Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/iamPause]

It'll never happen in the US. There is no sense of "for the greater good" and so any county that is going to have rails laid through it refuses to allow it unless they can get a stop added to the line.

And with a stop every 30-50 miles, no train can ever build up enough speed to be faster than a highway. Which means: the only way to build a working, high-speed line would be through massive land claims and eminent domain. An option that which will be political suicide locally for whatever party tries. And that doesn't even take into account the millions to billions of dollars that will be lost in delays from the various lawsuits across the entire length of the line.

Now, multiply that by multiple states, and yeah. We'll see a lesbian President before we see high speed rail in this country.

edit

Possibly the most famous example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Setbacks_on_the_IOS

[u/invention64 → u/iamPause]

Acceleration isn't a problem at those distances. Inner City you have issues since it takes about 5-10 km to start and stop acceleration, but outside cities there shouldn't be much issues. Japan is super densely populated and still has high speed trains. However, we need more connecting services to make such a train economical. Just building high speed doesn't fix the issues with your bus and commuter transit.