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Comment by Svexav | Hacker News Reader

You expect a high speed train station outside your front door? Awfully optimistic of you.

Little need for high speed rail when you’re talking about daily commuting. Personally may last five apartments have all been in short as in under five minute walking distance of a subway, that’s the advantage of living in high density areas.

Come to Detroit where our only public transport options are "SMART" (slow) buses, the Detroit People Mover (a joke that barely circles a small area downtown), and the newly built Q-line that travels only a few miles straight back and forth.

IMO the addition of birds and limes has been really nice.

I live in London, and I can tell you that you pay significantly more in order to be within 5 minutes of the tube. And some people want to have children and don't want them out on the streets in the city, so they pay significantly more in order to be close to fast rail links.

High speed rail would allow people who live in Milwaukee and Madison to commute to Chicago, and vice versa. What is a 3 hour drive would become a 45 minute commute, which is reasonable considering the distance.

Cost of living drops off as you leave metro areas. Like another responder to your comment noted: people pay for convenience. I'd say cost is a disadvantage of living in a high-density area.

High speed rail can’t do multiple quick stops. So, you can get to a city’s center with it, but acceleration and deceleration times plus station time means you are stuck with subways for in city use. You can’t use high speed rail and and a subway system to move very far and still have a 45 minuet commute.

So, now you need to live near HSR and your job also needs to be next to HSR in order for that trip to work.

If you live, work and shop within five minutes of subways then you have no real use for a scooter. That isn't the case for most people, however. We can't all move to the big city.

That’s a fair point, but they are also rather useless in the ultra low density country or extreme urban sprawl. They are really only extremely spread out US style cities. Where, cars are almost useless, but you can’t really walk to everything useful.

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