Vote for me, and I'll bring it to you, along with Universal Healthcare, the collapse of Western Civilization, and the end of the Capital Orders of their Capitalist conspiracy by 2030.
Cut the Capitals at the Head, as it was said.
Bring a valid episteme.
Have you looked at how hard is been to get HS2 built in the UK, and how much of it has been cancelled? 😏 China builds high speed rail, but France and Japan etc. got theirs started years ago, and even France has trouble now. And the US would have so many more miles of land to buy up...
There are limits to how much you can upgrade (often neglected) freight infrastructure for high speed passenger trains, but the other big problem is spare capacity and priority, which is what kills current Amtrak service (and why most countries have dedicated HSR lines if they can build them).
That is if it ends up being cheaper. I read the fare for the las Vegas route would be similar to the flight and end up being the same duration of travel with all the boarding delay for air
True, but even if it's neither less-expensive nor faster, the experience is ten times better.
Well, assuming the who've made air travel utterly awful don't do the same with trains.
I assume what would happen is that a Democratic administration would fund construction, and then a subsequent Republican administration would privatize the system so corporations could f*ck everything up.
The train should have energy efficiency advantages also. Train could potentially pre-board cars and pick up and drop off whole cars in minutes so the whole train isn’t delayed substantially by boarding at each station.
Is that really necessary, though? The bullet trains in Japan stop at each station for about 60 seconds. Unlike a plane, there’s no need to have people seated and belted while the train is moving.
That's fair. They'd announce arrival with time to allow folks to queue up for the doors. I've never ridden a bullet train, but I assume the (acc/dec)eleration is designed to be fairly smooth and gentle.
A big advantage over planes is that there’s two doors per car, so at most intermediate stops each one has only 5-10 people waiting to get on/off.
At the major stops, they do wait longer, but even then just for a couple of minutes.
Oh, that's really interesting! Feels like it's extensible out to things like 'cars with wheel problems' or 'malfunctioning engines', &c.. Racing pit-style replacements when called for.
There could be more lines, for sure, but better than what we've got. Like right now my best option for getting to kew gardens from crown heights is the lirr
ngl part of me died as an adolescent watching the city just erase any semblance of its presence in the downtown area. i dont remember a lot of my childhood, but i remember being incredibly saddened by that.
I remember sprinting after a N'awlans street car when I was visiting my brother and had gotten super sick with some kind of flu or strep throat or something back in the late 1990's. It was the last one headed back to his little shotgun house for the night and it would have been a long walk w/o it.
You can leave Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas off the network: they'll be uninhabitable long before the railway network could recover the cost of building stations there. (Same probably goes for Florida, too.)
Northbound: Evacuees
Southbound: MAGA crowd moving to their new Trump Shorefront Estate properties. (Not knowing the "estates" are on the wet side of the shorefront.)
Imagining that Florida loop, I picture the intercity train in World of Warcraft where you go underwater and check out the cool sea monsters through the steampunk Chunnel.
I would travel so much more, to way more places, and spend so many tourist dollars. It would be so effective. And for business trips?! I could work so much more comfortably on a train.
If they can’t care for like, environmental or human happiness reasons, capitalism should want this for itself.
Airlines and oil companies are certain to lose future revenue with high speed rail. There are towns that would likely disappear without tourists driving through.
The gains exceed those losses, but the gains are distributed wider and no specific sector is guaranteed gains, so the status quo wins.
A dedicated HS west coast line would be amazing. People visiting Portland frequently don’t need a godamn car once they’re there, and a 7 hour train down to SF is honestly preferable to flying a decent chunk of the time, etc
I'm coming in August, on the Empire Builder, actually! So far, we've been able to schedule everything we want to do on either bus or tram, incl Cannon Beach and Multnomah Falls. Seems like a great city to get around in.
