this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
38 points (100.0% liked)
United States | News & Politics
2795 readers
1422 users here now
Welcome to [email protected], where you can share and converse about the different things happening all over/about the United States.
If you’re interested in participating, please subscribe.
Rules
Be respectful and civil. No racism/bigotry/hateful speech.
Post anything related to the United States.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'd imagine it's because the US is 18x bigger than France.
America is the richest country on earth and has the third largest population. They can have high speed rail.
Maybe in metropolitan areas, but your high speed rail isn't going to be very high speed if it has to stop at 3 dozen small towns between two metropolitan areas.
Again, the US is huge. Take Texas for example, it can take upwards of 16 hours to drive from one side to another.
Enough of this bogus argument. It's incredibly dumb. Why? Because rail doesn't have to serve every podunk, desert town in west Texas (even though a railroad is why they exist in the first place!) to be useful. The Amtrak Acela route runs from one tiny hamlet called Washington, D.C., to a ghost town called Boston, stopping in between at some backwater nobody's ever heard of called New York. Why isn't that a high-speed rail line?
Or, as Ray pointed out in one of his City Nerd videos, the Great Lakes region is about the same size as Spain, and has more people living in it. Spain has a built-out HSR network. Why don't we? There's plenty of demand. Amtrak added the Borealis train last year because the Empire Builder was overbooked, and it immediately exceeded ridership projections.