Bret Devereaux

Still, 3 hours to get from Boston to NYC? Should be better along crowded corridors.

There's the time and there's the price - an extraordinary percentage of the time it is cheaper to fly. With climate change looming that state of affairs can't be accepted

Well and it seems possible that from a purely economic standpoint, the size and lower density of the United States may simply mean that air travel is going to generally outperform rail. The question becomes how willing are we to subsidize the latter in the name of the climate.

The counterpoint: the challenge in building high speed rail along the NE corridor is that property values are too high for Amtrak to plan its rail lines with a straight edge. Between Providence RI and New Haven, CT ACELA/Amtrak makes a total of Seven 360-degree turns. 1/

In great part because New England's density, entrenched political power -- (# trains limited by need to allow Old Saybrook sailboats under drawbridges) -- ensures that the physical structure conflict with the physics of speed. 2/

I tend to be convinced by arguments that the density and property values here are less a factor than the entrenched local political power. Much of the west coast has the same problems of development-paralysis.

Absolutely, the problem being that density itself has a causal relationship to entrenched political power.

Which, parenthetically, is why we've heard a lot about the travails about 'big wind' offshore of Cape Cod, but much less about major developments in e.g. West TX or KS.