Inhabitat

Hi John,
Thanks for your comment – you’re right, the correct amount is 8 billion, and not 8 million. We’ve updated our post to reflect this.

Best wishes,
Mike

About time. There is no reason why the U.S. should lag behind Europe and Japan in high-speed rail travel, but based on the map, I think it might be a mistake not to connect the Midwest to the East Coast.

Porters got it right, to an extent. Similar to how I had commented on this over at treehugger. These plans only help transit between a few major city centers while connecting to existing rails systems for the cross-country/cross-coastal travel. But it does nothing for connecting beyond that ie. inner-state travel.

Now as Porter points out, like many other proponents to the concept, examples of country\’s where these systems have worked. But you\’ve forgotten one thing.

SIZE.

More accurately land area.

The US is the 3rd or 4th (depending on definition) largest country in the world @ 9,629,091square km.

Compare this to say Japan.
Japan # 61 @ 377,915km
This is a bit bigger than the State of New Mexico
New Mexico # 5 @ 314,914km

Lets go even further down to the main Island of Honshū.
Honshū @ 227,962.59 km
This is about the same size as Minnesota.
Minnesota # 12 @ 225,171km

Lets try England.
England (part of the United Kingdom # 79) @ 130,395km
About the size of the state of Louisiana.
Louisiana # 31 @ 134,265km

From the comments from treehugger, there a comment from caro who just moved back from Holland, praising there system. So lets use that example.

Holland (part of the Netherlands # 133) @ 5,488km.
This smaller than the state of Delaware @ 6446km
but is larger than Rhode Island @ 4002km
These are our 49th and 50th state in size.

None of these states have anything near the rail system that the comparative size countries do.
Comparatively speaking not many people in these countries travel the same distances the people of these states do on a daily basis.

Now here we do have a mass transit that works in a few major cities so lets use this for comparison.

New York city @ 1,214.4km
metro area @ 17,405km
San Fransisco @ 600.7km
metro area @ 9,128.2km
Chicago @ 606.2km
metro area @ 28,163km
Washington DC @ 177.01km
metro area @ 5564.6km

Their metro areas which is mostly covered by their mass transit system would make them Larger than caro\’s Holland.

Perspective is needed when talking about Mass transit systems from other countries when trying to implement it in the US. There is a far greater need to increase the mass transit systems within the states themselves than across the country.

Glad to be of service.

Good points all, but once peak oil makes air travel unfeasible, an inter-connected nationwide network is going to start looking like a good idea, whatever the cost. Perhaps if we started taxing aviation fuel and ploughing all proceeds into rail, maybe that would generate sufficient funds.

Either way, great to see Obama dragging the US railways into the 21th century.

I think everyone here has stated what I’ve thought. Living in St. Louis, i see a lot of people going to Chicago, Nashville, New Orleans and Austin for frequent travel. Although this plan is a great step in keep up with the Euros, Asians and other, it’s needs to be more comprehensive, and must connect coast to coast. If the airline companies want to compete, they should consider investing in High-Speed Rails to help diversify their own budgetary plans.