>>1959849>No, I'm dead set on fixing your fairy tale perception of the country as only the biggest name tourist destinations(and urban centers)Anon, I REALIZE this. But the point of transportation is to connect the largest amount of the population as possible. If you bothered looking at a map, picrel, you'd see the interstate system did exactly this. The difference is the interstate system has had half a century for secondary and tertiary branches to be added off the main routes, while the world's greatest passenger rail network languished.
>There are THOUSANDS of trailheads in the USAnd once again, you strawman my argument as being for public transit to every trailhead in bumfuck nowhere. That's not it. The most heavily visited national and state parks should have public transit access to and inside of the parks, and those with less the worst congestion should have private car access restricted. Because even though there's 70 state parks in MN, the bigger more popular parks are the ones everyone both in and out of the US know, and these parks are the ones seeing ever increasing visitor numbers. In turn with that, local trails within metro areas should also have access. I can think of quite a few within my metro area, along existing transportation corridors to the suburbs, that get 0 public bus service but overflow their parking lots regularly. The trails themselves aren't crowded, just the parking areas. Paving the problem away with a new parking lot is a dumb and unsustainable solution.
>nobody is saying you can't try and run shuttles.Nice backtrack. Just a few posts ago you were losing your goddam mind over the idea of running public transit for trails within metro areas and the big (read: most visitor count) national parks.
