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APTA: most Americans would use high-speed trains
This survey is bogus and should be thrown out. For one thing the sample is way too small. There are some 350,000,000 people in the US and they sampled 1,000 people. I don’t think I can get my calculator to get a decimal that small but let’s see. Ok I was wrong that is a sample of .0000287. Hardly reliable I would think. The survey should also be disregarded becasue it was conducted by or for the very people that will benefit the most from high speed rail the APTA. You can get a survey to show anything you want. I could probably do one that would show that people don’t want high speed rail depending on how the questions are asked. What would the responses have been if they were told what the true costs in their tax dollars will be to support high speed rail?
Randomly chosen 1000 people is a good number for simple yes/no questions.
Tell them the fares that would be necessary. Then count up the answers.
The average national poll has a sample size of 1,000 adults. http://www.pollingreport.com/ncpp.htm
Interesting how the “arguments” against HSR and rail passenger service in general are getting increasingly marginal. As if pollsters, economists, city planners, transportation experts, basically everyone in the world except for the vocal minority were wrong on this issue. So go ahead, tell us how rail only works in Europe, and how climate change is a global hoax, and how human evolution is just silly… but be sure to speak up - your voice keeps getting quieter and quieter.
Obviuosly Mr. Hoffman you’re clueless because any one who thinks that what any 1,000 people think is representative of the other 349,000,000 can’t have too much going for him or her. And don’t get me going on the global warming hoax. Anyone still pushing that deadhorse is a snakeoil salesman. High speed rail can work in this country in the highly populated corridors but only if done by private industry not the government. Amtrak is a failure in most cases and that proves government ineptitude in transportation.
A more lotta haha…it begs the question: why all those folks head off to Europe for the first time and ride trains, nothing but trains, having never ridden trains in the USA, and upon return, ask this question: “why don’t we have trains like they do over there?”
The answer here in Wisconsin is that we have about $4 billion plus going in highway (haha upgrades) spending this year. Guess how much on rail.
I’m sorry, but you can’t use the 350,000,000 number to compare the amount of people too, you have to exclude teenagers and children down to infants as they wouldn’t be making their own decisions on what kind of transportation to take. That brings the number of people you could potentially survey down significantly. @Robert J Mcguire, apparently you don’t know how surveys work, they usually are just like the one APTA did, and they normally have a plus or minus factor of approximately 3% to cover any potential biases, when you do a phone survey you generate a random list of number across the entire USA, normally exceeding the number of respondents you want so that you exclude those underage(if they survey is directed at adults) or those that decline to participate…and yes/no questions would generate the same response regardless of how you ask then, they can only be asked so many ways. As for cost, I can guarantee you it would be less expensive to transport 400 - 500 people at a time between Point A and Point B via HSR then it would to transport roughly 200 between those same points in an aircraft, it’s called economy of scale.
The KEY sentence in this article includes " seems to show that most people in the U.S. would use high-speed rail if it were available ". WOW, what an awe inspiring, scientific survey, involving a whopping 1,005 people !
This article isn’t even worthy of publishing ! I personally would be embarrassed to publish it !!!
Anyone who thinks a thousand people is a small sample size needs to take a course in statics and read up on scientific polling. The Literary Digest poll in 1936 might be a good place to start. As Maine goes so goes Vermont.
I thought TRAINS was a pro rail site. Where’d all these anti-rail ideologues come from?
Sorry Bill but I am never surprised-bothered but not surprised-at the degree of negativity shown by a rather sizable segment of so called rail fans. They seem sizable but maybe it’s just because they tend to rant a lot. When it comes to passenger trains they hate Amtrak, dismiss high speed rail and don’t want government transportation funding of anything but roads. I suspect that most of them never ride any passenger trains. They only thing that might please them is if the private railroads somehow restarted the California Zephyr with the original equipment and ran it without any subsidy. Don’t know if they would actually ride it but they would flock to take photos.
1,000 is a perfectly reasonable sample size. Anyone who disagrees needs whatever high school mathematics diploma they received revoked, it’s basic, ordinary, statistics. That’s not to say the survey could be wrong, but if it is, it has nothing to do with the sample size.
And it’s also a commonsense result. HSR is a rival to the airlines, which are incredibly unpopular right now. People are crying out for change and for choices.
