 railroads are capital intensive so to be more profitable they don't spend any money they don't have to. Such as more sidings, more train yards, not maximizing the length of trains so they fit onto those sidings, or more than one operator per train. Class 1 railroads are focused on cargo and making money, not helping Amtrak trains go first. The government doesn't care to enforce the law either. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/tracking-productivity...
Amtrak operates routes that suffer from low demand instead of focusing on the New York Washington DC route. It's about counting US Senate votes as much as customer satisfaction or breaking even.
The Federal government heavily subsidized cars starting in the 1950s through the Interstate Highway System. Cars and airliners are considered critical passenger transportation infrastructure, trains are not.
The S-Line project is underway in NC and VA. It will rehabilitate an abandoned line (the former Seaboard Coast Line) to allow faster travel between Raleigh and Richmond. It won't be electrified but will allow trains to run at up to 110 mph/177 kph which is a big improvement over the current 60-70 mph (when the passenger train isn't being delayed by a freight train).
They are currently doing a couple of grade-separation bridge projects in north Raleigh and some minor curve straightening. Since the S-Line is not currently being used they can straighten many of the curves since there won't be any impact to existing operations.
The S-Line right of way is owned by CSX and they will be running freight on it. The budget wasn't there to acquire all of it by NCDOT and VA and dedicate it to passenger service.
I’m curious if a classic starlings antenna works at 100-300 km/h with occasional rotation, or will it need to be mounted on a targeting motor on top of the train?
Years ago I tried to book a train from San Francisco to Chicago as part of a trip I had planned but found it to be more expensive and, more significantly, a multi-day journey instead of a few hours. If you happen to be an American living near one of the useful passenger rail lines, and desire to go to one of the few destinations it can take you to quickly and affordably, more power to you. But most Americans live nowhere near a useful rail system.
I guess so. We took the girls when they were young to Omaha a few times from the Bay Area. I wasn't even sure passenger trains would be around when they were adults so wanted to give them that experience. I took a train between Kansas City and Chicago as a kid and found it magical.
So, yeah, the train ride was actually a significant part of the experience for those particular vacations.
Imagine if we had passenger rail like Asia does, it would be amazing. But sadly it's all a matter of political will, the US simply does not want to create such a rail system where we can take bullet trains from NYC to LA.
There is no world where bullet trains between NYC and LA would make any financial sense at all. The trains can't possibly go fast enough for passengers to be satisfied with the speed (even maglev isn't fast enough), and the cost of track construction and maintenance would never be paid for by ridership.
I live in Japan; bullet trains are great here, but the distances they cover are quite short by American standards. Extremely high ridership, with trains covering relatively short distances between extremely populated population centers (the Tokyo metro area has 38 million people for reference) means the trains operate at a profit. That could be done in America, maybe, but only between select cities that aren't too far apart, such as DC and NYC and Boston. Even here in Japan, no one is taking the shinkansen between far-apart cities in the north and south; they use inexpensive and faster domestic flights instead.
In China it's a matter of politics rather than financial sense, of unifying the country hence why they have them in ethnic minority areas too. The trains would be like roads, sure, most people wouldn't take them from one end to the other, A to Z, but there are enough people to take them from A to D, J to N, Q to T, so to speak. If one could commute in one hour from Boston to DC for example each way, daily without flying, it opens up more economic opportunities in total. But like PG said, the competition to an airline isn't a car or a plane, it's Zoom.
Yes, I can see how some people might think the same system would work in the US too, with a HSR network going from Boston to LA, with stops along the way in NYC, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, Denver, and maybe some smaller cities too.
But China has a much larger population than the US, by far, and an authoritarian government that has no problem using the "build it and they will come" business model for large infrastructure projects that may or may not work out as planned and no worry about opposition from local politicians, NIMBYs, etc. Don't forget, most of their population is concentrated on the east coast; the inland areas are relatively unpopulated. And they don't have a population that's been conditioned from birth, ever since the 1940s, to think that automobiles are the mode of transit that society should be based around.
