The funny thing here is that you clearly didn’t bother to read to the end of my first post:
Except of course people won’t actually be riding the train because it will be too expensive and on an inconvenient schedule. So basically you get what you have now and a train that flies by empty a few times a day.
As for your list “boondoggles”, notice how those were all advances in technology that nobody was sure there was a need for or how society would need or use them. HSR is a train, only “new” thing about it is speed. We already know how trains are used in society: freight. Passenger trains are the past in America. Cars are more convenient for anything you can drive in a day because you get to use your own schedule, bring more luggage, and have your car at your destination; and planes are more convenient for anything you can’t drive in a day because they’re faster, faster even that HSR.
Trains are the past, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. People that want HSR want us to spend BILLIONS of dollars on something we already know people won’t use because they already aren’t. Amtrak was supposed to be a temporary solution while somebody figured out how to make trains profitable for a private company again. 40+ years later it’s still here and it’s still not profitable, and the Atlanta airport has more passengers in a year than the entirety of Amtrak. And changing the speed of the trains isn’t going to dramatically increase ridership, you’ll just have the same not enough people riding more expensive trains.
Can we do less? (/s)
Trains are catching on these days if you haven’t noticed. The Metrolink in Los Angeles is quite popular and the Capitol trains in Northern California have been an amazing success story. Both operate in short haul corridors where cars previously predominated.
Which brings me to this part of your comment:
“Cars are more convenient for anything you can drive in a day because you get to use your own schedule, bring more luggage, and have your car at your destination; and planes are more convenient for anything you can’t drive in a day because they’re faster, faster even that HSR.”
Cars are more convenient for travel in uncongested areas and, as you said, they’re fine for up to a day’s drive but that’s for the odd trip, not for a commute.
Planes are also wonderful but given the hassles of travel to the airport, parking, and then getting to your flight and then vice-versa at your desitination planes are not as handy as they were prior to 9/11.
In corridors of 400 to 600 miles HSR is competitive with both cars and planes in terms of time savings. A 200mph train reduces those trips to three to four hours from downtown-to-downtown. That easily beats driving.
It also becomes competitive with planes when you look at portal-to-portal trips. Flying Sacramento to downtown LA via Burbank (which is faster than Sacto to LAX) is typically a four hour to five hour trip depending on traffic. HSR will do that same trip, reliably, in about four hours including stops from downtown Sacto to Union Station. And you don’t need to deal with the TSA or rental cars.
More important for towns like Bakersfield and maybe even Fresno is that HSR makes it possible for people living in those cities to commute to San Francisco or LA to work and that will help those local economies. No working person in their right mind would do that commute by car or air right now.
For us in Wyoming a HSR corridor is being talked about from Cheyenne through Denver to as far as maybe Pueblo. We do go to Denver often and being able to just drive to Cheyenne and then hop a train into Denver would be awesome. Again, such a train opens up possibilities for workers that don’t exist right now.
But I know you are against rail and nothing I say will sway you.
Except maybe this: All the billions to be poured into HSR will be billions that the Democrats can’t give to illegal aliens and etc.