What If The United States Built A Transcontinental High Speed Rail Line? | Geography By Geoff (11:41)
What If The United States Built A Transcontinental High Speed Rail Line? | Geography By Geoff (11:41)
16 comments
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It needs to be complimented by better local transport infrastructure, or else we just end up with bigger parking lots on both ends
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Shit, I'd be happy with a good commuter rail network lol
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Can anyone please provide a bit of background on this YouTuber?
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That'd be cool, as long as Musk isn't allowed anywhere near the project.
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If it's such a good idea, why aren't the private RR companies getting together to ask that question? Questions like: who pays for it? what does 'high speed mean' (150mph average = about 20 hours), why transcontinenal (SF to NY is mostly EMPTY) and who'd benefit the most (not most of US).
I read the other day that some company is making JET fuel entirely of human poo. Sounds like saner option.
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I think there would need to be a lot of public funding, and the amount of airline lobby money against this would make it impossible.
Good idea or not, it all comes down to money.
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Right now, the federal government pays for Amtrak, along with a few ticket sales and whatnot. They got 66 billion dollars last year from the feds. Private companies simply couldn't afford to run passenger rail, it's just not profitable when airlines and the highway system exist. Hell, the rail companies struggle to compete with trucks on freight.
Edit: Got curious. In 2020, Amtrak ran 16.8 million passengers. They effectively got paid 3928 dollars per passenger, not including the cost to the passengers themselves.
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I’m not sure the moderator of a right-wing propaganda community on lemm.ee is really the right person to be talking about how something shouldn’t be because it isn’t “profitable” for private companies.
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It's fun to think about this stuff, but like the YouTube comments discuss, this is not going to be a practical solution. The cost:benefit ratio just isn't there.
My personal opinion is that continued electrification of existing transport modalities is probably going to be the defining feature of future transportation developments for the next century. The biggest issue is battery energy density, but I'd be shocked if things like solid state batteries didn't start coming online within the next decade or two. There's just so much investment going on here right now.
So obviously things like electric cars and buses on existing roadways is going to continue growing. Full self driving will eventually occur. Convoys of high speed electric vehicles traveling down highways will basically do everything that high speed rail is supposed to do, but without the need to build high speed rail. Like by the time a transcontinental high speed rail system would be built (50 years?) It would be obsolete.
That's not even taking into account how the enormous investment and innovation fueled by the electric car/truck/bus industry is also going to enable electric airplanes. Being able to fly a couple dozen people to local air strips a couple hundred miles apart will be a true transportation revolution. You'll be able to connect up all these regional locations without any significant infrastructure and at aircraft speeds and for relatively low cost.
High speed rail is amazing for high density locations like Europe, Japan and China. But for the USA it's a much tougher sell. And with upcoming developments in electric vehicles it's likely to be obsolete by the time you finish building it. It's sort of like trying to convince a big African country with poor telecom infrastructure to build out a national network of expensive high speed fiber optic cables instead of going for something like wireless cell towers or just switching to satellite constellations like Starlink in another decade.
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East coast united states has similar population density to most of europe.
It's just out west we have a lot of empty land.
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16 comments