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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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