High-speed rail connecting every North American city.
What technological mega project is practical to build today?
Submitted 1 year ago by ruford1976@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
matthewmercury@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 1 year ago
Coast to Coast? Sure, but every city in North America? Nah, that isn’t practical at all.
For instance France apparently builds high speed rail for 25 Million per kilometer so lets use their cost number. The straightline distance, shortest possible, from Denver to Omaha is 483 kilometers so the line from Omaha to Denver alone would cost 12 BILLION dollars.
Denver to Salt Lake is 590 Kilometers, again straight line, so there goes another 14.7 Billion dollars. SLC to Los Angeles is 930 kilometers, another 23.2 Billion.
We’ve now spent 49.9 Billion to connect just FOUR cities and only have a single rail line that goes from Omaha to LA.
Trying to connect every city in North America with High Speed rail not only isn’t practical it isn’t economically possible on any reasonable timeline a it would require a major percentage of the US’s entire GDP to be spent on it every single year for the next century.
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
In 2020 the US state and local governments spent $116 billion for the construction of roads and highways and $94 billion of operating costs.
If you just cancel half of the road construction projects by a year you get enough money to fund the connection of the 4 cities you described.
DrDeadCrash@programming.dev 1 year ago
Pretty sure the interstate highway system isn’t terribly practical either, but with enough funding it can be done. Maybe saying every major city would make it seem more practical.
GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The total cost for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was $8 Trillion over 20 years This country has the money it just doesn’t the leadership that wants to change. And why would they want to change? The way this country runs work$ well for them.
Mr_Blott@lemmy.world 1 year ago
France’s public infrastructure construction industry is one of the most corrupt and wasteful systems on earth 😂
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
In 2020 the US state and local governments spent $116 billion for the construction of roads and highways and $94 billion of operating costs.
If you just cancel half of the road construction projects by a year you get enough money to fund the connection of the 4 cities you described.
meco03211@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The problem then is transport inside the city. Couple this idea with the (currently) top comment to make cities walkable and this is pure fire.
knobbysideup@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Trains you can park cars on. Would be great for camping weekends where I need all of my gear but don’t want to drive for hours.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah light rail, bike lanes, and walking roads. We can build a constructed environment designed around human beings. A world that’s good for our health, both physical and mental, and for our planet. All we need to do is accept a reality that cars aren’t a good use of resources and that walking and biking are really good for us.
Fondots@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not that there isn’t a lot of room for improvement, but while I can’t say I’ve been to every major city in the US, I’ve never had a major issue getting around once I’m inside the city. Even if things are spread out a bit, there’s sidewalks and crosswalks, which is all I personally need to consider an area walkable. And public transportation will usually get you to different areas of the city even if you may still have to walk a bit when you get off.
Admittedly I’m probably more willing to walk around than the average person, and not everyone is capable of walking that much, so like I said, still lots of room for improvement.
My biggest issue tends to be getting into the city in the first place, or getting from one city to another. From my home in the suburbs I can drive to pretty much anywhere in my nearest city in about an hour or less as long as I can avoid any major traffic jams. If I try to take public transportation though, im looking at an hour walk before I get to somewhere I can catch a bus (which only comes a handful of times a day,) and then a couple more hours before I get where I’m going, probably having to transfer to a different bus or train at least once along the way. If I drive a half hour or so to a train station then I can get right to downtown pretty easily, but the train only comes about every hour so if I don’t time it right and miss the train it’s significantly faster for me to just drive the rest of the way than wait for another train. Then they mostly stop coming at about 11pm, which means if I’m going into the city for a concert or something, I’m cutting it close and may not be able to get back home on public transit.
And if I’m trying to get to another city, I’m pretty much SOL. I’m basically at the halfway point between that major city and 2 smaller cities, and there is no transit options to get to those 2 other cities from where I am.
uis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
E-scooters, e-bikes or regular bikes if you want to go cheap.
DJDarren@thelemmy.club 1 year ago
No, I’m afraid that’s not possible. The UK government scrapping HS2 has shown this.
uis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It was corrupt prime minister AFAIK
smellythief@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Why not to everyone’s front door?
rtxn@lemmy.world 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.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 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 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 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 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.
troutsushi@feddit.de 1 year ago
Property acquisition in the US more expensive than in Europe? I think not, at least for the immense swaths of land that make up most of the US’ land mass.
