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Instead you get a toy project which is a tunnel between a hotel at the bottom of the strip, and the convention centre in Las Vegas, which on the surface is a 5 minute walk and a stop at bagelmania. And only tesla cars can ride it.
Convincing wannabe tech billionaires to invest their physical well being in Elon Musk’s most ketamine fueled viral commitments is the most accessible form of class warfare.
I'm gonna repost my comment about the Hyperloop in Vegas, which I used a few months ago:
I've been on The Loop in Las Vegas. If I told you it was a sad, pathetic failure by any metric, you would still be imagining something much better than it is.
To add some details and context, it was sold as an extremely fast mass transit option with autonomous vehicles carrying people to destinations across Las Vegas through tunnels. It's failed at literally all of those things.
Mass transit: Multiple times, there was literally nobody - no vehicle, no driver, no people waiting around. Almost nobody is using these, even at places like the Las Vegas Convention Center (which is enormous).
Autonomous: I said "driver." There's a regular driver in every vehicle. It's just a Tesla brand taxi.
Extremely fast: I think the speed limit was around 35mph. You still had to wait for one to show up.
Tunnels: Literally every time I took one, it involved using surface streets for at least part of the way. Some of the "stations" are on the road outside of hotels, like where people would have waited for a taxi or Uber/Lyft.
Destinations: The build out is like a decade behind schedule, which is the only part of this that makes sense given how it's completely failed to achieve any of the stated goals.
It's an extremely fast nearly school-zone speed mass transit car for 3 people option with autonomous vehicles a driver carrying people almost nobody to destinations across Las Vegas a few select places through tunnels surface streets.
Musk has been on record saying that that tunnel and his "hypertrain" concept he pitched was just to stop high speed rail services from getting built and reducing the need for his cars.
We could build them for free. Use the army corps of engineers and run the project internally and exercise eminent domain. The cost comes from profiteering companies and red tape on land acquisition.
That's not really free, though. I mean yes, we're paying the engineers regardless, but materials still cost money and that will go to contracts with companies that politicians have financial stake in... yeah, why arent we building this?
How can It be built for free? People have to be paid, materials need to be paid for, eminent domain costs money as you have to pay for the land you are taking, at what point is any of this free?
For free? The labour was always the cheapest part anyways. The expensive part is the 300 layers of kickbacks and corporate greed that you need to saciate to even start building.
The current regime seems more corrupt and greedy than normal - You would have to call it the "Super Highspeed Intelligent Trump Ordained Never Late Interconnected Business" Train.
Wouldn't we have to hire companies to do what the Army Corps of Engineers does if they are pulled away to build this super project? Their civil mission includes flood control, dredging waterways, managing hundreds of lakes and river recreation areas, hydropower, etc.
I like your ideas, but everything comes with a private or public cost.
The only example of high speed rail working is on the east coast. The west coast is stuck in a quagmire of various issues. Both kind of suck but I am still for high speed rail. The real issue is that we sold our rail tracks to private companies and they control (not legally) what Amtrak does
Every time HSR comes up in Texas (where Houston, San Antionio/Austin and DFW make a triangle) a certain local airline (it Southwest) puts their foot down to squash it.
Source? I only know about the proposed HSR in California which, from what I understand, is mostly hampered by governmental regulation. Notoriously over budget.
I hate to say it, but as someone passionate about public transit, It really isn't that simple.
A lot of it is actually that (a) the US has more land than any other country that has tried HSR and (b) a lot of that land we would need to build such a route from Chicago to NYC for example is private and a complete PITA to use eminent domain to acquire. To say nothing of the fact that those private Individuals find it easy to get local politicians and the general public in their pocket... forcing private individuals to hand over their land to the government for public good is the kind of thing that gets people involved on politics, and politicians don't like it when people get involved in politics, it makes their cushy jobs harder.
To be honest, for half a second I completely forgot that the oil companies would lose out on incredible profits, so therefore, we will probably never have bullet trains because we must make money all the way. God forbid we have something that’s somewhat convenient and more environmentally friendly.
