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Ave_TechSenger t1_j9ygllo wrote

Reply to comment by littleferrhis in High-Speed Rail Project Will Create Over 10,000 Jobs in California by gammapsi05

Here’s the thing.

Japan has most of its population centralized in a few cities but still has HSR and standard rail options to the boonies. It’s pretty sparsely populated outside of those cities. The difference is that infrastructure including public transit is seen as a necessary public service in much of the world, cities and spaces are typically more pedestrian and bicycle friendly, etc.

China’s gotten there too. 20ish years ago, there was no train line to my hometown (with a population of about 20,000 and century old homes that still had unused open sewers repurposed as storm drains). We took a 6 hour bus from Shenzhen, then a 2 hour car ride. 15ish years ago, they put in a rail line to a nearby city (Chaozhou), so 3 hours on a train and 1 hour by car. 8 years ago, a maglev line was completed with a stop 15 minutes’ drive from the grandparents’ house, cutting total transit time to like 90 minutes from Shenzhen.

Here in the US, we do have very sparsely populated areas that this wouldn’t make sense in such as the plains, the Dakotas, etc. But certain circuits would make sense such as the coasts, regional hubs such as around Chicago, etc. would maybe be feasible along with connecting lines to link major hubs over distances. It would be seen as government bloat, anti/car, etc. most likely and those would be political obstacles…

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littleferrhis t1_j9ykffp wrote

See I totally agree with that. Standard Gauge rail has worked in the U.S. over small populations in the past, and has proven to work in countries with higher population dispersions like Russia. It’s in fact working really well right now with cargo rail.

If I wanted to go forward with a plan to bring rail back into common use with the U.S. I would go to CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, etc. and propose government subsidized passenger cars/trains on their trains to government owned stations along their routes. The routes are already there, the U.S. already has one of the largest cargo rail networks in the world. The cost would be relatively minimal for these companies, the real question is how much profit is there to be gained from it? The problem with Amtrak is its sharing the cargo rail for passenger service, essentially competing with the cargo companies on their rail. The key would be to work with these companies so that they make them a priority.

This guy was talking about HSR across the U.S., which is laughable given our population dispersion.

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