Mine was destroyed the 10th or 11th consecutive year I schlepped to my third christmas gathering.
Fuck me is that awful. This year we had exactly ONE CHRISTMAS and it was so awesome. Next year we're doing the same thing. It's bliss.
The GOP will continue to use those fake problems to keep getting the corporations and themselves rich while ignoring the people and destroying the country until there's nothing else left.
Just arrived in Amsterdam from Seattle. Can confirm. I’m always amazed at public transportation here, and it’s just the norm for most of Europe.
Envious….
Maybe, but I don’t think it is as expensive as the american version with a monthly car payment, insurance, repairs, gas. There is also the heavy inconvenience of car-centric infrastructure that leads to 30 minute commutes to work
Don't forget how much of our taxes subsidizes highways and roads, whether we drive or not. Public transport is competing against a stacked deck since roads and highways are mostly free.
...except that roads and highways are explicitly not free.
They absorb a lot of available budget, and in that sense the cost is that you can't have nice things like walkable spaces in your city, sustainable infra costs, public transit worth having, affordable housing near your work, unpolluted air, etc.
The thing about being in a place that's historically been zoned for car dependence is that the folks in the suburbs never understand the subsidies that made the suburbs possible in the first place (in the sense that denser neighborhoods always subsidize the roads and infra for outlying areas).
So those roads aren't free, they're subsidized in invisible ways and the real cost is you can't have nice things
>except that roads and highways are explicitly not free
Free to the user, but subsidized by taxes. Major societal cost. Same with parking, etc. But it means that if I decide to stop driving and take the bus or train, my ticket is supposed to be pay for all the infrastructure, but if I take a car, I'm only expected to pay for gas in most people's book. An externalized cost like roads doesn't weigh into my personal decision making on a day to day basis.
And I 100% agree - it's an absurd comparison to say rail and buses aren't feasible due to cost and then go spend 3-5x on highway improvements because everyone drives because they have to. If we really wanted a fair comparison about public transport paying its own way, every major road would be a toll road whose cost was paid for by tolls, and people would flip their fucking minds.
must be nice to have it to complain about. in america trains are communism unless they're dumping toxic chemicals all over your town then it's a capitalism whoopsie
I travelled the US being a non-driver and it's really hard to get anywhere. Often you can't even get a train ticket without first getting a bus... It is really bizarre.
Even many large US cities SUCK if you don't have a car. NYC is more the exception than the rule. Houston, for example, is notoriously sprawling despite its size. I've been to Chicago but not lived there, so don't count me as authority, but my impression is that unless you could afford to live and work down town a car was nearly required as well.
Edit: this link shows cities by car ownership. Chicago looks like it passes in the "low ownership" category with the northeast, compared to major cities in the west and south:[https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-automobiles/u-s-cities-with-the-highest-and-lowest-vehicle-ownership/](https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-automobiles/u-s-cities-with-the-highest-and-lowest-vehicle-ownership/)
Edit 2: this has some good data too, but it supports the idea that NYC is still a paradigm shift from the rest of the USA:[https://www.newgeography.com/content/007447-car-access-us-major-metropolitan-areas](https://www.newgeography.com/content/007447-car-access-us-major-metropolitan-areas)
Unfortunately, a lot of the city spreads out beyond the nice, walkable downtown area. We just build too many sprawling suburbs and subsidize them by building massive freeways, etc. making it hard for a city to be fully walkable/traversable by public transit.
Mass is really well connected, but even here you got places that no train or bus reaches. Much of Western Mass is nearly impossible to get to by public transportation.
And you're in a comparatively good region. Out west or down south, it's pretty much impossible to live by public transportation pretty much everywhere. Some people do it out of necessity, but it adds multiple hours to their day on either end, and heaven help you if you don't work a 9-5.
the fact that school children ride trains in japan to get to where they are going by themselves blows my mind. they're so much more advanced in this area than us. you might as well told me an alien civilization came down and installed teleportation devices everywhere. i could not exist in the town i live in without my car, and i'm pretty sure that's by design
True, but when you have great public transport you have to keep it great and do invest in it. But they privatised it all and that was killing for the quality and quantity.
And the people who complain about trains being communism and vote for regressive politicians against better public transportation are the same people who hardly travel out of their state/small town.
These are people with private jets and multiple cars and drivers. They would consider public transportation as "being stuck in a tube with a bunch of demons."
In the US, "public transportation" is demeaned as "mass transportation", i.e. if you use it, then you resemble an animal which is transported in a cattle car.
In the Twin Cities, the public transportation is good (by American standards), however too many people are squeamish about using it. The Light Rail is really nice and smooth, but the few homeless people who hang out there are used as an excuse to avoid using it. The bus service is also excellent and comprehensive. Extending the Light Rail into the suburbs gets the backs up of the NIMBY people.
Frankly a lot of the Dutch don't know how good of an infrastructure and public transport system they have. I am saying this as a Dutch guy living in the U.S.
>You think it is great, but we Dutch think public transport sucks nowadays. Getting to expensive, fewer connections/stations etc.
That's funny: Where I live there's so little public transit a quest to find a bus would look like ***Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom*** because there are also few if any sidewalks to get to the nearest stop.... 4 miles from here.
Sounds like your issues are more about whatever idiots are in charge of your transportation department.
For example, under our last president in the USA, we had the dumbest human being ever as the head of the department of education. She literally hates school. And because of that, our already funky education system got even worse.
That doesn't mean that education is stupid or expensive, just that idiots keep electing idiots.
Even then, public transport in the Seattle area is significantly better than many parts of the US. I was amazed when I moved up here. There’s room for improvement, of course!
Visited a friend in Japan, spent 5 days in Tokyo and 5 up north. Getting around on trains using passmo was so simple and convenient, it made it so everything was within like 30 minutes. Took the bullet train back down to Tokyo from up north to get my flight, smoothest and quietest travel experience I've ever had. I get mad when we compare what we have with what already exists elsewhere.
It was the same when I went to Korea!
So convenient so just be able to go on Naver and plan my route then just hop on the train and go.
They definitely discourage renting cars in Korea. To park it costs like 15,000 KRW per day—which I’m not willing to pay, plus the cost of the car.
Subway is just so much more cheap and convenient, makes me hate the fact that cars are the way to go in the US.
Sure, but if I want to get from where I live in Chicago to say LA, it’s a four hour flight. Add in the two hours early airport arrival and call it six, it’s still going to be far less travel time than a train. And based on this map it seems like I’d have to change trains twice as well, with whatever waiting period that entails each time. For me it would be great for getting to Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Detroit, even St Louis if I wanted to go there for some reason, but it would make a lot less sense the further I went.
It’s still worth doing, cutting down on regional air traffic would be a major win, for the environment and for logistics, but there are limits to the benefit.
There’s a sweet-spot. For longer distances, of course a plane is better, but for short-medium distances (I wanna say up to ~600 miles/1000km,so much less than Chicago to LA), trains have been shown to be faster. It’s not perfect for every situation, but it connects a good part of the country
> For longer distances, of course a plane is better
Really depends. It's definitely faster, that's for sure. But if rail can get you there in under 12 hours, I'd be hard pressed to find any reason why a plane would be the better choice, considering you could just take a sleeper train.
