depressing that people have to drive 8 hours to visit others, should be a 5 hour train at least
Laughs in Canadian.
My longest single day non-stop drive was around 18 hours… Never even left the province. The flight alternative required me chartering my own plane and would have cost many many thousands of dollars more, so I went with driving as it was the cheapest option.
As a European, these distances are mind-boggling. If I drive 18 hours, I can drive through half a dozen countries (or more, if you optimize for that) and easily get from the Baltic sea to the Mediterranean sea.
Sure, we’ll just delete some of the land in North America so everyone can live closer together.
China has high speed rail in its eastern most populated section, with a single line running to the entire western half of the country, and similarly sparse lines to the north. The dense population centers in the US are not all in one area, they are spread across the continent interspersed with large swaths of rural land. That being said the US is working on high speed rail, and we’ve had passenger trains that cross the entire country for nearly two centuries - see Amtrak, as well as bus services like Greyhound.
As much as I hate to break up a circle jerk, the US is about as good at this as any other western country, and it’s doing it across an entire sparsely populated continent, not small, highly dense European countries.
I didn’t know that when highways were built land was deleted so everyone could live closer together. I mean if we can delete it once, why not for the second time amirite?
The only way for there never to be long trips in a country that spans the width of an entire continent would be to condense every one into a much smaller area. So you either abandon land in 2/3rds of the country, or you figure out how to magically drop away the land in between large metro areas.
For Cargo, population is not really a factor. A 600 People Hamlet can have a freight train running several times a day because there is a mine. A 10,000 soul city might not have any freight lines. For passenger trains, people are the cargo, i.e. there have to be enough people wanting to take a train
This is a myth that is also used in Canada to make sure nobody demands public transit and keep using cars. Both our countries were literally developed by railroads. And now we maintain a vast road network to all of those small towns that also costs billions.
Somehow we’re dense enough for highways, electricity distribution and phone lines but not railroads.
Sure, but you could have stoppers within the state to the capital, then a high speed interstate train, and then a slower stopper the other end.
There’s also transport solutions like shared car fleets the other end of the high speed train (in effect short term rental) so you make the inefficient miles be done individually, but the main leg with the high demand a rail one.
There are plenty of trips that could be made more efficient with sufficient will and imagination among transport planners