The proposed electric railway line could travel 240 miles in under 90 minutes for over 6 million passengers per year.
Texas could get a 205-mph bullet train zipping between Houston and Dallas::The proposed electric railway line could travel 240 miles in under 90 minutes for over 6 million passengers per year.
On the other hand, one of the reasons they like bullets is because they can be used to kill minorities. A bullet train designed in a certain way can kill both a lot of minorities and public interest in mass transportation.
Elon will say he can build a hyper loop and it will be way better. Then he’ll do nothing and sell as many teslas to his still mostly untapped conservative base until they’ve had enough and then he’ll switch back to selling cars to liberals
Seriously. It comes up every couple of years. Then the residents of Grimes county get all up in arms, put signs all along highway 6, vote against it, and then it dies a silent death.
I live in Texas and this is unlikely to happen. It was more likely to happen a few years back. I doubt they will build a eletric train between two liberal cities. The only thing that would make it less likely is if you said it was a gay eletric train. Even if they did, Texas cities are sprawled out and require a car. It would only work if you could load your car on the train. It would be useful for students going back and forth to their universities. However, university students are almost as despised as poor people or minorities to most of the voters in Texas.
Yes exactly that. You can't start a high speed train and expect for it to work.
Each train can handle the same amount of passengers as a couple large planes if not more. When they arrive at the destination something is needed for them to reach their destination..
The biggest obstacle, besides politics and oil/gas money, is neither of these cities are non-car friendly. Both cities are so sprawling you end up spending significantly more time using public transportation than driving. That's even if public transportation goes to the part of the city you need.
They'll each need an intermodal stop. That would be so much easier on passengers than the traditional airport stop and, given projected volume, would be essential.
Not sure if it's going to happen in Texas, but the Bright line high speed rail between Miami and Orlando is going to be finished by the end of the month hopefully!
For what it's worth, Brightline Florida isn't quite considered high speed by most metrics. It will have a short 125 mph section, which is kinda the minimum design speed to be considered high speed. The state of rail in the US is so bad though that Brightline Florida might actually have a higher average speed than the Acela...
Brightline West between southern CA and Las Vegas will be designed as a deticated high speed line though.
This. We'd have a high speed rail going between San Diego and Seattle by now if Mush hadn't gotten everyone exploring hyperloop (a concept we've known to be terrible for over a century now).
As fun as it is to watch Musk do dumb stuff, giving him credit for killing HSR is a reach. There’s a really great article about it here — even Epstein was involved for some reason!
I'm seeing a lot of commenters shitting on Texas here, and while it's not completely undeserved, I'd like to point out that Texas is 1st in the nation in wind power generation. Texas will implement things -- even "Blue" things -- if the economics make sense.
Republicans like Abbott went on Fox News and blamed windmills for the storm outage. The party is very different than they were when these projects started, when economics mattered. Texas politics may still accidentally allow a select few progressive things to happen, but the builders and owners must be extremely "friendly" and perfectly thread the needle. Oil and gas owns this state, including the windmills, probably.
They may generate the most wind power, but that's just because they're so big. They're not even in the top 10 if you look at what percentage of their power generation is from wind power
I remember people talking about a HSR system linking the three biggest cities in Texas way back in 2010s. They couldn't even raise enough support to finish the research for the placement of the train stops. Not sure this will even get pass that.
The US is actually in the bottom of the middle third as far as derailments and accidents per mile traveled. If you’re looking for an outlier on this, Germany has almost four times the European median for accidents per mile traveled.
Rubbish. With around 75-80 dB at 25 meters, high speed trains at 300 kph are about as loud as 6 lane highways, and unlike the highway that is for less than 6 seconds to a stationary observer. A V8 formula one car was ear damagingly loud at more than 130 dB.