# American High Speed Rail is a Terrible Idea **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 4, 2021, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-high-speed-rail-is-a-terrible-idea/939404 "2021-04-04T21:11:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 227
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2021, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-high-speed-rail-is-a-terrible-idea/939404/227 "2021-04-08T18:08:23Z")
Really? ‘Aspirational’ language that’s flat-out impossible? In the same speech he also aaid that we will have hypersonic airplanes flying 21,000 miles per hour that can span the globe in an hour. > [@](#): > > We’re going to talk about commercial aircraft flying at subsonic speeds — supersonic speeds. To be able, figuratively, if you may, if we decide to do it, traverse the world in about an hour, travel 21,000 miles an hour. So much is changing and we have got to lead it.” No, no we won’t. Hypersonic airplanes fly anywhere from Mach 3 to Mach 5. Max speed maybe 3,000 mph or so. 21,000 mph is near orbital speed. The only way you are doing that is with point-to-point rockets, and that’s a SpaceX pipe dream. And anyway, they are the only people with a vehicle that could, maybe, one day make that trip, and it’s a totally private system that has nothing to do with Biden and his daft infrastructure plans. In fact, corporations like SpaceX are the ones who will be taxed to pay for Joe’s vision. As a reminder, he said this crap in a speech to build support for his infrastructure plan. Talking about 600 mph trains and 21,000 mile per hour aircraft to build support for a plan that offers neither is spreading misinformation. If Trump had uttered ahy of this nonsense you would have gone crazy. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-high-speed-rail-is-a-terrible-idea/939404)._