The population density of the American Midwest is comparable to that of #Spain.
Spain has 2,240 miles of high-speed rail.
American Midwest: 0.
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High-speed rail in this region would replace short-haul flights, and go a long way to reducing carbon emissions. Should be a no-brainer for Amtrak Joe Bidenβyou'd think, anyway...
(Fantasy map below)
I bring this up b/c @the_transit_guy has made the comparison between overachieving China and sad-sack US. Fair point, but a more proximate comparable might be Spain...
"Back in 2009, SNCF (#France's rail system) proposed a $68.5 billion (94.6 in 2022 dollars) dollar high-speed rail system for the Midwest"
β @RealEric4Real
#Spain offers a high-speed train service between Barcelona and Madrid called Avlo.
It covers the 625 km distance in 2 hours 30 minutes, top speed 330 km/h (185 mph). Fares start at β¬7.
β’ β’ β’
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Hey, nobody says you can't make commuting fun, as well as easy!
In the #Netherlands, you can cycle to #Utrecht Overvecht station, drop your bike off, then ride the slide down to the platform. Multi-modal travel, Dutch-style.
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Here's another "transfer accelerator": a slide next to an escalator to the turnstiles of the #Budapest metro.
(My kids have been begging me to try this at our subway station for years.)
#Disney World has better transit than most US cities. Its 12-train-set monorail + 325 buses would make it the nation's 16th most ridden transit system.
People drive to a place where, for once, they don't have to drive everywhere.
Turns out that's exactly what Walt intended ππ§΅
As a child, Disney lived in Marceline, Missouri. It became his idea of Anytown, America: park with a Civil War gazebo, bustling and walkable Main Street, the Santa Fe depot. Most of all: trains, lots of trains.
After Fantasia bombed at the box-office, Disney became depressed, and retreated to his backyard in the Holmby Hills part of Los Angeles, where he built "Mickey Mouse Park," whose centerpiece was an oversized model railroad.
This is a map of western part of the network of just one Canadian passenger railway in 1955.
You could really go a lot of places by train then.
And fast: 71 hours, 10 minutes from #Montreal to #Vancouver. (It's 94 hours, if you're lucky, from Toronto to Vancouver today.)
π€οΈπ§΅
There were two express trains across the country that year: The Canadian (CP) and the Super Continental, run by Canadian National Railways, the "People's Road."
Your freedom of movement was impressive, especially if you lived in eastern Canada. From Montreal, you could go to Chicago via Detroit; you could ride from Quebec City to Boston; Atlantic Canada was served by a very dense network of tracks.
Great-grandfather: allowed to walk 6 miles on his own Grandfather: could walk 1 mile
Mother: could walk a half mile
Son: could walk 300 yards (to end of street).
What happened? *Cars* happened.
A flood of traffic shrunk the geography of play and free-roaming.
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(Thanks to Shrinking geography of childhood in UK, thnx to @timrgill and @drwilliambird for the research and graphics.)
What's the solution? One way forwardβplay streets.
The UK once had 700 of them; closed to traffic, but open to kids.
@timrgill @drwilliambird A century ago, Play Streets were common in NYC, closed to cars by order of the police.
Watch out for "stations fantΓ΄mes," now closed, but which you can see flashing past on some lines. I got to visit St. Martin, which still has beautiful tile ads from the 1950s.