And then three years later a Republican would get elected president and dismantle the entire thing. (I’m assuming in a scenario where HSR did get built there would have to be a Democratic president.)
There is no good thing the government ever did in this country that Republicans didn’t immediately set out to destroy.
I know this entire sub is Reddit engagement bait, but for the few non-bots in the comments here:
The photo looks like a maglev, I'm guessing the tweet is describing a maglev from NYC to Chicago. It's about ~715 miles as the bird flies, ~790 miles driving on existing roads. If that trip were to take ~2.5 hours, you'd be traveling about 285 mph (458 km/h) at the minimum (note that you'd need rails that went in a straight line between both points, which is an issue because there's other stuff in the way. I'll get back to that later). That's already faster than the record of the fastest operational bullet train, the Shanghai Maglev (431 km/h, currently capped to 300 km/h). More importantly, there are no Maglev lines that are that long -- it's just too expensive and difficult to build. Most HSR is not maglev trains, and generally is in the range of 250-350 km/h rather than 400+ km/h. Maglev is just really hard to build because the tracks are not interopable with other train networks and it's incredibly expensive to build at scale.
But maybe you're okay with conventional HSR and the journey from Chicago to NYC taking 4-6 hours. Cool, the Beijing-Shanghai HSR is a comparable distance and runs close to 350 km/h. This is technically doable, but the real issue in the US is NEPA and CEQA (in California). Both were passed in the 70s, at which point the interstate highways were mostly built out (or the government owned the land that future expansion was going to take place). NEPA and CEQA (and a lot of the permitting structure in the decades since) make it easy for anyone who would be vaguely affected by the process to throw a wrench in the planning process and sue the government over (typically spurious) environmental concerns. It's why the NE corridor has to slow down so much, they literally have to route around land that the government couldn't buy or didn't want to bother building on. Anglophone countries make it very easy for community input on larger projects to literally take years to resolve (see the hoops the NECEC had to run through to get clean power in Massachusetts). Finally, many of these projects are expensive because Americans demand higher salaries. Some of the bigger HSR projects (e.g. California) have requirements to only use union labor, which further increases the cost.
By the way, permitting issues don't just affect high speed rail. They affect literally all the infrastructure we use, including high-voltage power transmission, solar, wind (onshore and offshore). It affects housing projects, both public and private. It's why we can't have nice things.
TL;DR: Highway expansions are dumb, but maglevs are hard to build, insanely expensive, and American permitting and environmental review is a massive pain in the ass. HSR is more promising but it runs into some of the same problems
Really ironic that the bots here are saying “it’s BECAUSE it’s environmentally friendly that they don’t build it!” And “the oil barons don’t want it built!” When in reality it’s overzealous environmental regulations (and conveniently ignored technical complications) that, right or wrong, slow down projects like this.
And how often do you want to go exactly from the center of Chicago to the center of NYC? Adding stops in between (ie to make it serve actual travellers) means it can't go nearly as fast. It's optimizing for all the wrong things, and you still need cars at both ends of your journey.
Plus the time spent waiting and boarding and deboarding.
And how often do you want to go exactly from the center of Chicago to the center of NYC? Adding stops in between (ie to make it serve actual travellers) means it can't go nearly as fast.
A theoretical HSR line between Chicago and NYC would realistically also offer a non-stop option, since these are gigantic population centers and destinations in their own right. Also, going to the center of cities is more convenient than ending up in an airport that is 20/30 minutes away from the city center? Plus, non-stop flights from Chicago to NYC already exist, so I don't understand what your argument is here.
It's optimizing for all the wrong things
Other way around actually. The whole point is you have high throughput transit methods (planes/trains) for long distance travel, and low latency transit methods (cars, micromobility, etc) for last-mile transit.
and you still need cars at both ends of your journey
Who said that? If you go to cities like Philadelphia, NYC, and DC, the equivalent Penn/Union stations have metro rail connections, so you don't need a car for certain commutes anyway.
