High-speed rail connecting every North American city.
Coast to Coast? Sure, but every city in North America? Nah, that isn’t practical at all.
For instance France apparently builds high speed rail for 25 Million per kilometer so lets use their cost number. The straightline distance, shortest possible, from Denver to Omaha is 483 kilometers so the line from Omaha to Denver alone would cost 12 BILLION dollars.
Denver to Salt Lake is 590 Kilometers, again straight line, so there goes another 14.7 Billion dollars. (This is also absolutely impossible to do at this price) SLC to Los Angeles is 930 kilometers, another 23.2 Billion.
We’ve now spent 49.9 Billion to connect just FOUR cities and only have a single rail line that goes from Omaha to LA. If you want coast to coast then a single least possible distance link from D.C. to San Francisco would cost right at $100 Billion.
All of those calculations assume the 25 Million per kilometer can be done in the United States too. For example the High Speed rail being built in California is costing four times as much.
So no, trying to connect every city in North America with High Speed rail not only isn’t practical it isn’t economically possible on any reasonable timeline as it would require a major percentage of the US’s entire GDP to be spent on it every single year for the next century.
In 2020 the US state and local governments spent $116 billion for the construction of roads and highways and $94 billion of operating costs.
If you just cancel half of the road construction projects by a year you get enough money to fund the connection of the 4 cities you described.
The total cost for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was $8 Trillion over 20 years This country has the money it just doesn’t the leadership that wants to change. And why would they want to change? The way this country runs work$ well for them.
Pretty sure the interstate highway system isn’t terribly practical either, but with enough funding it can be done. Maybe saying every major city would make it seem more practical.
France’s public infrastructure construction industry is one of the most corrupt and wasteful systems on earth 😂
Drive past any road or rail project, astonishingly, every single excavator or dump truck is brand spanking new, every year
In 2020 the US state and local governments spent $116 billion for the construction of roads and highways and $94 billion of operating costs.
If you just cancel half of the road construction projects by a year you get enough money to fund the connection of the 4 cities you described.
The problem then is transport inside the city. Couple this idea with the (currently) top comment to make cities walkable and this is pure fire.
Yeah light rail, bike lanes, and walking roads. We can build a constructed environment designed around human beings. A world that’s good for our health, both physical and mental, and for our planet. All we need to do is accept a reality that cars aren’t a good use of resources and that walking and biking are really good for us.
Trains you can park cars on. Would be great for camping weekends where I need all of my gear but don’t want to drive for hours.
E-scooters, e-bikes or regular bikes if you want to go cheap.
No, I’m afraid that’s not possible. The UK government scrapping HS2 has shown this.
E: For the avoidance of doubt, /s
It was corrupt prime minister AFAIK
A massive high speed railway network across North America, coast to coast. Russia did it, China did it, most of Europe did it. Canada and the USA have no excuse.
Canada’s excuse is “we’re roughly as big as the US but have a way smaller population and GDP. I really don’t think it’d be financially justifiable for them to build a rail equivalent to the trans-Canadian highway. It’d be a non-starter in a political sense.
The US, on the other hand… yeah. We genuinely have no excuse.
Property acquisition costs and legal fees are immensely more expensive in the US. Have to obtain those thousands of miles of land for rail development from somebody.
There are ways. Maybe bring our number of aircraft carriers down to only 3x the rest of the world combined instead of 5x, just as an example.
Maybe bring our number of aircraft carriers down to only 3x the rest of the world combined instead of 5x, just as an example.
I did the math on what a single coast to coast least possible distance link from D.C. to San Francisco would cost and it came out to 100 Billion dollars. It would connect no cities other than SF and DC unless they happen to fall directly on the rail line.
US Aircraft carriers cost around 10 Billion each (I’m averaging a bit here) and we only have 11 so we’d have to get rid of ALL of them to pay for a single coast to coast high speed rail link. Trying to connect “Every City in North America” would require cutting the entire military budget in half and spending it all on rail construction for the next 50 to 100 years.
The US is fucking HUGE and has a lot of cities.
You’re only counting the build cost though, they cost anywhere from $1-2 billion a year to operate depending on which article you read. Considering an aircraft carrier’s service life is usually around 40 years, that’s quite a savings just from removing a single carrier group from the fleet. That would pay for anywhere from 50-80% of your estimate right there. I’m not discounting the 40-50 years of rail maintenance, but you would hope rail service could at least come close to breaking even by selling tickets. There’s no profit coming out of an aircraft carrier group, unless you’re the one selling them the supplies.
