Thoughts on a week-long train trip to Baltimore
I took the Amtrak for the first time on a week-long trip from Raleigh to Baltimore. The trip, to my wife’s sisters’ house, was an opportunity for my wife to work with a change of scenery. Because she was working, we didn’t have a lot of events, and mostly stayed at home. But we did move around the city using various means of transportation. And on that matter, I have a few Thoughts.
The Amtrak
I’ve lived in downtown Raleigh — less than a mile from Raleigh Union Station — for about two years. I’ve also been living car-free during that time. But somehow, I had never stepped foot inside the train station until this trip. I was very impressed with the building. It was enormous, had ample seating, and it really felt like a train station. We left in the morning when it was busy, and they treated it a bit like an airport — not letting you onto the platform until your train was called. I learned later that this restriction does not exist in the afternoon when it’s less busy (and I doubt they strictly enforce this anyway).
Riding the train was great. The seats were spacious, there was room to stand and stretch and store luggage. I compared the trip to other means of travel — driving and flying — in a few categories.
Time:
The train is a bit slower than driving. The trip was estimated to take 7.5 hours and ended up taking about 8 hours. Depending on traffic, you could make the trip by car in 5 to 6 hours. Compared to flying, I do think it’s important to factor in more than just the flight time. Flying requires us to arrive at the airport hours ahead of departure, and the process of getting to and from the airport often adds another hour or so. Even so, the train will take the longest time.
Price:
Train tickets are expensive in the US. I bought a ticket from Venice to Munich — roughly the same distance as Raleigh to Baltimore, but between countries! — a couple years ago for $30. The tickets to Baltimore were $61. You can likely find cheaper plane tickets. Compared to driving, the train may appear more expensive due to how cheap gas is. But when you factor in car maintenance, the picture changes. Estimates can vary but we’ll use $.13/mile.
333 miles * (2.90 $/gal / 33 mi/gal + .13 $/mi) = $72.56
The train is cheaper!
Comfort and entertainment:
This is the category where the train excels. The seats are spacious, but what I found most important was the ease with which you could stand and walk up and down the train cars. Frequent stretch breaks meant I still felt fresh by the end of the journey. In a car, you cannot ever stand up unless you stop. In a plane, you are restricted to your seat for a large portion of the journey. When you can stand, the space is tight and turbulent.
Entertainment is like what you have on an airplane: you bring books and a laptop or tablet to watch TV and movies. But on the train, the seats have 120 V outlets, and the wifi is free!
Compared to a car, there’s no competition. If you’re driving, all you can do is halfheartedly listen to a podcast or audiobook. As the passenger, you could potentially distract yourself with something, but you should really be keeping the driver company, so you’re tasked with coming up with endless topics of conversation.
The train may take eight hours, but it won’t be an empty eight hours.
The Metro
In Baltimore we rode the metro a few times to get to cafés. I had looked up the fare system beforehand so I would be acquainted and not stressed when dealing with an unfamiliar transit system. I downloaded the app, the CharmPass, and used it to buy day-pass tickets on my phone, which appear with a QR code.
When we get to the metro, we’re confronted with turnstiles that have a slot for a paper ticket and an RFID fob of some kind. I show my phone to the attendant, who, without looking, hands me two paper tickets. I shrug and use the tickets to get through the turnstile. When I look at it, it says, “Valid for 90 minutes,” so we can use it for transfers. Except we got on at 8am, and the ticket was printed at 6am. Okay…
At our destination, it appears you need to use your ticket again to leave. But one of the turnstiles is just open, so we go through that one. Okay…
While we’re at the café, I ask on reddit if anyone can tell me how to properly use the CharmPass app. The only response: show your phone to the attendant. The app is marketed in every station, saying “Go Faster.” But I have to show it to a person to use it? Okay…
On the way back, around noon, we don’t see an attendant, so I bring up the ticket on my phone and hold it up to the RFID. There is a loud and angry beep. We try our tickets from that morning and somehow it works. Okay…
At our destination, I try my ticket and get a no-go beep. I look pleadingly at the attendant, and he points to a stack of paper tickets sitting in a tray. I grab one and it works. Okay…
Baltimore, why don’t you just go fare free? Are you getting any revenue from ticket sales?
Owings Mills Metro Centre
My wife’s sisters live in Owings Mills, which is a suburb about 30 miles north of downtown Baltimore. Google Maps shows a train going from near Penn Station in downtown to near their house in Owings Mills. Despite this, my wife’s sister wanted to pick us up by car anyway. Okay, no big deal.
The next day, we want to go into town to work at a café. The metro station is a mile from their house, about a 20-minute walk. We don’t have the car, so we walk.
This was one of the least comfortable walks I have ever taken. Despite the fact that there is a huge metro station in the suburbs to take people into town, the city not only built the surrounding infrastructure with only cars in mind, but they also seem to have gone to lengths to actively make the experience awful for anyone on foot.
Slip lanes abound in Baltimore. For those unfamiliar, a slip lane allows cars to maintain speed while turning right through a traffic light. So not only are cars going faster, they are looking to the left — away from their direction of travel — to check for traffic. Slip lanes are very unsafe for pedestrians.
