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This makes me sad about missed potential. I've taken the ski train from Central London to the French Alps - was great. With high speed rail it should be possibl

• bobthepanda 9y ago
  Running the ski train in Europe makes sense because it's leveraging high speed rail that was built and is mostly used for other things; very little new stuff was needed. Chicago-Denver, as a city pair, is so sparsely populated and so far apart that new HSR doesn't pencil out, nor does building it out incrementally (it's hard to justify KC to Denver or Omaha to Denver)
  • emodendroket 9y ago
    We built a rail system that spanned the country once and the highway system doesn't just maintain itself.
    • bobthepanda 9y ago
      That rail system still exists. Asking for a national high-speed rail system is like giving everyone a Rolls Royce.
      • emodendroket 9y ago
        Imagine if the response to the invention of rail were "well we just built all those canals."
        • bobthepanda 9y ago
          The original rail network was on par with airplanes in terms of relative improvement of speed of travel. The highway network did the same for travel to areas unlikely to ever get a rail connection. (There aren't that many sparsely populated countries with a rail connection to every town; even fairly dense countries don't manage this.) In today's world, HSR fills a very specific market niche; planes are much faster for long distances due to higher speed and small requirements for land acquisition, and cars are just as competitive for short distances due to the last-mile problem. So I don't think it's reasonable to connect every possible city pair in the US with HSR, but rather it's much better to just build strong regional networks of HSR that work on their own. There's no reason to build a continent-spanning HSR network.
      • voidlogic 9y ago
        We un-deregaulte rail and force them to offer the passenger service they used to do an excellent job at delivering.