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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

this also always gets forgotten when high speed rail comes up. Air travel makes a LOT of sense for the way the US population is distributed. Rail makes more sense when you want to have stops along the way, but in the US, there's a lot of nothing between distantly located cities.

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Even in places where it makes all the sense in the world, we don't have quality rail. It's more expensive and slower to take the train than to drive from Boston to NYC, and that's a perfect length of trip for rail. The whole North East Corridor seems to run ancient track, and the "High Speed" Acela service doesn't even count as such in locales with modern HS services.

If it was just the matter of replacing track in the existing right-of-way they would have done that. Unfortunately, much of the NEC right-of-way between NY and Boston -- particularly in Connecticut -- is too curvy. Bulldozing a new, straighter right of way across CT is not politicaly feasible -- it would most likely require massive amounts of property seizure by eminent domain that nobody has the stomach for. If there were real breakthroughs in low cost tunnel boring machines there might be a way but it's not going to happen at or above ground.

The old rich folks in CT who don't want the NEC alignment don't care if it's in a tunnel (folks still came out to oppose the new alignment near Old Lyme even when the proposal changed to allow for a tunnel so they didn't have to see or hear the thing).

If there was true HS service on the NEC between Boston and NYC you'd easily get a far larger share of the BOS-NYC pax trips made. Estimates are about 15MM trips/yr with rail being about a third of that. Is getting an extra 5 million car trips off the road worth inconveniencing some of the most affluent communities in the US?

BOS NYC, driven is about 2 micromorts, the drive is about 140kg CO2. So, napkin math, if half the people traveling by car and plane switched to train, you save 5 lives per year and 500,000 tons of CO2 emission. That's a (shittily calculated, admittedly) estimate of the cost of inaction.

Specific corridors in the US are quite populous and quite ready for modern infrastructure. We just aren't in the mood to pay anything for it, unless it's more highway lane-miles.

At least in my area, we also don’t build new highways. We only widen existing ones.

Right of way seems to be the biggest driver of cost and seems to be a major blocker for transportation progress.

The east coast and west coast states between them, however, have over half of the US's population and are mostly relatively dense. Transcontinental passenger service might be a little pointless, but clearly there is room for good-quality high speed lines. SF to Seattle, say, would be doable non-stop in about four hours on top-quality conventional (ie ~320km/h) rail. Less with high-speed maglev and other exotics, but now that China seems to have largely lost interest, I'm not sure if anyone is seriously pursuing those.

One attempt to do that (in CA) picked a not-great corridor, and hasn't done much in a decade. It's really turned people off it, even if there are much better places to try.

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