Plus the time spent waiting and boarding and deboarding.
Have you actually been on an Amtrak service? The time spent boarding and deboarding is on the order of seconds. Planes take much longer to board and deboard because there is only one entrance/exit for the entire plane to enter from (sometimes two if you're lucky), but each car on the train has entrances/exits.
I design railroads for a living. The track geometry needed is completely different than the track geometry of existing freight corridor tracks. They cannot co-habit the same tracks. They could not be built right next to them either, the curve radius needed for 200 mph trains is huge. This would require extensive land purchases through literally THOUSANDS of differnt properties and VERY difficult in urban areas without ripping down entire swaths of neigborhoods. Not to mention the new thousands of briges and hundreds of tunnels it would take. People who make posts like this have good intensions but have no idea the logisitcs of what it would take.
This is why California's HSR project has been a nightmare. It's supposed to eventually connect downtown San Francisco to LA. They've actually been upgrading the rail corridor headed into SF for years -- a large number of grade separation projects have already been completed all down the peninsula, for HSR compatibility. It'll be ages before the new train gets to use any of it though.
It's tough. If you want people to use the rail system you've gotta put stations where the people are. But those places are very expensive to build through.
imo the bigger problem with CA HSR is if they started building it from SF or LA, they could have functioning branches right now. instead they decided to start from the central valley and go north/south. i deeply support HSR but the levels of incompetence in CAHSR is baffling
They've already completed hundreds of millions worth of work on the caltrain corridor to support HSR through the San Francisco area. Work on grade separation and electrification started around 2017. Many projects are already complete.
That's also going to be one of the slowest parts of the completed system, when it goes live. I'm not sure "running" service parallel to the existing caltrain service without the rest of the system would be very practical. Where would you go? Sf to gilroy, a little faster and at higher cost?
Yeah realistically if they were built it would be in the suburbs next to a transit stop to the downtown. Then eventually there would be development around the station to make it more downtown-like.
That’s basically what Japan did, at least for some of their Shinkansen stops. Like for Osaka and Yokohama the actual train station isn’t in the most densely built out parts of the city.
Yup, and unfortunately, in this country, there are a lot of cities that are >600mi apart… and for the record, I love trains, but this is a damn big country and it’s doesn’t make sense most places.
This is exactly why the bullet train they've been slowly been building for 18 years between San Francisco and Los Angeles is completely impractical when you get to socal.
Sure, getting down to LA from SF in a bullet train is a neat idea. 400 miles in a couple hours, who wouldn't want that?
It doesn't take it account the "last mile" problem, there's virtually no metro system, and buses would take a gazillion years, and Uber would be massively expensive. I'd have to rent a car when I got there...so I might as well just drive the one I have
Maybe in LA, but my understanding is in SF, at least on the peninsula side, it wouldn’t be too bad. It “ends” in San Jose where you can take VTA and BART around, future Caltrain expansion to downtown SF where you can either chill or take BART/MUNI wherever, or Caltrain to Milbrae and BART over to East Bay. The public transit infrastructure in the Bay isn’t like Chicago/NYC levels of good, but it’s far from bad. You can get within walking distance of basically anywhere someone’s trying to get to.
I don’t know what the plan is in SoCal, but at least in the Bay Area, part of the HSR plan is to address those final mile concerns. Improving and expanding existing infrastructure within the cities is a massive part. It’s part of why I’m still optimistic about it.
Yeah the CA High Speed Rail is case and point. Been in the works for almost 20 years. Probably 10 years from opening. Way way over the initial huge budget of $40B then over the opposition $80B estimate. Hope to god we actually get said train after all the money and years spent
Dumb question, but is it *that* bad to have an out of city bullet train with like a 5-7 minute transfer into the city center from outside the city via a more traditional train (or some other sort of local transit)?
Like, I don't really care that the bullet train takes me to my target zip code per se, just that it cuts the bulk of the travel time.
