Housing for everyone and in a way that mega-cities are walkable
Billionaires did not like that
Pfft with all that tax-subsidized rent to be made? They love it.
If its a mega city how can it be walkable? I wouldnt want to walk an hour to get to my job that would have been a 15 minute walk. Or am i misunderstanding what you mean by walkable?
Walkable doesn’t necessarily mean the entire city is within walking distance just that where you live doesn’t require you to have a vehicle and you can walk to everything you need. Being able to walk to work and the grocery store and to any entertainment is so nice.
High-speed rail connecting every North American city.
Coast to Coast? Sure, but every city in North America? Nah, that isn’t practical at all.
For instance France apparently builds high speed rail for 25 Million per kilometer so lets use their cost number. The straightline distance, shortest possible, from Denver to Omaha is 483 kilometers so the line from Omaha to Denver alone would cost 12 BILLION dollars.
Denver to Salt Lake is 590 Kilometers, again straight line, so there goes another 14.7 Billion dollars. (This is also absolutely impossible to do at this price) SLC to Los Angeles is 930 kilometers, another 23.2 Billion.
We’ve now spent 49.9 Billion to connect just FOUR cities and only have a single rail line that goes from Omaha to LA. If you want coast to coast then a single least possible distance link from D.C. to San Francisco would cost right at $100 Billion.
All of those calculations assume the 25 Million per kilometer can be done in the United States too. For example the High Speed rail being built in California is costing four times as much.
So no, trying to connect every city in North America with High Speed rail not only isn’t practical it isn’t economically possible on any reasonable timeline as it would require a major percentage of the US’s entire GDP to be spent on it every single year for the next century. The US is fucking huge and we have a lot of cities.
In 2020 the US state and local governments spent $116 billion for the construction of roads and highways and $94 billion of operating costs.
If you just cancel half of the road construction projects of the year you get more than enough money to fund the connection of the 4 cities you described.
Pretty sure the interstate highway system isn’t terribly practical either, but with enough funding it can be done. Maybe saying every major city would make it seem more practical.
In 2020 the US state and local governments spent $116 billion for the construction of roads and highways and $94 billion of operating costs.
If you just cancel half of the road construction projects by a year you get enough money to fund the connection of the 4 cities you described.
The problem then is transport inside the city. Couple this idea with the (currently) top comment to make cities walkable and this is pure fire.
Yeah light rail, bike lanes, and walking roads. We can build a constructed environment designed around human beings. A world that’s good for our health, both physical and mental, and for our planet. All we need to do is accept a reality that cars aren’t a good use of resources and that walking and biking are really good for us.
Trains you can park cars on. Would be great for camping weekends where I need all of my gear but don’t want to drive for hours.
Not that there isn’t a lot of room for improvement, but while I can’t say I’ve been to every major city in the US, I’ve never had a major issue getting around once I’m inside the city. Even if things are spread out a bit, there’s sidewalks and crosswalks, which is all I personally need to consider an area walkable. And public transportation will usually get you to different areas of the city even if you may still have to walk a bit when you get off.
Admittedly I’m probably more willing to walk around than the average person, and not everyone is capable of walking that much, so like I said, still lots of room for improvement.
My biggest issue tends to be getting into the city in the first place, or getting from one city to another. From my home in the suburbs I can drive to pretty much anywhere in my nearest city in about an hour or less as long as I can avoid any major traffic jams. If I try to take public transportation though, im looking at an hour walk before I get to somewhere I can catch a bus (which only comes a handful of times a day,) and then a couple more hours before I get where I’m going, probably having to transfer to a different bus or train at least once along the way. If I drive a half hour or so to a train station then I can get right to downtown pretty easily, but the train only comes about every hour so if I don’t time it right and miss the train it’s significantly faster for me to just drive the rest of the way than wait for another train. Then they mostly stop coming at about 11pm, which means if I’m going into the city for a concert or something, I’m cutting it close and may not be able to get back home on public transit.
And if I’m trying to get to another city, I’m pretty much SOL. I’m basically at the halfway point between that major city and 2 smaller cities, and there is no transit options to get to those 2 other cities from where I am.
Why not to everyone’s front door?
A massive high speed railway network across North America, coast to coast. Russia did it, China did it, most of Europe did it. Canada and the USA have no excuse.
Canada’s excuse is “we’re roughly as big as the US but have a way smaller population and GDP. I really don’t think it’d be financially justifiable for them to build a rail equivalent to the trans-Canadian highway. It’d be a non-starter in a political sense.
The US, on the other hand… yeah. We genuinely have no excuse.
A majority of Canada’s population lives in a straight line from Toronto to Québec, but they can’t even manage that.
Property acquisition costs and legal fees are immensely more expensive in the US. Have to obtain those thousands of miles of land for rail development from somebody.
There are ways. Maybe bring our number of aircraft carriers down to only 3x the rest of the world combined instead of 5x, just as an example.
Maybe bring our number of aircraft carriers down to only 3x the rest of the world combined instead of 5x, just as an example.
I did the math on what a single coast to coast least possible distance link from D.C. to San Francisco would cost and it came out to 100 Billion dollars. It would connect no cities other than SF and DC unless they happen to fall directly on the rail line.
US Aircraft carriers cost around 10 Billion each (I’m averaging a bit here) and we only have 11 so we’d have to get rid of ALL of them to pay for a single coast to coast high speed rail link. Trying to connect “Every City in North America” would require cutting the entire military budget in half and spending it all on rail construction for the next 50 to 100 years.