So even if they did build an HSR network across the US, I don't think it would work out. How much travel is there between Denver and St Louis, really? A lot of the intra-US travel is really between places on opposite coasts, or on the same coast, because that's where the population is.
Delta has round trip flights from ATL->WAS for ~$800
TFA train round trip shows $306 without a private cabin.
TFA already mentioned the time differences.
The googs says it's 638miles doable in 9.5hours. Say an average of 20mpg at $4/gal (I have no idea what current rates are in that part of the country) needs 32gals for $128 one way or $256 to come back. Of course someone needs to drive it.
The train definitely looks like a decent deal for this route. I've priced train rides from my town, and prices look like plane routes but in days instead of hours. The train doesn't make sense all of the time, but I'm holding out hope I'll find a trip where it will make sense.
Like other commenters I was also confused at the "~$800" comment.
I tried this myself, picking a time a few weeks in the future (round trip April 15th to 22nd). Round trip as I'm assuming you'll want to go there and come home.
All of the following info is for ATL to Washington-Area airports (BWI, DCA, IAD). Amtrak is for Atlanta to Washington Union Station
Delta (20+ nonstop a day every 30min or so, ~2hrs flight time):
- ~$244->$304 Main
- ~$444->$504 Comfort+
- ~$769-$974 First
Amtrak (11:29PM->1:47PM, 14h18m):
- $356 Coach
- $1107 Private Room (Roomette)
I'm sure that a more accurate analysis would include a spread of days.
In general, this means that with the train you'd increase your travel time by ~26 hours round trip (over a whole day) while also paying ~$112 more.
(Note that the Amtrak website prices each leg independently while Delta prices round trip, I made sure to go all the way to the cart to gather the end pricing)
I was curious so I also did a trip much sooner (March 30th to April 6th):
Delta:
- $616-$665 Main
- $785-$800 Comfort Plus
- $1065 First (they were all priced the same)
Amtrak:
- $517 Main
- $1369 Private Room (Roomette)
So for a much sooner trip you do save ~$100 for the tradeoff of ~26 hours more time spent.
It's also worth noting that this route's travel occurs primarily at night, in the dark. This means both trying to sleep on a train as well as not being able to see much outside as it'll be dark most of the ride.
Based on the last long trip I did in the U.K. where I averaged 43 miles per US gallon (52mpg) I’m shocked how terrible efficiency is in the US. That’s real world highway driving in a 4 year old petrol
car.
I deliberately chose a low mpg value. Most people are driving SUVs what I assumed 20mpg would be safe. My car averages about 26mpg. I have no insight into how many kilometers per liter UK cars get, but the translated £/litre to $/gallon has always shocked me at the price paid on that side of the pond. If Americans had to to pay the same rate, we'd have better mpg ratings as well.
Among SUV drivers in the US the biggest segment is compact SUVs (think Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V). Then midsize (like Toyota Highlander or Hyundai Palisade), subcompact (Mazda CX-30, Hyundai Kona), then full sized (Chevy Tahoe, Ford Expedition).
RAV4 non-hybrid is around 35 mpg highway. CR-V 34 mpg highway.
In midsize, Highlander is 29 mpg highway, and Palisade is 25 mpg highway.
In subcompact CX-30 is 30-33 mpg highway depending on options. Kona is 29-34 mpg highway depending on options.
The full size category, which does get down to around 20 mpg, is only around 3-4% of SUVs in the US. Tahoe is 20 mpg highway. Expedition gets 23 mpg highway.
Great, but it's still 9.5 hours of time on the wheel. Train/plane eliminates that. So even if it is 1/3 cheaper in fuel, it's something that needs to be considered.
> RAV4 non-hybrid is around 35 mpg highway. CR-V 34 mpg highway.
