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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!
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).
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.
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.
Way way past time. It should have been a natural progression from first laying tracks to a nationwide high speed grid.