• ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social
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    10 months ago

    Hello, I’m Albertan. Stop saying this. Our governments maintain roads in between these cities every year, there is no reason they couldn’t have been train lines instead. Roads are far more expensive than many realize.

    Once upon a time, all cities were connected by train, and we ripped it all up to build roads instead. Sure, it’s going to cost money to build these up again – that’s what happens when we make a mistake, we have to pay for it in one way or another. But connecting smaller towns and cities is not the herculean impossible task that people seem to want to pretend it is.

    There ARE major urban areas in North America. People are not evenly spread out across the landmass equally. Connecting these first is obviously the goal, because that will take care of 70% of the problem already. And always remember not to make perfect the enemy of good - even if we stopped there we’d be in infinitely better shape than we were before.

    • Floon@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      We’ve done a ton of that. The Acela is great, I’ve ridden it a bunch. But that kind of thing doesn’t scale as efficiently as you would hope. It can serve corridors of people, but not huge continents of hundreds of millions all that well. There are to many places to be.