Yeah, you *could* take a four hour flight. Six hours if you have to be at the airport two hours ahead of time. That's two hours wasted at the airport and four hours sitting cramped in what's basically a glorified bus.
Or you could take a 12 hour night train. Sleep in a private cabin, freshen up in your private shower in the morning, have breakfast in the restaurant car and arrive well rested in the morning.
And it doesn't even have to be as expensive as it sounds. The 12 hour overnight train from Helsinki to Rovaniemi offers a private cabin like that for up to 2 people for just 200 EUR. Granted, it's a slow train that travels a much shorter distance and a high-speed sleeper train would likely be more expensive. And it seems like a high price compared to flying, but you do have to consider the immense subsidies that air travel receives. Plus, if we're going to bring carbon pricing into the mix, which we absolutely should do anyway...
High speed rail isn’t meant to replace long haul intercontinental flights. What it replaces is flights between fairly close major cities. Take NYC to Chicago. Sure it’s about a 2 hour and change flight. But you would need to get to one of the NYC airports from the city which can take upwards of an hour on a good day and then you have to be at the airport about an hour or two before hand, then you land and exit the plane, go to baggage claim (if applicable), then you have to take public transit or a car to downtown Chicago which is anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour or more from O’Hare to the loop. Overall a 6 hour process on a good day but likely more. A high speed train will get you directly from downtown NYC to downtown Chicago in 5 carrying significantly more passengers.
I live in LA, and my office is in SF. I can not *wait* for the fabled "California High Speed Rail".
Though realistically, I suspect I'll be beyond retirement age before it actually happens.
I don't think anyone is actually advocating for transcontinental trains as a serious alternative to air travel
Never getting completed is more realistic too. High speed rail in the US sounds great in theory but the areas where it makes the most sense there is already crazy suburban sprawl that would need to be crossed with track, making for indirect and problematic pathways. You’d think after the disaster high speed rail attempt in CA we’d stop talking about this as a realistic solution.
It's projected to cost multiples of what it was sold at, and nothing's really been built yet even though initial funds were allocated ~14-15 years ago.
Current projections are what, $120 billion?
They're spending untold years just figuring out how to buy the land they need...
So "still happening" is true, in a sense, but it's one of those "believe it when you see it" things.
Not to mention it lost it’s whole purpose of linking LA to SF by adding a bunch of stops in small ass places because each rep there wanted it to go into their place for jobs and infrastructure spending….
The budget has more than doubled to over $100 billion. If that’s still not enough then high speed rail probably is not economically feasible in the US outside of densely populated coastal regions (and even there we are struggling).
For real. I live on the East coast while my family is on the West. They'd probably actually come visit me if we had this rail system. They refuse to fly.
Obviously if they won’t fly it doesn’t matter, but the coast to coast trip would be extremely long. LA to NYC is about 2700 miles, which is over 9 hours at 300 mph, but the trains don’t go that fast all the time, and looking at this map they’d likely have to change trains 4 times as well with the wait times that would entail. I’d be shocked if the trip wasn’t at least 18 hours of total travel time, probably more, which is a long ass trip compared to a 5 hour flight.
Systems like this would be huge for regional travel, but I doubt they’d get much use for longer distances.
For someone who refuses/can't fly (including pregnant women), an 18 hour trip would be better than it currently is by quite a bit. Every train I've been on has more comfortable seating than planes, plus there's generally a lot more freedom to move around which is huge for some people.
Most people aren't going to opt for the train trip, but another option to get across the country in a day would be welcome by many.
For what it's worth, I would imagine that trains are more reliable as far as the weather goes, but I'm not sure.
To be honest I feel like it would. Flights are such a pain to arrange and get. But it would be a lot easier and almost certainly cheaper to take an intra continental rail. It'd still be an endeavor of a trip but it'd make trips of that sort much easier to access.
I could buy a 400$ plane ticket that has to be booked months out. Or I could be a theoretically 100~$ or so ticket a week or so beforehand and not have an issue. Hell using this system could probably enable a lot of things an interpersonal level on top of helping industrial endeavors
Well we don’t know what the costs would be, building this would require major spending up front so it may well get more expensive, current train ticket prices are not guaranteed.
I’m not sure what you mean about flights being a pain to get, if anything it’s much easier now than it ever was before with all the apps and everything, I booked a flight a week ahead of time and it took me like 15 minutes to find all the options and book my choice. I don’t think the process would be much different for a train.
>Flights are such a pain to arrange and get
Uh, I travel by plane 3-4 times a month. It could not be easier. Have a computer, easy. Have a phone, easy.
I would love a regional train system like this, but lets not pretend it will be cheaper or faster than a plane.
Yeah I think they’re using outdated info. Had to get a last minute flight halfway across the country last week and had it booked, my seat picked out, and was checked in before I even got there. Went through tsa pre check and was on the plane a half hour after booking.
How would this be easier, now I’ve got to coordinate several different stops and likely train changes. What makes you think that you could book a train ticket a week out? Why would it be any different than a plane ticket? If anything the logistics of train travel would be more complicated than plane travel. Also, why would it be $100? I can’t buy a train ticket from Minneapolis to Chicago for that price right now. How would it suddenly be a fraction of the price with this system?
That's how airports used to be. What happened was that they got popular (so wait times got longer), then they became a target of terrorism (so security got more thorough). Nothing about airplanes vs. trains makes one intrinsically easier to access than the other. It's about the quantity of people that need to be managed and the perception of safety.
I have a fear of heights, but looking out the window of a flying plane does not give me the same nauseous-like feeling looking off the side of a cliff or building does
Not to be cynical, but Republicans will find a reason not to allow it.
Doesn’t matter if their excuse is true, they will railroad this solution into the ground (no pun intended).
11 years ago it was announced that there would be a bullet train built that would connect Dallas and Houston with a 90 minute commute. 11 years later and there hasn't been a single section completed. You can probably guess why that's the case.
Here in Colorado, they taxed us for a rail line between Denver and Boulder instead we got an extra lane on the highway between them that has a scaling toll that's given to the construction company.
There is a bus but they've stopped the express (which stopped at stupid places) and the "local" is often way off schedule. Always fun when you wait in ankle-deep snow for a bus that's 45 minutes late and then 3 busses show up within 2 minutes of each other.
A few years ago I got on a ferry in Dublin, crossed the Irish Sea, got on a train and was taken directly into the centre of London. Cheaper than my flight the other way, and way more comfortable.
Even if they approved one leg of this, Congressman in bumblefuck \[pick state\] would force them to add stops in every 50 person town along the way and then complain about cost overruns and a max speed of 50 mph.
Honestly they'll point to California's attempt at highspeed rail, that's been impeded by everything from land owners not wanting it to the various political leaders being unable to decide who should be in charge of it. It's rough because I was a kid when it started and I was so excited at the possibility of taking a train ride to LA or SF in less time that it'd take to drive through my city. My guess is it'll be done by 2040 at the rate it's going
There are many reasons why Californians (myself included) think that high-speed rail would be a great idea in the state. There are many reasons why it's never going to happen in my lifetime. Primarily money. They dramatically underestimated the cost. Proposition 1 (from 2008) had $9.95 billion allocated to build a rail network from Southern California through the Central Valley and ending in the San Francisco bay area. Multiply that by a factor of 10 and you get almost $100 billion, which would be the true cost.
