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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Density is destiny. Population densities:

  407/km² England
  256/km² UK
   93/km² California
   32/km² USA

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But this comparison is wrong and meaningless. Certainly no one would build a high-speed, dense train network across, say, Nevada.

But building one across the coastal part of California? Or across the NE United States? Why yes, that does make sense, and why yes, it is warranted by the densities in those areas. The fact that the U.S. also owns Alaska doesn't really matter. No one is arguing Alaska needs a high-speed rail network.

Build fast trains connecting all the red areas:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Californi...

Repeat for suitable other areas across the U.S.

I can believe that's a good plan for the US NE corridor... which already has usable (but improvable) Amtrak.

The California coastal cities (and connecting areas) are still pretty sparse, comparatively. And the marquee High Speed Rail project takes a big inland detour to the smaller interior cities, for political reasons. If ever finished, that will hurt its price/time attractiveness compared to flying.

The US NE corridor is arguably the only place it makes sense to build a high speed train network.

You'll notice that Elon Musk's plan for the Hyperloop includes an option for shooting automobiles through the tubes. That's because the mass transit within the cities on that coast is shit.

Inter-city mass transit only makes sense once you've solved intra-city mass transit. Unless you really, really love hanging out within a few city blocks of an inter-city train station, you need to have a convenient, desirable mass transit system waiting for you in the city you're going to. If you're linking Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, you're liking the best mass transit system in America with four other pretty good transit systems. Cutting Boston to DC from 6.5 hours to 90 minutes is definitely worth doing.

That's because the mass transit within the cities on that coast is shit.

As someone who uses only mass transit, I think that's untrue.

I was going to make a flippant comment about "Congratulations on living in San Francisco!", but hilariously, there's a better chance you live in Los Angeles (lower ridership percentage, but significantly higher population).

Even in Oklahoma City, where only ~1% of people commute via mass transit, there are still thousands of people who can live happily without a car because mass transit serves them fine. That does not mean that Oklahoma City has a great transit system.

I live in Oakland, have lived in San Francisco for a long time, frequently work in LA, and have lived in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona as well, so I feel I've had exposure to a good variety of transit systems in order to form my opinion.

Even in the Northeast, Amtrak's improvement plans are incredibly wasteful:

http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/north...

> Certainly no one would build a high-speed, dense train network across, say, Nevada.

I wonder. It's easier to find low cost airfares to Las Vegas than other cities. A conduit to Las Vegas from the populated west coast might be interesting to some.

2.8/km² Australia

And here you can travel from most parts of Melbourne to most parts of Sydney with just two train changes. One at a Melbourne hub to the interstate trains and one at Sydney to the local system.

Even so, we feel our train systems suck too.

Yes, our high speed rail process is currently on a ridiculous timescale, something like 50 years out. If something isn't slated for major construction works within a single term of government you can pretty much assume it will never happen in its current form.

That figure is meaningless considering Australia is a large piece of largely uninhabited land, with two or three metropolitan areas on the coasts.

Unless you can take a train into the center of Australia, in which case I apologize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Australia_Railway

Actually you can, rather expensive though.

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