this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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depressing that people have to drive 8 hours to visit others, should be a 5 hour train at least
Laughs in Canadian.
My longest single day non-stop drive was around 18 hours.... Never even left the province. The flight alternative required me chartering my own plane and would have cost many many thousands of dollars more, so I went with driving as it was the cheapest option.
As a European, these distances are mind-boggling. If I drive 18 hours, I can drive through half a dozen countries (or more, if you optimize for that) and easily get from the Baltic sea to the Mediterranean sea.
Don’t worry, I expect to see North America to be similar, barring climate extinction.
Took me 13 hours to drive from Vancouver to Canmore Alberta, 13 hours to drive from Canmore to Kenora Ontario, 13 hours to drive from Kenora to Saults Saint Marie, and 7 more to get to Toronto.
Managed to cut it down to 18 hours straight to get the hell out of Ontario.
Sure, we'll just delete some of the land in North America so everyone can live closer together.
China can make high speed rail. And it's not a small country
America was built by train too to be fair
China has high speed rail in its eastern most populated section, with a single line running to the entire western half of the country, and similarly sparse lines to the north. The dense population centers in the US are not all in one area, they are spread across the continent interspersed with large swaths of rural land. That being said the US is working on high speed rail, and we've had passenger trains that cross the entire country for nearly two centuries - see Amtrak, as well as bus services like Greyhound.
As much as I hate to break up a circle jerk, the US is about as good at this as any other western country, and it's doing it across an entire sparsely populated continent, not small, highly dense European countries.
The US has a concept of eminent domain, which it has used in the past to build fairly fast affordable rail (and highways). There's no reason it can't work today except the fact our politicians are owned by car lobbiests.
We've should have nationalized high speed rail the same way we have a nationalized interstate highway system. Not everything needs to be privatized for profit.
When they put up highways, they very *very" often bulldozed through poor black neighborhoods. They didn't care.
I don't suggest we start doing that again, but the US had and has the capability to build out a fantastic trail system, but the highway system is lobbied for hard by car manufacturers.
AMTRAK gets like an eighth of the federal funding that roads get.
How profitable are highways?
I didn't know that when highways were built land was deleted so everyone could live closer together. I mean if we can delete it once, why not for the second time amirite?
The only way for there never to be long trips in a country that spans the width of an entire continent would be to condense every one into a much smaller area. So you either abandon land in 2/3rds of the country, or you figure out how to magically drop away the land in between large metro areas.
Unless it's cargo...
For Cargo, population is not really a factor. A 600 People Hamlet can have a freight train running several times a day because there is a mine. A 10,000 soul city might not have any freight lines. For passenger trains, people are the cargo, i.e. there have to be enough people wanting to take a train
This is a myth that is also used in Canada to make sure nobody demands public transit and keep using cars. Both our countries were literally developed by railroads. And now we maintain a vast road network to all of those small towns that also costs billions.
Somehow we're dense enough for highways, electricity distribution and phone lines but not railroads.
https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd370:g3701:g3701p:rr000640/full/pct:12.5/0/default.jpg
Sure, but you could have stoppers within the state to the capital, then a high speed interstate train, and then a slower stopper the other end.
There's also transport solutions like shared car fleets the other end of the high speed train (in effect short term rental) so you make the inefficient miles be done individually, but the main leg with the high demand a rail one.
There are plenty of trips that could be made more efficient with sufficient will and imagination among transport planners