I am not suggesting and either/or situation, I am suggesting and “and” situation.
As someone who’s been driving 95 between Miami and NC for more than 2 decades, my experience is that much of it can be a shit show of traffic, and that includes the sparsely populated section through South Carolina.
Having solid direct HSR from the NE to South Florida could take a lot of traffic off of 95 and curtail the the never ending widening of the Interstate that supposedly fixes the ever growing traffic…even through the sparsely populated areas.
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I went to the bathroom there once a few years ago.
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I stopped by last year. The store was fun, the restaurant doesn’t sell Mexican food, and I got horrific food poisoning from the chicken sandwich. So… a mixed bag.
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HSR travel from the Northeast to Florida just isn’t practical. 4 or 5 hours, roughly 750 miles, is the outer limit before it’s no longer competitive with flying. As I mentioned, DC to Jacksonville just barely ekes in under that criteria, but going any further north or south and you’re out of HSR territory.
While New York to Orlando or Miami are both pretty big travel markets, high speed rail is just never going to capture much market share. Even given all the hassle of air travel, 8+ hours on a train just isn’t very appealing or practical.
I’m not saying it could never work, but HSR’s sweet spot is travel in the 200-300 mile range. Charlotte-Jacksonville is itself already well outside that range, at close to 400 miles. DC-Savannah, Charlotte-Orlando… those sound fairly promising, but they’re both over 600 miles, a range where HSR can work, but the advantage over air travel is significantly diminished.
Sorry to disappoint, but catching a high speed train from Raleigh to Florida is not likely to be possible any time soon.
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I am not thinking of myself here. By the time anything would actually be implemented I’ll either be in a nursing home or dead.
I guess that we will just continuously invest in our Interstate System in this corridor instead and keep widening it.
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I’m just saying we need to focus first on the routes where HSR is proven to excel, and that generally isn’t long distance travel like Northeast<->Florida.
The data shows that Northeast->NC->Atlanta, and Atlanta->Florida are more important than a direct Northeast->NC->Florida route, and I’m highly inclined to agree.
I do genuinely hope we reach the point where we’ve covered all the low-hanging fruit and are ready to pursue more marginal cases like Northeast->NC->Florida, but focusing on that now would be putting the cart before the horse IMO.
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When this person (me) talks about the 95 corridor it most definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the northeast having grown up in FL and making annual trips to NC.
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I can’t believe this destination is excluded from all the gravity models
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In aggregate, I have driven every mile of I95 between Connecticut and Miami. I haven’t done that trip end to end, but I’ve done long drives on both the north and south end. While the north end is terrible, dealing with all of the folks who do complete drives of nearly the entire length do contribute to horrible traffic (especially in South Carolina).
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Do people actually do that to say have have driven all of I-95? Like it’s the Appalachian Trail or something?
I doubt it. However, plenty of people do drive the length from the BosWash corridor, and even from Quebec and Ontario. Who do you think is staying in all those cheap hotels that seem to dot I95 in NC and SC? The two states are the halfway point on a two day drive.
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I love all of these routes, including the one you proposed. Southern Pines and Wilmington are both big vacation regions and I absolutely see the appeal. The main thing would be making sure those towns have adequate transit from their stations to the leisure areas.
Overall I love that NC is looking to connect Greenville, Winston, New Bern and Morehead City in the future. Winston is the fifth biggest city in the state and has a growing biotech sector. Morehead City, New Bern, and Greenville all punch above their weight in terms of potential passengers (two tourist towns and the 4th biggest university in the state, respectively).
This might be heresy but I would much prefer frequency, reliability, and options over blazing speed. There is also a network effect, the more destinations we make available, the more appealing it becomes to expand even further.
One final spur I’d like to add to your map would be Boone. App is the 5th largest university in NC and also a great vacation town. Winston-Wilkesboro (home to Merlefest) - Boone.
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A train to Boone would be neat but unfortunately it’s going to be a destination served by cars and buses period forever. There has never been a railroad that reached Boone from the east. The only one ever to exist, the ET&WNC (aka Tweetsie) came from the west, Elizabethton, TN. Terrain is too rugged to the east.
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Would be cool if it went all the way to Johnson City and Bristol though. One of the Corridor IDs that got funding was extending Amtrak down to Bristol.
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Can always count on you to throw cold water on my dreams haha. I actually do appreciate your realistic take on things. Good to have someone with actual knowledge in this conversation!
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More good news! Virginia and North Carolina are Home to the Busiest Amtrak Stations in the Southeast - Amtrak Media
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NC Amtrak ridership up 21% over last year
The big change is that a 5th Piedmont frequency was added in July 2023 meaning that we have gone from 5 to 6 daily round trips.
This is a 21% ridership increase resulting from a 20% service increase. This means that ridership per train has already gone up 5%, after less than a year for the new service to be absorbed.
It is actually even better if you look at service miles instead of round trips: this is 21% ridership increase comes from a 12% increase in revenue miles per day, accounting for the fact that the Carolinian is a longer route, providing a round trip on the 704 mile corridor from Charlotte to New York, instead of the 173 mile corridor from Charlotte to Raleigh.
The long-term pattern has been that after a couple years, doubling service triples ridership, so we would expect roughly a further 7.5% increase over the next year or so.
I have long said that we will need to get to the point where we are measuring service in terms of trains per hour instead of trains per day before ridership starts to become diluted on a corridor like the Piedmont. This press release just adds more evidence on top of the last 20 years of growing ridership.
The tracks are clear with a highball signal for NC By Train to proceed full throttle with continued service expansions.
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If they could split grades, double track, electrify, elevate all station platforms, and run 12 piedmont trains a day, we’d be cooking.
It would become a legit commuting option and I would ride it much more.
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Great news. I’m very happy to see the increase in ridership. I think this will continue and rise even more quickly when and if Charlotte ever gets its act together and builds a new downtown station.
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