The legal fees I see, but that’s why most developed nations have legislature for disowning property owners of land necessary for infrastructure at a set compensation. Whether that’s fair or just is up for ideological debate, I’m sure.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
I’m not sure any of these are quite as ambitious as crossing the entire continent of North America. In fact I’m not even sure that would make sense to do. That said lines connecting major cities on each coast and some parts of the Midwest would be a no-brainer.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think the proof of concept really should be the NYC-Cleveland-Chicago line. From there it can be extended westward as desired
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If you look at the various proposals, you’ll see they start like that. You start with focus areas where cities are close together, such as connecting cities in the Midwest to Chicago. You have similar opportunities in southeast, Texas, California, northwest, and of course the northeast where we already have Acela.
However, once those are established, neighboring cities naturally want to be extended to. You can easily imagine that process eventually turning into a connected map - except maybe Great Plains and Rockies
601error@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Car-independent livable cities.
jeroentbt@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We’ve even been doing that for thousands of years!
winterayars@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Housing for everyone, food for everyone, clean energy (nuclear power, though we would do well to advance the tech a little is immanently practical).
Those are all easy mode stuff that would dramatically improve the world for a lot of people, but we could do more.
Hard mode: Orbital rings.
We would have to develop some tech, but not nearly as much as you might think.
Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Don’t even need nuclear, renewable energy at its current pace will get us to 100% renewable by 2050, which is about as far away as any nuclear plants you started constructing today for way, way less money and zero waste storage issues.
There’s basically no point building any other kind of energy at this stage. Giant, expensive power plants that require huge amounts of expensive fuel and large expensive workforces simply can’t compete with panels pumped out by factories you can install anywhere that generate free energy for decades with little to no maintenance.
float@feddit.de 1 year ago
The problem with only panels and wind is the fluctuation. We need at least a small “baseline” power supply that works when there is no wind at night. Storing large amounts of energy is the missing piece here to get rid of conventional power plants altogether. We’ll get there eventually.
uis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Universal healthcare, public transit, communism
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Economic communism won’t be achievable until we fully automate the economy and institute some kind of technocracy or lottery style political system.
A truly “stateless” society is a joke, but separating the economy from the state is only possible if we are all out of jobs.
johnlobo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
uhh
Olap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Just want a space elevator, surely we can’t be that far
Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We can’t make long enough pieces of anything strong enough to handle that level of strain.
Olap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not yet!
qevlarr@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Pinging ecollierastro
Speculater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nuclear bomb fueled rockets to space. Look up project Orion.
ruford1976@lemmy.world 1 year ago
isn’t that bad?
GraniteM@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You didn’t ask if it was bad, you asked if it was practical.
DeathByDenim@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Depends on which side of the exhaust you are on.
DirigibleProtein@aussie.zone 1 year ago
That stupid 100 mile long building in Arabia.
morriscox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They could keep people from entering/leaving and suicide/(murder?) becomes much easier. Mass surveillance could also be built in.
ours@lemmy.film 1 year ago
What part of that is practical?
DirigibleProtein@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Practical as in being able to be done, rather than theoretical and not able to be done. (As the man said, just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done). Genuine question: did you intend another meaning of practical?
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We’ve recently figured out beaming power to another location. We might be able to start a Dyson swarm, which is just a collection of solar panel satellites that beam their energy back to earth.
I’d like to also see the start of space resource extraction/refinement. The more of that Dyson swarm we can build without having to lift it off earth, the better.
qooqie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Housing for everyone and in a way that mega-cities are walkable
zcd@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Billionaires did not like that
clearedtoland@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Pfft with all that tax-subsidized rent to be made? They love it.
Deepus@lemm.ee 1 year ago
If its a mega city how can it be walkable? I wouldnt want to walk an hour to get to my job that would have been a 15 minute walk. Or am i misunderstanding what you mean by walkable?
qooqie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Walkable doesn’t mean the entire city is within walking distance just that where you live doesn’t require you to have a vehicle and you can walk to everything you need. Being able to walk to work and the grocery store and to any entertainment is so nice.