Name: Are Americans Ready to Love Trains Again?
Uploaded: 2020-03-08T00:32:26.000Z
Duration: 11 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I get this warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feeling,

where it's just a hassle to get anywhere by train,

For the most part, the only passenger trains are Amtrak.

That's the case that it's been for almost 50 years now.

stretching from Washington, D.C. to Boston,

less than 10% of trips each year are taken by train.

So it might be surprising to learn that this guy,

the Milwaukee Bucks basketball franchise,

I think people lack imagination a little bit sometimes,

I think it'll be a question of, you know,

So how did trains get such a bad rap in America?

Just over a hundred years ago, train travel was really

But as two major technological innovations came online,

passenger rail's competitiveness dropped significantly.

with a massive amount of highway construction.

The other major technological innovation,

by the federal government, and as a result,

the number of riders on passenger trains started to plummet.

And so, the railroad companies, they were losing

all sorts of money on their passenger lines,

so they wanted to dump them, so they basically convinced

the federal government in 1971 to create Amtrak

and basically take over intercity passenger rail.

Amtrak actually runs a fairly popular, reliable service.

where Amtrak doesn't even own its own tracks,

frequent delays are the norm, and ticket sales are dismal.

But of course, it doesn't have to be this way.

taking an intercity train is as natural as it is

for Americans to hop into their own cars.

There's a dramatic and large-scale public investment

in rail in East Asia and Western and Central Europe.

That's just not an investment we've made here in the U.S.

So we just have significantly less service on offer.

But in some ways, you could see that as a glass half-full,

and there's a tremendous amount of opportunity there.

The question is, how can we build more of it,

and where is that service gonna work best?

Brightline announcing it's just a few weeks

and they started testing the tracks today.

by Gilded Age railroad magnate Henry Flagler,

a new grand rail experiment is taking place,

intercity passenger rail service in America

It's the brainchild of this guy, Wes Edens,

head of private equity firm Fortress Investment Group.

How do you help convince a culture that isn't really

interested in the train as transportation

to become interested in trains as transportation?

Not only is it the time and the efficiency of it,

it's a very, very pleasurable experience.

It's a proven commodity around the world.

It's only the United States in the industrialized world

that doesn't have it, but I think that's gonna change soon.

running modern Siemens-built passenger trains

between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach

at speeds at up to around 70 miles per hour,

By 2022, the route will be extended up to Orlando,

on newly-built tracks that will allow the trains

The entire 250-mile route will take around three hours,

falling into an important passenger rail sweet spot.

It's too short to fly but too long to drive.

then rail service doesn't really make much sense.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Are Americans Ready to Love Trains Again?

potential

stretch

infrastructure

sense