• rtxn@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    A massive high speed railway network across North America, coast to coast. Russia did it, China did it, most of Europe did it. Canada and the USA have no excuse.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      Canada’s excuse is “we’re roughly as big as the US but have a way smaller population and GDP. I really don’t think it’d be financially justifiable for them to build a rail equivalent to the trans-Canadian highway. It’d be a non-starter in a political sense.

      The US, on the other hand… yeah. We genuinely have no excuse.

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        A majority of Canada’s population lives in a straight line from Toronto to Québec, but they can’t even manage that.

    • count_dongulus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Property acquisition costs and legal fees are immensely more expensive in the US. Have to obtain those thousands of miles of land for rail development from somebody.

      • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        There are ways. Maybe bring our number of aircraft carriers down to only 3x the rest of the world combined instead of 5x, just as an example.