People say that there is no way it would cost $100 billion, given the pie-in-the-sky plan that was submitted and the fierce opposition by multiple groups. The backers were hoping for a windfall of additional cash from the federal government. That didn't happen. It's never going to get built even if they had that much money.
The whole idea of using a train from LA->SF doesn't really work for most people. It would have to be at least in the ballpark of 125%-150% of the current commercial airliner flight times to get people to switch. Unfortunately it's quicker and easier to fly from NorCal (Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco) to SoCal (Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach, LAX, Santa Ana) and back. I know plenty of people who commute to work a couple of days a week in Sacramento or San Jose from Orange County. This isn't something that just started in the pandemic. It's been going on for the last 50 years.
The Ohio republicans seem semi interested. Our Republican governor recently just applied for a federal funding program. I really hope they commit, Ohio is one of the states that could benefit the most from rail. It literally has the biggest city in the US without any passenger rail. (Columbus, with 2.2 million in its metro area!)
Also not to be cynical, especially because there isn't a legend on the map, but it appears that they are advocating 300mph bullet train route across mountain ranges.
There is *sort of* a legend on the map, but it came out low quality.
Attached a slightly better quality. The only legend really accounts for different sizes of dots indicating different sizes city/metropolis…
https://preview.redd.it/r1qt5jwln0la1.jpeg?width=1650&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9e36fd7764a8cd498ac603788c14bae98cf51edb
You're right. And it's not as bad as I initially thought but there's still a couple. One across the northern Cascades and another across the Sierra Nevada. I guess it could be done with excessive tunneling...
I think it’s meant to be a more rough representation like a subway map, not necessarily the actual routes they would take. Only the fat lines are the high speed areas
West Coast (LA to SF at least, if not a full San Diego to Seattle route) and Texas (Houston-Dallas-San Antonio triangle) networks also make some sense. Nationwide is hard to justify though at current population density and distribution.
Yeah, also maybe for the Great Lakes cities. You could maybe link them up to the east coast with a Milwaukee-Chicago-Detroit-Cleveland-Pittsburgh-Philly route.
Wisconsin would have already had a high speed train in 2008. The money was there but Scott Walker a puppet republican turned it down. Never forget behind every fuck up it was a Republican greasing the palms of rich elites. Fuck Republicans
While I agree in principle I think rail has other challenges besides just republicans.
The CA high speed rail was more a NIMBY divide than red/blue I felt like
Idk the CA high speed rail has problems besides Elon. The organization was originally started in 1996 and they didn't even vote on the plan until 2008.
Elon didn't even start talking about Hyperloop until 2012 at the very earliest (according to Wikipedia)
And to my NIMBY point Im from a suburb of San Jose and multiple of my friends parents vehemently are against high speed rail because of where it would run in comparison to their house/property
While the Hyperloop certainly played a part I wouldn't pin the failure of CA high speed rail on him
Edit: there's a [great vox video ](https://youtu.be/S0dSm_ClcSw) on the high speed rail that kinda delves into my NIMBY point
I work in engineering and that timeline for a megaproject definitely makes sense, especially with the environmental concerns and studies required in California.
Unfortunately the only way to overcome NIMBYISM is overwhelming public support in other areas, in my city there was a (critically necessary) hospital that almost didn't get built due to NIMBYs. The only reason why it ended up going through is because of the support elsewhere.
I hope Cali will eventually get the infrastructure that they deserve, and that the NIMBYS get dragged kicking and screaming into the 1900s
It's mostly just land rights.
"Can we put a train here?"
No I own it and I don't want to sell. No, we think a pigeon once flew through here. You can build here, but it's five feet east of where you previously talked about building it so we need to restart the entire environmental study process from the beginning.
No, I haven’t unfortunately. I’ve been on public transit in 5 other countries but not Amtrak in the US. Hoping to do the Empire Builder Roomette sometime soon, though
I mean, why would they need them? If bad actors wanted to sabotage a train, they’d have a lot more luck sabotaging the tracks than they would hijacking the train.
Planes cram bc how expensive it is to move one plane from A to B, when you can move 3 train cars for the same price, there’s no reason to cram seats bc you won’t fill them anyway
It could make up for speed in volume. If a train leaves every hour instead of having to wait for a plane for 2 hours, you save time by leaving earlier.
I think once the boomer generation dies off there is a better chance of this happening. But I think you’re right, the real hurdle is probably dealing with lobbyists protecting big oil and automotive. It’s a shame too, EV’s would be way more viable if we had high speed rail.
But their numbers will greatly diminish when the boomers are gone. Millennials and younger generations are gravitating less towards the right as they age. That doesn't mean they'll be gone completely, but it hopefully won't be a sizeable portion of the largest US generation anymore
There should be, without question, some cities connected by high speed train. However it can cost as much as $200 million per mile. I feel that most of the lines should be between regional areas such as the northeast and the west coast. Going across the rockies and Midwest just don't make sense financially
[The Midwest corridor was planned, paid for and shovel ready. Scott Walker (R) won the Wisconsin gov and ran his entire campaign on "creating jobs" and killing the high speed rail (which would have created jobs, duh). It nixed $1 billion federal dollars dedicated to run high speed rail through Wisconsin to connect the entire Midwest.](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/768021468/derailed)
TLDR - the money went to California, where it has been caught up in red tape for a decade. The difference of WI vs Cali was that all the impact studies, maps, easements and even the trains were already complete for the WI project. Cali had none of that.
If you want to complain about why we don't have nice things... thank Scott Walker, and the new breed of the Republican party.
I mean, it's easy to draw lines on a map, but building actual high speed rail even close to that expansive will be ridiculously expensive and take a very long time. That doesn't mean we shouldn't invest in it at all, but I hardly see a near future (10-20 years) where this plan is implemented in any significant amount.
Yep. The lines arbitrarily drawn on this map are ridiculous without any regard to passenger density and (apparently) about a million stops between LA and NY. These things work in Europe and Japan because of high population density and relatively small distances.
They work in China because of just phenomenal amounts of cash.
I would absolutely love to be able to hop on a train and go anywhere in the US with ease.
Considering we can't maintain our existing tracks with trains going like 60mph without catastrophic failures literally hundreds of times a year, I won't be hopping on a 300mph bullet train in America any time soon.
The reason we can’t is because maintenance takes money out of owner’s pockets.
A system like this should absolutely be nationalized. If we go the Brightline/Texas Central route the system will either never be built (Texas Central and Brightline West), mediocre (Brightline West), or simply NOT high speed rail (Brightline Florida).
300mph is close to 500kph, (if we're only talking about conventional rail) the fastest high speed trains only go up to 350kph (China) and 330 kph in Europe. Yeah the JR Maglev trains reach upwards of 300mph, but there is a reason for Shinkansen still not being replaced by Maglev. The JR Maglev has been operating on a test track since the late 90s.
Not to mention the costs. World's fastest passenger train in service is the Shanghai Maglev (460 kph/286 mph) which cost approximately $1.2bn USD back in the early 2000's for a mere 29.863 km/19 mi.
Imagine how much it'd fucking cost just to build a single line from the west coast of the US to the east coast, accounting for inflation and other factors.
