Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
The level of train service between Tokyo and Osaka is likely higher, but obviously the level of interaction is much lower. Japanese don't drive or fly or bus as much, they take the train.
The frequency of New York-London flights is much higher than the frequency of London-Manchester flights. That doesn't mean that New York has more interaction with London than London does with Manchester, it simply means that other forms of travel are largely impossible for NY-London, and England, domestically, doesn't have many flights.
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The Tokaido Shinkansen isn’t shuffling around air; it’s pre-pandemic ridership was
40% higher than the MTA LIRR which is the largest commuter network in North America. That isn’t to say that all of the urban areas along the Tokaido Shinkansen are part of some massive metropolitan area, commuter shed or major labour market, but there certainly is a very high level of interaction.
Before the pandemic, the peak-hour service was a train every 12 minutes between Manchester and London, the equivalent capacity of 10 x A330neo’s per hour. HS2 will deliver the equivalent additional capacity of 11 x A330neo’s per hour with a journey time of 67mins.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
There are flights from NY to Philadelphia (there shouldn't be, but that's another topic), but they are just meant for connecting passengers. It would be pretty stupid to buy a plane ticket from NYC to Philadelphia. As I said above, there's probably a bus leaving New York for Philadelphia an average of every 10 minutes.
There's Megabus, Flixbus, Ourbus, Greyhound, Peter Pan, and various independent operators (the "Chinatown bus"). I struggle to imagine two major cities in the world that are easier to travel between than New York and Philadelphia.
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Where are these coaches every 10mins? Looking at your own links (plus further research), there are just
six services (2 Greyhound, 1 Chinatown, 1 Flixbus, 1 Megabus + 1 Peter Pan) that arrive in New York from Philadelphia in the 3-hour period of 0600-0900. A 30-minute frequency isn’t exactly great especially considering the lower capacity provided by coaches.
Out of interest, over the same time period, there are five coaches that run from Birmingham (2 Flixbus, 2 National Express + 1 Megabus) arriving in London between 0600-0900.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
There probably aren't two cities with this level of intercity bus service anywhere in the world. The PABT is the busiest bus terminal on earth, and Philly is the #2 U.S. city for intercity bus volumes.
But I don't see why any of this is relevant. Modal share differences across countries aren't particularly relevant to relative interactivity. The U.S. obviously has much lower rail share than Japan, that's all.
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I suspect that there are probably quite a few emerging economies which have higher frequencies/volumes when it comes to intercity bus/coach services, mainly down to the absence of or low quality intercity rail infrastructure.
Coaches – whilst a low-cost mode – are typically slower and provide far less capacity than modern rail setups. As noted above, there are just six coach services arriving in New York over a 3-hour period (0600-0900); that would probably equate to the capacity of a single Acela trainset, or half that of a class 390/1 trainset (which run between Birmingham and London), or a quarter of the future HS2 rolling stock.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
This is dumb. You're comparing Amtrak, which is not even 10% of the Penn Station ridership. The NY area has something like 20x the commuter rail numbers of SoCal. The NY-Trenton NJ Transit line has higher ridership than all the commuter rail lines in California, combined. In normal, non-pandemic times, that route alone has over 100 bilevel trains daily, and up to 12 cars in length. Obviously Acela and Septa would add significant numbers too.
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SEPTA’s Trenton Line and NJT’s Northeast Corridor Line aren't through running, but by far the biggest issue is the atrocious average transfer time at Trenton of 17mins. The services might as well terminate another town away with such poor coordination.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
There is no reliable data on how many people travel between NYC and Philadelphia on a daily basis because it is next to impossible to track. There isn't even any good source that counts the number of seats traveling between the two cities on a daily basis. The number of buses running daily between the two cities is well into the 100s. Using Amtrak or NJ Transit + SEPTA, there are around 50 or 60 trains per day between NYC and Philadelphia. At a minimum you're talking about 25,000 - 30,000 seats on bus or rail transit between Philadelphia and New York on a daily basis.
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London to Birmingham pre-pandemic was circa >50,000 seats. HS2 is going to add another 60,000, combined with WCML capacity relief and CML upgrades, the London to Birmingham capacity will probably be north of 120,000 seats by the end of the decade. As noted by others, there are plenty of other intercity corridors with higher capacity than that between Philadelphia and New York.