....35mpg at 60mph and little traffic, maybe. I can't speak for that specific model, but most vehicles I've driven do significantly worse than advertised.
My Subaru Legacy advertised 27 City, 35 Highway, 30 Combined. In practice I average 25-26 while commuting and on extended highways drives more like 29, still on stock tires.
I don't know where you're coming with deliberately here as if that's something I chose. I'm not familiar with cars getting 43mpg in the US. Maybe some hybrid, but that's definitely not the norm on this side of the pond. Even when I had a Corolla, which was the highest rated car I've ever driven, did not get 43mpg.
Your "deliberate" sounds a lot like victim blaming here.
<shrug> it's what my look up specifically for this comment gave me using Delta's website. I tried booking for 3/30 - 4/02 roundtrip. I went with Delta as that was specifically called out in TFA. Deliberately limiting the variables. Besides, I'd be in a really desperate situation to choose Frontier.
I’m hoping it won’t be necessary but, if TSA is fundamentally broken with an international transfer through Dulles I will seriously consider taking the train from a union Station to Boston.
Honestly surprised how many TSA people are still working without pay. I wouldn’t in their shoes. Maybe if TSA just basically shutdown commercial aviation in the US it would lead to some progress.
I’m not sure historical precedent tells us a whole lot and Congress has now skipped Washington. It’s hard to say when this will be resolved. It could be a month or more.
The tone of the article, as well as some of the comments here, make me think of "City of New Orleans" (a song about the history and experience of American railways) instead of "Midnight Train to Georgia".
I rode the amtrak from NYC, to DC then finally to Atlanta. Beautiful all the way, but incredibly slow, and the train "station" at Atlanta is left to be desired to say the last.
I highly recommend everyone read “The Grass Frontier”. It provides a detailed account of the development of American suburbanization and its integration with the automobile industry. (and why cars > trains after that)
The United States is a very unique case—its capitalist development progressed faster than in other countries. Although many industries today are controlled by oligarchs and politicians and no longer serve the public interest, this history remains distinctive and worth remembering.
You don't take Amtrak because you want to get there fast, and you don't really take it because it's cheaper than flying. You take it because you can, and because it's more important to you to be (comparatively) comfortable instead of rushing from A to B. You take it because of the sights, the people, the chance encounters, the proximity to city centers that airplanes can never hope to match. It's an experience in and of itself that's distinctly foreign to many Americans, and one I wholeheartedly recommend.
Sitting in a roomette, crossing from Boston to LA over a long weekend, sharing delicious meals with total strangers as the countryside whizzed by (or we sat on a siding waiting on a freight train).
Just not comparable.
The only profitable routes are Boston to Washington DC.
Outside of that it's both better and worse. Sometimes you meet friendly people, sometimes your stuck next to folks with hygiene issues.
I've had way more chance encounters flying, went out with a girl once.
It's cool, but so underfunded that I don't think it'll ever catch up to say Japan. An 18 hour highspeed NYC to LA train would be amazing.
I think I did Chicago to NYC once. Afterwards my thought was , cool I did it, I don't need to experience that again.
And I honestly don't know what adventures people are talking about, most people keep to themselves. I've had more stranger experiences on flights than I have on Amtrak but maybe it's different in the West Coast.
I spent the entire trip (including a 4 hour delay where we didn’t move) in the cheap seats from Atlanta to New Orleans smelling the farts of someone with serious GI issues while a college kid walked up and down the aisle spraying axe body spray to drown out the smell.
The romance of it is wonderful too, but even from a purely practical standpoint the only real downsides are the slow speed and inconsistent arrival times.
If you really like to have good food when you travel, the dining car wears thin quite quickly. I lament the lack of options for better food (I would happily pay more).
Unfortunately this is misleading. Outside of the Northeast Acela corridor, there is no certainty in train travel in the U.S..
Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case. So a 14.5 hr train journey can easily be delayed by several hours.