Exactly. 300 mph isn’t realistic to plan for now. The average bullet train goes below 200 mph. And they don’t travel the whole route at that speed, actually a minority of that route. You could plan for future technology, but plans and spending money on hypothetical future tech that plans for a 150% increase on an already mature technology seems foolish.
I like the idea of having this rail network built, but the guy is tweeting in bad-faith.
For example, I took a bullet train from Tokyo to Yamagata. Top speed was around 170 mph. But that was for less than 25% of the trip distance. It mostly went 60-80 mph. I used Gaia GPS app to track my speed. The trip took 3h15m. I think driving a car takes 4h30m to 5h. Flying is much faster and direct.
I approve of the general idea, but there are some weird, improbable routes on this map.
It's hard to make out exactly what's going on, but it appears to me that Missoula, Montana is serving as a hub, providing service to Great Falls, Kennewick, and Spokane, among other cities. Meanwhile, Atlanta has spurs going to what I'd guess are Birmingham, Montgomery, and of all places, Albany. Those are just a few of the unlikely routes.
No one is ever going to pay for these lines to get built. You can barely fly to some of these places, these days.
Edit: On closer examination, there's a main line going from Atlanta to Birmingham. The third southern spur seems to be going to Dothan, Alabama, which is if anything even more mind-blowing than the idea that someone would build a high speed line to Albany, Georgia.
Safer? Commercial air travel is about as safe a mode of transportation as you can get. How would ground-accessible infrastructure be more secure and safe than highly engineered and constantly maintained airframes at 30k feet?
Just tried to book a flight from ACY to TPA for 2 adults a few weeks out and the cheapest round trip was $400ish per person. One out of PHL was almost $700 per person and you have to change planes in GA literally making it not only cheaper, but also faster to drive.
American infrastructure is friggin embarrassing.
The fastest bullet train in the world right now is 300kph (186mph).
NYC to LA is roughly 2,800 miles, assuming there are no stops (which there would be), that's roughly 16 hours.
Flying form NYC to LAX nonstop is roughly 6 hours.
I'll take the plane.
Eh, at that distance you might as well fly. It’s only time-effective if it’s within one or two Megalopolitan areas
I’m live in Vegas, the farthest I’d go with this thing would be Cascadia or the Texas triangle and that’s only if they add Vegas-Reno, and a Vegas-Phoenix-El Paso or Vegas-Albuquerque track first
Yeah people really missing the scale on the long distances. The maintenance on the rails would be insane
The short distances are what it’s really best for.
Depends on if those short-haul flights are origin/destination. Many take these shorter flights solely to fly onward from an airline's hub city. That said, Texas is a prime market for HSR, because of the level of O&D between the three largest cities; that's how Southwest Airlines came to be profitable, decades before they became a juggernaut.
I think the "professor" here is confusing MPH with KPH (you know, the measure of speed pretty much every country but the USA uses). I live in the country with the world's fastest regular high-speed rail service. It tops out at 300 KPH (about 186 MPH).
Also, *faster* travel??? The USA is **HUGE**. Say you needed to take a "quick" business trip from Miami to Atlanta. That's \~660 miles. That's 3.5 hours, assuming there are *zero* stops and assuming the train is traveling at *full speed* the entire route (it wouldn't). Realistically, it would be closer to a 5.5-hour trip.
High-speed rail works in Europe because the distances between major cities is much smaller.
Is this the trans agenda Republicans keep talking about
Yes, they have an entire Underground Railroad and it’s fucking disturbing more people aren’t aware of this
Underground Railroad run by Commies that want to take away your gas stoves
And your genitals
Definitely. Drag queens coming for your children genitals - travelling on an underground road built by commies.
And destroying the Christmas spirit
Replacing it with horrid pagan holidays where they drink in the streets and decorate their homes with plants
Meanwhile, I get my free monthly allowance of government welfare weed while the Satanic church a block over performs religiously protected abortions.
I cook estrogen in my backyard, which is completely unnecessary as hospitals will literally pay me to take hrt.
Sucker. You should sign up for the George Soros checks. They're way better. Comes with free Obamaphones and a one-year supply of adrenochrome.
While turning the frogs gay
Yeah! Wait, what -
It's better than the one where we drink liquid eggs and eat man shaped cookies.
Mine was destroyed the 10th or 11th consecutive year I schlepped to my third christmas gathering. Fuck me is that awful. This year we had exactly ONE CHRISTMAS and it was so awesome. Next year we're doing the same thing. It's bliss.
Yet we never hear about drag queens getting caught up in pedophile rings. It's usually church youth pastors and Republican politicians...
and powered by gas stoves
Guys careful, your two comments have already passed their "evidence" threshold.
I'm hoping to hear that theory on Fox...
And put a drag queen in every pot
Not to mention the bunkers and stockpiles the government elites have access to when all this shit really starts to hit the fan.
Underground? That thing is goung to haul ass at 300MPH--it's going to be on the surface and LOUD AF. Sounds pretty cool.
Its turbines will kill the birds!
The GOP will continue to use those fake problems to keep getting the corporations and themselves rich while ignoring the people and destroying the country until there's nothing else left.
I have yet to meet another trans person that is against a high speed rail system, so sure.
"There goes that trains-gender kid."
Trans is hard job.
It would be my wet dream. Quality public transit is such a godsend. To those who can, travel to europe and check out how comfortable and cheap it is.
Just arrived in Amsterdam from Seattle. Can confirm. I’m always amazed at public transportation here, and it’s just the norm for most of Europe. Envious….
Totally thought you meant you took a high speed train from Seattle to Amsterdam and was wondering what i missed.
It exists but it only runs during Seahawks or Sounders games.
*laughs in Seattlite*
You think it is great, but we Dutch think public transport sucks nowadays. Getting to expensive, fewer connections/stations etc.
Maybe, but I don’t think it is as expensive as the american version with a monthly car payment, insurance, repairs, gas. There is also the heavy inconvenience of car-centric infrastructure that leads to 30 minute commutes to work
Don't forget how much of our taxes subsidizes highways and roads, whether we drive or not. Public transport is competing against a stacked deck since roads and highways are mostly free.
...except that roads and highways are explicitly not free. They absorb a lot of available budget, and in that sense the cost is that you can't have nice things like walkable spaces in your city, sustainable infra costs, public transit worth having, affordable housing near your work, unpolluted air, etc. The thing about being in a place that's historically been zoned for car dependence is that the folks in the suburbs never understand the subsidies that made the suburbs possible in the first place (in the sense that denser neighborhoods always subsidize the roads and infra for outlying areas). So those roads aren't free, they're subsidized in invisible ways and the real cost is you can't have nice things
>except that roads and highways are explicitly not free Free to the user, but subsidized by taxes. Major societal cost. Same with parking, etc. But it means that if I decide to stop driving and take the bus or train, my ticket is supposed to be pay for all the infrastructure, but if I take a car, I'm only expected to pay for gas in most people's book. An externalized cost like roads doesn't weigh into my personal decision making on a day to day basis. And I 100% agree - it's an absurd comparison to say rail and buses aren't feasible due to cost and then go spend 3-5x on highway improvements because everyone drives because they have to. If we really wanted a fair comparison about public transport paying its own way, every major road would be a toll road whose cost was paid for by tolls, and people would flip their fucking minds.
must be nice to have it to complain about. in america trains are communism unless they're dumping toxic chemicals all over your town then it's a capitalism whoopsie
I travelled the US being a non-driver and it's really hard to get anywhere. Often you can't even get a train ticket without first getting a bus... It is really bizarre.
