>Which is why I suggested a hub and spoke system, where the ends of a spoke services several thousand square miles.
Do you really think people are going to pay ~$200 each way to commute to the city every day? Because that's the kind of ticket price you can expect with HSR. Train systems like that are not cheap to run. They work great here in Japan for traveling between cities, where they're competing with airplanes, but the tickets are not as cheap as you seem to think. Your idea means far more miles of track to build and maintain.
>In fact, reviving the economically struggling rural areas necessitates increasing population density and economic activity. And that's a good thing.
Why? Just because you like those places? If they were economically viable, they wouldn't need all this help. And if you increase the population density, suddenly it's no longer "rural" but is now a "city", which is exactly what most of the people there don't want, or else they would have moved to a city.
Do you really think people are going to pay ~$200 each way to commute to the city every day? Because that's the kind of ticket price you can expect with HSR. Train systems like that are not cheap to run. They work great here in Japan for traveling between cities, where they're competing with airplanes, but the tickets are not as cheap as you seem to think. Your idea means far more miles of track to build and maintain.
>In fact, reviving the economically struggling rural areas necessitates increasing population density and economic activity. And that's a good thing.
Why? Just because you like those places? If they were economically viable, they wouldn't need all this help. And if you increase the population density, suddenly it's no longer "rural" but is now a "city", which is exactly what most of the people there don't want, or else they would have moved to a city.