The US is fucking HUGE and has a lot of cities.
You’re only counting the build cost though, they cost anywhere from $1-2 billion a year to operate depending on which article you read. Considering an aircraft carrier’s service life is usually around 40 years, that’s quite a savings just from removing a single carrier group from the fleet. That would pay for anywhere from 50-80% of your estimate right there. I’m not discounting the 40-50 years of rail maintenance, but you would hope rail service could at least come close to breaking even by selling tickets. There’s no profit coming out of an aircraft carrier group, unless you’re the one selling them the supplies.
Property acquisition in the US more expensive than in Europe? I think not, at least for the immense swaths of land that make up most of the US’ land mass.
The legal fees I see, but that’s why most developed nations have legislature for disowning property owners of land necessary for infrastructure at a set compensation. Whether that’s fair or just is up for ideological debate, I’m sure.
I’m not sure any of these are quite as ambitious as crossing the entire continent of North America. In fact I’m not even sure that would make sense to do. That said lines connecting major cities on each coast and some parts of the Midwest would be a no-brainer.
I think the proof of concept really should be the NYC-Cleveland-Chicago line. From there it can be extended westward as desired
What’s west of Chicago though? That line makes sense on its own merits but if you want coast to coast, a southern route might make more sense.
A southern route makes sense in a lot of ways but on the east you have two problems with a southern route: very few major population centers, and all of them are in or surrounded by land that’s not great for rail construction either due to mountains like Nashville or due to swamps like New Orleans and Florida. You’d probably hit Atlanta then there’s little reason to go all the way to the coast at savannah.
Part of the goal of an initial route is for it to demonstrate that best case scenario it will be usable, and connecting the biggest and third biggest cities in the country is useful, as well as the fact that because it’s nyc at the end it provides easy access to the northeastern Amtrak network which is the only well developed intercity passenger rail system in the United States. The fact that there’s basically nothing from Chicago
An alternative route might be the mid country route of dc to San Francisco by way of Columbus, Denver, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and a few others. It’s a lot of cities of reasonably large size and even would hit Sacramento. From there you can basically build out triangles to Denver or St. Louis on the coasts. The Appalachian mountains are a pain still, but they’re nothing compared to the Rockies and the population density means crisscrossing them is probably worth it, while the west coast can have their population bubbles all connected on their end.
Really as a Midwesterner I’m mostly concerned about getting the Great Lakes Region connected into Amtrak because we have every reason to be and it would be a huge deal to have easy access from Ohio and Indiana to both Chicago and the east coast
As much as I would love that central route (I live in Sacramento) crossing the Rockies and the Sierras seems almost insurmountable for high speed rail. The mountains of the southwest are a lot more isolated, so that’s why I see that as more viable.
But yeah realistically we need to look at connecting regions first, then once we have two robust networks in the west and east, we can determine the best way to connect them.
If you look at the various proposals, you’ll see they start like that. You start with focus areas where cities are close together, such as connecting cities in the Midwest to Chicago. You have similar opportunities in southeast, Texas, California, northwest, and of course the northeast where we already have Acela.
However, once those are established, neighboring cities naturally want to be extended to. You can easily imagine that process eventually turning into a connected map - except maybe Great Plains and Rockies
Yeah I definitely support that model. I’m just not convinced very many people would want to go coast to coast by this method. It’s likely to be more expensive and slower.
A bunch of years back, I remember reading about 500 miles as a rule of thumb for that tradeoff. Between two cities less than 500 miles apart, high speed rail could be the preferred travel choice, while air travel clearly wins for longer distances.
Obviously the exact distance depends on the details, but we would do well to present high speed rail for the trips that it can be better.
For me personally, I love travel by train and hope some day to travel long distance at least once. I live near Boston, one of the few US cities with pretty good transit, and one end of Acela, the closest we have to high speed rail. From the time Acela opened, it was immediately the best choice to travel Boston —> NYC. However I’ve been to DC every year and never tempted to take the train. Flying is better for that distance, given how slow Acela is: sure enough, close to 500 miles
Yeah Acela isn’t really true high speed rail though. Many sections are slower. Boston to DC would be workable with the right infrastructure. But coast to coast is over 3000 miles which is a whole different beast, barring some technological advancement.
Acela isn’t really true high speed rail though
Last time I looked, it could only achieve its top speed of 150mph for 35 miles!
However the whole idea of Acela is incremental improvement. They did enough initially to make it viable, then Every year they knock a minute or so off the trip. The new train sets have a higher top speed so that should help, when they get into service. I recently saw a project announcement for replacing a tunnel near Baltimore where it was stuck under 30 mph. The new tunnel won’t be high speed but clear enough of a bottleneck to be a nice trip time improvement
I actually like Acela. You have to work with the infrastructure you start with, but eventually I’d like to see a faster and more subsidized line there.
Car-independent livable cities.
We’ve even been doing that for thousands of years!
Housing for everyone, food for everyone, clean energy (nuclear power, though we would do well to advance the tech a little is immanently practical).
Those are all easy mode stuff that would dramatically improve the world for a lot of people, but we could do more.
Hard mode: Orbital rings.
We would have to develop some tech, but not nearly as much as you might think.
Just want a space elevator, surely we can’t be that far
Nuclear bomb fueled rockets to space. Look up project Orion.
isn’t that bad?
Depends on which side of the exhaust you are on.
You didn’t ask if it was bad, you asked if it was practical.
That stupid 100 mile long building in Arabia.
