[brailsafe]

Well, if all the interstates did have plenty of intersections, and someone proposed removing them all retroactively, would that not be an absolutely gargantuan undertaking at present, to the point where justifying it would seem fanciful?

[fc417fc802]

Given the current state of US passenger rail I suppose such a proposal is closer to building out the interstate system from scratch. Which is indeed a bit on the fanciful side.

On the other hand, who says you have to do the entire country at once? Perfect is the enemy of good and all that.

[zmgsabst]

Japan has an average density of 338 people per sqkm.

There’s only 3 US states with a density higher than that (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey) and an additional 2 US states of at least 220 people per sqkm (Maryland and Connecticut).

The US isn’t population dense enough for such transportation to make sense.

[rangestransform]

Nobody’s proposing to build rail in flyover country, but there are many places where high speed rail make sense based on GDP and population density (CAHSR, DC-NYC-Boston maglev, DFW-Houston)

[brailsafe]

Flyover county was definitely included in my initial response about at grade crossings, but wasn't specific to passenger rail, and why wouldn't it hypothetically be included? There already is rail everywhere, that's why I suggested it's a bit fanciful, it's just mostly freight. Doesn't necessarily need to be bullet trains, but given how bad North America seems to be at building any major rail projects in the modern era, I don't really have high hopes for advancement in this area, just dreams.

I do tend to prefer rail whenever viable, and the cascades route is already halfway decent, just not competitive on any front except ease of access with flying.

[zmgsabst]

There’s only 5 states with density similar to Japan (at least 66%).

People underestimate how spread out US cities are.

[fc417fc802]

Density over some wide area is the wrong metric here. An entire state is absurdly large (in most cases). Two dense endpoints can be separated by quite a distance and still be worth connecting.

[zmgsabst]

CA is a third as dense as Japan, as whole.

Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)

You have half the justification in CA you do in Japan, looking at similar urban areas. In the case of Japan, connecting those two cities goes through another 3 with over 1M population (and totaling over 7M together).

US cities are spread out and relatively low population.