America’s First High-Speed Rail Project
7th July 2015
Despite continued evidence that high-speed rail is a waste of money, reporters still write articles lamenting that high-speed trains in America are “elusive.” It’s elusive for a simple reason: it makes no sense, being slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than both.
The problem with trains is that they take you and people you don’t know from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be at a time that is inconvenient to you. This naturally recommends itself highly to Democrites and other statists.
What’s changed between 1906 and today? Today we have trains that can go roughly twice as fast as the train Miller proposed, but we also have planes that go at least five times as fast. We also have automobiles that can take you anywhere you want in an urban area, while the trains can only serve a few points because every stop reduces the average speed and makes the train less viable.
What hasn’t changed is the cost. After adjusting for inflation, building high-speed rail lines across mountains, such as the coastal mountains between San Francisco and Los Angeles and California’s Central Valley, is still extremely expensive. Even in the relatively flat area between Tokyo and Osaka, proposals for a high-speed maglev project call for 80 percent of the route to be in tunnels. Why spend all that money when we have planes that can fly over the hills at twice the speed of the trains?
Because the regressives want to cancel the 20th century, and getting rid of planes and automobiles (except for the Crust, of course) is a big part of that.
July 7th, 2015 at 05:05
The biggest problem with high-speed rail is you can’t take your car with you. If high-speed rail could transfer you and your car from LA to DC at 300 mph average speed, lines would form to board it.
Come to think of it, in this age of containers, why can’t high speed rail transport your car?