America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There’s a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we’ve created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
Regional airports are generally extremely simple places. There’s nothing complicated about them. Now, big international airports, that’s unsustainable. Fact is, rural places aren’t conservative because they don’t have trains, rural places are more conservative because there’s a lower priority placed on education and more of a priority placed on working the family farm. Then you get fed whatever horseshit political opinion your dad has and that becomes your opinion.
Honey, we already have opinions for you at home.
Also because(I’m only assuming that its the same in the states) usually politicians don’t really care about investing in rural infrastructure and wehen you can see the quality from all of your infrastructure decline its easy to use populism to catch the votes from people who feel left out.
The point about trains is that it effectively reduces the separation between urban and rural.