- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3541719
America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There’s a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we’ve created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
There’s nothing wrong with this argument. They’re not literally saying the country is too big to fly a plane across, they’re countering the argument made by bad faith actors that America is too big for trains, by pointing out that planes don’t actually solve the problems people think they solve.
And they’re absolutely right. I live five minutes away from a regional airport, and I would kill for high speed rail connecting me to some of the major cities in my neighbouring provinces. Hell, just a train from my town to the nearest city would be a godsend. People in North America will come up with any excuse to dismiss the potential rail has to really connect up a lot of disparate areas of these countries, because the reality is they just don’t want to invest now in a solution that takes years to realise. If twenty years ago we’d all started building high speed rail the way China did, the difference today would be unimaginable.