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The requirement for colinearity seems like something you made up. And, you don’t gauge travel demand for one mode based on another. They didn’t build the Golden
by shereadsthenews 8y ago
The requirement for colinearity seems like something you made up. And, you don’t gauge travel demand for one mode based on another. They didn’t build the Golden Gate Bridge because there were many people swimming to Marin. Two well-connected cities with robust economies will enjoy strong travel demand.
- jcranmer 8y agoThere are many things that factor into how likely HSR is to be used. Intercity travel demand is one of the chief metrics, but you also have to consider the quality of intracity public transport. Indianapolis and Columbus as a city pair simply does not score very well on this metric; you'd put the billions of dollars investment to much better use elsewhere. The point about collinearity is that you can make a strong demand by combining many individually weak demands. And this is the problem in the Midwest: the strong demand is Chicago, and it has a lot of moderate demand endpoints, such as St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit. But the real strong city pair is Chicago/NYC, which is already at the extreme margins of acceptable time, which means substantial detours to hook up the lesser demand centers is going to kill ridership.