I expect better of the rail network in America. This is a tiny network for the size country we are.
These poor people have such a bad rail network that even their dreams are limited...
I felt that one as a Brazilian (govt literally went "fuck trains, cars are the future!" for ~30 years starting in the 1950s)
it takes me 24 hours to go by train the same distance it takes me to fly 1.5 hours. and the cost is the same. there are some problems.
This has more to do with how commuter trains are forced to give priority to freight trains, causing delays, than actual travel times
The REAL US Tylenol Map
Thank you. I was kind of offended with the other one for implying I would neglect a huge region.
Nah, Idaho can get fucked.
why do all tracks lead to Florida?
Its the other way around, there needs to be as many ways to get out of Florida as possible.
One reason for this is hurricanes are more frequent, and sometimes the notice level is too short to have safe evacuation from Miami through highway systems. There has been anger over deaths from evacuation, when a storm warning did not destroy as many homes as was "hoped"/feared.
I think because it has large populations on both coasts?
A bunch of individual reasons.
Chock Full-0-Sea ports
Nasa historically moved a lot of big stuff over rail.
Florida has a shit ton of Agriculture but a lack of raw materials
Tourism
It's flat as hell
Chock Full-0-Sea ports
Is really the big reason. Less and less portage is going through the traditional East Coast hubs of NY and NJ, mostly going to places like Louisiana , Texas, and Florida instead.
Historically Florida has always been pretty big on trains as well. In fact you used to be able to take a train from Florida to Cuba....kinda. You could take a train across the overseas rail line to Key West where they would ferry the whole train car over to Cuba.
We used to be an actual country that did stuff, and that's because we weren't afraid to do cool stuff with trains.
The train tracks are extra support to keep Florida from floating away.
Lots of people in a pretty small area in relatively dense cities that currently drive or fly between the cities (technically called strong city pairings). There's also a pretty enormous tourism industry in Florida that captures much of the Midwestern US/anyone not going to California or Hawaii for their beach or disney vacation. Florida is also flat which makes for very cheap high speed rail. Note how the map goes out of its way to avoid the mountains out West.
That being said, I'm not sure this map is one of the ones made with serious city pairing calculations. I'm skeptical that Quincy, IL has a really strong draw for high speed rail, for example, and that long gap between Portland and Sacramento/San Francisco, while beautiful and filled with cool places, is way too sparsely populated to justify 6hrs on high speed rail. I think it's a sort of meme map that's been going around for years, though I wish it were real.
It’s better than being stuck in Cheyenne Wyoming.
Thats a weird way to spell Chicago? 3 out of 8 tracks is far from all of them
I assume the gray gaps are due to red states refusing to get on the Tylenol/Autism Train, but I can't believe, if the Autist Party were in power, they wouldn't insist on connecting ALL the dots.
Yeah this is clearly the work of Big Acetylsalicylic Acid
You-know-who oughta be grateful he only had to stumble through pronouncing acetaminophen.
I would think that Kansas City would be a bigger hub since it already has a lot of rail through there and is more central in the country.
for freight, not passenger rail, which is what high-speed rail is primarily designed for
As would I. There is an existing line from Kansas City to Tulsa to OKC that has been talked about being opened for passengers for a couple decades.
The most efficient would be 3 major east/west lines, Boston to Seattle, DC to San Francisco, and Atlanta to LA, connected by a series of north/south lines to form a grid. On the east coast, just extend the Acela down to Atlanta.
You need to hit major centres and you need to consider common trips to be efficient. You’re talking about the most efficient per station but most efficient per passenger is going to look different. This image doesn’t see too bad and can still have branching lines.
The biggest concern with that setup is how inefficient it is to reach the Pacific Northwest region, LA is a serious bottleneck on top of being a common endpoint in and of itself. A line that goes straight to either Seattle or Portland from the Northeast simplifies things a lot.
The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That's nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we're building trains, let's build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.
Why do I feel like inefficient access to the Pacific Northwest suits all involved?
Umm yeah...now we are autisming! Though I'm not autistic as a disclaimer.
My dumb ass thought this was a ticket to ride map for a minute.
No, there are more routes in ticket to ride
Tryna get that LA to NY route
I don’t get it
Trains are a common special interest of people with autism.
I know two neurodivergent people that love trains, one is into models and the other trainspotting. They are correct too, trains are awesome.
It's something that happened in the meme-o-sphere and I too am left out
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
