And I’m calling them out for it. You have a problem with that?
The U.S. has the best rail freight system in the world. The reason it does is because it is private and because freight doesn’t often share track with passengers. Freight routing can therefore be optimized. And freight makes much more sense to send by rail than passengers. In Europe those passenger trains you love had the effect of pushing freight onto the roads, making freight delivery less efficient, causing more road wear, increasing congestion and consuming significantly more energy per lb delivered.
High Speed Rail is not the future. It was the wonder-technology of the 1960’s. Sixty years later there are much better, more flexible options. Cars passed rail for energy efficiency a long time ago, especially if there is more than one person in them. But electric cars are more energy efficient even driven solo. If you parked your train and put all the passengers in Teslas you would save energy, and since both use grid electricity, there’s no difference in energy type either.
Also, building a web of steel tracks across the country is going to do wonders for increasing CO2. Do you know how much energy it takes to smelt and form high strength steel? Or to clear and grade land with heavy machinery?
So a new nation-spanning rail system will cost a fortune in money, resources, and CO2 output, and when it’s running it will make the transportation system less energy efficient and less flexible. And you want to build it with borrowed money. Great plan.
And if California’s experience it typical, it will take 50 years to build and cost multiples of what the politicians promise.
Sorry, this is a hijack. If yoh want to continue the discussion of high speed rail, let’s open a thread.