United States | News & Politics

Do you not understand how high-speed rail systems work, and how it tiers down from major hubs, to regional, to local, and how train transfers work? All of the trains in Japan aren’t Shinkansens. This is like suggesting that you should have point-to-point flights for literally every city - an obviously absurd and wasteful idea.

Enough of this bogus argument. It's incredibly dumb. Why? Because rail doesn't have to serve every podunk, desert town in west Texas (even though a railroad is why they exist in the first place!) to be useful. The Amtrak Acela route runs from one tiny hamlet called Washington, D.C., to a ghost town called Boston, stopping in between at some backwater nobody's ever heard of called New York. Why isn't that a high-speed rail line?

Or, as Ray pointed out in one of his City Nerd videos, the Great Lakes region is about the same size as Spain, and has more people living in it. Spain has a built-out HSR network. Why don't we? There's plenty of demand. Amtrak added the Borealis train last year because the Empire Builder was overbooked, and it immediately exceeded ridership projections.