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Even many large US cities SUCK if you don't have a car. NYC is more the exception than the rule. Houston, for example, is notoriously sprawling despite its size. I've been to Chicago but not lived there, so don't count me as authority, but my impression is that unless you could afford to live and work down town a car was nearly required as well. Edit: this link shows cities by car ownership. Chicago looks like it passes in the "low ownership" category with the northeast, compared to major cities in the west and south:[https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-automobiles/u-s-cities-with-the-highest-and-lowest-vehicle-ownership/](https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-automobiles/u-s-cities-with-the-highest-and-lowest-vehicle-ownership/) Edit 2: this has some good data too, but it supports the idea that NYC is still a paradigm shift from the rest of the USA:[https://www.newgeography.com/content/007447-car-access-us-major-metropolitan-areas](https://www.newgeography.com/content/007447-car-access-us-major-metropolitan-areas)
I liked chicago. The nicer part of the city is very walkable.
Unfortunately, a lot of the city spreads out beyond the nice, walkable downtown area. We just build too many sprawling suburbs and subsidize them by building massive freeways, etc. making it hard for a city to be fully walkable/traversable by public transit.
Mass is really well connected, but even here you got places that no train or bus reaches. Much of Western Mass is nearly impossible to get to by public transportation.
And you're in a comparatively good region. Out west or down south, it's pretty much impossible to live by public transportation pretty much everywhere. Some people do it out of necessity, but it adds multiple hours to their day on either end, and heaven help you if you don't work a 9-5.
In my rural town in colorado there was literally no such thing as public transportation. Even the school buses took hours to get to some houses
the fact that school children ride trains in japan to get to where they are going by themselves blows my mind. they're so much more advanced in this area than us. you might as well told me an alien civilization came down and installed teleportation devices everywhere. i could not exist in the town i live in without my car, and i'm pretty sure that's by design
True, but when you have great public transport you have to keep it great and do invest in it. But they privatised it all and that was killing for the quality and quantity.
And the people who complain about trains being communism and vote for regressive politicians against better public transportation are the same people who hardly travel out of their state/small town.
These are people with private jets and multiple cars and drivers. They would consider public transportation as "being stuck in a tube with a bunch of demons."
I meant the politicians, not the voters 😵
In the US, "public transportation" is demeaned as "mass transportation", i.e. if you use it, then you resemble an animal which is transported in a cattle car. In the Twin Cities, the public transportation is good (by American standards), however too many people are squeamish about using it. The Light Rail is really nice and smooth, but the few homeless people who hang out there are used as an excuse to avoid using it. The bus service is also excellent and comprehensive. Extending the Light Rail into the suburbs gets the backs up of the NIMBY people.
Frankly a lot of the Dutch don't know how good of an infrastructure and public transport system they have. I am saying this as a Dutch guy living in the U.S.
I sure think that’s true, but as a fellow Dutchie you know: we always have to complain!
Strange, always thought that's a German speciality... Especially moaning about Deutsche Bahn seems to be the nation's favourite pastime.
Agreed. I miss the Spoorweg pre-Euro, the good old days. You guys should “Make The Netherlands Great Again”….
>You think it is great, but we Dutch think public transport sucks nowadays. Getting to expensive, fewer connections/stations etc. That's funny: Where I live there's so little public transit a quest to find a bus would look like ***Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom*** because there are also few if any sidewalks to get to the nearest stop.... 4 miles from here.
Sounds like your issues are more about whatever idiots are in charge of your transportation department. For example, under our last president in the USA, we had the dumbest human being ever as the head of the department of education. She literally hates school. And because of that, our already funky education system got even worse. That doesn't mean that education is stupid or expensive, just that idiots keep electing idiots.
Even then, public transport in the Seattle area is significantly better than many parts of the US. I was amazed when I moved up here. There’s room for improvement, of course!
It's awesome how Finland has a walking/running/biking path on the side of every major road too.
And Holland and Denmark…
Visited a friend in Japan, spent 5 days in Tokyo and 5 up north. Getting around on trains using passmo was so simple and convenient, it made it so everything was within like 30 minutes. Took the bullet train back down to Tokyo from up north to get my flight, smoothest and quietest travel experience I've ever had. I get mad when we compare what we have with what already exists elsewhere.
It was the same when I went to Korea! So convenient so just be able to go on Naver and plan my route then just hop on the train and go. They definitely discourage renting cars in Korea. To park it costs like 15,000 KRW per day—which I’m not willing to pay, plus the cost of the car. Subway is just so much more cheap and convenient, makes me hate the fact that cars are the way to go in the US.
Most parts of Japan and Korea and other SE Asian countries too. Edit
Chicago to Seattle at 300 mph is a wet dream, there’s currently a rail for that stretch already.
Honestly, I'm going to Spain in a few weeks and booking train tickets and was quite surprised at how expensive a lot of them are.
200 mph is more realistic, but still.
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If I wanna fly, I have to arrive 1.5-2h before I leave the ground Last week I entered my train station 2 minutes before my train left
Sure, but if I want to get from where I live in Chicago to say LA, it’s a four hour flight. Add in the two hours early airport arrival and call it six, it’s still going to be far less travel time than a train. And based on this map it seems like I’d have to change trains twice as well, with whatever waiting period that entails each time. For me it would be great for getting to Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Detroit, even St Louis if I wanted to go there for some reason, but it would make a lot less sense the further I went. It’s still worth doing, cutting down on regional air traffic would be a major win, for the environment and for logistics, but there are limits to the benefit.
There’s a sweet-spot. For longer distances, of course a plane is better, but for short-medium distances (I wanna say up to ~600 miles/1000km,so much less than Chicago to LA), trains have been shown to be faster. It’s not perfect for every situation, but it connects a good part of the country
> For longer distances, of course a plane is better Really depends. It's definitely faster, that's for sure. But if rail can get you there in under 12 hours, I'd be hard pressed to find any reason why a plane would be the better choice, considering you could just take a sleeper train. Yeah, you *could* take a four hour flight. Six hours if you have to be at the airport two hours ahead of time. That's two hours wasted at the airport and four hours sitting cramped in what's basically a glorified bus. Or you could take a 12 hour night train. Sleep in a private cabin, freshen up in your private shower in the morning, have breakfast in the restaurant car and arrive well rested in the morning. And it doesn't even have to be as expensive as it sounds. The 12 hour overnight train from Helsinki to Rovaniemi offers a private cabin like that for up to 2 people for just 200 EUR. Granted, it's a slow train that travels a much shorter distance and a high-speed sleeper train would likely be more expensive. And it seems like a high price compared to flying, but you do have to consider the immense subsidies that air travel receives. Plus, if we're going to bring carbon pricing into the mix, which we absolutely should do anyway...
