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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a good observation. The USA is just too spread out for rail travel to really work well. Most European countries are no bigger than a medium sized US state, and the cities are denser and smaller than American cities. It's easier to run a rail route between two European cities and realistically serve most of the people in those cities. And the cities aren't so far apart that flying becomes a really time-saving option.

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> The USA is just too spread out for rail travel to really work well

Not true.

Chicago to Detroit: 282 miles (4.5h via car) 5hours via train TODAY. (It should really be 2 hours with a train going ~180mph)

Chicago to St. Louis 311 miles (5h via car) 5.5 hours via train (With proper investment: 2.2 hours via HSR train)

Sure end to end may be long; but even then not as long as most people realize.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/26/china-opens-worlds-longe...

> China launched services Wednesday on the world’s longest high-speed rail route, linking the nation’s capital in Beijing all the way to the country’s southeastern hub of Guangzhou.

> Averaging speeds of up to 186 m.p.h. (300 km/h), the 1,425-mile (2,293 km) route now takes eight hours to complete;

New York to Los Angeles : 2775 miles. Or double the above line. 16 HOURS via High-Speed train. 16 HOURS.

As a point of reference flight time is 6 hours. (Not counting being at the airport 2 hours early, etc.) - so lets just say ~9 hours for a plane. So a plane is twice as fast; but with significantly less capacity.

You are deeply wrong and need to look at proper maps.

Europe is 33% larger than the USA (contiguous 48).

[added] Note sure why this fact would be down-voted. We don't include Greenland or e.g. French Polynesian dependencies in the European total. Sweden is slightly larger than California, with 1/4 the population. Et caetera. Really, you should look at maps, population facts, as well as the extent and quality of railroads.

And quit pretending that there is no rail connection across Europe. [1] America is failing when it comes to 21st century pubic transportation. Angrily lagging behind European, Japanese [2], or Chinese [3] railroads is not a healthy path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

Define "Europe." "Europe" doesn't have high speed rail. Germany, France, etc., do, and those countries are a lot denser than the U.S. and most U.S. states. Moreover, U.S. cities are shaped very differently from Western European ones. Take the ratio of (city population) / (metro area population) and compare the U.S. state capitals to European capitals. In Europe, it's common for the majority of a metro area to live within city limits, even in small cities. In the U.S., the only major city that gets close to that benchmark is New York.

The arbitrary government boundaries are not really relevant.

Given that the governments fund the passenger trains, those boundaries are extremely relevant.

Not really, the city government works with the county government, which works with the state government, which works with the federal government.

The Port Authority of NY and NJ is just such a agency.

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