Thanks. I think having a few solid rails for really populars route is justified. The issue is building too many of these rails to where ridership is not even enough to produce a profit in the beginning, let alone sustain it forever. Also, cities grow and die. Can you imagine if US built out an expensive high speed rail from New York to Detroit? or Seattle to Portland?
> The issue is building too many of these rails to where ridership is not even enough to produce a profit in the beginning, let alone sustain it forever.
There's a ton of flights each day - the FAA says something around 45.000 flights [1], of which sadly there are no statistics if they are domestic or not. But even assuming just 25% are domestic, that's about 11.000 flights that could be done on a decent HSR network, saving local populations in the inflight zone of airports from a ton of noise and a lot of fuel/CO2 emissions.
No matter what, CO2 emissions will make air travel unsustainable very fast very soon, and the US is barely prepared for this new reality.
> Can you imagine if US built out an expensive high speed rail from New York to Detroit? or Seattle to Portland?
Well, that is how the US grew so fast from East to West back in the day [2]. IIRC, a lot of the existing lines are the same routes that were built back then.