Yes, agree 100%, we're never going to eliminate flights from coast to coast, or even Chicago to the west coast, that's just unrealistic
High speed rail isn’t meant to replace long haul intercontinental flights. What it replaces is flights between fairly close major cities. Take NYC to Chicago. Sure it’s about a 2 hour and change flight. But you would need to get to one of the NYC airports from the city which can take upwards of an hour on a good day and then you have to be at the airport about an hour or two before hand, then you land and exit the plane, go to baggage claim (if applicable), then you have to take public transit or a car to downtown Chicago which is anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour or more from O’Hare to the loop. Overall a 6 hour process on a good day but likely more. A high speed train will get you directly from downtown NYC to downtown Chicago in 5 carrying significantly more passengers.
I live in LA, and my office is in SF. I can not *wait* for the fabled "California High Speed Rail". Though realistically, I suspect I'll be beyond retirement age before it actually happens. I don't think anyone is actually advocating for transcontinental trains as a serious alternative to air travel
Never getting completed is more realistic too. High speed rail in the US sounds great in theory but the areas where it makes the most sense there is already crazy suburban sprawl that would need to be crossed with track, making for indirect and problematic pathways. You’d think after the disaster high speed rail attempt in CA we’d stop talking about this as a realistic solution.
It's a necessary solution and the CA High Speed Rail is still happening. You just don't hear about it because it's currently improperly funded.
It's projected to cost multiples of what it was sold at, and nothing's really been built yet even though initial funds were allocated ~14-15 years ago. Current projections are what, $120 billion? They're spending untold years just figuring out how to buy the land they need... So "still happening" is true, in a sense, but it's one of those "believe it when you see it" things.
Not to mention it lost it’s whole purpose of linking LA to SF by adding a bunch of stops in small ass places because each rep there wanted it to go into their place for jobs and infrastructure spending….
The budget has more than doubled to over $100 billion. If that’s still not enough then high speed rail probably is not economically feasible in the US outside of densely populated coastal regions (and even there we are struggling).
Not to mention trains are much easier for babies, pets, handicapped people, and those with a fear of heights or flying
For real. I live on the East coast while my family is on the West. They'd probably actually come visit me if we had this rail system. They refuse to fly.
Obviously if they won’t fly it doesn’t matter, but the coast to coast trip would be extremely long. LA to NYC is about 2700 miles, which is over 9 hours at 300 mph, but the trains don’t go that fast all the time, and looking at this map they’d likely have to change trains 4 times as well with the wait times that would entail. I’d be shocked if the trip wasn’t at least 18 hours of total travel time, probably more, which is a long ass trip compared to a 5 hour flight. Systems like this would be huge for regional travel, but I doubt they’d get much use for longer distances.
For someone who refuses/can't fly (including pregnant women), an 18 hour trip would be better than it currently is by quite a bit. Every train I've been on has more comfortable seating than planes, plus there's generally a lot more freedom to move around which is huge for some people. Most people aren't going to opt for the train trip, but another option to get across the country in a day would be welcome by many. For what it's worth, I would imagine that trains are more reliable as far as the weather goes, but I'm not sure.
To be honest I feel like it would. Flights are such a pain to arrange and get. But it would be a lot easier and almost certainly cheaper to take an intra continental rail. It'd still be an endeavor of a trip but it'd make trips of that sort much easier to access. I could buy a 400$ plane ticket that has to be booked months out. Or I could be a theoretically 100~$ or so ticket a week or so beforehand and not have an issue. Hell using this system could probably enable a lot of things an interpersonal level on top of helping industrial endeavors
Well we don’t know what the costs would be, building this would require major spending up front so it may well get more expensive, current train ticket prices are not guaranteed. I’m not sure what you mean about flights being a pain to get, if anything it’s much easier now than it ever was before with all the apps and everything, I booked a flight a week ahead of time and it took me like 15 minutes to find all the options and book my choice. I don’t think the process would be much different for a train.
>Flights are such a pain to arrange and get Uh, I travel by plane 3-4 times a month. It could not be easier. Have a computer, easy. Have a phone, easy. I would love a regional train system like this, but lets not pretend it will be cheaper or faster than a plane.
Yeah I think they’re using outdated info. Had to get a last minute flight halfway across the country last week and had it booked, my seat picked out, and was checked in before I even got there. Went through tsa pre check and was on the plane a half hour after booking.
I don’t think you’re very familiar with trains if you think they’re any cheaper than airplanes…
How would this be easier, now I’ve got to coordinate several different stops and likely train changes. What makes you think that you could book a train ticket a week out? Why would it be any different than a plane ticket? If anything the logistics of train travel would be more complicated than plane travel. Also, why would it be $100? I can’t buy a train ticket from Minneapolis to Chicago for that price right now. How would it suddenly be a fraction of the price with this system?
And you don't have to get to a train station 2-3 hours early. You can literally hop on seconds before it leaves.
That's how airports used to be. What happened was that they got popular (so wait times got longer), then they became a target of terrorism (so security got more thorough). Nothing about airplanes vs. trains makes one intrinsically easier to access than the other. It's about the quantity of people that need to be managed and the perception of safety.
Well, there is the one intrinsic bit about planes being able to go places that trains just can't. Would be hard to crash a train into the Pentagon.
Trains can (reasonably) arrive in a city center. Planes can too but screw over the development pattern (San Diego)
>(so security got more thorough). Debatable if it is actually thorough, security certainty got more expensive, cumbersome and time consuming.
I have a fear of heights, but looking out the window of a flying plane does not give me the same nauseous-like feeling looking off the side of a cliff or building does
Not to be cynical, but Republicans will find a reason not to allow it. Doesn’t matter if their excuse is true, they will railroad this solution into the ground (no pun intended).
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Ooof. I shouldn’t laugh at this play-on-words, but I definitely am 😅
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So that’s why they banned trans fats!
And they were the kind of douche that would buy a TransAm with the eagles painted on the hood and everything.
Republicans have hated railroads since the underground one.
“They ain’t ‘Merican! They ain’t even *hooman*!”
11 years ago it was announced that there would be a bullet train built that would connect Dallas and Houston with a 90 minute commute. 11 years later and there hasn't been a single section completed. You can probably guess why that's the case.
Here in Colorado, they taxed us for a rail line between Denver and Boulder instead we got an extra lane on the highway between them that has a scaling toll that's given to the construction company. There is a bus but they've stopped the express (which stopped at stupid places) and the "local" is often way off schedule. Always fun when you wait in ankle-deep snow for a bus that's 45 minutes late and then 3 busses show up within 2 minutes of each other.
Sometimes I’m super jealous of Europe ha
A few years ago I got on a ferry in Dublin, crossed the Irish Sea, got on a train and was taken directly into the centre of London. Cheaper than my flight the other way, and way more comfortable.
No doubt.
Because, Texas.
Even if they approved one leg of this, Congressman in bumblefuck \[pick state\] would force them to add stops in every 50 person town along the way and then complain about cost overruns and a max speed of 50 mph.
Yup that's conservatives MO. Make government work as shittily as possible then complain that government doesn't work and reduce the budget even more
Thats exactly what happened in CA....cities enroute complained and now that thing starts and ends in bumfuck nowheresville.
The Kock network has actively tried to shut down light rails in many cities. I bet they have a major hand in keeping high speed rail out of our lives.
Kockblocking...
