Surely there are other places where a big infrastructure project isn’t constrained by fault zones? I mean, even the new rail tunnel under the Hudson River seems to finally be happening, though years late.
What’s left for the US to build that is amazing and also makes sense? I think all the cool projects have already been done.
A bridge to Hawaii? OK, not serious. But serious improvement to the Northeast Corridor rail line does make sense. And I still wish California would build high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles. More rail in general would be nice.
I thought that is already happening and well on its way.
I agree with you that the US should invest in high speed rail. Northeast corridor, Midwest (Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati), Texas (Dallas, Houston, Austin)…I’m sure other places too.
With the way the budget keeps ballooning (last I heard, it would cost $100 billion), I doubt it will come to pass.
It seems it is happening:
Full title: Despite seismic concerns, last segment of Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail line is cleared environmentally
Do you also recommend he stay away from airplanes? Especially their cockpits? 
Fears are funny. I am afraid of heights, but when I drove over the Confederation Bridge between PEI and New Brunswick I was disappointed that they had block the sight of the ocean below.
And I have driven dozens of times over the bridge to Annapolis at the upper end of Chesapeake Bay without noticing anything much. So I was astonished to discover that there are people who make a living by driving other people’s cars over it because they can’t bring themselves to do it themself.
I can just see if we’d invested billions in connecting the now-Rust Belt destinations. 
Sounds like a great setup for a heist!
Soemone needs to invent the high speed horse for the getaway…
All the cities listed still have metro populations in the millions, and ghod-knows how many flights between them. Rust Belt does not equal dead, not even for Detroit.
A rail tunnel from Boston to NYC, bypassing all those small towns the ne corridor goes through, and underground so they don’t need to buy a gazillion expensive homes to lay the rail, might pay for itself. I suppose it would hurt the airline industry, though.
It’s only about 200 miles. A train that didn’t make intermediate stops could do that in about an hour. And the train stations are a hell of a lot more convenient than the airports.
Of course, Boston can’t even connect North station to South station, and the NE corridor entry to Penn station (er, moynihan train hall) somehow takes nearly an hour just from Stamford, so a clean straight line between Boston and New York isn’t going to happen.
Which is largely true only because they’re nearly unused. If a high speed rail line was built, and became a commercial success, the train station would be just as crowded as the airport.
Huh? No, it’s because they are in the middle of the city and easy to get to by public transit, or just walking from a lot of the city. Airports are way the hell out where it’s hard to get.
Especially if you are doing a business trip, you often want to both start and end in the center of the city.
I’ve rarely had issues with crowds at either airports or train stations. Except i guess the Los Vegas airport, which was horrible in all kinds of ways, but fairly easy to get to.
Convenience is usually measured in terms of distance or time to something, rather than crowding of it.
A train station can be built in the center of a metro area, as it requires less acreage than an airport (and some of a train station’s acreage can be built underground). This makes it more convenient to a larger number of inhabitants than an airport which requires a lot of land outside a city (though cities will often grow around the airport, which brings its own new problems when the airport runs out of capacity). It’s also easier to bring people to the train station using the existing public transit system in the center of town rather than have to put bus or rail lines out to an airport on the outskirts, making it easier and cheaper to get to the travel start/end point.
Having recently flown between DEN and LGA, and stayed in New York near Penn Station, I could supply some concrete examples.
Take the Orange Line to Downtown Crossing and either walk the 10 minutes or hop on the Red Line.
Well, that kinda depends. For people who live in suburbs, getting to a downtown train station may be less convenient than going to an airport in the suburbs. For Boston and New York City it’s not too bad; there are lots of people who live in those cities. For most U.S. cities, that’s not the case. It’s also worth noting that the Acela stops at Rte 128 (the ring highway around Boston), and also (if I remember correctly) the NYC bedroom communities in Connecticut.
The architecture of a train station is different than an airport. Trains park wingtip-to-wingtip, so the terminals are long, with lots of walking to get to your gate. Trains don’t take up nearly that much space. Most stations I’ve been to have a single waiting area, rather than separate seating areas at each gate. And trains open all the doors, rather than just one, so you can get passengers off, and new ones on, in only a couple minutes.
Still not terribly convenient. I’ve heard of proposals to build a heavy-rail tunnel between the two stations, but that would be a hell of an undertaking. It would cross all four existing subway lines.
You mean planes park wingtip to wingtip, i presume. But yes, i hadn’t even thought about that.
Fwiw, I’ve used busy European train stations that get loads of traffic. They usually post the full schedule, and passengers wait on track 17, or whatever, not in a central waiting area. It’s because many US train stations are poorly designed for their load that they don’t always know the tracks in advance and hold the passengers in a central area. But yes, i hadn’t even thought of that. You can typically make a connection between trains in a busy railway station in a leisurely 20 minutes, and if you know exactly what to do and hoof it, 10, or even 5 minutes is often feasible. That’s so not true of airplanes.
The train between England and Continental Europe does have annoying airport-like security bottlenecks. But the high speed ICE trains in Europe and the high Shinkansen trains in Japan just let you walk on.
It just so happens that I’m on a quick weekend family getaway to Paris that’s feasible only because European train travel is so efficient. This would be impossible by air.
My understanding is that they needed land sold to the post office many years ago, and a deal was negotiated, but the combination of DeJoy and then Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker killed that deal for another generation.