cross-posted from: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/727
crossposted: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/665
Oh boy...
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One of the factors is that the US is surprisingly huge. It takes EU tourists by surprise that a quick jaunt from NYC to visit their friend in Chicago is several days by road (unless you drive like an American roadtripper for fourteen hours a day) moreover, there's just huge tracks of land featuring not-too-exciting vistas (unless you plan your road trip to feature pretty routes, in which case multiply the distance by 1.3), so for the short while that airlines were regulated and we weren't worried (yet) about the air-travel carbon footprint (Huge. Enormous. Colossal.) it made sense to fly everywhere in the US.
Now that it's insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn't be doing it, it's time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.
Not that I disagree that we need high speed rail, but "several days by road"? That's a day and a half tops.
It's a day and a half the way we Americans drive which is to run on coffee and fast food and burn above the speed limit for fourteen hours a day.
I am (or was, now I'm having doubts) of the belief that European motorists were more inclined to take their time, see some sights and not exhaust themselves in the transit. That may have been a late-20th century thing.
No, it is a 13 and a half hour drive according to Google, which would be according to the speed limit. We Americans would do it in a single day because hotels are expensive.
Google is telling me it's only 12 hours. I've definitely driven that far in a single day, and could probably shave that down to 11
Still though, that's a huge travel commitment for tourists who are used to major cities being 4-hours apart by train