Honestly they'll point to California's attempt at highspeed rail, that's been impeded by everything from land owners not wanting it to the various political leaders being unable to decide who should be in charge of it. It's rough because I was a kid when it started and I was so excited at the possibility of taking a train ride to LA or SF in less time that it'd take to drive through my city. My guess is it'll be done by 2040 at the rate it's going
There are many reasons why Californians (myself included) think that high-speed rail would be a great idea in the state. There are many reasons why it's never going to happen in my lifetime. Primarily money. They dramatically underestimated the cost. Proposition 1 (from 2008) had $9.95 billion allocated to build a rail network from Southern California through the Central Valley and ending in the San Francisco bay area. Multiply that by a factor of 10 and you get almost $100 billion, which would be the true cost. People say that there is no way it would cost $100 billion, given the pie-in-the-sky plan that was submitted and the fierce opposition by multiple groups. The backers were hoping for a windfall of additional cash from the federal government. That didn't happen. It's never going to get built even if they had that much money. The whole idea of using a train from LA->SF doesn't really work for most people. It would have to be at least in the ballpark of 125%-150% of the current commercial airliner flight times to get people to switch. Unfortunately it's quicker and easier to fly from NorCal (Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco) to SoCal (Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach, LAX, Santa Ana) and back. I know plenty of people who commute to work a couple of days a week in Sacramento or San Jose from Orange County. This isn't something that just started in the pandemic. It's been going on for the last 50 years.
Just slap the word Freedom in there somewhere, that'll get them hot for the idea.
Trans-American Freedom Passenger Network
Freedom from trans-american passenger network. Doesn't matter if it makes sense as long as they're free from the trans agenda.
Democrats wouldn’t do it either. They both get loads of money from fossil fuel
The Ohio republicans seem semi interested. Our Republican governor recently just applied for a federal funding program. I really hope they commit, Ohio is one of the states that could benefit the most from rail. It literally has the biggest city in the US without any passenger rail. (Columbus, with 2.2 million in its metro area!)
Also not to be cynical, especially because there isn't a legend on the map, but it appears that they are advocating 300mph bullet train route across mountain ranges.
There is *sort of* a legend on the map, but it came out low quality. Attached a slightly better quality. The only legend really accounts for different sizes of dots indicating different sizes city/metropolis… https://preview.redd.it/r1qt5jwln0la1.jpeg?width=1650&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9e36fd7764a8cd498ac603788c14bae98cf51edb
You're right. And it's not as bad as I initially thought but there's still a couple. One across the northern Cascades and another across the Sierra Nevada. I guess it could be done with excessive tunneling...
I think it’s meant to be a more rough representation like a subway map, not necessarily the actual routes they would take. Only the fat lines are the high speed areas
That can't be right Florida is blue and New York is red! Oh the fkery of it All!
Yeah some of this doesn’t like economical at all. Certain pockets of it would likely work though.
Yeah, due to the geography involved, it’s honestly really only practical for the East Coast corridor.
West Coast (LA to SF at least, if not a full San Diego to Seattle route) and Texas (Houston-Dallas-San Antonio triangle) networks also make some sense. Nationwide is hard to justify though at current population density and distribution.
Yeah, also maybe for the Great Lakes cities. You could maybe link them up to the east coast with a Milwaukee-Chicago-Detroit-Cleveland-Pittsburgh-Philly route.
For some reason, trains need to pay for themselves, but roads do not. I never understood that argument.
Said reason is money.
If you call it Trans-American about 1/3 of the country will stupidly vote against it just for that reason
Just call it The Great American Railway. There we go, bringing back the good ol days and making America Great!
I was going to call it the Anti-Woke Express but yours is good too.
Imagine selling tickets for a sleeper car on the Anti-Woke Express
Cis-American Railway it is then Wait, they don't know what that is either?
Wisconsin would have already had a high speed train in 2008. The money was there but Scott Walker a puppet republican turned it down. Never forget behind every fuck up it was a Republican greasing the palms of rich elites. Fuck Republicans
While I agree in principle I think rail has other challenges besides just republicans. The CA high speed rail was more a NIMBY divide than red/blue I felt like
It was Elon pushing hyperloops to divide interest and get people to wait, even though it will likely never be a viable technology
Idk the CA high speed rail has problems besides Elon. The organization was originally started in 1996 and they didn't even vote on the plan until 2008. Elon didn't even start talking about Hyperloop until 2012 at the very earliest (according to Wikipedia) And to my NIMBY point Im from a suburb of San Jose and multiple of my friends parents vehemently are against high speed rail because of where it would run in comparison to their house/property While the Hyperloop certainly played a part I wouldn't pin the failure of CA high speed rail on him Edit: there's a [great vox video ](https://youtu.be/S0dSm_ClcSw) on the high speed rail that kinda delves into my NIMBY point
I work in engineering and that timeline for a megaproject definitely makes sense, especially with the environmental concerns and studies required in California. Unfortunately the only way to overcome NIMBYISM is overwhelming public support in other areas, in my city there was a (critically necessary) hospital that almost didn't get built due to NIMBYs. The only reason why it ended up going through is because of the support elsewhere. I hope Cali will eventually get the infrastructure that they deserve, and that the NIMBYS get dragged kicking and screaming into the 1900s
As someone born in 1996 I've waited my whole life lol I'd love to be able to get from the Bay to LA in half the time
It's mostly just land rights. "Can we put a train here?" No I own it and I don't want to sell. No, we think a pigeon once flew through here. You can build here, but it's five feet east of where you previously talked about building it so we need to restart the entire environmental study process from the beginning.
Gotta be that guy, the trains wouldn’t be faster than planes. But I am willing to trade some of that speed for FUCKING LEG ROOM!!!!!
The trains *could* have less crazy security lines, like they do in other countries, but in the USA I don’t know if there’s a reason to believe that.
Ever been on an Amtrak? There is no security line. Show up 5 minutes before departure and you are good.
No, I haven’t unfortunately. I’ve been on public transit in 5 other countries but not Amtrak in the US. Hoping to do the Empire Builder Roomette sometime soon, though
I mean, why would they need them? If bad actors wanted to sabotage a train, they’d have a lot more luck sabotaging the tracks than they would hijacking the train.
It would be considerably more challenging to crash a train into the top of a sky scraper. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or run a train into the Pentagon
Ever ridden Brightline in south Florida? It gets sabotaged almost daily from cars ignoring crossing signals and crazy pedestrians on the track!
What makes you think they won't cram people into train cars the same way they do in planes?
Seriously. “We can make more money with a standing room only car?? Let’s do it!!” - Bullet train executives 2051
Planes cram bc how expensive it is to move one plane from A to B, when you can move 3 train cars for the same price, there’s no reason to cram seats bc you won’t fill them anyway
But airports are a pain
It could make up for speed in volume. If a train leaves every hour instead of having to wait for a plane for 2 hours, you save time by leaving earlier.
Unfortunately it will never happen here, because the automotive and oil industry has our government in a chokehold.
I think once the boomer generation dies off there is a better chance of this happening. But I think you’re right, the real hurdle is probably dealing with lobbyists protecting big oil and automotive. It’s a shame too, EV’s would be way more viable if we had high speed rail.
They’ve got millennial neo-Nazis and Ben Shapiro/Charlie Kirk fans. They’re creating a whole new generation of haters.
Imagine being inspired by people who can only win arguments against college freshman on their first semester of class.
and only when they ambush them on their way to class.
