As the U.S. fantasizes, the rest of the world builds new transport system (2017)

1. Who said they would?

2. Also, it appears that many states already get a lot more than they contribute. That subsidy probably isn’t going in the direction you think it is.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...

The difference is population density. It make sense for china because popution center need to pipe huge amounts of people around. That doesn't exist in the US where cars are more efficient.

In 1869, Oakland and Council Bluffs Iowa were joined with a golden spike, completing the Pacific Railroad. From Oakland, it runs Sacramento, Truckee, Reno, Ogden, Cheyenne, Lincoln, and finally Omaha across the Missouri from Council Bluffs. I80 follows the same route today. Not because of travel demand between Oakland and Cheyenne, Wyoming (population 60k).

Because of geography.

The article asserts France has about 3000km of high speed rail. That will connect Oakland and Council Bluffs, with just enough left over to cross the bay to San Francisco. But not from SF to San Jose.

From Council Bluffs to New York, it's another 2000km. That's all the high speed rail in Germany plus all the high speed rail in Italy (as asserted in the article). In European terms, it's like building a high speed rail line from Paris to Moscow. But if the Urals were in between.

The US doesn't have a national high speed rail network because a national high speed rail network doesn't make sense. Between the Canadian and Mexican borders, there are three geographically reasonable rail routes to the Pacific.

To the north of the I80 route, there's the I90/Great Northern route through North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho. South of I80 is the I10/ATSF route across West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. It is the only all-weather route to the Pacific in the US. The US obtained it via the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. The three routes alone would require the US to build the second largest high speed rail network.

Using the US Interstate system as a first approximation, a US network would have about 77,000 km of high speed rail line. 77 Germanies or 26 Frances or 3 Europes. On completion, it would be larger than all currently existing and planned high speed rail.[1]

There are places in the US where high speed rail makes some sense. Again, it's about geography. Maybe the article's DC to Charlotte is one of them...Dallas to San Marcos (population 44,000) probably not.

The US is vast. Even at 3x the speed of high speed rail in optimum conditions, most of it is experienced as fly-over states.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lin...

Sorry, but an "Authoritarian Government" absolutely makes it FAR easier because it can chase any kind of developmental boondoggles it wants to. See China's ghost cities. It has stupid cheap labor supply and can relocate hundreds of thousands of people in the snap of a bureaucrat's finger because they have no rights to fight the state.

They also have cities with 30 million people in them, and dominate the cities with populations > 1M on the planet besides India and other parts of SE Asia. Rail just makes more sense there in a way the US can't even compare. It has nothing to do with country size and everything to do with density and cost.

Even if you could plan HSR in the most rail-friendly parts of the east coast, you're going to have to eminent domain tons of property for immense cost, or disrupt the shit out of the exiting rail line which the region actually depends on for things like commuting.

The conspiracy about interests wanting to kill rail make little sense. Its struggled because other modes of transit have proven better. Amtrak is heavily subsidized and terribly unpopular for travel because planes are just better here.

California's eternal dream is HSR between LA and SF and it is turning into a ludicrous cost-overrun disaster. Construction of rail costs 7x in NYC what it costs in France due to labor, environmental and other land use regulatory burdens -- let alone how much cheaper it is for China (who has a looming debt problem but is also mostly internal IIRC, and doesn't have to worry about efficiency because it is not a business)

Rail doesn't happen en masse in the US because other modes are more cost effective given the population density realities. Atmospheric CO2 scrubbing tech is coming a long way in a short amount of time, so rather than chasing rail that will never be faster than flying (not to mention the fact that you can change flight paths with ease as demand to go from place to place changes because there's no physical infrastructure limiting you) we should focus on the rest of the green energy in our grid to make a dent in carbon.

I lament USA's car driving culture as much as anyone. I live in a dense and transit friendly city and wish more parts of the USA were like that, but HSR is part pipe dream, part white whale, and part hammer that politicians want everything to be a political nail for. One can't just assume that just because something works in one place, it will work everywhere. The realities in the US are different, and next-generation transit here has to face those realities.

There's probably room for more rail here as cities become revitalized and between things like airports and said cities, but you will have to change the entire face of the majority of suburbia and rural America to make trains become the most useful mode of transit here and as someone who wants to go live in Europe for a bit for many of the same quality of life dreams you probably share, I wish you good luck with that.

High speed rail is a circuit switched network. Air is packet switched. Surface roads are in between. Generally high local redundancy, occasionally bottle necked by geography.

There's nothing wrong with circuit switched networks. POTS has great voice quality. ISDN tends not to drop packets. But we all carry cell phones because packet switching is more flexible in more places.