Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

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At the scale of the US, passenger rail is disconnected from geography. Look at the map and locate Salt Lake City. It sits in the endorheic watershed known as the Great Basin. It is the only metro area of more than a million people in the Basin. The Great Basin is about the size of France.

From Salt Lake City heading west the first metro of more than one million is Sacramento a thousand kilometers away. In between is nothing but mountain ranges running north south. The little ones only nerds and locals can name. The big one, the Sierra Nevada, which most Americans will vaguely allude to as “the Rockies.” Despite the Rockies being five hundred kilometers to the east of Salt Lake City.

Even further on the other side of the Rockies sits Denver 800 km away. It's the closest million plus metro to the east of Salt Lake. Again across north south mountain ranges.

That’s 1800 km of mountain traversing rail line that only serves Salt Lake City. And it’s still almost that far - 1600 km - to Chicago...and a mere 1200 km to New York City.

The US is vast. Europeans don’t have practical rail from Helsinki to Athens. Or Berlin to Baku. Both significantly shorter than NYC to San Francisco.

This only applies from the Midwest to the West Coast. There's no geographical reason the Northeast (and parts of the South) should not be densely connected with intercity rail.

I agree in theory. In practice, national rail has to pass the Senate where Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Hawaii, and the Dakotas are twelve percent of the votes. Throw in all the places you are leaving out and you're close to half the of it.

National passenger rail isn't politically viable in the US because passenger rail is an absurd approach in most of the US.

The west and the midwest are most of the US.

Not in terms of population density, which is what matters when it comes to intercity rail. I know this isn't convincing to senators from big western states — but we've gotta draw a line in the sand in allocating decision making power to big empty spaces in this country, it's becoming an existential concern at this point.

Existential for whom? You talk about "this country" so clearly it's not everyone in the world. And you talk about the big western states, so it's not me as I live in California.

So really, it's just your concern that is important to you. There's no "we" in it. Only what benefits you.

If you think intercity rail is a great idea, you don't need the US Senate. Just your own local and state officials to boldly pay for it with your own local and state taxes.

Draw the line with them, not with me.

The federal government is the issuer of our currency and is well-positioned to fund intercity rail in a way that states and cities just aren't. It's bad that, as you suggested, the senators from large and sparsely populated western states could shoot the idea down because it doesn't happen to work for their states, even though it could be a great solution for 200+ million people on the coasts (California included) in the South, and in the Great Lakes region. If the United States can't mobilize to build infrastructure because a minority of the country doesn't want to, that's an existential threat to the country.

The existential threat to the US is that war upon the locals is establishing methodology. Your championing it here is symptomatic of its continual underlying appeal as the alternative to self control.

The problem isn’t that some states won’t go along. It’s that you think of Hawaii as owing you fealty. New Mexico as obliged to pay tribute.

The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term. There’s no “Plymouth Rock therefore California.” No “Jamestown therefore Santa Fe.” No “Mount Vernon therefore Maui.”

I dunno if this is really some high modernist plot to assimilate all of these quirky little polities into a single transportation regime. If New Mexico or Montana don't want trains I really couldn't care less. But the actual power dynamic is the inverse of what you're positing: the western states elect senators with frontier mindsets who value austerity and self-reliance (nevermind who is paying for the interstates that crisscross their states) and they exert an outsize influence on policy for the rest of the country. "Santa Fe therefore Jamestown" is actually a fantastic summary of how federal transportation policy has been standardized over the last seventy years, using the sparsest and least geometrically constrained places as a yardstick for what should be built (freeways) and for whom (people making 20+ mile city-suburb or suburb-suburb commutes).

> The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term.

Here we agree, which is why the US should build several dense intercity rail networks within its borders which will eventually serve as skeletons for its balkanized successor states :)

war upon the locals is establishing methodology

I suppose you consider federalism itself to be "war upon the locals". That ship sailed (or perhaps burned and sank) when the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution.

continual underlying appeal as the alternative to self control

If I could only just control my compulsive, pathological desire for decent-quality intercity rail travel in densely populated regions...

The problem isn’t that some states won’t go along. It’s that you think of Hawaii as owing you fealty. New Mexico as obliged to pay tribute.

By that logic, taxpayers in New York have been paying fealty to Texans in the Fort Worth area (via the Lockheed F-35 construction facility) for years.

The OP just gave an example of Portland to Oakland which took 20 hours. That's still mid-north pacific.

But if you're connecting east and west, you will need to cross the Rockies. Why not do it through a city of a million?

The two southern routes don't cross the Rockies. The route through Flagstaff crosses the Colorado Plateau. It skirts south of the Rockies through La Junta following the Santa Fe trail...La Junta is named for the point on the old Spanish maps where the alternative routes of Santa Fe trail came to a junction. La Junta (literally "the junction") is east of Salida Colorado where the Arkansas River provides an exit ("salida" in Spanish) from the Rocky Mountains. It's the route Francis Parkman used and describes in his book The Oregon Trail...he never got very close to Oregon. The opium might have had something to do with that.

The southernmost route traverses the mountains of the Basin and Range physiographic region.

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