This whole mess is a bed-rock American issue – MONEY. We've burned through an enormous amount of cash in roughly a half century of spending on roads and airports. I would be afraid to read an HONEST report on historical spending on mobility (roads, rail, water, air) because the numbers might be enough to make me puke. Do NOT forget that one part of Uncle Sam's largesse covers canals, dams, and locks used by barges (Army Corps of Engineers). Passenger rail in this country has long been in the position of Oliver Twist – namely getting laughed at when asking for a second helping of slop.

Let's set aside all of the feel good items. Instead, let's look at the money. Options :
1) Do nothing – cheap, but leads into a death spiral;
2) Build roads/runways – expensive, dirty, incurs high maintenance costs and eats lots of land that could be used for farms and parks;
3) Build rail corridors – seemingly expensive (until compared to roads/runways), minimal dirt, medium maintenance costs and eats some land that could be used for farms and parks.

We do NOT have rail corridors at this time. What we have are pathetic excuses for corridors that are balkanized, archaic, and have a Paul Bunyan-sized piper handing us a bill for fifty (50) years of neglect. I think that the only out left to us is to follow the canal/dam/lock model and go federal. This is an interstate commerce issue since most of the links (other than Calif. and Texas) cross a state line or two. We've got a Gordian Knot and Uncle Sam needs to use a sword-pen on it.

P.S. Why is Hong Kong's transit system the only profit making one in the world ? Because it isn't a transit system. It's a property management firm that offers transit services to its tenants. Now think back to our transcontinental railroads and how they were lured into their herculean labors.

P.P.S. I've worked in the aviation field in a support role for a decade. I'm also a rail-fan who enjoys living in what amounts to the world's biggest railroad museum – the San Francisco Bay area and northern California (e.g. The Skunk and Roaring Camp ).

Uh, for Detroit it's all those people who live in Detroit and can't find jobs there — plus people who are priced out of housing in Chicago etc. and can buy a house for a dollar in Detroit.

Simple really. Detroit-Chicago is a booming transportation opportunity.

Thundermutt, everything you say about highways is true in Europe and Japan, too. Remember Lyon’s paltry metro system. Nothing about the amount of auto dependence in Kentucky or Tennessee says that Chicago-Detroit HSR won’t be successful. Even Japan doesn’t have nearly the auto independence you think it has outside Tokyo and Osaka proper – Tokyo’s suburbs have an auto modal share on a par with large cities in the US Northeast, like Chicago and Philadelphia, rather than New York; and yet, the Tokaido Shinkansen is so profitable and congested that JR Central is designing a parallel maglev line to be funded purely out of the existing HSR profits.

When do you propose to start?

Clearly there are significant differences between the NE Corridor and the US heartland that must be taken into account.

One is that the heartland deals in manufactured goods and commodities, not software, financial products, ideas, and government. Moving goods is more important than moving people in our transportation network. And we already move lots and lots of stuff by regular old air and rail…much of it by intermodal transfer to regular old semi-trailers. Note that FedEx has its two main hubs in Memphis and IND; UPS is in Louisville. The centers of the US rail network are in Chicago and St. Louis, as that is where the legacy “eastern” and “western” carriers interchange.

Quite frankly, we cannot do without highways in the heartland. The population is too diffuse to efficiently run rail lines to every fair-sized city. In fact, this country has been ripping up Class I rail mainline for decades now….but what is left is highly efficient and highly utilized, made possible by intermodal facilities.

I am flattered that Urbanophile has dubbed my position “the thundermutt theory”, though it’s more of a conjecture. While in the abstract, I agree that we need to be ready for a non-fossil-fueled future, I don’t believe HSR is THE answer without which the US is doomed to a second-class existence.

As advanced as they are, please note that the Western Europeans were shivering when the Russia-Ukraine dispute shut off their natural gas. We in North America (as Boone Pickens has suggested) can use our rich gas resources to build our bridge to the non-fossil future.

I certainly agree with any notion that American cities, and particularly midwestern cities, don’t need to be linked by HSR to be economically successful business centers.

To the contrary, look at our European counterparts, whose cities are linked by a large continent-wide network of high speed passenger trains that make our system look like a joke in comparison. What advantage has it really given them over us, at least in regards to economic growth?

What it has done, however, is equip them for an energy-deprived future. To me, America is like a candle that has burned brightly for a century but may soon go out in smoke if it doesn’t invest wisely now.

My point is, if we try to sell the economic advantages to HSR we need to tout its long term advantages, not its short term ones. Talking about having a train that can get you from Indy to Chicago in under 3 hours (or whatever) to get to that meeting is nice and all, but the REAL advantage of the HSR system is how it preserves America’s ability to move people and resources around efficiently in an energy-poor future. And that is the real investment we are talking about.

You have no idea what you are talking about. The disintermediation that has happened in music and is currently being played out in newspapers, magazines, video, books, journals etc will forever change how all that content is produced….and where it is produced…and where the decision makers are located who make those decisions.

I know what am talking about as have been in the in the on line biz for 25 years….w BI (Way before the Internet)….and it is not some fly-by-nite organization.

The ‘intellectual set’ themselves are now using POD and starting (maybe finishing) research on the Web (thanks Google).

I am not suggesting the demise of ‘world cities’ as much as am suggesting that ‘world cities’ are like museums…nice places to visit and look at…but when you really want to get something done and make money…they are not the places to be.

Would add that the whole ‘world city’ thing and the attitude and arrogance that goes with that has caused much of the current economic disaster. That blame can also be placed on all those private/liberal arts colleges that cost updwards of $35K/year. Guess what…you are no longer relevant.

Midwest/Upper South cities have an opportunity now to do what they do best…be real!

Flyover country will do more to save this country from its current mess than Wall St/DC combined.

It should start with a resounding no thanks for billions on HSR that will NEVER pay-off in this part of the country.

Well, maybe according to you. But business travel volumes between major US cities are large, and cities like New York and Los Angeles attract millions of tourists every year.

Will the publishing world go the way of the music world, with lots of indie book chapters and journals downloaded at the iBookstore for 99 cents? There’s certainly a chance.

There isn’t. Writers need publishers for quality control, editing, knowing who to market to, etc. When they do try self-publishing, disaster ensues: at vanity presses, POD companies, and the likes, the bestselling books ever tend to sell a few thousand copies, which wouldn’t even make back the advance at a real publisher.

The Internet just doesn’t have the standards to ensure quality in this area. If you don’t believe me, go to a fan fiction website, read some of the stories, and try to think whether anyone would ever pay for them, even people who have entire libraries at home of SF and fantasy.

There is one publishing-related industry that did get a hit with the rise of the net – porn. The rise of porn sites has killed video porn. But even then, the online porn industry seems very centralized to a few places, like San Francisco and New York. An adult photographer might actually be very interested in taking advantage of a high-speed train from SF to the San Fernando Valley.