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somedudevt t1_izu44zk wrote

Reply to comment by headgasketidiot in Suppose budget was no issue. What inter-town/city rail connections would you build, either within Vermont or from places in Vermont to elsewhere? by DrToadley

Here is the problem with your complaint against our society:

SIZE, you are ignoring size. Switzerland has 9 million people, in an area the size of roughly 2x VT. Burlington to Is the equivalent of crossing the furthest 2 places in Switzerland (~190 miles as the crow flies) NYC to BT is 260 miles as the crow flies.

The distances are greater and the populations are smaller. If you look at a Swiss rail map you will see that most of the network is in the northern part of the country, which makes up the vast majority of the population. The southern part of the country is very sparsely serviced by rail. And if you take the southern part of Switzerland it still has a greater population than Vermont.

The reality is passenger rail doesn’t work in low density places where you don’t have demand. And trying compare a place that is 10x higher population density to VT is crazy.

Dreaming big is fine, but to say that our region and society is somehow wrong for not having robust rail is just missing economics.

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giraffehugger t1_izvc0np wrote

Let’s not forget that that rail line has to travel a contiguous line, and it only takes a handful of land owners in the middle between say Burlington and Boston to ‘not see the value’ of having train tracks run through their land, or the tracks running to close to the breeding ground of the Black-capped Chickadee to kill a project or tie it up in endless red tape. What

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