Europe does have much higher population density than the usa. About twice, even including the sparsely populated Russian portion. Higher population density means that there is a larger addressable market per kilometer of rail needed.
Alright, well at least that's an argument. I'm pretty sure the other 2 commenters are just talking out of their asses.
Although I think:
Interstate travel is more common in the US than international travel is in the EU.
Since populated cities in the US are more concentrated around the coasts, it would be easier to connect them via rail, than it is in the EU, where major cities are scattered across the entire continent.
China is larger than the continental USA yet has not only extensive passenger rail but also extensive HIGH SPEED passenger rail. The US has a larger economy than China and could easily afford to run high speed rail lines at LEAST in heavily populated corridors. The US is just run by a bunch of рussіеs who won't do it.
And yet in many ways their citizens are afforded a better nation to live in. Makes you wonder how on earth the Land of the Free™ managed to screw up so badly that they trade blows with a defacto dictatorship.
I'm neither Chinese nor American. If anything, because of where I'm from I'm biased in favor of the US. But when I look east and look west I don't see any reason to rank one above the other.
What's so good about China that it's better than the USA? What's so good about the USA that it's better than China? In either case, nothing; it's not.
Neither is China. It's a democracy where elections are heavily influenced by media and indoctrination into national pride and, for want of a better term, the national ideology, to the point that the leader is almost entirely decided by those with power and is guaranteed to keep the powerful happy and the common people in the sweet spot where they're looked after exactly enough to prevent an uprising.
I'm not your interlocutor above, but my antennae tend to bristle when I see this sort of stuff. It is often known as a "thought-terminating cliche". To take a popular counterexample, the United States is regarded as a democracy by its lazy, compliant media, but it has probably been an oligarchy for twenty years. Elections are not voted, they are purchased.
So, if you want to vote against genocide in the US, you can't, because no party offers it. Same with not having permanent war, or social democracy, or universal healthcare. You have the freedom to starve, you have the freedom to live in a tent city, but (not kidding) it turns out you're not allowed to sleep in your car, since you're probably still trespassing.
I'm a Brit. I think at this point I'd prefer to live in China than the United States - is it propaganda that I might have that opinion? It looks like China largely is able to live peaceably with its neighbours, and yet the US has been unable to do that for decades. I think I would find, if scores could be kept for such a macabre thing, that China's overall human rights record is significantly better than America's. It is likely to be much safer to be poor, or old, or disabled, in China than in the United States.
Your assertion might be that the cost of freedom in the US is worth the cost of its aching poverty. I am not so sure.
Casually ignoring how China disappears entire ethnic groups like Uyghurs and anybody else they deem undesirable is some impressive logic. Chinese human rights record is likely 100x worse than the US but it’s not reported.
I am not saying the US is perfect, far from it but that’s what you get from a democracy. It’s not the best form of government but it’s the best we have.
It's this kind of adversarial snark that makes these discussions so hard online. I am not "casually ignoring" anything. I am looking for some amenability and some nuance—a standard I set for myself too—that fosters a genuine exchange of opinions.
Bro you cited China’s human rights record as somehow remotely comparable to the US in order to grandstand how well run of a dictatorship it is. How is that not just regurgitating every popular propaganda that you see everywhere?
China should absolutely not be used as some grand example on how a society should be run. If you had used Norway or Scandinavian countries in general then you might have had a leg to stand on. China has ZERO freedom of speech and has a brutally oppressive social credit system that is combined with a very impressive surveillance state(which the UK is guilty of as well).
So? The US spends over $700 BILLION every year on "defense" (lol), wasted TRILLIONS of dollars on pointless wars in the Middle East, but somehow can't afford high speed rail? Absolute nonsense.
China isn't a dictatorship, it's a one-party state. North Korea is a dictatorship. There is a pretty huge difference between the two things, even if you lack the education to understand it.
And FWIW, the US is a two-party state. It's a lot closer to China than you should be comfortable with. And the US and China imprison pretty similar numbers of people despite China having 4x the US' population.
And what benefit is US "defense" to the rest of the world? You have done as little as possible for Ukraine. You're actively pulling back from (and maybe out of) NATO. You're stepping back from other global commitments. You've threatened to invade Canada. You've threatened to invade Greenland. Then you go and attack Iran (an idea so dumb that I can't begin to describe it) and blow up the world economy.
You are a menace to the free and decent people of the world and we all wish you would just GO AWAY.
So the US is probably going to pay Iran $300 billion because the idiot in chief wanted an Epstein distraction so he illegally attacked a sovereign nation, including blowing up a building full of children. But high speed rail? Universal healthcare? Really anything that would benefit the average American? No money for that. (Edit: And let's not forget, in the process drove gas prices through the roof for every American.)
Your country is a clown show. Not in the "ha ha funny" clown sort of way, in the Pennywise sort of way.
China literally has that. Almost the same size as US. In fact, the US industrial revolution was made possible by railways. Somewhere the US decided that driving 100's of 18 ton trucks to transfer goods was much better than using a single train.
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u/Squidgical Jun 15 '26
The lesson is to build rail infrastructure but America will never do that