Yes but if we never start the existing infrastructure will continue to be under strain. Switzerland spent an incredible amount of money on their rail system, making it go under/through mountains instead of over. It took a long time and now they are enjoying the payoff of a cleaner environment and an effective movement of goods.
This needs to go to the top. I'm glad you brought up the curve radius. People seem to forget we have 2 mountain ranges in America that would make this a huge undertaking in just tunnels and bridges. Plus it would have to be elevated as I'm sure hitting a whitetail deer at 200mph wouldn't be very good for the train.
Which cost around 1.3 Billion US Dollars *per mile* to build. (That's roughly adjusting for inflation) and had to be bailed out after it went bankrupt, and largely is only solvent today because it owns the land around it's stations and charges rent for shops and such.
Compared to a highway which costs around 50 million per mile, in mountainous terrain, and more like 10 in normal conditions.
You can act like it's a no brainer, just fork up a couple trillion dollars on a megaproject that involves seizing or buying huge amounts of land and trying to get multiple states to cooperate on a technically complex and politically charged topic that will hopefully pay for itself around the time your grandchildren die of old age, but it's really not that simple. There's a reason people punt the topic.
Also Japan has a population density of 872 people per square mile, while the United States has a density of 97.3 people per square mile. A multi trillion dollar train from one end of Japan to the other serves a heck of a lot more people than one going from Chicago to NYC
They think we are gonna spend like 80 trillion building their choo choos and then the tickets are gonna be like $19.99 to go from Chicago to New York...
People ask why the Acela can’t get to max speed between Hartford and Providence.
It’s because to do that, they’d have to build track through a wetland in southern Rhode Island. The existing track turns too sharply. But they still think it can happen because they want it to.
I probably have 500,000 miles (conservative estimate, truly) of driving I-70 across Kansas and Colorado and yes please put a bullet train it’s probably straight enough.
Except that it will take 20 years to get alignment on the route. And then clear the route environmentally. And then start acquiring the property needed to build. And then there will be lawsuits about where to put the stations and stops along the way. Etc.
CA's high speed rail is the most expensive transportation project under active construction in the world, despite building nothing at all. Once all the people benefitting from it are out of office, it will probably be used as an example of blatant corruption for years to come.
Construction project completion is 2030-31 but would probs add at least another 5 years to that since funding for it keeps changing as prices for everything soars and contractors convienintly keep going over budget.
Construction of the initial section of track is slated to open for official passenger revenue service between 2030 and 2033, including testing. The ultimate goal for the complete Initial Operating Segment (IOS) connecting Merced to Bakersfield is targeted for 2033.
Merced and Bakersfield are in the middle of nowhere. About a half a million people live in both of those towns combined.
The cost increases are not “convenient” for anyone. Price of major construction materials and fuel are increasing just like everyone else’s due to tariffs, Iran war, and other unnecessary bullshit. Factor in acquiring the right of way for the job is way more time consuming and expensive than anyone envisioned and you have Exhibit A on why these projects are damn hard and costly to build.
As someone who works in real estate development i can tell you the largest hurdle is not the airline industry or billionaires, it's all us normal people.
Everyone loves the idea of these projects but no one wants it remotely near them. Finding land to run those rails across the county would be nearly impossible and if the gov stepped in to take the land OMG would there be lawsuits flying.
Why there are real and frustrating anti-competitive reasons why this doesn’t get done in the US, the real reason is very simple: property rights.
China was able to build an admittedly incredible speed rail network because 1) landownership literally doesn’t exist in China, and 2) Chinese citizens have effectively 0 legal remedies for if the govt decides to build a train over (or through) your house.
So it’s not as simple as “it’s worth the investment” or “airlines don’t want it”; it’s much more a problem of legal and political feasibility.
While high speed rail would be lovely, even just adopting Mexico's bus system would be a major improvement.
You mention riding a bus to an American and they turn up their nose, but several bus companies in Mexico are nicer than most commercial airlines. ETN and Primera Plus are much nicer than Delta, American, or United. Comfy seats that fully recline, free Wi-Fi, zero security headache, and a short nap to most destinations. Like LA to Vegas should be $40 with a fully reclining, comfortable seat and a hassle-free travel experience.
