| > There are literally many multi million and multi-100k cities away from the coast. They're not near each other. If you draw a 100 mile radius around New York City, inside it you find Yonkers, Stamford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Edison, Woodbridge, Lakewood, Allentown and Philadelphia. Each of which is a city of at least 100k people. Philadelphia is 1.5M. If you draw a 100 mile radius around St. Louis, which he's got on his map, you've got... Springfield, IL just at the far edge of the radius with just over 100k people, and that's it. There is one midwestern US city with a population in the multi-millions, it's Chicago, it's the one I suggested as the terminus of the rail line, and it's still on the coast... of the Great Lakes. > And trains don't need to be connected, its totally reasonable to have train network that mostly covers one area. Oh sure, high speed rail along the California coast could make sense even if it's only in California. Though then it's only in California and doesn't require any federal involvement. High speed rail in Indianapolis though? > But most people don't actually live in 'farm country'. So its completely irrelevant. Most of the central United States by area is farm country. It's the thing you have to traverse, laying hundreds or thousands of miles of tracks through, if you want to try to connect a handful of medium-sized midwestern cities. The fact that not a lot of people live there (i.e. it has a low population density) is a big part of the problem. > I'm gone go with the guy who is a professional transit expert over your opinion. Your transit expert is a mathematician with a Wordpress site. Math is neat, but it's also the thing that leads to hubris when the equations are missing a variable you were ignoring because it's the same in coastal cities all over but not in midwestern states where the cities are both smaller and farther apart and the largest employers are the automakers whose employees see your transit solution as a threat to their livelihood and are not going to use it. It's a classic central planning fallacy. You have some numbers in a spreadsheet but haven't gone to the place you're drawing lines over on a map. |