The evidence too is that the majority of Americans like passenger rail. They really do. That’s why politicians keep the non-NEC part of Amtrak humming along, despite ideological opposition from half of Congress. Amtrak, remember, has its origins in a political/business fraud, with railroads and the executive concocting a plan to take over the passenger train industry and then run the business into the ground so it could be discontinued without fanfare, and even this couldn’t kill passenger rail, public opposition made the “running into the ground” part politically untenable from the start.
It seems to be an article of faith amongst some that trains must be unpopular because numerous government -run passenger rail systems, in the US and abroad, aren’t profitable (which is the same thing, right?) and because after government policy forced people onto the roads from the 1940s on, there were fewer riders.
This is unreasonable thinking. Of course passenger trains will never be as used as back in the 19th Century where there were no real alternatives. But they’re still the only form of transportation ever to be invented that are safe, comfortable, and fast. Most people will always want them to be around, and most will use them when they can.
To me, the key sentence in this article begins “Millennials and younger adults…” Today’s young people are keen on denser, more walkable communities and automobile alternatives, including long-distance rail travel and local mass transit. They know what’s out there and they want it where they live, too. Another defense of sample size: put 300 million beads in a tank, 100 million each of red, yellow and blue (the “universe”). Mix thoroughly to make sure the colors are well distributed. Blindly draw out 1,000 beads (random selection). Result: you will have very close to 333 each of red, yellow and blue, within a few percentage points either way. 1,000 is a common sample size for national surveys, and perfectly valid - if done correctly.
To all the naysayers on this and other articles, I would say this. Railroading is a business, and like all successful businesses the must evolve. We are not going back to the days before the mega mergers, nor are todays railroads going to run there own passenger trains. They got rid to passenger trains because there was not return on the expenditures. Lets enjoy what we have today because even that will change.
Apparently 37% of the people surveyed realize that there will be a charge associated with a ticket on High Speed rail. Surveys that do not disclose the potential cost of a product or service are not reliable. If a ticket for California’s High Speed Rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles is $1.00 there will be many more riders than if that same ticket is $10,000.00. What isn’t answered in this survey is how many of the Millennials, younger adults and even geezers like me will use High Speed rail if tickets are say 200% of business class airline prices?
I might take rail at the higher price just for the knee room but I’m not going to get excited over a survey that doesn’t include hard numbers.
I bet the people that ran the survey also failed to mention that there will be seats to sit on in the train. It’s a wonder that so many people said they would ride a train without knowing whether or not they will be forced to stand up for their entire journey. And windows, oh my god, will there be windows? Will they charge extra for windows and seats?
As an interesting follow up, the results here are interesting:
“Nearly three-quarters of Americans (71%) support the reduction of government
regulations in order to allow the development of high-speed rail stations and
surrounding amenities, such as popular retail shops, walkable neighborhoods,
and unique dining experiences. Close to two in five respondents (36%) support
deregulation strongly, while 35% support the move somewhat.”
Who would generally be opposed to making it easier, legally, to create those things near a transit stop?
Well, I kinda know. Suburbanists (that is, people who advocate suburbs, as opposed to suburbanites, who are those who have to live in them) tend to strongly support the kinds of insane zoning that bans high density mixed use development near transit stops. To them, the existence of urban alternatives to suburbs is itself a moral wrong. And those same people tend to be anti-train on principle.
The question is a good one because it tells us how many people oppose passenger rail solely because, ideologically, they want to dictate how others live - that they want to force Americans to live in suburbs and be reliant upon (not simply able to use, but physically unable to live without) the car. The number could be as high as 29%, or nearly a third of the country.
Which is somewhat scary.
Please forward this article to the Sacramento Bee. Californians need to know that high speed rail is welcomed by such a large number in the rest of the country, even though opposition in this state has, and continues to, stall the line in California
A lot of negativity going on here. I’m not sold on any idea yet but I know throwing money down a bottomless pit of highways is not the only answer even though I profit handsomely from it. We are currently ripping out new concrete highway lanes that were just installed three years ago to straighten out some curves wasting millions yet no one seems to care one bit. I think it’s because politicians and the media says that highways are good and railroads are bad over & over. Believe what you want because the status quo works out for me quite well.