This seems like an awfully fanciful idea for anywhere but places with the most dense rail networks per sq km, at least if we're talking a full-scale refactor of existing infrastructure, in terms of financial, physical, logistics.
Is it not somewhat true that rail/freight companies have more authority over the land that their lines run through than the regions do? I may be talking out of my ass here, but I feel cities and provinces in Canada pretty much have to yield to CN or BNSF in some form or another; they operate their own police afaik. Railyards seem to be regarded as defacto permanent fixtures in terms of urban infrastructure.
> anywhere but places with the most dense rail networks per sq km
It seems to be the contrary to me. In Japan or France (in the denser places of these countries, because they have plenty of low density areas) building a whole new dedicated rail network was (and still is, see the Bordeaux-Toulouse LGV project) a major undertaking because there's no way to avoid built-up areas. The high-speed lines go from city center to city center, and we're talking about Paris and Tokyo here.
The Shinkansen and TGV use dedicated rail networks, that are built from scratch and are still being expanded. TGV can use legacy lines as well at low speed (including at grade road crossings, although these have almost completely been replaced today) not sure about Shinkansen.
In contrast, it seems to me like it should be easier in the US to find space for cheaper bypasses, tunnels and bridges since it's less dense.
In what way is it fanciful? There's an extensive network of interstates in the US with nearly zero intersections. If it's viable for I-90 why isn't it viable for the equivalent rail line?
If you don’t mind losing I-90 for car use, you could just repurpose the right of way. Otherwise, you just need to build another I-90 for HSR, well, it wouldn’t need to be as wide, you probably could do more tunneling and viaducting through the mountains so it doesn’t slow down much like the real I-90 does. But in Seattle, I don’t think there is room for another new right of way, so you have to tunnel or somehow run it down the middle of the freeway (and forget about lake Washington, you would need a new floating bridge unless you could stomach the slowness of going around.
All can be solved with lots of money (and the space issues can be solved with even more money).
Well, if all the interstates did have plenty of intersections, and someone proposed removing them all retroactively, would that not be an absolutely gargantuan undertaking at present, to the point where justifying it would seem fanciful?
Given the current state of US passenger rail I suppose such a proposal is closer to building out the interstate system from scratch. Which is indeed a bit on the fanciful side.
On the other hand, who says you have to do the entire country at once? Perfect is the enemy of good and all that.
Japan has an average density of 338 people per sqkm.
There’s only 3 US states with a density higher than that (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey) and an additional 2 US states of at least 220 people per sqkm (Maryland and Connecticut).
The US isn’t population dense enough for such transportation to make sense.
Nobody’s proposing to build rail in flyover country, but there are many places where high speed rail make sense based on GDP and population density (CAHSR, DC-NYC-Boston maglev, DFW-Houston)
Flyover county was definitely included in my initial response about at grade crossings, but wasn't specific to passenger rail, and why wouldn't it hypothetically be included? There already is rail everywhere, that's why I suggested it's a bit fanciful, it's just mostly freight. Doesn't necessarily need to be bullet trains, but given how bad North America seems to be at building any major rail projects in the modern era, I don't really have high hopes for advancement in this area, just dreams.
I do tend to prefer rail whenever viable, and the cascades route is already halfway decent, just not competitive on any front except ease of access with flying.
Density over some wide area is the wrong metric here. An entire state is absurdly large (in most cases). Two dense endpoints can be separated by quite a distance and still be worth connecting.
Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)
You have half the justification in CA you do in Japan, looking at similar urban areas. In the case of Japan, connecting those two cities goes through another 3 with over 1M population (and totaling over 7M together).
US cities are spread out and relatively low population.
> Tokyo has 8.9M people while LA has 3.9M people; half the number. Osaka (3rd largest) is 2.7M people while San Jose (3rd largest) is just under 1M people; again, half the number. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is 500km, while from LA to San Jose is 550km. (In both cases, the 2nd largest city is nearby the largest.)
Paris has 2M people and Bordeaux has 1M people (sixth largest urban area in France), they are 500 km apart. How come France is able to operate a dedicated high-speed line between these cities? The third largest city on that line is Tours with 360k people or so.
California has almost the same population density as France, actually, but it's less spread out so just one line would be much more useful than a single line is in France.
Canada just announced a high-speed line project between Québec, Montreal and Toronto, by the way.
Why is Japan's density the magic number? A given route is either viable or not.
The US historically had much more passenger rail than it currently does. You haven't provided any convincing reasons why that shouldn no longer be workable in the modern day.
The US created a cross country rail network, basically by government fiat and investment, well before there was anyone out there to ride them.
Hell, a lot of towns with good rail access nowadays in the US only exist BECAUSE the rail line was built there.
It's hilarious how often "but density" is wheeled out to complain how we can't do trains when, not only did we use trains to create density, but the US has regions that are denser than Europe and could easily support comprehensive rail. The US is a place where people are unwilling to buy a car that can't go 300 miles on a whim. People used to take the trains for day long trips.
There is no excuse but political. We could talk about how expensive it is to build anything in the US but the US has always had massive pork in large projects and is so fucking rich that if we stopped giving free tax breaks to billionaires and maybe go a decade without having to artificially inflate our economy we could build the most expensive railroad network in the world with giant kickbacks included and STILL benefit and afford it.
We could financially justify not just removing grade crossings, but a literal maglev between DC and NYC (The city pair has higher GDP than Osaka and Tokyo, which is actually getting a maglev)
Don't know how it is in the US, but it's similar for cars, highways don't cross small routes either there's typically a (small) bridge involve (no need for viaduct).
Limited access, freeways in crowded areas take space, hence my point about viaducting (or tunneling) to create more space. But ya, if you pay for the spaces of the bridges over the freeway through your downtown urban area, you can also do that with a train if you have more space for it (or tunnel the train under). China just doesn’t have that kind of space, which is why you see viaducts everywhere in cities like Shanghai or Beijing.
Sounds like a good investment to me regardless of rail speed.