Thanks for the article, George. It illustrates the problem of high speed rail in the US -distance and money. With an estimated cost of $30 million per mile to build a high speed corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a distance of 489 miles, we're looking at about $15 billion just for this one corridor. That's almost twice as much as Obama has requested for high speed rail service for the whole country. To build all the high speed corridors shown in the article would probably be close to $1 trillion and that's assuming any of the cost per mile estimates are correct. Given the cost of such a system, it would require huge subsidies every year just to make the cost of a ticket anywhere near competitive with other forms of transport. You'd also have to switch huge amounts of people away from cars and airlines to trains to have any material impact on the carbon footprint as well. High speed trains don't run on hot air. Either diesel or electric power will just shift the carbon footprint, not reduce it.
As much as I like trains, we already have a high speed transport system in this country. It's called the airlines and they run with very little public subsidy. There's a gigantic amount of blue sky and pure guesswork in Obama's plan.
