[noirbot]

Defining it as "a human choice" is both clearly accurate and misses the point. Yes. It's obviously not physically impossible. But just ascribing it to "a chronic lack of intestinal fortitude" as if everyone involved is just too much of a sissy to blow a hole in a mountain like people used to is absurdly reductionist. It ignores the vast history of how much past US grand projects like the interstate and the railroads were built on the back of destroying the environment and often genocidally taking land from native Americans.

Yes, some of it is for dumb reasons, but there's also plenty of reasons that aren't just "we used to be a real country". It is, in fact, not 1824 any more. We can't just offer thousands of Chinese immigrants $2 a week and have half of them die while putting a hole in the Rocky Mountains. Yes, that's "a human choice", but the physical dimensions of the problem define the very real tradeoffs that have to be made. The "physical laws of nature" don't stop us from doing all sorts of things we'd probably regret, many of which we do regret now.

To go back to my original point, those reasons are a lot more compelling when you're spending some billions of dollars that connect to another country's billions of dollars of trains, and you get some regular amount of cross-traffic. Sure, we could build more, but we're not going to build a Deutsche Bahn amount of rail within Arizona. They're about the same geographic size, and Germany has 10x the population. Likely same with Nevada and Oregon. So what do you propose we connect to that has anywhere near the same network effect of cross-travel?