It absolutely left on time but had to wait for three freight trains on the way. 9 hours later we got to the "station". One of the other passengers said that their previous trip was cancelled and Amtrak bought everyone bus tickets.
In the Midwest, there are no guarantees with trains other than you'll get there. Eventually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgottonia
It can easily be delayed a lot longer than that. The last time I took Amtrak I was delayed over 24 hours.
I was looking at Tucson to Seattle trip on a relatively short notice - all sleeping tickets were sold out multiple weeks in advance. And due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat.
This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.
This also includes some images that aren't part of the netscape.com version... which is probably part of the point of it: "A view of America from the tracks" has some pictures of Amtrak stations and Virginia countryside.
(and for some nostalgia- City of New Orleans by Steve Goodman https://youtu.be/fhHxNMyw0dI )
As the author states traveling by train just a more pleasant experience.
I should note that even though there is technically wifi on every Amtrak train, it’s cellular based. You’ll find that at least from atlanta to NY, the train somehow threads the needle between cellular ranges. Both your phone and of course the train will often be either out of range of fast cellular service or out of range altogether. Supposedly Amtrak is getting starlink but we’ll see. So, don’t expect to be getting on any video calls.
What kind of funding are we looking at? Is the issue that this is cost-prohibitive for reasons of scale that make this non-competitive for businesses themselves to fund as compared to elsewhere?
Amtrak does not own its own rail network. It has priority over cargo trains de jure but in practice cargo takes priority. Many areas only have one set of tracks and trains can only pull over onto sidings when they exist. Class 1 railroads are capital intensive so to be more profitable they don't spend any money they don't have to. Such as more sidings, more train yards, not maximizing the length of trains so they fit onto those sidings, or more than one operator per train. Class 1 railroads are focused on cargo and making money, not helping Amtrak trains go first. The government doesn't care to enforce the law either. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/tracking-productivity...
Amtrak operates routes that suffer from low demand instead of focusing on the New York Washington DC route. It's about counting US Senate votes as much as customer satisfaction or breaking even.
The Federal government heavily subsidized cars starting in the 1950s through the Interstate Highway System. Cars and airliners are considered critical passenger transportation infrastructure, trains are not.
They are currently doing a couple of grade-separation bridge projects in north Raleigh and some minor curve straightening. Since the S-Line is not currently being used they can straighten many of the curves since there won't be any impact to existing operations.
The S-Line right of way is owned by CSX and they will be running freight on it. The budget wasn't there to acquire all of it by NCDOT and VA and dedicate it to passenger service.
https://www.ncdot.gov/divisions/rail/s-line-projects/raleigh...
https://vapassengerrailauthority.org/projects/richmond2ralei...
So, yeah, the train ride was actually a significant part of the experience for those particular vacations.
Just by way of comparison, in China the 819-mile train route between Beijing and Shanghai takes 4.5 hours.
I live in Japan; bullet trains are great here, but the distances they cover are quite short by American standards. Extremely high ridership, with trains covering relatively short distances between extremely populated population centers (the Tokyo metro area has 38 million people for reference) means the trains operate at a profit. That could be done in America, maybe, but only between select cities that aren't too far apart, such as DC and NYC and Boston. Even here in Japan, no one is taking the shinkansen between far-apart cities in the north and south; they use inexpensive and faster domestic flights instead.
But China has a much larger population than the US, by far, and an authoritarian government that has no problem using the "build it and they will come" business model for large infrastructure projects that may or may not work out as planned and no worry about opposition from local politicians, NIMBYs, etc. Don't forget, most of their population is concentrated on the east coast; the inland areas are relatively unpopulated. And they don't have a population that's been conditioned from birth, ever since the 1940s, to think that automobiles are the mode of transit that society should be based around.
So even if they did build an HSR network across the US, I don't think it would work out. How much travel is there between Denver and St Louis, really? A lot of the intra-US travel is really between places on opposite coasts, or on the same coast, because that's where the population is.
TFA train round trip shows $306 without a private cabin.