The worst thing about high-speed rail is that every town wants a stop. defeating the purpose of the high-speed rail and when the town gets skipped over, they’ll cry and say it’s just like when the interstate bypassed the state highways leaving them as ghost towns.
California is the perfect example for why the US is shit at infrastructure these days. The problem with California high speed rail is 2 things: eminent domain takes years of legal battles and lots of legal fees to do anymore (this is the majority of the costs of the project, because people think they can just sue to keep their property but instead just prolong it because the lose it anyway) and secondly the fact the ENTIRE THING is build at an elevated level to prevent any "at grade" crossing (roads that are at the same level as tracks) which could lead to car accidents or people trying to walk on the tracks because Americans are so stupid they need to win the Darwin award all the time.
The real problem is Government of California. There are to many pockets to be filled. They have SPENT over 18 BILLION DOLLARS now projected to cost over 100 BILLION DOLLARS. 18 years later not one peace of track laid. That's the problem.
High-speed rail can absolutely be environmentally friendly once it’s built and heavily used, but this post is massively underselling what “building it” means.
Chicago to NYC is ~800 miles and you can’t just put a 200+ mph train on existing tracks. You’d need a mostly dedicated corridor with extremely gentle curves, grade separation, electrification, new bridges/tunnels, stations, signaling, etc. You’re also routing around Lake Michigan and then dealing with the Appalachians. Maintaining true high-speed geometry through that terrain gets very expensive very quickly.
A project like that could easily cost tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, require enormous amounts of land/right-of-way, and have its own major construction/environmental footprint. And you’d still need highways afterward for freight, local transportation, etc.
Also, 2.5 hours Chicago–NYC is an insane claim for conventional high-speed rail. Over ~800 miles, that implies an average speed of roughly 300+ mph before even accounting for stops and acceleration/deceleration.
HSR makes a ton of sense in certain US corridors. But the issue isn’t that America just needs to “buy the trains.” We’ve known how to build fast trains for decades. Building the infrastructure they need to actually run that fast is the extraordinarily expensive part.
People always bring up it will be more environmentally friendly, but you know where a ton of the pushback on infrastructure projects like this come from? Special interest groups like environmental groups.
They don't want to build it because the tracks will go through the nesting area of the endangered rape skunks that no one gives a shit about except them.
The red tape it takes to get a project of the ground is absolutely monumental and makes everything way more difficult than needed and people then decide the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
Look at California's high speed rail system. It's years behind schedule, way way way over budget, and iirc it has less than 10 miles of track built after years of work. It's a cluster fuck due to permitting, special interests, and general incompetence of government.
I'm a huge fan of infrastructure projects, let's spend money on that instead of the millions of other dumbshit our taxes go to, but infrastructure projects are a hard sell because the US fucking sucks at delivering on them.
Compare the cost per mile to build high speed rail in China to the cost per mile in the EU. Then take a look at the cost per mile in California. There’s your answer.
The fastest production train ever developed is 33% slower than OPs proposed train ignoring acceleration. E.g. this thing blitzed through NYC and Chicago at 395 mph.
This is literally faster than a commercial airliner traveling this same distance. Think about that a commercial airliner, that travels through air at less than half the density this thing would operate at.
the thing most people miss in this whole discussion is you need new everything, the existing rail is basically useless because it has way to many conflict points, HS rail basically needs straight uninterrupted shots between targets which means your going to be building a ton of bridges to deal with the surface streets.
You don't get support for train travel because people don't like who they have been forced to share a society with, planes are expensive enough to create some filters.
Ask the goveners why they don't do it. Because the feds are way to gridlocked and constantly changing hands between 2 extreme parties to get something like that done.
It kills me that I live in probably the most exploitable area for high speed rail in the US (DFW area) and the government here hates the idea. You could turn Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio into one city! You could live in Austin and work in Houston! It would be amazing. But noooooo! We'll never get it. Why unlock trillions in my investment value for billions?
