this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
308 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
58143 readers
5203 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
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
Flying is such a miserable experience from start to finish that I would opt for rail every time if it was viable, even if it took 3-4 times as long.
I mean, the good news is that you basically already can
Quick check says amtrak from NYP to LAX is 67.5 hours long. Or about 2.79 days
Which is a lot more than a six hour flight. But... that is six hours plus an hour or so on each side (at least) AND is a direct flight, so "one day" is how I would classify that. You aren't doing much in a day when you fly from NY to LA.
Which... is the 3-4x as long that you were asking for.
But hey. Maybe you are cool with spending the vast majority of a week long holiday in a train. I doubt your employers are fine with you spending three days to go to a conference on the west coast and another three days to come back.
The problem today is that it's an order of magnitude longer. Chicago to LA by airplane is 4 hours. Chicago to LA via Amtrak is about 56 hours. I don't know that high speed rail is going to fix that problem, sure it might get it down some, but even a 24 hour train is six times longer than flying.
I say this as someone that takes Amtrak at every opportunity because I enjoy trains and want to see them become viable for more people.
You’re looking at it from a coast to coast perspective when it should really be an intra-state one.
People aren’t regularly traveling from Chicago to La on a daily basis, even by plane. They are traveling within the same state or to nearby states instead.
Dallas-Houston, SF-LA, Miami-Orlando are all distances that people have to drive/fly to on a daily basis that could easily be replaced by hsr.
I don't disagree, regional high speed is where it's gotta start.