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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Building a high-speed rail network has nothing to do with our "model". It's 50 year old technology with commercial use before man first set foot on the moon.

There are a dozen countries with it. Spain, for example, has a few thousand miles.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_rail_lines

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I'm not talking about the technology, I'm talking about the implementation.

Doing this requires a lot of collective work: investment, property acquisition or licensing, railway building, etc

This requires collective vision and goals

US population density: 34/km^2

Germany population density: 226/km^2

The Northeast US has a fairly good railway system despite it having a lot of legacy constraints not around in Germany. Most of the rest of the US is far to sprawling for railways to be effective.

See the average speed of Acela trains (time vs distance) compared with TGV/Thalys/ICE

And don't you think Germany has more legacy constraints with a higher density and older tracks?

Acela trains share track with freight, TGV and ICE certainly don't. This includes the requirement for safe collision with a freight train, which adds a lot of weight.

The ICE shares tracks with freight trains as well. Only the TGV has completely dedicated tracks afaik.

Thanks for the correction; ICE trainsets are still way lighter right?

Depends.. ICE1 trainsets appear to be slightly heavier than the Acela, whereas the newer ones are lighter. But that seems to be mainly due to having no dedicated power cars (ICE1 and the Acela Express do have power cars).

YES, this has been discussed a million times before. Please don't waste our time discussing the population density of the entire US. It's irrelevant.

Can you give us the population density of Southern California vs Spain, for example?

It doesn't matter since Southern California isn't a political unit. Any significant rail improvements would require state and federal funding to be feasible.

First you use the argument that the entire United States is not as densely populated as Germany, which I pointed out is flawed. Now, you're trying some political tangent. First, we should agree that it is worth, or not worth, being built on technical merits then we can discuss the politics that follow. Jumping around in a scattershot discussion is not effective, unless your goal is to derail the conversation. Pun intended...

I thought we were discussing why Germany has better passenger rail infrastructure, not whether there are technical merits for building it.

You were, he's looking for an argument.

That's a pretty sweeping statement. Education impacts all things, voting, social norms, behavior, social sentiment... all of which impact how politicians act. In addition the politicians themselves go through the public education system.

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