Distances between 300 and 1000 km are exactly the sweet spot for high speed
trains, and there are plenty of important city pairs in the US within those
distances—you mention a couple in your post, plus SF-LA, obviously the whole
Northeast corridor, Jacksonville-Tampa-Miami etc. Precisely because there is
not much in-between makes the high speed rail a good option—if there are too
many stops than the average speed become too low. Between Alicante and Madrid,
a distance of 440 km, the train stops at most twice, and often just once, in
Albacete. It helps that Spain is relatively thinly populated by European
standards, with a large percentage of the population concentrated in the big
cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville.
The place where high speed trains do not make sense are precisely countries
like the Netherlands or Denmark, small and densely populated. There, garden
variety trains going up to 200 km/h are plenty enough for the distances
involved.
Cheers,
Nathan
Nathan Wajsman
Alicante, Spain
http://www.frozenlight.eu <http://www.frozenlight.eu/>
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PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws
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<http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/belgiangator>
YNWA
> On 23 Apr 2015, at 16:06, Bob Benson <bob.benson91@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Some years ago I ran a program that brought groups of Dutch middle managers
> to St Louis for a month. They were, as you might imagine, struck by the
> lack of rail transportation compared to their expectations.
>
>
>
> But . then again . they couldn't get over the, to them, amazing distances
> between cities. Realistically, the distance to the next big towns from St
> Louis were in the 300 to 500 km range (e.g., Kansas City, Chicago, Memphis),
> which to them would get them to Paris or Berlin etc. from Holland. In
> between, in their view, was nothing .. Just little towns like Springfield
> and Columbia, and these were the biggest by far, and still were more than
> 150 km away. In northern Europe, you get to the next big city in no more
> than 50 to 100 km.
>
>
>
> When I teach in Holland I give them this data: they have 17 million folks,
> we (e.g., Kansas) has less than 3 million mostly concentrated along I 35 .
> in something like ten times the space.
>
>
>
> As one fellow put it, "I get in the car, drive for 4 hours, and still
> haven't gotten anywhere." From Holland he'd have gone through countries.
>
>
>
> So . as Ken has pointed out . there's just no chance of investing in HST.
> There's a lot more open space in places like Kansas than in Europe . even in
> the East Coast except for the 95 corridor.
>
>
>
> Bob
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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