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High speed rail costs $20M-$250M/mile to construct. So laying 19,000 miles of track across the Americas would cost anywhere from $380 billion to $5 trillion. At
by ggreer 3y ago
High speed rail costs $20M-$250M/mile to construct. So laying 19,000 miles of track across the Americas would cost anywhere from $380 billion to $5 trillion. At 200mph, it would take 4 days to go from one end to the other. Maintenance would be over $2 billion per year. If you had 3.5 million passengers per year (far more than pre-covid flying numbers), paying for the maintenance costs alone would be $600 per ticket. Paying off the project within a century would require charging $1,700-$14,000 per ticket.
- kristopolous 3y agoRight. It wouldn't be built stupidly like that. You can take any project and give it the drooling moron building plan and come away with ridiculous numbers. Let's do lowest possible speed and highest possible cost of an automobile road and we get something like 0.25 mph traffic with mangled bodies in crashed vehicles everywhere and tollbooths every 5 miles where everyone is forced to drive million dollar Bugattis. Really, this is like someone in the 1970s claiming smart phones are impossible because you can't fit a rotary dial, satellite link, tape storage reel and a CRT in your pocket.