As someone who lives in Seattle, the high speed we’d be getting is great. It would go from Vancouver BC down to Portland. My guess is that there would be an ask for high speed to connect the bay area to portland in the future.
Edit: I’m not sure we’d even need it since it’s pretty rural through the areas not high speed because there aren’t a lot of stops.
I’ve wanted that train route for decades now. PDX to BC in a few hours? Wonderful! If it had a stop within shouting distance of downtown in all three cities, stops within 10 mins of the airports (or even right at them) and a connection to the new line to Bellevue… Amazing.
That’s a great spine to build a regional network on. Start putting light rail into all of the stations, local trams, and if you’d be nice to us on the east side, a interurban line to Spokane that would leave during the day. Bam! Cascadia is in great shape.
Building it is only part of the solution. The other part is making it affordable to use. The rail in Florida was basically already built, and recently. The problem is that it’s not affordable as an option for residents. A weekend trip from Orlando to Miami is $120 (one way) www.gobrightline.com/booking. It costs half that in gas to drive round trip, and takes about the same time too.
In my opinion, public transportation doesn’t need to be profitable. Subsidized by taxes, like our freeways. Adds to the economy and is worth the investment
I would bet actual cash money we will not see any high speed train outside of California in the next 10 years.
I was high on copium for a decade that Obama was gonna give me fiber internet and it never happened.
This isn’t cynicism, this is just a giant novelty size pork barrel filled with rotting lard like the last several nationwide infrastructure projects were.
Well, you probably already lost that bet, because the LA->Vegas train is likely to be done before 2033 (even with some setbacks in the schedule). In fact, it’ll probably be done before LA->San Fransisco. It follows an existing highway route, so there isn’t much fight over land use. Most of the things that bog down these projects already seem to be cleared for it. Also helps that there isn’t a lot in between LA and Vegas; you don’t have every town over 10k people demanding they get a stop.
I don’t need a train. I need rent that isn’t 60% of my take home, or, better yet, a house. What’s that? NYT is saying that’s never going to happen and that I should just be okay with it. Oh and the economy’s doing great.
Housing subsidies raise the overall cost, and the middle class still gets to pay the bill. It has its place for low incomes, but it’s counterproductive when done too broadly. I’m definitely in favor of taxing investment real estate though.
Most of the things that would improve the housing market would be done at the city level. Getting hedge funds out of owning houses would be nice, but zoning and higher density are things done by your local city council.
I am surrounded by hundreds of empty units owned by a few multinational corporations subcontracting out their properties to the same management firm. They all use the same profit maximizing algorithm with a shared database. It’s very illegal. I don’t think a city could win a fight against a single billionaire, let alone a legion of them. I don’t see my city even trying. Right now some tenants across the country are suing, which is an even more damned approach. This needs a federal stick.
yeah it’s kind of difficult to feel good about it when it’s coming on the back of him / congress enabling literal genocide on the other side of the planet, thanks
I’m not sure y’all know what nihilism means. Assuming you are talking about Nietzsche’s nihilism, he described it as a series of transformational stages where a new understanding of self would necessarily emerge while the control structure of religion slowly crumbled away in modernity. He argued that this idea was so revolutionary that it would be news to atheists too.
There isn’t even a lot of despair or handwringing about it—he just points out that we need a new type of operating parameters to meet the modern world head on:
“…we are faced with a difficult, long term restoration project in which the most cherished aspects of our way of life must be ruthlessly investigated, dismantled, and then reconstructed in healthier form—all while we continue somehow to sail the ship of our common ethical life on the high seas.”
Even if you don’t necessarily believe in a God, unless you’re proud of cynicism without rationale (your typical teen), considering people have gotten this far, both collectively, and if you imagine your father or mother’s life, you’d still believe in something good, even if it’s just the power of money, or laughing at life’s misery in general
No. That’s stupid. “Apparently” implies I don’t think so i.e. “the crowd [except me] seems to think”. Please do better before you get sanctimonious with me.
This is the dumbest exchange I’ve had on lemmy, I want my money back.
I can’t believe there’s not a plan for a rail from Atlanta to New Orleans also. There is so much back and forth from Atlanta to New Orleans these days.
So…what if the railroad companies take the money and then do absolutely nothing, like what happened every single time this has been tried? What is there to hold them accountable this time?
Broadband is getting better! My in-laws who live in the boonies a few miles outside of a tiny town of 400 are jumping from ~2-4mbit/s download speed to fiber to the home, and I’ve seen broadband expansion in my extremely rural area by multiple telecom companies! It’s obviously slow going but it is happening
That’s surprising…only way we are getting it here is from our power company which is a coop. They’re basically running it to all the homes they supply power to. Only another 2-3 years for us.
In the one hand, most of these allocations are to fund planning studies, so that’s exactly what will happen
In the other hand this is not like the telecom situation where we hand money to private companies promising to provide service. It’s generally infrastructure improvements and I believe project ownership is Amtrak or local DOT
In fairness, last time this was tried we had Husky Musky employing a fraud with the explicit intent of killing the high-speed rail. Toss on a host of republican opposition and undermining in 2013± and you have the reason why it failed. It has nothing to do with the rail companies. It has everything you do with political dysfunction and not wanting to “let liberals win”.
The general theory is that musk dislikes any public transit that decreases car dependency. My personal feelings are more along the lines of “rich dumbass doesn’t like ideas that help the poors”, but obviously that may very well be cynicism on my part.
Generally, also pompous-ass disease. As the other user mentioned, Musk has pretty systematically worked against the 99% for his entire adult life. The idea that a normal everyday person could afford a ticket from LA to San Francisco that would get them there in roughly the same amount of time as his private jet would probably have infuriated him beyond compare. Just look at how he reacted to a college student forwarding publicly available information about the movements of that very same jet.
Really? www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63978323It is 100% real. Just to be clear, in early 2022 Husky Musky got butt-hurt about the account and attempted fo give the kid $5,000 to shut it down, thinking he would just take the money and comply. He refused and laughed at him. A couple of months later, we start hearing talk of him buying twitter. About a month after buying twitter he bans the account after making some retarded changes to the ToS to justify it. Yes, I am literally saying he spent 44billion dollars because some 19-year-old in Florida pissed him off and there was nothing he could do about it because the kid was 100% within his rights and didn’t violate any rules of twitter. I’m sure he had additional motivations, like having control of a cesspool of pro-conservative nutbags that he thought he would be able to milk for power and money, but short of Elon Musk pulling up in front of my house and showing genuine human emotion besides anger to tell me that it is not the case, the primary reason he bought twitter is because a peon had the audacity to tell him no and he was impotent to do anything about it.
Lol, I am supporting my assertion of the underlying reasoning for his decisions based on real and factual evidence. It is an inductive argument. Look at a problem, find a pattern, find a general description for the pattern, then execute the general description on further instances of the system.
I asserted that Elon Musk was a pompous assclown who looks down on normal people and thinks they don’t deserve to be capable of the same things as him. You challenged that assessment, so I found a pattern of behavior and was able to support it with evidence that validates it, then generalizing the pattern of behavior and applying that generalization to my original assertion still yields a true output, so therefore 'ole Husky Musky is a pompous assclown who sees fit to punish the little guy and make sure we are all kept in our place. QED ∎
(to my math literate comrades, the redundancy is a joke)
It took a bit to find a map that isn’t so tiny, but the main thing to know is the red lines are high speed rails, and the blue lines are conventional rails. The solid lines versus dotted lines differentiate between FSP-N selections and CID selections.
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