this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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"Trains wouldn't work in the US, we're too spread out"
Meanwhile, we did have a near-ubiquitous rail network a century ago and destroyed it.
Meanwhile, the US road network is the single most economically expensive undertaking in human history and has achieved complete ubiquity in almost every lived location in the country, all of it costing more per mile than your average rail line, much of it literally poured over old rail line.
Meanwhile, Europe is the size of the US and achieves equivalent rail density with far less investment.
Meanwhile, China is larger than the US, has an order of magnitude more people, an even more dispersed population, and achieved high speed rail ubiquity in less than two decades.
Anyone who tells you ubiquitous rail cannot work in the US because of our size and density is either disingenuous, misled, or ignorant.
edit - Or they're doing a bit!
Reminds me of my home city where people argued that there was no way to incorporate urban rail into the city, but luckily the town is crisscrossed by bike trails. The bike trails were literally the rail bed from our urban train system that got torn out in the 50s.
I love and use rails-to-trails myself, but I can't shake the feeling that they're essentially motornormative culture scapegoating cyclists to bury any possible hope of reviving rail networks. The carbrained planner says "No you can't put the rails back in, you'd displace the cyclists!" While displacing cyclists every time they choose to exclude cycling infrastructure on streets.
I have similar feelings bit ido tell myself this: If nothing else rails to trails maintains the right of way. The carbrained city planner says you'll displace the cyclists, but in 30 years that planner will be retired or dead. What would kill railroads forever would be carving up the ROW and selling it off.