this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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I wouldn't be too excited about the passenger rail expansion without diving further into it. Basically, the bulk of the HSR funding is being given to a private company with a bad track record. It will be another Amtrak situation in a decade or less once again (also suggest diving into the history of Amtrak and why it came to be).
i think we need to dissolve amtrak honestly. Legally mandate that a rail company cannot own anything outside of state bounds.
Force them to cooperate, it'll make them less miserable.
Amtrak is actually a government program that helped save passenger rail after it became unsustainable with the private companies. It's a fascinating history that they simply don't teach the general populace.
There were several key provisions:[29]
Of the 26 railroads still offering intercity passenger service in 1970, only six declined to join the NRPC.[31]
The original working brand name for NRPC was Railpax, but less than two weeks before operations began, the official marketing name was changed to Amtrak, a portmanteau of the words America and trak, the latter itself a sensational spelling of track.
source
huh, neat.
I still think rather unfortunately, that national scale business tends to incentivize extreme optimization, while good, tends to hurt significant portions of the service. But that's just me.
Nooooo :( if I were American dictator I would just say fuck it and build a mag-lev network that averaged 250 from station to station.
or just do any of the many examples that the rest of the world is successful with. HSR in America isn't actually High speed rail anyways
Brightline is the company which received the funding for the California-Nevada HSR, it's a public company that's already coming under scrutiny for their practices and costs vs their projections. I guess I need to do a write-up to link to whenever the HSR comes up with the infrastructure bill.
edit: forgot to add link for the wiki I was referencing.
Yeah but a 250 average mag-lev is already possible from a technical standpoint. The Chinese and the Japanese have trains that can do it. Almost certainly the Chinese stole their design from the Japanese, but whatever. Plus, with that minimum it makes an overnight trip across the country extremely reasonable, and it makes a lot of medium day trips possible too. For example, Denver to Chicago would be only 4 hours.