I tried to make it fairly realistic. Obviously I would like HSR absolutely everywhere, but a line through middle of nowhere Montana probably would not see much ridership and would come at extreme cost (especially in the mountains).
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
436 points (95.8% liked)
Fuck Cars
9685 readers
1678 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
“I guess crossing the Rocky Mountains is impossible”
-OP
For high-speed rail? Basically, yes. Unless you're into spending a couple million bucks per mile to rip out big chunks of the mountain. High speed rail can't reasonably navigate tight turns or steep grades.
I’m inclined to believe you, and have to say I love to see discussion like this here on lemmy’s version of fuckcars, but curious, does anyone know what switzerland does? Afaik, they have tons of rail and tons of mountains. Is it all/mostly low-speed? Sorry if it’s a dumb question or easy to answer.
Yes, it's low-speed. There are only a handful of HSR lines crossing the Alps, afaik, but they're generally huge, expensive projects that basically tunnel through many kilometers. For example, the Gotthard Base Tunnel is a 57-km tunnel through the Swiss Alps, but its feasible because it's connecting large population centers with large existing HSR networks on both sides.
I also love that this community is picking up some discussions so very much thanks to @Fried_out_Kombi!
As I live in Germany, directly at the swiss border I may be able to give some insight. The West of Switzerland is quite flat in comparison to the rest, so a lot of south/north traffic goes there. Also a lot of cargo trains. (Funfact, there is a project ongoing to make the north south cargo route more useable. Renew and expand the railways. Swiss has done its part years ago but Germany has not even started)
But as he said, there are also quite some HSR lines through the alps. The swiss people are pretty good in building them, but yeah its mostly possible due to the high population density in Europe. There are also quite some slow trains in switzerland but the view is always incredible so I don't mind to much.
So yeah I think its probably not feasible to do the same in the US. At least as long we don't invent magical new tunnel construction