Is it too much to ask

German here: please learn from our mistakes and try to keep it in the hand of the government if possible. Private companies that maintain rail systems will only destroy it. Trust me.
- Unfortunately for us Americans, the railway industry was privatized long ago, and they consistently lobby for things to only move in their favor.
- B-but that's socialism
- I mean honestly, if any government can fuck up a large-scale infrastructure project it's absolutely the US federal government.
- Come to the UK and marvel at our range of privatised services. It's poetry in motion! Not that I'd dare think what would have happened in the past 13 years of glorious Conservative 'governance' had anything been in public ownership...
- Having multiple companies using the same state owned tracks would be even better. Competition is always good, and you really don't want a monopoly, which is what you'd most likely get with everything being state owned.
  We've got one big railway in Austria (ÖBB), which is owned by the government. And then we've got one smaller, private one (WESTbahn) which only goes to certain cities and in a certain direction. The private one's prices are usually way better, even though they pay the government to be able to use the rails.

My programmer's dream is to use a geodata map of the US with population and visitor statistics to make a slime mold map to use as the transit model.
Geodata because I want it to account for terrain in addition to population and visitor data.
I also want to include the national parks system in it just because it can revitalize the whole thing with stationside hotels for people to leave their junk at while they're in the parks.
- I don't fully understand what all that means but I like the sound of it and hope your dream comes true
  
  Thank you!
  Basically a slime mold map is simulating a blob that forms a network of centers and bridges based on the location of "food", and supposedly in the process demonstrates the most efficient network of transportation between those locations.
  Its applications for public transit were realized when trying it out with an actual slime mold revealed a map very similar to the actual layout of the Tokyo metro system, hence the name.
  So the theory is that you can simulate transit stations by putting "food" at those locations and the slime mold simulation will organically draw a map of an efficient transit network for you because it's a stretchy little slime that just wants food.
- Haha yes it also bothered me that the slime mold didn't have to consider the ferocity of the Rocky Mountains.

Get me dat yellow line! Pop into NO in 2 hours, get hammered en Vieux Carre, nap on the ride back? SOLD.
6 hours to El Paso? And I could finally afford to visit the west coast?!
So many ways to pay for this. Haul for Amazon, UPS, FedEx, USPS, all of them. Use passenger fees for ongoing maintenance.
This could be the next iteration of the interstate highway system. Ya know, that thing that made America's economy explode by connecting us?
And if we took many passengers, and at least some freight, off the interstates, less maintenance costs.
- Keep freight and passenger trains on seperate tracks for the most part otherwise you end up like Canada where passenger trains have to yield (delay) to let the frieght pass.
  
  Yeah, because of this it takes me 8 hours to make a trip to Seattle by train when it takes 5.5 hours by car. That entire trip is in the US, too.

why does florida get three lines?
- That's why this is disgusting.
  
  Reprehensible, honestly.
- Expedite leaving Florida.
- Disney and Miami/Keys. No one WANTS to go through Jacksonville, but it's the shortest route if you're going down the coast.
- Huge tourist hub and destination for a lot of flights. Need lines from both the northeast and Midwest to capture a majority of the air traffic going there.
  Speaking as a former midwesterner who would drive down to Florida with their family for vacations this would be a god send, I'm sure most east coasters would agree too.
- The blue green are just a merged line I think. Florida is. Kst heavily populated on its coasts and then part way down you have the ver glades. Of you look at a map of Florida now this is more or less what I75 and I95 do.
- Expedite moving old people to Florida
- Because they are already building it.
- Don't worry they'll dedicate one to Disney somewhere where the three meet lmao

"But America is too vast to have rail lines!!!"
- "No, I don't care if Russia has a good system, Russia does everything badly"

yeah airplanes were supposed to be the solution for this, but since air travel absolutely sucks now unless you have your own private jet, I guess we're taking it back to the ground.
- Also, it takes way more energy per person to travel by plane than train.

Because Montana & North Dakota don't deserve modernization.
- I've been to both. Montana is happy to larp as a cowboy state and North Dakota knows what it did.
  
  whispers: What did ND do??
- Or South Dakota, or Wyoming, or Idaho, or any part of Nevada that isn't Las Vegas.
  
  It's not that those places don't deserve modernization, it's just that those are much more sparsely populated areas, with much longer distances between population centers. From a cost and logistics perspective, it doesn't make sense to build routes in those places before establishing routes elsewhere, in denser areas. You have to walk before you can run, etc.

WE RAN OUT OF DESTINY, QUICK, MANIFEST MORE.

Wild that it would still take over a DAY to get from NYC to LA. The USA is huge
- A day? That's still incredibly fast. It takes a week to drive a car across the country.
  
  The cannonball run records are under 24 hours. A week travel includes few hours per day travel and generous breaks.
  
  Yeah but cars are slow. I was mentally comparing to flying, and planes just happen to be really freaking fast.
- This is unfortunately why this will never happen. It's 4x as long as flying and requires 1000x the infrastructure to maintain. High speed rail makes sense for regional connections, but I remain skeptical that it's viable for this kind of travel.
  
  I mean, any network is just a set of regional connections. Sure maybe no one takes NYC - LA line, but if people are taking the NYC to Chicago and LA to Dallas and Dallas To Chicago there's no reason not to join them up.

Man if only. I would be in Vegas every other month if the train was already done.

This should be posted to that fuckcars community

I mean, affordable high speed rail is kinda sexy, iykwim

What did that mass of land in the North-West-ish ever do to you?
- Very few people live there, though they should probably extend the turquoise line so the PNW can go somewhere other than California.
- Right? Seattle to New York goes through… Los Angeles???
  
  … seattle?
  … los angeles?
  Ah! Right! Seattle is that place from the Simpson Movie and Los Angeles is that thing from Xenoblade.
  
  Personally I want to ride that Chicago to Quebec City line that goes through checks notes ... New Orleans

The pink line cuts across NH without a stop at either Manchester or Concord.
- I don't mind, I never go there anyway.

I currently live in a void, but would absolutely move to be adjacent to a high speed node. This is an excellent map to think about.
What data was used to decide on routes? Is it based off highway data?
- Most of it is existing or proposed Amtrak routes

Anyone in Quebec getting on the Chicago train is in for a nasty surprise.

Quincy? Really?

Teal line really should be going to at least Duluth (city at the western point of lake Superior). It's so weird that it stops at the twin cities. I'm guessing the person who made this map doesn't know much about Minnesota.
- No, they know that no one outside of Minnesota wants to go to Duluth.
  
  "Does this bus go to Duluth?"
  "No, it goes 'beep beep'."
  
  ???????????

Thanks for stopping in Rochester!

Skip Texas and southern red States
- Setting aside just how idiotic that notion is for just a second:
  You know some of those states are just gerrymandered red, and even if they aren't nearly half the population is going to be blue. And these trains would largely service blue, urban areas.

When are Feminists gonna learn that the Marxists are on their side?
- ... What? Did you mean to reply to a completely different post or did saying unrelated nonsense just give you a sense of pride and accomplishment?