Quote:
Originally Posted by Shiva_TD
At less than 1/2% of the land area of the United States there is one hell of a difference between building a subteranean rail service in Switzerland and the United States. And the costs do not go down because the government is paying for something. Typically they go up. As I noted in a previous post the cost is over $80 million per mile so a nationwide highspeed subteranean rail system would cost more than 500 years of the entire federal budget just to connect the large cities.
Of course the system does not be underground. Above ground rail is only a fraction of the cost of subteranean rail systems. There have been proposals for a high speed rail between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The economics of it simply haven't worked though but might someday in the future. When it becomes economically feasable it will happen.
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While I do agree with you about the feasibility of subterranean high speed rail, I highly doubt your numbers afterwards.
I guess it bases on the senseless assumption to connect the entire US with high speed trains like it was done with conventional trains a century ago. If thats the assumption behind the number its a straw man. No one plans that or demands that.
The point is rather to connect all cities with each other per high speed rail where the basic criterias are met. Principally as a rough rule one could say that high speed is highly competible where the cities can be connected within 4 hours, its still feasible up to 6 hours I think. If more cities are following one to each other, the network can be enlarged far beyond that restriction though, because every conglomeration can have the potential for itself.
Actually you could connect a quite substantial numbers of US cities while meeting those criteria. Of course there will be no Atlantic-Pacific crossing built, but thats not the task anyway.
For such a realistic task there can be impossibly the need for 500 times of the yearly federal budget, unless your federal budget is a joke. The reason why I believe that is that Europe was able to build up in the somewhat 30 last years a substantial high speed network without spending an extremely large part of its budget (even though it spend a certain amount of course) on high speed rail.
PS:
For all who are interested into it. Here is the best map of the European high speed network, its incomplete but still pretty good
http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q...rnEurope20.gif