The crosswalks have raised curbs at odd angles, forcing you to take circuitous routes to avoid stepping up and down. I cannot imagine anyone with mobility issues using these crosswalks. The intersection above also lacks any pedestrian signals. So you just go, and if the light changes while you’re crossing, you hope the people in cars looking at their phones look up before they gun it.
The sidewalk runs directly adjacent to a five-lane, 45 mph highway. Having cars fly past you at that speed is not pleasant, to say the least. The only thing the curb is going to do if a car strays off the road is launch it up into our heads.
When you finally reach the Metro Centre, you find a half-way attractive hub, with restaurants, housing, and even a library sharing the same space. There is also a massive parking deck between the entrance road and the entrance to the metro. If we hadn’t already dropped off my wife’s sister here, I honestly don’t know how we would have found it. There is no signage directing anyone to the entrance. Bizarre.
On one hand, I’m impressed by the Metro Centre. There is a big suburb outside the city that has a big metro hub servicing it with regular trains into the city. Raleigh has nothing like this. Even the big parking deck makes sense to me — you can live in the suburbs, but still only drive a mile and then commute to work by train. If you live in the hub, you potentially have everything you need within walking distance.
On the other hand, the lack of infrastructure for anyone outside of a car is mind-boggling. I cannot wrap my head around the decisions that lead to this. The five-lane highway for example, which has two travel lanes in each direction and a center turning lane.
Can a DOT genius explain the purpose of this center turn lane to me? The road literally looks like this for its entire length until you reach an intersection, at which point a dedicated left-turn lane appears. There’s also the sidewalk on the right side of the road, which just terminates into some trees before ever reaching an intersection. Why even build it? It serves literally no function. This road is in dire, dire need of a diet. Rebuilding the infrastructure around the Owings Mills Metro Centre could entice people to walk or cycle more, which would get them out of their cars and would be the only real solution to congestion on this road.
Driving
Despite my distaste for it, we necessarily did a fair bit of driving during our trip. In one of my favorite ironies, we drove ourselves to places to walk or run. Owings Mills has some nice wilderness trails. But even though they were only a few miles away, we had to drive on humongous, oversized roads to get to them.
My favorite road was a four-lane highway that ran adjacent to two elementary schools. Yes, you read that correctly. What was especially funny about this road was the audacity of the speed limit signs to say “30 MPH.” As if any driver would be compelled to go that slow on this road.
What’s even more incredible, as I just discovered from Google Street View, is that this is a recent addition to this road. Check out these two views 10 yards apart.
Google Maps even captured the very bulldozer that destroyed this place.
I drove at the posted speed limit down this road, but I can assure you no one else did. This road was built for speed. It’s clear that this was the priority of the traffic engineers who designed it, and that safety was nowhere on the priority list.
Once on the trail, I felt a sense of awe and gratitude that these places had been preserved. But it also raised the question: what hadn’t been preserved? The huge roads must have run straight through more of this tranquil wilderness.
I am left to wonder how much longer the wilderness can hold out.
Miscellaneous
Getting out of a car is really hard to do. You’re kind of sunken down and low to the ground, and you can’t stand up inside the car, so you have to haul yourself up and out at the same time. And the doors are small and oddly shaped. If there’s a car parked next to you, you have to be really careful not to smack it with your door. When we all drove to a restaurant, after I got out, I looked back and saw every other person still in the car, looking at their phones. I don’t think it’s because they’re damn millennials, but because getting out of a car is so hard and nobody wants to do it. Compare the experience to a bus or train. You sit up high, upright; you’re not strapped in, there’s nothing obstructing you from standing, and there are usually handles to help pull yourself up. The door is large and rectangular — human sized and shaped.
Trains offer lots of interesting views outside the window. Like this mural for train passengers to look at in Richmond.
Or this part of the rail which goes right down the main street of Ashland, Virginia.
The train also lacked the security measures I’m so accustomed to at the airport. There was no metal detector, no bag scanner, no checkpoints of any kind. As far as I could tell, the only security measure was a sign that promised “random searches.”
This has really given me a lot to think about. The Carolinian train can carry 331 passengers. A Boeing 737 carries just 189. If a terrorist wanted to inflict damage, it seems like they would be better off targeting a train. A plane can be flown into a building, but that has only happened once in US history.
Why then are plane passengers subjected to such rigid security measures, while trains are nearly devoid of them? One starts to suspect that the entire experience at the airport is just theater. The strict security makes one feel unsafe, while simultaneously making one feel like the government is doing something to protect them. Unfortunately, as Jeff Speck writes in his book Walkable City Rules, “a built environment that loudly proclaims the expectation of attack is in itself a form of terrorism, inciting fear, uncertainty, and suspicion of one’s fellow man.” These measures “are best understood as artifacts of a complicit terror-industrial complex that profits by keeping us scared.”
I wondered why the other train passengers had chosen the train over the more common modes of flying or driving. For me, it was mainly an effort to reduce my carbon footprint and have a new experience. For others, I would guess the reasons are more simple: fear of flying, lack of access to the airport (which can only be reached by car in the early morning and late evening), or perhaps they simply cannot deal with the stress of going through airport security. I’ll be flying to Yellowstone in a month, and I am certainly not looking forward to the airport experience.
I am looking forward to more Amtrak journeys. There’s a few things you have to be willing to put up with, like the long travel time and lack of destination options. But I’ll gladly trade that to avoid the stress of traffic or the airport.
