> Thalys (Paris-Brussels) is 160mi in 1:25 or 112mph average. Acelas do
> NYP-Washington (222 miles) in just about 2:45 which is 80mph, still
much
> faster than your mythical 65mph car.
Thus assuming that the existing distance you mention is not shortened by new tracks, and that the average Acela speed cannot be upgraded to that of Thalyss, that still gives us 595/80=12 hours between Chicago and NYC. Did not you doubt that when I first stated it?
In the same vein, there is nothing that would prevent building tracks along I-5 (which runs across a rather flat terrain for the most part) and thus reduce travel speed. Tracks cost less than a freeway.
> The biggest benefit of highway subsidation is found in lower consumer
> prices; team driven trucks beat (in time and price) even the fastest
> cargo trains between Chicago and LA (and certainly do much better on
the
> shorter hops!). So what's this bank-for-the-buck calculation you're
> doing?
The situation would look much different if we added the full cost of automobile traffic, which includes such externalities now conveniently stuffed under the rug like environmental pollution, or safety (everything else being equal, truck are bound to cause more accidents than trains by the virtue of their sheer numbers). Trucking companies do not pay those costs, the taxpayers do.
The bottom line is, Jordan, that political pork can travel much further in explaining the current shape of the US transportation system than any cost/benefit or geography consideration. If it were otherwise, how come that nobody else but the US-ers insist on implementing it, and everyone else sticks to the old fashioned and "inefficient" trains?
The same, btw, can be asked of the supposedly "superior" US political institutions - how come that all of the newly democratized in the1980s and 1990s countries opted for the 'Old Europe's" parliamentary democracy rather than new brave world of the politics championed by the US?
Wojtek