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The U.S. Is Not Ready for High Speed Rail

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3aqz...igh-speed-rail

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- While I love the optimism HSR fuels in American transit nerds, we are not starting from where Japan was in the 1950s or France in the 1970s. We have no passenger rail culture to speak of outside of the northeast corridor and some tourist novelty routes. It would require an incredible building spree, the likes of which the U.S. hasn't seen for generations. --- So, at the heart of this HSR question is not "would it be good?" but, rather, a more strategic issue. Do we take the lower risk, lower reward path to drastically improve the rail infrastructure we already have? Or do we go with the big swing and try to start all over with high speed rail? We have a passenger rail network. It sucks right now, but we can make it better a lot easier than we can build a new one.

- One possible answer is "why not both?" This has obvious appeal. It's always preferable to not be forced into difficult choices. But given the several hundred billion dollars currently needed to build just one U.S. HSR line, "build it all" isn't likely to happen, especially in a country where one political party is opposed to publicly-funded HSR (although that wasn't always the case). --- HSR requires a lot more work than just buying faster trains. It needs new tracks and signals and often new routes entirely to both reduce the severity of curves and hills to enable faster speeds and to cut travel distances. --- The U.S. already has an extensive 140,000-mile functional rail network owned and operated by freight rail companies that is also used by Amtrak. If we're going to have decent U.S. rail service in time to make a meaningful impact on emissions, this is our best shot.

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