>>1959098>doesn't completely crash and burn wasting hundreds of millions of dollars.For a national budget getting into the trillions, even a few billion is a rounding error. Fact is, around 60% of people in the US live in metro areas of 1 million population or greater. That's about 54 metro areas in total, picrel. In addition, around 56% of Americans live east of the Mississippi and 80% are east of the 98th meridian. An HSR system can absolutely take significant market share of intercity travel in that region.
>>1959102>The whole point is that modest-length trips between arbitrary locations that are currently trivial by carNobody is trying to take your car from you. Nobody cares if you still have to drive from Mansfield to Lafayette. The point is to give other options to people, and of course the biggest metro areas, IE the easy wins, will be prioritized first. Once that's built out, then you could get in to normal intercity rail branches to smaller towns and cities. Just because it doesn't directly benefit you to begin with doesn't mean it wouldn't eventually benefit you in terms of less traffic or other travel modes.
>>1959239>NY to Boston (220 miles) takes not 1 hour, but 3.75-4.5 hours for an average of 50-60 mphWhich sucks, and is why it should be improved. But the fact that even despite that low average speed it's both profitable and competitive in mode share should be proof enough that it works. The existing NEC's problems are that it runs on existing ROWs with tight curves that restrict speed, and it also has to share that ROW with some local freight traffic and commuter rail. Any new HSR project outside that corridor would need to follow CA HSR's example and have a dedicated ROW for just the HSR trains, as Japan does.
>>1959722The cost doesn't matter. Everyone, literally everyone, complains about the cost of ANY public project that isn't a road. Doesn't matter if it's a park, a shopping center, a stadium, they complain. It's what people do.