Property acquisition in the US more expensive than in Europe? I think not, at least for the immense swaths of land that make up most of the US’ land mass.
The legal fees I see, but that’s why most developed nations have legislature for disowning property owners of land necessary for infrastructure at a set compensation. Whether that’s fair or just is up for ideological debate, I’m sure.
I’m not sure any of these are quite as ambitious as crossing the entire continent of North America. In fact I’m not even sure that would make sense to do. That said lines connecting major cities on each coast and some parts of the Midwest would be a no-brainer.
I think the proof of concept really should be the NYC-Cleveland-Chicago line. From there it can be extended westward as desired
What’s west of Chicago though? That line makes sense on its own merits but if you want coast to coast, a southern route might make more sense.
Car-independent livable cities.
We’ve even been doing that for thousands of years!
Housing for everyone, food for everyone, clean energy (nuclear power, though we would do well to advance the tech a little is immanently practical).
Those are all easy mode stuff that would dramatically improve the world for a lot of people, but we could do more.
Hard mode: Orbital rings.
We would have to develop some tech, but not nearly as much as you might think.
Don’t even need nuclear, renewable energy at its current pace will get us to 100% renewable by 2050, which is about as far away as any nuclear plants you started constructing today for way, way less money and zero waste storage issues.
There’s basically no point building any other kind of energy at this stage. Giant, expensive power plants that require huge amounts of expensive fuel and large expensive workforces simply can’t compete with panels pumped out by factories you can install anywhere that generate free energy for decades with little to no maintenance.
The problem with only panels and wind is the fluctuation. We need at least a small “baseline” power supply that works when there is no wind at night. Storing large amounts of energy is the missing piece here to get rid of conventional power plants altogether. We’ll get there eventually.
Universal healthcare, public transit, communism. Or at lease food for everyone, housing for everyone and communication for everyone.
Economic communism won’t be achievable until we fully automate the economy and institute some kind of technocracy or lottery style political system.
A truly “stateless” society is a joke, but separating the economy from the state is only possible if we are all out of jobs.
uhh
Nuclear bomb fueled rockets to space. Look up project Orion.
isn’t that bad?
Depends on which side of the exhaust you are on.
You didn’t ask if it was bad, you asked if it was practical.
Just want a space elevator, surely we can’t be that far
We can’t make long enough pieces of anything strong enough to handle that level of strain.
Not yet!
Pinging acollierastro
We’ve recently figured out beaming power to another location. We might be able to start a Dyson swarm, which is just a collection of solar panel satellites that beam their energy back to earth.
I’d like to also see the start of space resource extraction/refinement. The more of that Dyson swarm we can build without having to lift it off earth, the better.
That stupid 100 mile long building in Arabia.
They could keep people from entering/leaving and suicide/(murder?) becomes much easier. Mass surveillance could also be built in.
What part of that is practical?
Practical as in being able to be done, rather than theoretical and not able to be done. (As the man said, just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done). Genuine question: did you intend another meaning of practical?
I don’t buy for a second that catastrophe can actually be built.
It’s 100% pure “CGI engineering”. All the effort went into a snazzy presentation to sell it to petro-billionaires ego-blimps with no consideration for feasibility.
Fair enough. I don’t think it’s useful to build it, (I think it’s a stupid way for wanker money hoarders to buy recognition and fame), but we know how to pour concrete, we know how to install air conditioning, we know how to construct large buildings and make them habitable. Let me fall back on “English is my second language”; I think we both agree on the (lack of) usefulness of the project. I happen to think that it could be built (practical); or at least started, but that doesn’t make it a useful thing to build (practical). I don’t feel that I can clearly explain what I thought the word “practical” meant; but I didn’t mean to get into an argument about it.
Don’t sweat it, we are in agreement except I’m certain the engineering won’t hold up. It’s not just building a wall, they need to build all the infrastructure inside of it (somehow).
Will they shove some sand around and start pouring cement and waste a bunch of money before moving to the next shiny CGI project? Very likely. So it doesn’t really matter, they aren’t ever even going to try to finish this.
