That's the average for the entire country.

Read the figures in the brochure. I think a lot of people don't realize all of the separate expenses that should be counted as part of automobile ownership.

Not true at all.

It's easiest to show you on any maps program: 37.788672, -122.393561 and 34.054912, -118.234603.

I once took a cab to the Tokyo airport. Never again.

Europe isn't all apartment buildings. Many people have lawns, roads, and good trains.

If I am going to blame anyone, it's going to be whoever encouraged the general public to have more than two children per couple. Which in our case might be the Old Testament. Not those Native Americans you're talking about.

Finance charges means interest on debt. Most people buy automobiles on credit. You either get artificially low interest from an auto company, which means you paid too much for the car and the interest is hidden, or you get it from a credit union, a bank, or one of those non-bank debtors. It's a significant amount.

The rate of depreciation is connected with the resale price of the automobile rather than its service life. That is the book value of the property - what you would get for it if you sold it. You might keep it for 24 years and drive it 250K miles, but most of its resale value is gone long before then, and thus the depreciation schedule should be relatively short.

This illustrates a problem. Most people don't fully apprehend what their real costs are concerning something like an automobile. Most people are bored by accounting, after all. They would not, without a long walk through numbers and principles, make a well informed decision about something like rail vs. car.

Western Europeans have quite high incomes and have built good fast trains. Eastern Europeans have lower incomes and correspondingly worse trains. Building those good trains was just one of the infrastructure costs of developing a good income for Western Europeans.

I think you're buying into a fiction of poor people paying for upper middle class people's trains. Upper middle class people and the businesses around them pay for their trains with their taxes. They also, to a great extent, pay for pulling Eastern Europe out of the muck.

Yes, the geodesic from Milan Malpensa to Cairo is mostly over water. But that isn't so for SF-NY.

The study you cited didn't include purchase cost!

$2500 is way low. I don't think that would even cover insurance for many drivers.

I generally use the AAA's research when filing my taxes. They say $8698/year. Their Your Driving Costs brochure is useful, and here's their press release discussing vehicle cost for 2015.

The studies you cited really say one thing: The U.S. has a lot more poor people than those other places. The Atlantic is very clear on that, income inequality is much more severe here.

That doesn't particularly say anything meaningful about rail vs. automobiles. Just that they still have a middle-class, and we increasingly do not.

Why wouldn't SF to NY be a non-stop? Sure, there will be things that aren't, but the main places you fly aircraft non-stop through today can as easily support nonstop rail. There are several dozens of SF-NY nonstop flights every day.

Well, our freight railroad is the best in a way. Japanese freight lines use electric traction cars. Each car has its own motor, not just brakes, no diesel locomotives. 100% containers onboard. And they have high-speed freight trains for their equivalent of FedEx, etc. OK, it's a small country, but our system looks very backward next to that. But it is bigger.

You will have to figure out how long the blocks are (taking a diversion into how railroads work here) and the stopping distance to determine how close they can actually space trains. 10 minutes could be pushing it. BART has never achieved its design goals on train spacing.

that means 1,000 passengers per hour, every hour, every day.

Piece of cake.

I could just have you count cars on I-5 to prove that one.

BART runs 65 trains at commute time. That is at least 13,000 people per hour, just for a piece of the SF Bay area. Just counting two commutes, it's more than you are talking about.