[mschuster91]

I don't know why your comment was marked as dead, vouched it as you make a good point.

The thing is, debt isn't bad per se - having a strong rail network can actually enable far far bigger returns. The US is the perfect example actually... railroads were what enabled "going west" from the East Coast where the European settlers landed.

If you have a strong rail network, you can move a ton of goods (or people) with barely any emissions, leagues better than airplanes, cars and trucks - only ships have a better efficiency in fuel consumption/CO2 emissions per passenger/ton kilometer. And rail infrastructure can hold up insanely long... here in Germany we're still using signalling systems and rails literally built way before Hitler, before the first German democratic government, back when we still had a Kaiser. Spread the 900 billion debt over 100 years lifetime and whoops, pretty cheap, isn't it?

[jamesaurichs]

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?

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers

[2] https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...