Not sure why you say "if that was so easy, why bother counting the votes at all?". My estimate isn't really easy in that it's based on 86% of votes counted statewide, thanks to the hard work done by election officials, poll workers, and volunteers in Nevada.
Agreed but I've seen arguments both ways. If I had to bet, I think the Biden shift will be stronger than my prediction but I chose to adopt a more conservative assumption.
1. The article is meant to be aspirational, not literal. We're talking about 2040 and what we could accomplish, if we put our minds to it.
2. I did the same calculations you did but went with a more provocative headline for reason cited in 1. above.
3. Re: only benefiting NY & SF, if you read my article you would know that I'm advocating a network of trains to replace the antiquated, wasteful, and enviironmentally unfriendly extant network of highway systems.
In response to your final comment about bad math, etc, I would say that your feedback is replete with the kind of overrly-literal interpretation, detail knitpicking, and generally holier than thou attitude that has given HN a bad reputation. Nonetheless, thank you for sharing your thoughts.
I recommend driving from New York to San Francisco as a research project. It will take you through Omaha, across Nebraska on the Overland Route (or Lincoln Highway or I80 or the Oregon Trail -- fortunately your sister is unlikely to die of dysentery these days) and along the Platte into the Wyoming Basin, then down into Ogden, across Nevada, over Donner Pass, and down into Sacramento before finally reaching the Bay Area.
The most direct route hasn't changed because the geography hasn't changed. You'll spend a thousand miles going up and down mountains and valleys. Most of it will be sparse desert and bitterly cold in the winters and broiling hot in the summer. Sparsely populated -- even Reno is only 1/2 a million people and everyone Casper, Wyoming will fit in a Division I AA football stadium because it's all a long way from anywhere of much importance except to the people who live there.
Though I said I recommended it as a research project, I really recommend it because driving it will probably change your life. It's beautiful and remote and awe-inspiring in a way that the average place that people live isn't and doesn't convey over a few hours in the air 8km up.
There are only four practical rail routes across the US. One further north through Montana and down to Portland used by the Great Northern. One south of the Oregon Trail that follows I40 over the Colorado Plateau south of the Grand Canyon. And finally, the only all-weather line across the width of Texas through El-Paso and southern New Mexico and Arizona. It's the reason for the Gadsden Purchase.
The highway system is what public transit looks like in the US because the US is what it is. Increasingly vast, rugged and remote once you cross the Mississippi. Vast, rugged and remote in a way the tends to make it map poorly between the way we tend to think about political geography relating to physical geography.
The reason there isn't high speed rail across the US isn't in the details. It isn't because of some great conspiracy. It's in the course grain of physical geography. It's not a lack of imagination. It's an abundance of rail expertise applied over the better part of two hundred years.
Re: 5 vs. 4, again, it's aspirational. How do you know what's possible by 2040?
Re: highways, thank you for pointing that out. I've fixed the article by s/interstate highway system/public works program/ with link to the details. Btw, FDR spent over $4B on highways, roads, and streets, a considerable sum in those days.
Re: You can't aspire using the impossible." Naysayers like you are why we may hever have this.
How do you know it's not going to be 2 hours? Or 1 hour?
The evidence you presented requires a straight connection between the two cities. That's not going to happen, for reasons I presented and for which you yourself agreed.
If it happens it will be via regional hubs, say via Chicago and Denver. Even non-stop (with no additional acceleration and deceleration) that non-GC route will add more time. Plus there's the 10 minutes or so for acceleration/deceleration to 600mpn.
If you pigeonhole me as a naysayer then may I pigeonhole you as one of those Project Plowshare advocates who wanted to use nukes to make harbors and canals, and fracture the ground for oil production? Or as a modern Lyle Lanley?
I'm asking you to use realistic numbers which make you seem well-informed, not numbers that are easily dismissed as overly optimistic, if not ridiculous.
Just like in Marge vs. the Monorail, US infrastructure is horribly under-maintained. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ for example. That sort of Federal involvement in local projects is more in line with FDR's Great Depression actions than Eisenhower's interstate system.
Do you want to convince people of your vision? Because that seems like your goal.
I'm trying to point out that if you follow your current path - including the name calling - then you won't get very far, and I've pointed out some of how people will perceive you if your pieces continue in this vein.
Say "Oops, yes, I somewhat underestimated the time and was thinking of a different New Deal project. Thanks for pointing it out!"
I am dead serious that I believe the poor infrastructure of our existing water, power, and mass transit systems, and horridly unequal internet service, are far more important than shaving a few hours off a transcontinental passenger service.
I am also annoyed with using the huge number of small public works projects of the WPA (the largest being the TVA, which is quite large but much smaller than the Eisenhower interstate system), which was explicitly made to hire unemployed people, to justify a single large public work; and one which excludes the WPA support for artists, musicians, libraries, education programs and many others who are not construction workers or support staff.
Would it really affect your views or your ability to persuade were you to posit a 5 hour estimate instead of 4?
Airplane travel times have decreased over the decades because it's more fuel efficient and therefore cheaper. You can't simply predict that the future is going to faster than current estimates.
Here's an easy way to see how this works. Run this script:
echo dollar-star:
for i in $; do echo $i; done
echo dollar-at:
for i in $@; do echo $i; done
echo quoted-dollar-star:
for i in "$"; do echo $i; done
echo quoted-dollar-at:
for i in "$@"; do echo $i; done
./x.sh a "b c" d
dollar-star:
a
b
c
d
dollar-at:
a
b
c
d
quoted-dollar-star:
a b c d
quoted-dollar-at:
a
b c
d
The lack of a human touch on this site is simply a function of our priorities. This site was developed by volunteers, in the proverbial Google 20% style, and we've put very little effort into marketing. Admittedly, it could stand a bit more warmth, but, for better or worse, we've always put our focus on the content -- giving developers a fast track to building something fun.
Take a look at the open source projects parent mentions. Do you think they are putting their focus on marketing over content? OSS sites are made by real volunteers. While this project is neat and is a side project, all the contributors are paid by Google, right? So it’s perhaps possible to get 21% time. Or convince someone with some empathy to volunteer as well. The problem has been solved by many community driven projects.
Apache has amazing content as well as a “human” touch.
This site demonstrates that someone put some effort into the design, so perhaps the easy solution is to spend even more time on marketing and skip the design-o-tron.
> Do you think they are putting their focus on marketing over content?
I never said, nor meant to imply, judgements about any other projects. I was simply sharing the choices we've made based on our priorities and resources.
Personally I'm comfortable with those choices because they've resulted in literally hundreds (>650 at my last count) of nice looking and fun to use coding tutorials. I'm also quite proud of the authoring flow we built: these codelabs are generated directly from Google Docs (you don't have to write a line of code to produce them) and we've open sourced the tools for others to use (https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools).
