Getting High-Speed Rail Wrong
As i understand things at a fairly high level, and particularly w&#x2F;r&#x2F;t the northeast corridor, high speed rail in the US has two interlinked technical facts about it that are hard to get over even if we can wave a magic policy wand and make governmental buy-in work several orders of magnitude better:<p>- It&#x27;s not that &quot;American rail construction is just bad. However, this is not because rail is bad; it’s because the United States is bad.&quot;.  It&#x27;s that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD, and we&#x27;re hosed by the first adopter paradox.<p>- from this, it directly follows that upgrading the rail for high speed use is HARD, because the issue is at least in part down to rail line geometry.  AIUI, a fundamental reason you can&#x27;t go 95mph between Boston and New York is that the railroad tracks have curves in them whose radii have a maximum speed without risk of derailment that&#x27;s quite low, and to resolve this problem you&#x27;d have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven.   There are other issues too, like local&#x2F;freight&#x2F;... sharing the same lines, but that&#x27;s kind of saying the same thing twice: construction through densely populated Northeast Corridor cities is so impractical that it&#x27;s hard to see how it could ever happen or be thought of as a particularly good thing if it did.