When my wife was a summer advertising agency intern in Chicago and I was a law student in Ann Arbor, we actually used the Amtrak service between those cities quite a few times.
The case for a Toronto to Detroit high speed rail line is pretty strong. It would serve a huge share of Canada's entire population with urban centers that are all along a straight line that is flat and manageable to build a high speed rail line on, and Canada is more familiar with the benefit of high speed rail from its stronger connections to Europe.
I'd need to be convinced with more facts that a Detroit to Minneapolis high speed rail line (or parts of it) could be viable and make some kind of economic sense. It might be viable, it might not.
Another route not shown that has been seriously considered for more than thirty year, but never gone anywhere, and wouldn't be too expensive to build (its flat and a lot of the land between the major cities is farmland), would be a Cincinnati-Dayton-Columbus-Cleveland line connecting Ohio's major urban centers. It wouldn't require interstate cooperation, which could make funding it operations and the political process of getting it goin easier (much like high speed rail lines at various stages of development in California, Florida, and Texas). It might give Ohio a much needed economic boost, from construction in the short term, and good transportation infrastructure aggregating the connectively of its major urban centers in the long run. But it is also possible that Ohio's economy has declined so much in the last thirty years that there isn't enough traffic between its major urban centers to support it. Projects in Florida and Texas, however, have at least demonstrated, however, that being a red state isn't an insurmountable political barrier to support for high speed rail.
I do think that the approach of focusing on specific corridors that are either entirely in one state, or in a small number of states in a single region, is a better one than pie-in-the-sky national high speed rail network approaches.
The virtue of focusing on specific corridors also reflects the fact that the sweet spot for high speed rail is medium length trips.
For long distance travel, the speed of commercial air travel and the lack of a need to maintain expensive infrastructure on the ground between airports through varied terrain with large swaths of low population density, gives commercial air travel a decisive advantage over high speed rail.
For short distance travel, the high speed doesn't deliver enough of a marginal advantage relative to driving and intracity rail, and having lots of local stops destroys the speed benefits of high speed rail.
But, for medium length trips of hundreds of miles to several hundred miles, high speed rail can provide significant benefits in speed and comfort over driving, and its ability to deliver passengers all of the way to a city center and its lack of long delays associated with security and checked baggage can give it an edge relative to commercial air travel (and also puts pressure on the commercial air travel system to reduce those delays). Combining it with low volume, high value mail, parcel, and freight service could also tip the balance in favor of high speed rail's economic viability.
The Pacific Coast, improvements in the Northeast Corridor, the connector in place between major Florida cities, planned Texas triangle, and LA to Las Vega routes, for example, do make sense.
I'm ambivalent about Colorado high speed rail proposals.
In Colorado along I-25, sometimes including cities in Wyoming and New Mexico. I-25 south of Denver is quite fast, and it isn't particularly bogged down north of Denver either. Quality bus service on I-25 could fill the needs that I-25 high speed rail service would fairly well. But construction costs for high speed rail in the I-25 corridor are pretty low since its flat and much of its isn't densely populated.
The analysis for and against high speed rail along I-70 in Colorado from DIA to Vail or Glenwood Springs is very different. The need for better, faster passenger transportation options there that are less prone to interruption from landslides and weather related accidents is much more clear. But construction costs in the mountains are very high indeed, and much of the demand for high speed rail along I-70 is seasonal.
The U.S. is a big and diverse national geographically and economically. There are many places in the U.S. where the better approach in the intermediate term would be to end Amtrak as a passenger transportation option entirely, in favor of boosting the quality of intercity bus service, and to relegate Amtrak or some other future passenger rail service to a fully private sector, unsubsidized, scenic/mobile tourism destination service that isn't really about getting people from here to there efficiently (something that doesn't require high speed service).
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