this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Cities in the US are simply too far apart. Do you really think you can maintain a train route that runs from the suburb of Houston to the suburb of Houston to the suburb of Houston to the suburb of Houston to the suburb of Austin to the suburb of Austin to the suburb of Austin to the suburb of Fort Worth to the suburb of Fort Worth to the suburb of Fort Worth to the suburb of Dallas to the suburb of Dallas to the suburb of Dallas to the suburb of Dallas?
It would never work.
Have you seen how empty Texas is? And how flat it is? It's kinda ideal train territory. If Norway and Switzerland can set up train routes, the Great Plains certainly can.
I live in Texas and I can assure you it is anything but empty. The major metroplexes are so sprawled that they've started banging into one another. Austin and San Antonio are functionally one super-city at this point. Ft Worth and Dallas started mingling decades ago. Houston has fully consumed six other neighboring cities over the last 40 years and is - itself - surrounded by suburban echoes of itself in the Woodlands, Sugar Land, Clear Lake, and Katy. You can drive dozens of miles in any direction and never leave "the city".
Absolutely. Or, at least, supplementing/replacing the big metro arteries (I-10, I-45, the various mega-loops) with rail would make a lot more sense than just stacking overpasses on top of one another.
Fair enough! Sorry to generalize about the geography of a state I don't live in. I just drove through Amarillo a couple years back and it was so empty out there that it made a lasting impression 😅
No, that's fair. Although I think Amarillo is really cursed by the smell of all that livestock. Once you get down out of the Panhandle, population density picks up quite a bit. The Big Three - Houston / Austin / Dallas - are enormous urban smears across the landscape.
Ehm i beg your pardon but Switzerland is packed with people.
And super inconvenient mountains that you have to route tracks above, around, and through.
At the risk of feeding a troll, they really aren’t. Sweet spot for high speed rail is generally considered two cities 300-500 miles apart. That covers most of the US population
Sure. But you could improve commute times significantly with intra-urban commuter rail even before you're looking at big inter-metro HSR. All these mid-sized suburbs strung out along the freeways would benefit enormously from park-and-ride depots that linked to a metro line that doesn't need to fight traffic to get into downtown.
i can't tell whether you're sarcastic
Why not, if it's the same distance?
You just don't understand civil engineering!
The American physiognomy is incompatible with high speed tubes full of other commuters. You need to be physically separated by a large metal box. Unless, of course, you're living in NYC, Chicago, Boston, or DC, for obvious reasons.
Cities in the US are far apart because of car-centric design, not the other way around. If we just invested more in other forms of transit, then our cities would not be so sprawling.
Okay, dropping the act here, that's not actually true. Cities in the US aren't far apart when you consider the population-dense coastal areas (where large portions of the historical rail network are concentrated). That was my intended joke. You've got numerous large, increasingly dense suburbs all concentrated along highway corridors that run through urban centers. Like, we have everything you need for a successful rail line. In some cases we even have the rail lines. We just don't have terminals with commuter trains running on a schedule.
Oh, it was a bit. Yikes you had me triggered lol
Well, for context, I come from the Chicago area which does have commuter trains but is still a massive sprawling hellscape because everything - including the train stations - is designed for cars. So it's true that everything is too far apart there, because the car-centric design itself makes it so.
I guess I should specify - everything in the US is too far apart to be a good environment for people, because we built it that way. It is not too far apart for public transport to be built, though. Building public transport (as well as walking and cycling infrastructure) and specifically building less car infrastructure is the way to make it less far apart and make it better for people.
I'm gonna be honest: you fooled me and I almost removed your initial comment as misinformation.
Cities in the US are spread apart because of car-centric zoning. It's the laws governing land use that drive the infrastructure design, not the other way around.
(Note that I said "spread apart," not "far apart," by the way. I'm talking about travel within cities, not between them. Intercity travel has no excuse to not be rail regardless.)
This thread was started with a post on intercity rail. There are many parts of the US where highways have chronic congestion because they just can’t scale enough, nor could we afford to maintain them, where intercity rail would be a much better choice.
And effing Texas, are you really widening the Katy freeway again rather than consider a train?
The examples I can think of chronic congestion are pretty much all intracity (which I consider to include between the central city and its suburbs), not intercity (the long rural stretches between metro areas). Intercity rail is better than freeways (but more importantly, better than airplanes) for efficiency's sake, but doesn't necessarily have much to do with reducing congestion. Intracity rail (commuter rail, subways and streetcars) is what's needed for reducing congestion.
The northeast corridor is an existing example of- both highways and airways are so over congested, you couldn’t get anywhere without train. Ever since Acela stared 20 years ago, I refuse to travel Bos—>nyc any other way. It’s too much hassle
There are compelling arguments for Colorado front range rail, although that’s closer to metro distance, and cascadia - Vancouver—>portland. Even Texas needs more than commuter rail: you have three major cities in. Nice triangle that would do better if you could connect their economies. And of course this where I claim California high speed rail is necessary at any price. Send all mY taxes there. Let’s make it so
Zoning and laws like parking minimums are part of it, but it's also literally the government paying for car infrastructure because that is a routine and unquestioned part of government budgets while any spending on other forms of transit is heavily limited and it's expected to turn a profit from fares, which roads never do. The spending on roads should be questioned, and spending on other forms of transit should be seen as an important public service.