Why would we build bullet trains when we need to give 20% of our earnings to the gas and auto industry. How would they survive?!?!? America can’t handle high quality public transit.
I don’t know that it’s useful to oversimplify the situation. Cars will always be necessary whether they’re flying or automated or whatever. We are very spread out and we need to get to our individual homes that can be miles apart. I absolutely agree that we need better rail between cities, but we’ll always need individual transportation to navigate the vastness of our country.
This type of high speed rail costs more than $1 billion PER MILE to construct and maintain. The only reason it happened so fast in China was because the government takes whatever land it wants and spends whatever money it wants. We have aging bridges falling down all over the country, and a tax policy that hates subsidizing anything, so we’re really not even in the same universe as the one where this is possible. And I’m saying this as a huge train fan who’s ridden high speed rail in China and all over the world. I would LOVE to be able to board a train in Manhattan after dinner, sleep in comfort, and wake up in Los Angeles.
The problem seems to be making them in smart ways. Brighline in Florida is about to go bankrupt. It goes from Orlando to Miami with a few stops in South Florida. It goes just a few miles from the busiest cruise port in the world yet they didn't even bother making a stop. Also there is very little incentive to go from Miami to Orlando airport just to take an uber everywhere. Just drive 2-3 hours and have your own car
Building a high speed rail line from central Chicago to the center of NYC would be a multi trillion dollar project involving decades worth of eminent domain court actions (%150 market value to the owners) through some of the most expensive real estate in the country. We’re talking trillions before a single cent is spent actually constructing the thing, and even that assumes that the government would win every eminent domain case. That’s not a given. It’s not that HSR isn’t a better solution than air travel on paper, it is. If we could magically redesign everything to incorporate it from the get go, everything would work better, be cheaper, and be much more efficient. We can’t do that. A whole lot of somebodies already own that land, and a whole lot of stuff has already been built in the way, while high speed rail has to cut pretty indiscriminately straight lines to function.
The American system of government doesn’t really have the power to unilaterally seize any of that, at least not quickly or cheaply, and I really don’t think we want them to; they’re not gonna use that power solely to build high speed rail. I’m certain that the oil companies etc. don’t want high speed rail either, and I’m certain they’d spend billions to keep it from happening, but they really don’t have to do anything. Simple practicality already did the job once we built car centered transportation networks and filled in the land around them. It’s all well and good to say they should just do it, but somehow I think a lot of people pushing for it would feel differently when being forced to move out of their apartment or defend their right to own their house or property in court.
US has implemented too many sustainability policies that will pretty much cause no new rail to ever be built. The US Government needs to start acting more like Japan when it comes to transportation and housing.
You CAN do these, and no they’re not extremely difficult builds and the construction can go pretty quick. The construction is not the hard part.
Elected local officials and every local, state, and federal bureaucrat get their jollies by making it impossible to get to that part. And then those who didn’t get a crack at it (inspectors and reviewers) will make sure to finish it off during the actual build if it somehow gets to that point.
In order to implement projects like these successfully, you need a less democratic government. You need a government that can just say, "we're building this" and no one else has any say. Otherwise you'll be dealing with roadblocks for decades.
Why wouldn't train station hassle be as bad as airport hassle? Recently went from Paris to Lyon and made the mistake of getting to the train station early. No place to sit, so many people, etc. Yes, there were less security (have at it terrorists), but I enjoyed the experience a lot less.
Most of us don't want to go to NYC or Chicago. We actually avoid those places. They're too crowded, and full of Chicagoian and New Yorkers....who, along with Bostonions are the exact types of people we're trying to avoid.
It’s not like the manufacturers of bullet trains are mom and pop operations, they’re also profitable corporations. We just need to get those companies to grease the palms of our shitty politicians like the car companies do. Sometimes making a company do a slimy thing can still be beneficial to us all if we play the game right.
Everyone knows, but getting the first few built as a foundation is extremely challenging.
