The slow-motion trainwreck that anyone paying attention saw coming.
We rode it last year from Miami to Orlando. It was fine, but hardly high speed. Driving through Vegas yesterday on our way back home from Park City, we saw no signs of construction of the planned HSR from there to Victorville, let alone Rancho Cucamunga. They clearly don’t have the money.
And yes, this:
High-speed rail is catnip to politicians. Except it doesn’t work in America. Not only do we drive, but we take airplanes. As I said in March, much better to build more lanes on an expressway.
I’ve been saying for years that widening I-5 between the Grapevine and i-680 (as Pat Brown always intended) would be a vastly better investment for ground transportation between LA and SF than rail. The two new lanes could be charging lanes for fast electric FSD cars.
[Update a few minutes later]
California’s HSR boondoggle meets another justifiable roadblock.
I feel the appeal of the open road but I do not like actual existing interstate highways. To judge by the proliferation of screens in cars, neither do most Americans.
Regional rail and air travel in the USA are a has been or never were. “Since 2000, some 800 regional or secondary air routes in America have closed or been downgraded*.” People drive because they must until, as Rand suggested, FSD becomes normal.
*https://airsideint.com/issue-article/can-us-regional-aviation-be-reset/
Most Americans simply do not want to travel by train as there is last-mile inconvenience at both ends of any trip that one does not have with a portal-to-portal car trip. That is true of airline flight as well, but the trips are far quicker too.
US passenger train load factors started declining as soon as Ford started producing the Model T and the trend ran pretty much to completion by the early 1950s when Ike kicked off the Interstate Highway project.
FSD will soon make significant road trips far less taxing than they remain which will kill off both most short-haul passenger air transport and completely bury any potential economic basis for a revival of a 19th-century transport technology like passenger rail.
I grew up with kids working through high school so they could purchase their first car. Now nearly that same percentage don’t have a driver’s license when they graduate. Kids have no opinion on car styling, or makes, or models. Let’s face it most are nearly identical grocery getters. Their app will deliver the appropriate vehicle for their trip to the doorstep, and send it on when your done with it. They’ll be rolling entertainment/office spaces.
Also your traffic problems will end when we are driven. Your speed and direction will all be pre-planned with input by every car around you and the road itself. You’ll be warned when you travel may intersect with vehicles driven by “wetware” and alternate routes will be recommended.