Re:China and Japan race to dominate the future of high-speed...
by wsatb on Monday January 18, 2021 @11:49AM
(#25823616)
Is there actual evidence that it wouldn't work, or we're making an assumption? That is what makes it work in those places but to say it could never work in North America because of that I think is crazy. I think it would connect more sparsely populated areas to the rest of the continent better than the interstate system. If it's convenient, people will use it, and if it's anything like the Shinkansen, then people will definitely use it.
The biggest problem in the USA specifically is not where the population centers are but simply politics. It's not necessarily that it can't work, it's that there's a lot of money invested into making sure it never happens.
Re:China and Japan race to dominate the future of high-speed...
by nine_k on Monday January 18, 2021 @12:00PM
(#25823756)
It does work im North America where the density is high enough; when I need to do from NYC to Philadelphia, I take a train.
But a lot of other areas in the US (to say nothing of Canada) are way less dense. I can arrive on a train into the center of Philadelphia, but is there a center of Silicon Valley? A center of LA or Houston? A center of anything in Nebraska?
It's not much of North America, though, except a few coastal agglomerations. North America is quite sparsely populated — maybe not as sparsely as Siberia or Sahara, but not near European levels, to say nothing of Japan or south of China, so high-speed rail makes relatively little sense here.