That’s amazing, China is also geographically enormous compared to nearly every other country on that graphic.
Yeah, but then you get everything else that comes with China. Amazing feat though and works obviously for their style of government.
Non-authoritarian countries are fully capable of doing those kind of projects. Trans-continental railroad, massive public transportation projects, interstate highway systems, telecommunications infrastructure. Hell, Spain (SPAIN!!!) has one of the most reliable and efficient high speed rails in the world (50% fair reimbursement if the train is 15min late and 100% for 30+ minutes) and Spain doesn’t do ANYTHING efficiently or on time, and the whole project started as a public works to revitalize the economy of southern Spain.
I would politely point out the interstate system is arguably a victory of socialist inspired policy and p dang important for our country
Before any such project became vilified, leading to what we have now, collapsing bridges and undrinkable water.
Where is our high speed rail? The Acela between Boston and DC? Anywhere else? 740km seems awfully short for a country our size.
the amount of people that would use the fuck out of it between Seattle (and Vancouver if you could get an agreement with Canada) to San Diego on the West Coast alone would make certain parts of it viable as hell. I know my ass would be taking 4 day vacations to San Fran and up to Seattle several times a year if it was available. Throw in a few stops to places like Vegas or Boise and Salt Lake and you got a stew going for the part of the country that is most separated geography wise. Texas folks would arguably laugh at it, but the coastal areas wouldn’t think twice about using it all the time.
I don’t know of a single human being that opposes a high speed rail throughout the country. That means it will never happen.
I'm guessing massive traffic impacts due to construction. I think if you routed them to transport hubs outside the city centers (airports for example) it'd still work near cities and there's extant transpo infrastructure from airports already
I wanna be able to hop a train from my inland city to the coast any weekend I want. Have drinks and/or read on the way down since I don’t have to drive
There are advanced plans to build one between Houston and Dallas and then to expand to Austin and San Antonio.
Why do any people have problems with the potential of enormous government spending like would be required for a project like that? Increase in taxes.
I for one enjoy inexplicably paying several hundred dollars to fly domestically when I can fly internationally in Europe for $50
Due to state speed limits (in Connecticut) mostly. I think it could go faster if we let it. But my question was more, “is that even what we describe as ‘high speed’ or are there 740 km of bullet trains somewhere that I don’t know about?”
With the ease and availability of uber/lyft I personally would be much more likely to use it than I would have thought I would just a few years ago. I would think the same is true for many people Toss a leg up to lbk and I'd probably use it all the damn time for sports
Cant use current rail lines because of capacity and speed issues (see: Acela). Can’t build on freeways, because then you often aren’t penetrating into the core or connecting to existing mass transit and you’re kneecapping the line’s utility. That means building new lines, which means tearing up existing communities and putting a nuisance in the community (or you’re tunneling, which eliminates some but not all of these issues at significant cost and project risk) - and these are often communities that wouldn’t be served by the high speed rail. This is a pretty reasonable article covering both sides of the argument with respect to a proposed line from Baltimore to DC: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wa...a-bed5-880264cc91a9_story.html?outputType=amp
I'm no expert on this subject a quick Google search says the acela is 150 mph train If that's not over twice as fast as any 'normal' train my anecdotal observations are way off.
All we need to do is have a war that requires us to move lots of commuters and vacationers to the front lines.
China's fastest train goes 268 mph and they just unveiled a prototype for a train that will go 385 mph. Something like that would take so many cars off the interstate.