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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (860071)	5/26/2015 2:35:59 PM
From: i-node	3 Recommendations Recommended By Brumar89 one_less TimF Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576876

That's the thing cross country, hi speed rail doesn't have to be non stop. It can done much like airlines with certain cities serving as hubs. Hubs in NYC, Chicago and SFO with smaller hubs in say Cleveland and Denver would get people across the northern part of the country. And a similar line could exist in the South......hubs in either DC or Atlanta, Dallas, and LA with smaller hubs in say NOLA or Nashville and Phoenix. Each hub city would have feeder lines from neighboring cities. The US and China are both about the same size physically and China has had no problem developing cross country lines. It is this simple: The cost to set up a workable high speed rail network is insanely high. You have to know, before you spend that money, that people will ride it. All of the accumulated evidence we have suggests they will not. You can take the most transportation limited place in America, where I live -- with the only accessible airport requiring multiple hops to get anywhere at all, and there is a train that runs from where I live to San Antonio and requires maybe about 14 hours. That's not six hours, no it isn't. But it is cheap and will get the job done. I've ridden that train multiple times and it is EMPTY for a good bit of the ride. EMPTY as in you are liable to be the only one in the rail car. There is no evidence at all the massive cost of high speed rail would change this. And we cannot afford it anyway; SS, Medicare and Obamacare have left the country flat broke and no real chance to dig out of it. I just don't understand where you get the idea we can spend money on stuff like this.

To: tejek who wrote (860071)	5/30/2015 6:25:18 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576876

China is similar in physical size to the US, but it has a lot more people, and the people are concentrated on one coast. The US has big fairly empty areas, but its people are more distributed (East Coast and West Coast, Great Lakes area, the Gulf coast and then North in to Texas to Dallas), and there are a lot fewer of them. Also while China has been building a lot of air infrastructure it has a less developed long distance highway system and less resources invested in air travel.