re: #169 lawhawk

It would probably cost upwards of $250 billion, because as you say they would need to establish entirely new ROW.

That’s why you’ve got proposals for HSR in places like the central valley in CA, CA to Vegas, and Tampa/Orlando, because the acquisition costs for dedicated HSR is so much less.

If Amtrak improved its power supply/support/signaling, and eliminated the bottlenecks outside Baltimore and the Portal Bridge/Hudson River tunnel, travel times could be reduced to make the trip between DC and Boston much more competitive with air travel, and could allow for a critical mass to permanently shift travel plans.

Heck, HSR would be viable for NYC to Albany because the row could follow the NYS Thruway but that hasn’t received nearly the funding or attention it deserves even though there’s enough traffic to justify that routing.

I agree that the NEC is the best place for high speed rail, but I have a hard time getting critical of the decision to not pursue it, because I think that cost-efficiency matters.

The idea of looking at city pairs that have sufficient air or ground traffic between them to make HSR practical works for me. (I would guess that rules out NYC-Albany, but I haven’t seen that data.)

I doubt that HSR will ever be truly cheaper than air or car or bus if all the costs are loaded in, but on one level this isn’t purely about that: it’s a technology and jobs effort, too. (Although we’ll never get an apples-to-apples on costs, since air and road have all sorts of subsidies supporting them that we never want to factor in when we talk about rail.)

But at any rate, we can’t have it both ways: we don’t get to rail (no pun intended) about fiscal responsibility and then bemoan the omission of a zillion dollar project in the NE. Much as I would love to take a 200 mph train to Boston.