Some years ago I ran a program that brought groups of Dutch middle managers
to St Louis for a month. They were, as you might imagine, struck by the
lack of rail transportation compared to their expectations.
But . then again . they couldn't get over the, to them, amazing distances
between cities. Realistically, the distance to the next big towns from St
Louis were in the 300 to 500 km range (e.g., Kansas City, Chicago, Memphis),
which to them would get them to Paris or Berlin etc. from Holland. In
between, in their view, was nothing .. Just little towns like Springfield
and Columbia, and these were the biggest by far, and still were more than
150 km away. In northern Europe, you get to the next big city in no more
than 50 to 100 km.
When I teach in Holland I give them this data: they have 17 million folks,
we (e.g., Kansas) has less than 3 million mostly concentrated along I 35 .
in something like ten times the space.
As one fellow put it, "I get in the car, drive for 4 hours, and still
haven't gotten anywhere." From Holland he'd have gone through countries.
So . as Ken has pointed out . there's just no chance of investing in HST.
There's a lot more open space in places like Kansas than in Europe . even in
the East Coast except for the 95 corridor.
Bob
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