It’s been discussed many times. China simply does not have to deal with with unions, labour laws, land ownership and such. I don’t think we want to live in such system.
> A 300 km/h "classic" high speed rail like the German ICE will take 13h, but hey even that is manageable.
No, it won’t. There will be scheduled stops, weather, slow sections, accidents.
I used to take Cologne to Utrecht for 3 months once a week return travel. Only once I arrived in both directions on time.
Japan is a democracy that has all three, and yet they managed to build a HSR system. France has a very good HSR system as well.
> No, it won’t. There will be scheduled stops, weather, slow sections, accidents.
The entire point of the US being suited for HSR is that it is so sparsely settled in the center of the country that you don't need frequent stops, or you can get away with just having every 2nd/3rd train stop at a specific city - with 30min of spacing between the trains, that's still 1h/1.5h interval for "flyover states". And a single train carries up to 1.000 passengers, replacing 4-5 planes.
> I used to take Cologne to Utrecht for 3 months once a week return travel. Only once I arrived in both directions on time.
Please don't assume that the shit our politicians did with the DB network is valid for HSR in general.
Yeah, both started in 1960s.
> The entire point of the US being suited for HSR is that it is so sparsely settled in the center of the country that you don't need frequent stops, or you can get away with just having every 2nd/3rd train stop at a specific city - with 30min of spacing between the trains, that's still 1h/1.5h interval for "flyover states". And a single train carries up to 1.000 passengers, replacing 4-5 planes.
And now you have 4000km of high speed rail tracks to keep in top notch condition. With a mountain range between the two coasts. And trains passing rather frequently.
> Please don't assume that the shit our politicians did with the DB network is valid for HSR in general.
Oh. Nothing to do with that. Weather, accidents, no staff were the most common causes.
Actually, all three can be blamed on Deutsche Bahn. The Swiss for example have a ridiculously strong tree management program [1], which means they can keep operating even in storms because there is no danger of trees falling onto tracks which is a fairly common occurrence in Germany.
Accidents as well... a lot of tracks, everything up to 160km/h, has level crossings with roads. Only above 160 km/h you need dedicated, crossing free infrastructure. We could get rid of a lot of these level crossings if we wanted to.
And no staff? DB pays shit, that's the reason why no one wants to work for them, and the "private competitors" pay even less. And if the railroad workers go to strike, the entire fucking country shits on them for daring to fight for their rights.
[1] https://www.waldwissen.net/de/technik-und-planung/naturgefah...
Without even pausing I assumed this was some business speak MBA crap. I cackled when I realised.
Maintaining hundreds of planes is also hard and planes are terrible for the environment and terrible to travel in. Surely we can aim higher?
The thing is, debt isn't bad per se - having a strong rail network can actually enable far far bigger returns. The US is the perfect example actually... railroads were what enabled "going west" from the East Coast where the European settlers landed.
If you have a strong rail network, you can move a ton of goods (or people) with barely any emissions, leagues better than airplanes, cars and trucks - only ships have a better efficiency in fuel consumption/CO2 emissions per passenger/ton kilometer. And rail infrastructure can hold up insanely long... here in Germany we're still using signalling systems and rails literally built way before Hitler, before the first German democratic government, back when we still had a Kaiser. Spread the 900 billion debt over 100 years lifetime and whoops, pretty cheap, isn't it?
There's a ton of flights each day - the FAA says something around 45.000 flights [1], of which sadly there are no statistics if they are domestic or not. But even assuming just 25% are domestic, that's about 11.000 flights that could be done on a decent HSR network, saving local populations in the inflight zone of airports from a ton of noise and a lot of fuel/CO2 emissions.
No matter what, CO2 emissions will make air travel unsustainable very fast very soon, and the US is barely prepared for this new reality.
> Can you imagine if US built out an expensive high speed rail from New York to Detroit? or Seattle to Portland?
Well, that is how the US grew so fast from East to West back in the day [2]. IIRC, a lot of the existing lines are the same routes that were built back then.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers
[2] https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
I suspect it would take something spectacular (like how the interstate system was created) to actually make meaningful progress. And the irony is once it's in place no one could imagine life without it.
And of course a lot of rail work now is inter-European, so you get different country governments and the EU as well.
Well, China has built a shit ton of high speed rail across their country. There is nothing preventing the US from doing just the same.
NYC <-> LA is like, what, 4000km? Sounds insane at a quick glance, but a 500 km/h maglev train makes that an 8 hour ride, compared to a 6h flight plus 1h "dead" time for boarding, luggage, and security theatre. Not much of a difference. A 300 km/h "classic" high speed rail like the German ICE will take 13h, but hey even that is manageable.
And unlike Europe, y'all have the advantage that your land is barely occupied by anything but a few farms.