New conspiracy theory: Tylenol actually does cause autism. But China figured out that autism is the key to a better society and they are pushing RFK to ban it so that we remain self-destructive neurotypicals.

I felt that one as a Brazilian (govt literally went "fuck trains, cars are the future!" for ~30 years starting in the 1950s)

Nah, Idaho can get fucked.

One reason for this is hurricanes are more frequent, and sometimes the notice level is too short to have safe evacuation from Miami through highway systems. There has been anger over deaths from evacuation, when a storm warning did not destroy as many homes as was "hoped"/feared.

I think because it has large populations on both coasts?

Chock Full-0-Sea ports

Is really the big reason. Less and less portage is going through the traditional East Coast hubs of NY and NJ, mostly going to places like Louisiana , Texas, and Florida instead.

Historically Florida has always been pretty big on trains as well. In fact you used to be able to take a train from Florida to Cuba....kinda. You could take a train across the overseas rail line to Key West where they would ferry the whole train car over to Cuba.

We used to be an actual country that did stuff, and that's because we weren't afraid to do cool stuff with trains.

It's about need. Like yeah, Chicago through the Dakotas is easy as pie, but the demand would be to seattle and that crosses two mountain ranges and the only stops between Minnesota and Seattle with much demand there would be at national parks.

Like yeah it would be awesome as hell and the American version of the CCP would absofuckinglutely have a high speed rail to Yellowstone and the badlands since they're on the way. But Yellowstone is past the start of the mountains and you need to connect all the way to seattle for it to be more than a vanity project.

The important lines are the NY-Chicago (land is dirt cheap for lots of it, mountains are small, and population is dense with several makor cities you can hit) and the west coast line (basically actually do California high speed rail, then extend it from San Diego to just outside British Columbia. From there the east coast line, something involving texas, or stretching the ny-chicago line is good.

But dood. Put a USPS fishbowl-connected car on the end with a sorter working inside and prepping for each stop, and watch FedEx sweat.

Yeah just get a slime mold to design it for us.

The biggest concern with that setup is how inefficient it is to reach the Pacific Northwest region, LA is a serious bottleneck on top of being a common endpoint in and of itself. A line that goes straight to either Seattle or Portland from the Northeast simplifies things a lot.

Then I must be autistic then, because I love trains and dream of having high speed rail.

I know two neurodivergent people that love trains, one is into models and the other trainspotting. They are correct too, trains are awesome.