TFA already mentioned the time differences.
The googs says it's 638miles doable in 9.5hours. Say an average of 20mpg at $4/gal (I have no idea what current rates are in that part of the country) needs 32gals for $128 one way or $256 to come back. Of course someone needs to drive it.
The train definitely looks like a decent deal for this route. I've priced train rides from my town, and prices look like plane routes but in days instead of hours. The train doesn't make sense all of the time, but I'm holding out hope I'll find a trip where it will make sense.
I tried this myself, picking a time a few weeks in the future (round trip April 15th to 22nd). Round trip as I'm assuming you'll want to go there and come home.
All of the following info is for ATL to Washington-Area airports (BWI, DCA, IAD). Amtrak is for Atlanta to Washington Union Station
Delta (20+ nonstop a day every 30min or so, ~2hrs flight time):
- ~$244->$304 Main
- ~$444->$504 Comfort+
- ~$769-$974 First
Amtrak (11:29PM->1:47PM, 14h18m):
- $356 Coach
- $1107 Private Room (Roomette)
I'm sure that a more accurate analysis would include a spread of days.
In general, this means that with the train you'd increase your travel time by ~26 hours round trip (over a whole day) while also paying ~$112 more.
(Note that the Amtrak website prices each leg independently while Delta prices round trip, I made sure to go all the way to the cart to gather the end pricing)
I was curious so I also did a trip much sooner (March 30th to April 6th):
Delta:
- $616-$665 Main
- $785-$800 Comfort Plus
- $1065 First (they were all priced the same)
Amtrak:
- $517 Main
- $1369 Private Room (Roomette)
So for a much sooner trip you do save ~$100 for the tradeoff of ~26 hours more time spent.
It's also worth noting that this route's travel occurs primarily at night, in the dark. This means both trying to sleep on a train as well as not being able to see much outside as it'll be dark most of the ride.
Among SUV drivers in the US the biggest segment is compact SUVs (think Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V). Then midsize (like Toyota Highlander or Hyundai Palisade), subcompact (Mazda CX-30, Hyundai Kona), then full sized (Chevy Tahoe, Ford Expedition).
RAV4 non-hybrid is around 35 mpg highway. CR-V 34 mpg highway.
In midsize, Highlander is 29 mpg highway, and Palisade is 25 mpg highway.
In subcompact CX-30 is 30-33 mpg highway depending on options. Kona is 29-34 mpg highway depending on options.
The full size category, which does get down to around 20 mpg, is only around 3-4% of SUVs in the US. Tahoe is 20 mpg highway. Expedition gets 23 mpg highway.
Not to mention wear on the car.
....35mpg at 60mph and little traffic, maybe. I can't speak for that specific model, but most vehicles I've driven do significantly worse than advertised.
My Subaru Legacy advertised 27 City, 35 Highway, 30 Combined. In practice I average 25-26 while commuting and on extended highways drives more like 29, still on stock tires.
I’m not sure why I’d deliberately burn more fuel regardless of the price. Literally setting fire to cash for nothing.
That would be $120 for your trip to Georgia, about the same price as in the US despite fuel being $7.30 a gallon equivalent in the uk.
Your "deliberate" sounds a lot like victim blaming here.
Honestly surprised how many TSA people are still working without pay. I wouldn’t in their shoes. Maybe if TSA just basically shutdown commercial aviation in the US it would lead to some progress.
To be clear Sherman burned it to the ground which is why it got renamed Atlanta.
The United States is a very unique case—its capitalist development progressed faster than in other countries. Although many industries today are controlled by oligarchs and politicians and no longer serve the public interest, this history remains distinctive and worth remembering.
I miss when the web looked like this, and pages were documents instead of applications.
We built the wrong web, we needed two, one for documents, and one for applications, but we built this rube goldberg contraption instead.
more info here: https://hackaday.com/2026/01/27/zombie-netscape-wont-die/