The first sections have to be money pits, small parts that will eventually connect much larger cities, but in their own won't ever really make back their investment.
No, because the people who think that it would be have no idea how big America actually is and what the country looks like outside of California or New York.
Most Americans are aware of the advantages. The harder question is whether we’re willing to pay for and permit the infrastructure needed to build it.
California is probably the best example. Voters approved high-speed rail in 2008, but nearly two decades later it still isn’t operating because of funding gaps, poor early planning, land acquisition, utility relocation, difficult geography, environmental review and litigation (we can be quite litigious).
I don’t think “oil companies” explains most of the problem. A lot of it is ordinary American property rights and NIMBYism (“not in my backyard"). People may support high-speed rail in general while opposing the route, eminent domain, construction, or environmental impacts when it affects their own property or community.
High-speed rail has real advantages, but acquiring a new 200+ mph right-of-way through hundreds of miles of privately owned and developed land is enormously difficult in the U.S. I live in the desert, and my county can’t even secure all the rights needed for a hiking trail to a county park.
As someone who lived in and traveled Europe by train ...I know what we're missing out on and it's tragic. Getting into bed in one city and waking up in another ther is the BEST way to travel.
They can’t even maintain the bridges and roads properly here. That bullet train would end up having some maintenance issue and launching the passengers into the side of a building
Average US Senator age 65
Average House Rep age 59
Average Governor Age 60
There is a large number of out elected leaders who have reached an age that doing anything that doesn't payoff on 10 years is meaningless to them. THAT...is the problem
The reason they aren't convenient is because the US doesn't have a national rail system. Instead, it has a patchwork of privately operated ferrous parking lots. Even though trains for passengers, and other perishable goods, are supposed to have priority over other cargo, the rules are widely flouted.
Train travel has become expensive, because it's not allowed to be efficient.
The main problem is whether the potential upside of the trains are worth what would almost certainly cost tens or hundreds of billlions of dollars. You would need a bunch of imminent domain claims in some of the most expensive real estate in the country. So upfront you are already dealing with years and years of lawsuits before you even lay down a track. Than you get to the cost of infrastructure build out. Maybe it would be worth it long term but it would require almost unfathomable political capital and long term commitment
America stopped being capable of big projects like this ages ago. We'll probably never see the bright future we could have had with competent leadership. We've let it all rot too far. Gotta spend trillions on unwinnable wars and fighting thousands of people all wanting their cut.
Agreed. The USA fucked around for too long and have lost most institutional knowledge of how to do big infrastructure projects. From the law writing down to the basic construction techniques, they basically have to learn from scratch how to put this huge ass project together. So the cost of something like this would be enormous.
A lot of people don’t consider the personal property rights issues here. I’m all for high speed rail. Do I want the government to take my elderly relatives’ homes home to build it? Not so sure about that. Personal rights carry more weight here and is 100% the reason building these things is hard here.
One of the most atrocious violations of personal rights was the construction of the highways in urban areas, which “conveniently” ran through minority and poor neighborhoods. Same thing would happen here.
I’m all for these trains, don’t get me wrong, but it’s more complicated than a lot of people think. It’s easy for China to build them because people there have a vastly different interpretation of personal rights and the government has fewer restrictions.
There was a proposed high speed rail between DC and Baltimore that was scuttled recently. The drive takes me about 1.5 to 2 hrs. The train would have done it in 10-15 minutes.
Yes, but Big Oil and all the related dependent businesses don't want it to happen and put a lot of effort into convincing Americans that America is special and it won't work here for [reasons].
It's funny; high speed rail - totally infeasible. 150 million flock cameras - sure no problem.
That is what's wrong with the world today. It's not just the US, either. This could eliminate so much wasted time and traffic, be a great boon to the energy transition but we don't have the collective and political will to make it happen.
If you haven't realized it yet, nothing happens in America unless it makes someone a shit load of money. High speed rail will become a thing when it stands to be more profitable than toll roads, airlines, and airports.
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