this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
310 points (98.4% liked)

Fuck Cars

9662 readers
61 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Pipoca@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Correction:

the first world-class high-speed rail projects in our country’s history

The US already has high speed rail: the Acela express. According to Wikipedia, though,

The maximum speed limit on the Northeast Corridor is 150 mph (240 km/h) on 49.9 miles (80.3 km) of the 457-mile (735 km) route, in four sections of track in Rhode Island, Massachusetts,[6] and New Jersey. The Acela achieves an average speed (including stops) of 90 mph (140 km/h) between Washington and New York,[3][9] and an average speed of 66 mph (106 km/h) from New York to Boston.[2][11] The average speed over the entire route is 70.3 mph (113 km/h).

That is to say, the US has HSR, but mediocre HSR.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Mid-Speed Rail, really. Which isn't bad, just not HSR.

[–] Pipoca@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Looking at the definitions section of the Wikipedia article on HSR, the Acela is around the bare minimum of several definitions, such as

Existing tracks specially upgraded for high speeds, allowing a maximum running speed of at least 200 km/h (124 mph).

Or

Average running speed across the corridor in excess of 150 km/h (93 mph)

The Acela is either great MSR, or about half of it is bare minimum HSR, depending on definitions.