re: #239 garhighway

I’d love a system as comprehensive as Europe’s, too but:

1> their point-to-point distances are generally shorter than ours, and
2> they generally acquired the r-o-w a while back when it was cheaper.

Seattle to Minneapolis is a good example. That’s 1300+ miles through the Rockies with nothing meaningful in between. (No offense to Minot, South Dakota, et al, but you know what I mean.) The European counterpart would be (roughly) Paris to Moscow, plus mountains. Would that rail line exist if there was nothing in between (and if they had a really good freeway covering that route as well)? I doubt it.

We’ll never have their system. It will never make sense to build that, if cost matters at all. And it has to matter.

Not only that, those European cities also have the readily accessible metro systems and bus systems… all three of those transportation models support each other.

If I lived in Paris, and wanted to see a musical… let’s say Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express,” I could get on the Paris Metro, get off at Garde d’est, take the train to Bochum Germany (bet you never heard of the town) and then take bus to the Starlighthalle (a permanent theatre built for the show), see the show and be back in Paris sometime around 2:00am in the morning, under a 24 hour day trip.

But it’s those three services working in tandem that makes this possible. Here in the US, we are no where near that sort of infrastructure.