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America, exblain (europe.pub)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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[+] -11 points 6 days ago (8 children)

My feeling is that widespread high speed rail will never take off in America there are too many barriers. Two that come to mind that will delay and increase the cost to prohibitive levels are Private Land acquisition and Environmental assessments and preservation laws.

What I think will be a more realistic "High speed Rail" option for the US is using existing infrastructure in new ways. Something like fully automated cars, where each car is similar to a rail car and the connection between cars is digital not physical.

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  • [–] 10 points 6 days ago (3 children)

    Are they also big challenges for highway projects?

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  • [–] -3 points 6 days ago (2 children)

    Yes. But I would think less since that infrastructure has largely been in place for many decades. It's not building something out from nothing but updating and maintaining something already in place

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  • [–] 7 points 6 days ago

    What a strange argument. For those effected by projects it does not matter how anything is connected to anything. That said, HSR does not need to be part of an HSR network to make sense.

    New Highways are built all the time and many are widened, which also requires a lot of real estate to be taken over by highway infrastructure.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 days ago

    I think the best we'll see for high speed rail in the US is limited routes between relatively close cities with high demand. We're already seeing that with the stuff Brightline is doing (though it's debatable how high speed some of their routes could be called). For everything else, electric airliners are coming. They'll start on short routes (like feeders to major airports) and they'll gradually work their way up as battery tech improves.

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