You're viewing a single thread.
If it takes more than 4-6 hours to drive there, high speed rail is the clear choice. I'm someone who has been on several 10+ hour road trips, and driving for more than a few hours at a time sucks. You waste up to an entire day just driving. Even if it does take the same amount of time, it'd be nice to nap or read a book in that time instead of focusing on just driving. It's mentally and physically exhausting.
Especially I-70 in western Kansas and eastern Colorado.
The furthest I've driven in one day was about 9 hours to Edinburgh. Our trains over here are stupid expensive so it worked out much cheaper. But damn I regretted it big time around hour 4 when I realised I wasn't even half way.
No way man, I've ridden the train London to the UK. It's expensive in the sense that a first class ticket for me was .... 200 pounds I believe? Amtrak is gobs more for a much worse experience. We're fighting tooth and nail over here in the states to try to have something close to your system
Not tried rail in the USA so yeah, fair enough. But I've been to Italy a few times and I'm always jealous of their rail.
Fair, although while my ride in Italy was faster, I vastly preferred the overall vibe of the UK's system.
It's honestly hard to explain because it's so much different compared to your guys'.
So we have exactly one route that can go up to 125, in a couple of places. So taking that one out of the equation, the next highest speed in our entire system is 90mph.
I live in Seattle, about 4 million people, about 1.8x of Manchester. We have 3 rail lines, that take you to 3 places.
- Portland, 5 times a day, 4 hours away
- Vancouver BC, 3 times a day, 3 hours away
- Chicago, 1 time a day, 36 hours away.
- LA, 1 time a day, 24 hours away
We have what you would call a "well connected" city in the states too. Outside of the northeast corridor, this is in fact a "train city" here in the states.
Except in most of the (non-New England) US. San Antonio to Dallas by car is 4-5 hours. By train itโs 10-11 because it has to constantly pull over for the freight trains that own the tracks. The US only has about 100 miles of HSR for the whole country.
I think they meant it more in a "high speed rail would work better in these situations if we had it" rather than "we totally have that infrastructure in place let's use it". That was my read anyway. Plus, my understanding is that what we consider HSR here barely even qualifies as such in other parts of the world.
The problem with trains is that they are expensive to maintain and slower (at least the traditional trains are)