500 miles on Amtrak east coast can take about 10 hours! I’m doing it again in a few weeks. That’s just so dumb slow embarrassing.
And more expensive than flying a good chunk of the time!
Rail is more expensive than flying in China and Europe as well. It’s slower and costs more, but the experience is normal and dignified instead of airport security and aeroplane seats and Boeing quality pressurisation. It’s also better for the environment and the senses of anyone unlucky enough to live close to a terminal.
30 miles will go 100 mph tho!
Don’t you feel the future?!
See I agree, but Boston-New York and New York-DC are still very competitive with driving and flying, if only because their respective airports are so far from the city itself.
Once the US has one working world-class HSR line (probably Brightline West, or possibly CAHSR), the appetite for more lines will increase. HSR will have become something that is common for Americans to ride when not on holiday to Japan or Italian hilltop towns, and reflexively dismissing it as “it wouldn’t work here because we have too much (space/liberty/big cars)” won’t work anymore. New plans will be proposed (a midwest network connecting Chicago to Cleveland and St. Louis?) and old ones (such as the Texas one) dusted off. And the Canadians will notice and jump on the bandwagon (given that a big chunk of their population would be reached by a line from Detroit/Windsor to Quebec City makes it a no-brainer).
Yes, Biden provided some funds for some of this but let’s get real, that money likely will get stolen. We are lucky if they make boston to washington a real HS…
one can dream but for now, I want whatever this person is high on lol
Is it the case that the US fundamentally can’t do what, say, Spain and South Korea and Algeria have been able to, and that they have been able to do with, say, NASA, the military and numerous private corporate logistics systems, or just that they haven’t done it yet?
We used to have a thriving rail and trolley system in the US; in most major cities especially. The automakers destroyed it. When they were caught, they got a slap-on-the-wrist fine and the nation went with the automaker’s suggestion of building the highway system up.
So yes, there is a fundamental reason we can’t. It’s the auto makers and the politicians they own.
The answer is slightly more complicated than that.
Part of the problem is that a lot of mass transit was built in the USA by private companies to make a profit. This went from trolley lines in small cities to large parts of the NYC Subway and almost all commuter and interciry rail.
Most mass transit systems ended up being built as loss leaders to develop suburban property. After the property was developed, the incentive to maintain mass transit dropped. Along with that, rail companies generally hated passenger service and preferred freight instead.
It eventually got to the point where the private company would collapse and there was little political will to maintain service. There was some lobbying done by auto companies, but a lot of it came from cities and states too cheap to make transit a public good with public funding.
Just as side note… there was to that decision then just automakers btw.
Feds wants proper national high way system for defense purposes also. Automakers deff took that idea to turned into whatever this dystopian shit is while killing off any competition.
We have a new Brightline in Florida that goes from Orlando to Miami and has about 5 stops in between. It’s not super fast (it takes about 3.5h, which is similar to driving), and it can get expensive for a family, but not having to drive on I-95 in South Florida is worth every penny.
it seems to be very popular so far.
From what I understand, it’s slow because along much of the route it uses legacy rights of way with level crossings. Brightline West will have all new grade-separated right of way, which will allow higher speeds.
I’m cautiously optimistic that the burger empire will embrace HSR like the rest of the advanced world. America’s competition is no longer the Soviet Union, but China.
I’m not optimistic that that will happen under the next Biden or Trump administration. US corporate media avoid mentioning China’s HSR, but they can’t keep things under the rug forever.
Media is having hard time explaining away China’s concrete results across several sectors.
While China was investing and developing, our dear leaders in US and EU stole the money and now sitting with dicks in their hand looking to the working losers to pay up again to “compete” with China.
Our capitalist class and their bought politicians are sitting with our profits in their Scrooge McDuck swimming pools.
I get why “owners” are behaving like this but why are the bootlickers happy to enable it?
I’m not sure which bootlickers you mean—the politicians? Many of them are wealthy in their own right, and almost all of them rely on wealthy donors to get into office and to hold it. It’s one big club, and we ain’t in it. [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
This isn’t a recent development; it has ever been so. “Bourgeois Democracy”: What Do Marxists Mean By This Term?
I am talking about regular wage slaves who accept the status quo.
Boomers, that guy doing free OT, people who got nothing to hide, people who can afford because they are not poor, homeless chose to be that way… etc
Working class boomers lived in a unique moment in world history, which will almost certainly never recur, but they didn’t know it and still don’t. That unique moment was post-WWII America, when the rest of the industrial world was destroyed by war, the New Deal/Keynesianism/US labor militancy had not been completely crushed yet, and the socialist alternative to capitalism in the Soviet Union was looking like a viable alternative to capitalism still. These factors, combined with US colonialism/neocolonialism allowed the US working class to have super-profits never seen before or since, but the Boomers assumed that this was and would always be the new normal.
I’m not that optimistic, because “construction costs” in US are a big problem. As the line is announced, the land prices skyrocket and the government have to pay multiple times the old value to buy get the land.
You aren’t wrong, I mean just looking at how it is making just getting a home while those homes are treated like Wall Street stocks. But the longer that the shit gets pushed out, the more it will cost anyway. Especially as private corps are literally buying up everything. So the corps should be just forced out without pay period. And the only people that should get paid anything are actual people and not the fake persons that we allow corps to be legally seen as. Only other exception would be if land is native land, and plans for shit should be forced to not go through it.
Are the ideas above legal? Hell no, but fucking corps aren’t people and they already get their money from fucking over people and from getting all the tax cuts and exemptions for everything anyway. We have already been letting corps own the current rail lines and is a shining example as to why they should be purged for the benefit of the people.
Sigh, I wish we had HSR here in Canada.
The chain of cities from Detroit to Québec City really looks like it should be a prime candidate for HSR.
Yes
Way way past time. It should have been a natural progression from first laying tracks to a nationwide high speed grid.
Did not UK just botch HS2?
Even more odd is there being a Brit in charge of Amtrak
Isn’t there a single qualified American that cares about trains?
Pretty sure guy doing Texas high speed is… german speaker, austrain?
So looks like no, we don’t have know how at that level here and it makes sense.
So maybe there is hope if they are hiring someone with proper skill for the job.
Although, it would not be first time where we blow ton of money on project just to have derailed by political “process” corruption. But at least dudes in charged touched a high speed train once…
PS did not mean to disrespect the UK guy, I am sure they know what they are doing in UK expect the political “process” corruption, looks like they also suffer :/
He gives lots of reasons, but if one of them isn’t “oil-producing countries are starting to escape US hegemony and your gas-guzzling motor industry is on borrowed time” then I don’t think he’s really appealing to the US government’s interests.
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Dividing America by building infrastructure instead of dumping trillions of dollars into the next military superproject.