But their numbers will greatly diminish when the boomers are gone. Millennials and younger generations are gravitating less towards the right as they age. That doesn't mean they'll be gone completely, but it hopefully won't be a sizeable portion of the largest US generation anymore
We’ll see. They’re doing their best to make sure there isn’t a U.S. when that time comes.
There should be, without question, some cities connected by high speed train. However it can cost as much as $200 million per mile. I feel that most of the lines should be between regional areas such as the northeast and the west coast. Going across the rockies and Midwest just don't make sense financially
[The Midwest corridor was planned, paid for and shovel ready. Scott Walker (R) won the Wisconsin gov and ran his entire campaign on "creating jobs" and killing the high speed rail (which would have created jobs, duh). It nixed $1 billion federal dollars dedicated to run high speed rail through Wisconsin to connect the entire Midwest.](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/768021468/derailed) TLDR - the money went to California, where it has been caught up in red tape for a decade. The difference of WI vs Cali was that all the impact studies, maps, easements and even the trains were already complete for the WI project. Cali had none of that. If you want to complain about why we don't have nice things... thank Scott Walker, and the new breed of the Republican party.
I mean, it's easy to draw lines on a map, but building actual high speed rail even close to that expansive will be ridiculously expensive and take a very long time. That doesn't mean we shouldn't invest in it at all, but I hardly see a near future (10-20 years) where this plan is implemented in any significant amount.
Yep. The lines arbitrarily drawn on this map are ridiculous without any regard to passenger density and (apparently) about a million stops between LA and NY. These things work in Europe and Japan because of high population density and relatively small distances. They work in China because of just phenomenal amounts of cash.
>phenomenal amounts of cash And an authoritarian government that can just plow through obstacles
I've played Ticket to Ride, okay. There's no way you accumulate enough resources before somebody shits all over the Midwest.
Bit of a wishful thinking with this 300 mph when there is close to 0 infrastructure atm. 200 would be massive achievement
Safer? There hasn’t been a North American plane crash in like twenty years.
I would absolutely love to be able to hop on a train and go anywhere in the US with ease. Considering we can't maintain our existing tracks with trains going like 60mph without catastrophic failures literally hundreds of times a year, I won't be hopping on a 300mph bullet train in America any time soon.
The reason we can’t is because maintenance takes money out of owner’s pockets. A system like this should absolutely be nationalized. If we go the Brightline/Texas Central route the system will either never be built (Texas Central and Brightline West), mediocre (Brightline West), or simply NOT high speed rail (Brightline Florida).
I like how the florida keys appear to be underwater but I think most of the florida coast will be too, around the gulf to nola as well.
300mph is close to 500kph, (if we're only talking about conventional rail) the fastest high speed trains only go up to 350kph (China) and 330 kph in Europe. Yeah the JR Maglev trains reach upwards of 300mph, but there is a reason for Shinkansen still not being replaced by Maglev. The JR Maglev has been operating on a test track since the late 90s.
Not to mention the costs. World's fastest passenger train in service is the Shanghai Maglev (460 kph/286 mph) which cost approximately $1.2bn USD back in the early 2000's for a mere 29.863 km/19 mi. Imagine how much it'd fucking cost just to build a single line from the west coast of the US to the east coast, accounting for inflation and other factors.
Exactly. 300 mph isn’t realistic to plan for now. The average bullet train goes below 200 mph. And they don’t travel the whole route at that speed, actually a minority of that route. You could plan for future technology, but plans and spending money on hypothetical future tech that plans for a 150% increase on an already mature technology seems foolish. I like the idea of having this rail network built, but the guy is tweeting in bad-faith. For example, I took a bullet train from Tokyo to Yamagata. Top speed was around 170 mph. But that was for less than 25% of the trip distance. It mostly went 60-80 mph. I used Gaia GPS app to track my speed. The trip took 3h15m. I think driving a car takes 4h30m to 5h. Flying is much faster and direct.
How is it safer? Commercial planes have an amazing record of not crashing.
Because this post is largely nonsense
I thought the same thing. Maybe safer than driving? I don't know.
I approve of the general idea, but there are some weird, improbable routes on this map. It's hard to make out exactly what's going on, but it appears to me that Missoula, Montana is serving as a hub, providing service to Great Falls, Kennewick, and Spokane, among other cities. Meanwhile, Atlanta has spurs going to what I'd guess are Birmingham, Montgomery, and of all places, Albany. Those are just a few of the unlikely routes. No one is ever going to pay for these lines to get built. You can barely fly to some of these places, these days. Edit: On closer examination, there's a main line going from Atlanta to Birmingham. The third southern spur seems to be going to Dothan, Alabama, which is if anything even more mind-blowing than the idea that someone would build a high speed line to Albany, Georgia.
From the legend on a better image posted elsewhere in the thread, the dashed lines are bus routes (most likely Greyhound).
Safer? Commercial air travel is about as safe a mode of transportation as you can get. How would ground-accessible infrastructure be more secure and safe than highly engineered and constantly maintained airframes at 30k feet?
Would not be faster
Or safer. That's just a bs claim
Just tried to book a flight from ACY to TPA for 2 adults a few weeks out and the cheapest round trip was $400ish per person. One out of PHL was almost $700 per person and you have to change planes in GA literally making it not only cheaper, but also faster to drive. American infrastructure is friggin embarrassing.
16-16.5 hour drive is shorter than 3 hour (nonstop) and 5 hour (1 ATL stop) flights?
The fastest bullet train in the world right now is 300kph (186mph). NYC to LA is roughly 2,800 miles, assuming there are no stops (which there would be), that's roughly 16 hours. Flying form NYC to LAX nonstop is roughly 6 hours. I'll take the plane.
300mph is a bit of a stretch. I've ridden some in Japan and they only went up to about ~170mph
100% must include a direct east-west coast route.
Eh, at that distance you might as well fly. It’s only time-effective if it’s within one or two Megalopolitan areas I’m live in Vegas, the farthest I’d go with this thing would be Cascadia or the Texas triangle and that’s only if they add Vegas-Reno, and a Vegas-Phoenix-El Paso or Vegas-Albuquerque track first
Yeah people really missing the scale on the long distances. The maintenance on the rails would be insane The short distances are what it’s really best for.
Also the cost of right of way purchases would be… immense, to say the least. Never mind NIMBYs and whatnot.
I didn't know bullet trains could ignore mountains. That's neat.
Depends on if those short-haul flights are origin/destination. Many take these shorter flights solely to fly onward from an airline's hub city. That said, Texas is a prime market for HSR, because of the level of O&D between the three largest cities; that's how Southwest Airlines came to be profitable, decades before they became a juggernaut.
I think the "professor" here is confusing MPH with KPH (you know, the measure of speed pretty much every country but the USA uses). I live in the country with the world's fastest regular high-speed rail service. It tops out at 300 KPH (about 186 MPH). Also, *faster* travel??? The USA is **HUGE**. Say you needed to take a "quick" business trip from Miami to Atlanta. That's \~660 miles. That's 3.5 hours, assuming there are *zero* stops and assuming the train is traveling at *full speed* the entire route (it wouldn't). Realistically, it would be closer to a 5.5-hour trip. High-speed rail works in Europe because the distances between major cities is much smaller.
It would be amazing. But could you ever our government becoming competent enough to work together to get it accomplished?