I lived in Brisbane, Australia for a year. The good state of public transport there (at least for my use, commuting to/from Uni (UQ) and the city from Toowong) made car use non-essential. The sidewalks are maintained and have enough space to the road to not be alarmed by cars. To get further/certain parts of Brisbane is still a chore as it's still a car-centric infrastructure, but comparing it to Jakarta, Indonesia/metro US, it's much better. Public transport in Jakarta is an option for most, but the last-mile experience with subpar sidewalks (especially the lack of shade) make it such a chore.
I felt much healthier to walk and take public transport for my daily commute, and not to mention the beautiful views on the way. The increase in my Quality of Life is very apparent. I really miss it, and looking to move to Brisbane or another city with similar/better commute/transport paradigm in the future.
I hope one day people in the US can experience this feeling as well.
This concept of traversal-by-foot as an inherent measure of scalability is also known as the Marchetti Constant.
This article has appeared on HN before:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...
That reminds that one time where I borrowed a car after not using one for quite some time (moving on foot or by public transportation) and I remember a feeling of freedom, being able to go just about anywhere, not depending on unregular lines or taxis (which would have taken me where I went anyway, especially as I arrived late in the night). For going in the countryside, cars are unmatched, but I also appreciate efficient public transportation in cities
Once you get to the western mountains, there are only four rail grades that are suitable for freight. The old Northern through Montana near Glacier National Park; the original Union/Central Pacific route along the Platte and over the Sierras around Donner Pass; the ATSF route across the Colorado Plateau south of the Grand Canyon at Flagstaff and over the Sierras at Tehechapi via the loop, and the all weather grade through the Gadsden Purchase along the Mexico border.
The reason there are so few routes is simply geography. North America's mountains run north-south and there is more than a thousand miles of them between Denver and the coast. And since the west is dry much of what is west of the first line of mountains is desert as well as mountains.
Those are the grades that work for freight to the west coast. Notably, none serve much population between the Mississippi River and the Pacific. West of the Mississippi the US population density is low. The densest state California has about 1/5 the density of the Netherlands. The second most dense, Arizona is 1/20 as dense.
French TGV climbs 3.5%, German ICE climbs 4%. That simplifies a lot of the route planning. Rail bridges are surprisingly simple and cheap (open area, known loads, no salt) and tunnels are easier the simpler the rock.
I'd say it's no harder than any of the other miracles that we're building on the regular.
To put it another way, Europeans haven't built high speed rail from London to Baku for similar reasons. The tree lined cloisters where political theory makes all nation states equal is not a good model of physical reality.Swiss rail hasn't connected Bern to Baghdad.
The Swiss did vote for and consequently built things like the Gotthard Base Tunnel.
The Chinese are also building a lot of rail infrastructure and are of a similar size to the US. But then they have higher population density. But it's probably more a question of political priorities than physical realities.
The US geography makes high speed rail at the Federal level economically infeasible. Air transport reaches everyone including Alaska and Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Now air transport can reach everyone, but is also especially climate unfriendly. Maybe in the future there will be electric or hydrogen airplanes, but if there is an option to use rail or plane mass transit, rail will always have lower energy demands. But historically the US has low energy (and fuel) taxes, and that will favor the planes. EU on the other hand is now talking about taxing aircraft fuels and if that happens and the taxes are sufficiently high, trains will be more attractive, even if currently travelling long distances by rail in the EU is a huge PITA.
I’d venture that American rail could have looked similar if the North American continent was made up of dozens of countries instead of just one, forcing at least one of those countries to use the Rockies more comprehensively.
That's not to say that I like the American design of where you have to drive everywhere. I like living in a town where you can walk to shops and cafes. But I also like the freedom and the comfort and the fun of being able to get into a car and drive out.
The highways in America are super easy to navigate with carplay/gps and to be honest, and I have yet to see a jam where your car is completely stopped for more than 10 minutes. What I see is a dance of cars where every car travels to cruise speed.. another thing I’d mention is that I consider americans good drivers and very respectful of the laws compared to other countries.
Personally, I use my bike whenever possible, up to about a 30 minute journey. Farther than that, or when the weather is bad, I use the train. If I need to go somewhere remote, I can rent a car or call a taxi.
As for a commute, housing is cheaper here than you'd expect, partly because housing is not viewed as an investment. It's not difficult to live near where you work, if avoiding the trains is a priority for you.
The Shin-Hakodate to Sapporo extension will cost them 1.24T yen for 131 km of many tunnels and bridges [0], or US $83M/mi. This cost is why it's taken Japan so long to build a complete Tokyo-Sapporo HSR line, even though the Tokyo-Sapporo air route has been one of the most popular air routes for a long time [1].
They're also working on the Chuo Line which is a new Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka line going through mountainous terrain that will facilitate 67-minute travel between Tokyo and Osaka. This line will cost 9T yen for 438km [2], which will be a whopping US $187M/mi.
Funnily enough, speaking of the Tokaido line, the president of Japanese National Railway and the chief engineer resigned before its completion due to cost overruns [3]. Japan makes it look easy, but the Shinkansen had a troubled start.
In comparison, for the CA HSR [4], the fairly flat Central California portion is costing $19.5B / 199 mi ($98M/mi) while the more challenging Palmdale-Burbank section is costing $16.8B / 41 mi ($382M/mi).
I know you use it as a figure of speech, but all of this means that a US intercontinental line going through the Rockies would be difficult. Still, I would love to see an intra-Texas, Midwest, or East Coast HSR in my lifetime.
[0] https://www.town.kutchan.hokkaido.jp/town_administration/shi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen
[3] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140714-built-for-speed...
[4] https://hsr.ca.gov/about/high-speed-rail-business-plans/2020...
Something many people overlook about Netherlands is how reliant on public transport they aren't. City design enabling local amenities to actually be truly local (within walking distance) is an underestimated boon. That's enormously easier to do in practice without the burden of highways and carparks.
There's also a general myth about Europe being "forced" into smaller more localized city plans by having older cities with smaller streets (accidentally creating more "local" urban environments) but that's not really the case. Road-widening projects have been common in many old European cities for centuries; the cities that are human-friendly are the ones who've undertaken the gargantuan task of reversing a lot of these car-oriented urban plans[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
Very good introduction on how the few people (~15%) who really benefit from driving cars dictate far more than their share of public space, cause 99% of traffic deaths etc.
For me, I always felt that something was wrong about American cities / suburbs but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then, I spent a few months in Tokyo and something "clicked". It's an entirely different paradigm that forced me to reevaluate what I thought was possible.
When I returned to the US, on the ride from the airport my first thought was: Everyone in this traffic jam is going the same direction, and would fit in a handful of train cars. Why are we OK with this??
People say trains are expensive, but they don't realize how much money we spend on cars. Americans spent $1.1 TRILLION on personal vehicles in 2017 [2], not including the hundreds of billions spent yearly on road maintenance. Redirecting a fraction of that money would more than pay for high-speed rail.
Let's do a crude estimate. Using the chart here [3], we can expect to pay somewhere between $3-163 million USD per mile of high-speed rail. The distance from NY to LA is 2789.9 miles.
At $100M/mile, which is excessive, it would still only cost $279 billion. We could build THREE transcontinental high-speed rail lines every year with the money we spend on personal automobiles. If we're as cost-effective as Japan at $2.6 M / mile, we could afford to build 384,000 miles of high speed rail every YEAR.
Subway lines in a city are more expensive, around $200-400 M / mile, but of course there are fewer miles to cover, so the result is the same. New York pays an excessive $2.5 billion per mile, but my understanding is that is due more to corruption and red tape.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
[2] https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-uni...
[3] https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_...