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A massive high speed railway network across North America, coast to coast. Russia did it, China did it, most of Europe did it. Canada and the USA have no excuse.
Canada’s excuse is “we’re roughly as big as the US but have a way smaller population and GDP. I really don’t think it’d be financially justifiable for them to build a rail equivalent to the trans-Canadian highway. It’d be a non-starter in a political sense.
The US, on the other hand… yeah. We genuinely have no excuse.
A majority of Canada's population lives in a straight line from Toronto to Québec, but they can't even manage that.
Property acquisition costs and legal fees are immensely more expensive in the US. Have to obtain those thousands of miles of land for rail development from somebody.
There are ways. Maybe bring our number of aircraft carriers down to only 3x the rest of the world combined instead of 5x, just as an example.
Maybe bring our number of aircraft carriers down to only 3x the rest of the world combined instead of 5x, just as an example.
I did the math on what a single coast to coast least possible distance link from D.C. to San Francisco would cost and it came out to 100 Billion dollars. It would connect no cities other than SF and DC unless they happen to fall directly on the rail line.
US Aircraft carriers cost around 10 Billion each (I'm averaging a bit here) and we only have 11 so we'd have to get rid of ALL of them to pay for a single coast to coast high speed rail link. Trying to connect "Every City in North America" would require cutting the entire military budget in half and spending it all on rail construction for the next 50 to 100 years.
The US is fucking HUGE and has a lot of cities.
You're only counting the build cost though, they cost anywhere from $1-2 billion a year to operate depending on which article you read. Considering an aircraft carrier's service life is usually around 40 years, that's quite a savings just from removing a single carrier group from the fleet. That would pay for anywhere from 50-80% of your estimate right there. I'm not discounting the 40-50 years of rail maintenance, but you would hope rail service could at least come close to breaking even by selling tickets. There's no profit coming out of an aircraft carrier group, unless you're the one selling them the supplies.
Property acquisition in the US more expensive than in Europe? I think not, at least for the immense swaths of land that make up most of the US' land mass.
The legal fees I see, but that's why most developed nations have legislature for disowning property owners of land necessary for infrastructure at a set compensation. Whether that's fair or just is up for ideological debate, I'm sure.
I’m not sure any of these are quite as ambitious as crossing the entire continent of North America. In fact I’m not even sure that would make sense to do. That said lines connecting major cities on each coast and some parts of the Midwest would be a no-brainer.
I think the proof of concept really should be the NYC-Cleveland-Chicago line. From there it can be extended westward as desired
What’s west of Chicago though? That line makes sense on its own merits but if you want coast to coast, a southern route might make more sense.
A southern route makes sense in a lot of ways but on the east you have two problems with a southern route: very few major population centers, and all of them are in or surrounded by land that’s not great for rail construction either due to mountains like Nashville or due to swamps like New Orleans and Florida. You’d probably hit Atlanta then there’s little reason to go all the way to the coast at savannah.
Part of the goal of an initial route is for it to demonstrate that best case scenario it will be usable, and connecting the biggest and third biggest cities in the country is useful, as well as the fact that because it’s nyc at the end it provides easy access to the northeastern Amtrak network which is the only well developed intercity passenger rail system in the United States. The fact that there’s basically nothing from Chicago
An alternative route might be the mid country route of dc to San Francisco by way of Columbus, Denver, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and a few others. It’s a lot of cities of reasonably large size and even would hit Sacramento. From there you can basically build out triangles to Denver or St. Louis on the coasts. The Appalachian mountains are a pain still, but they’re nothing compared to the Rockies and the population density means crisscrossing them is probably worth it, while the west coast can have their population bubbles all connected on their end.
Really as a Midwesterner I’m mostly concerned about getting the Great Lakes Region connected into Amtrak because we have every reason to be and it would be a huge deal to have easy access from Ohio and Indiana to both Chicago and the east coast
As much as I would love that central route (I live in Sacramento) crossing the Rockies and the Sierras seems almost insurmountable for high speed rail. The mountains of the southwest are a lot more isolated, so that’s why I see that as more viable.
But yeah realistically we need to look at connecting regions first, then once we have two robust networks in the west and east, we can determine the best way to connect them.
If you look at the various proposals, you’ll see they start like that. You start with focus areas where cities are close together, such as connecting cities in the Midwest to Chicago. You have similar opportunities in southeast, Texas, California, northwest, and of course the northeast where we already have Acela.
However, once those are established, neighboring cities naturally want to be extended to. You can easily imagine that process eventually turning into a connected map - except maybe Great Plains and Rockies
Yeah I definitely support that model. I’m just not convinced very many people would want to go coast to coast by this method. It’s likely to be more expensive and slower.
A bunch of years back, I remember reading about 500 miles as a rule of thumb for that tradeoff. Between two cities less than 500 miles apart, high speed rail could be the preferred travel choice, while air travel clearly wins for longer distances.
Obviously the exact distance depends on the details, but we would do well to present high speed rail for the trips that it can be better.
For me personally, I love travel by train and hope some day to travel long distance at least once. I live near Boston, one of the few US cities with pretty good transit, and one end of Acela, the closest we have to high speed rail. From the time Acela opened, it was immediately the best choice to travel Boston —> NYC. However I’ve been to DC every year and never tempted to take the train. Flying is better for that distance, given how slow Acela is: sure enough, close to 500 miles
Yeah Acela isn’t really true high speed rail though. Many sections are slower. Boston to DC would be workable with the right infrastructure. But coast to coast is over 3000 miles which is a whole different beast, barring some technological advancement.
Acela isn’t really true high speed rail though
Last time I looked, it could only achieve its top speed of 150mph for 35 miles!
However the whole idea of Acela is incremental improvement. They did enough initially to make it viable, then Every year they knock a minute or so off the trip. The new train sets have a higher top speed so that should help, when they get into service. I recently saw a project announcement for replacing a tunnel near Baltimore where it was stuck under 30 mph. The new tunnel won’t be high speed but clear enough of a bottleneck to be a nice trip time improvement
I actually like Acela. You have to work with the infrastructure you start with, but eventually I’d like to see a faster and more subsidized line there.