Car-free West Coast: the Coast Starlight, the YARTS bus, a 53% on-time record
Last year, over 375,000 people rode Amtrak’s premier West Coast train, drawn by the promise of train-to-trail travel. But thanks to freight traffic, barely half of them actually arrived on time. Hey, I'm Salt. I'm Grace. So, I have this very specific fantasy of doing a West Coast park trip entirely by train.
You know, you step off a sleeper car, walk to a shuttle, and you're just in the woods. Is that a real thing you can do, or is it just a transit map pipe dream? It's sort of a mix of both. The long-distance rail part is— well, it's definitely having a moment. According to Amtrak's fiscal year 2025 report, which came out last November, they hit a systemwide record of 34.
5 million riders. Wow. And the Coast Starlight — that's the scenic route running from Seattle down to Los Angeles — saw its ridership jump 4. 8 percent to 375,571 passengers. People clearly want the experience.
Okay, but you mentioned in the open that half of them are late. How does that happen on a fixed track? It comes down to who owns the rails. A Federal Railroad Administration report updated in June 2025 looked at customer on-time performance, and for the Coast Starlight, it hovered at just 53 percent. You're kidding.
I wish I was. The primary cause is freight train interference. By law, passenger trains are supposed to get priority, but in reality, they get stuck on sidings while these, um, these two-mile-long freight trains just crawl past. They move at their own pace, and local dispatchers tend to favor the freight. Which kind of kills the romance if you're sweating a bus connection.
But Grace, if you do arrive on time, how are you actually getting from a rail station into a national park? In a few places, it works beautifully. Yosemite is the best example of this. During their summer 2026 season, running from May 22nd through September 30th, you can use a regional network called YARTS. What is YARTS?
It stands for Yosemite Area Regional Transportation System. You literally step off the Amtrak train at the Merced station and board a YARTS bus that drives you straight into the park, dropping you at the Yosemite Valley Lodge or Curry Village. You don't even have to fight for parking. Right. It bridges that last mile.
You see a similar effort up in Washington, where local buses and ferries connect Seattle travelers to the Olympic Peninsula without anyone needing to rent a car. You can take a Clallam Transit bus all the way up to Hurricane Ridge. So where does the fantasy fall apart? Mostly when you try to reach deep wilderness. Redwoods National Park is notoriously tough.
If you want to— when you look at the map for Fern Canyon, public transit will get you to a highway stop miles away, but you still need a vehicle to navigate the unpaved access roads. Because there just isn't a bus stop near the trees. Yeah. And even when transit gets you into a park, the internal infrastructure can change overnight. Just last month, in July 2026, the National Park Service announced they're suspending all boat tours at Crater Lake.
Wait — what? They're doing a major rehabilitation of the Cleetwood Cove Trail. Is that the only way down to the water? It is. The trail drops 700 feet from the rim down to the lake shore, and because they have to bring in heavy equipment and stabilize the rock face, they just closed the whole thing down.
So for the entire 2026 and 2027 seasons, the aquatic side of Crater Lake is off limits. Which means if you're traveling car-free, you can't just pivot and drive to a different trailhead or a neighboring state park. You're stuck with whatever is right in front of you. That lack of flexibility is a big barrier, and it hits some demographics much harder than others. Back in 2021, Keunhyun Park led a transit equity study out of the University of British Columbia.
What did they look at? They evaluated how public transit connects to natural areas across 15 western US cities. Park's team mapped out the actual routes people have to take. It's not just distance, it's it's the sheer number of transfers required. Let me guess.
The researchers found that lower-income and minority communities face the longest, most difficult transit trips just to reach wilderness spaces. Because urban planning hasn't prioritized rural bus lines? Exactly. City transit networks stop at the municipal border, and rural counties run on incredibly tight budgets. So you end up with these mismatched schedules where a county bus might drop you at a trailhead at noon, but the the only return trip left at eleven in the morning.
That can't be right. I know, but it happens. The federal agencies, local counties, and state transit boards operate independently. Building unified corridors between them takes a level of political coordination we just don't have yet. As the West Coast tries to balance ecological preservation with accessibility, it really leaves you wondering if true wilderness can ever be democratic without the private automobile.
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