They are spending 445 million USD on this.
I wonder how many of these flights are to other Midwest cities that could be easily replaced with HSR?
They could even build the rail station into the airport. It is on the edge of the city so there is ample space.
If I were king of the US, I’d connect all of the Major Midwest cities between the Appalachians and Rockies and then run the lines through the SW desert cities and then north up to Spokane and Seattle. Building through the mountains is expensive, so let’s not make perfect the enemy of good and go after the most cost effective locations. It would be feasible to run lines from Miami up to Bangor too. Connect it to the Western system through the deep south cities.
I’d love to have good connections from air to rail as well.
I’m from Pittsburgh, PA, and the last time I visited my Mom was telling me that they’re going to replace the airport.
She said that they’re going to build an entirely new airport just next to where the current Pittsburgh International Airport is. Likely a smaller one, since we have less traffic now than we did when the current one was built. Then they’ll just bulldoze the existing airport, I assume.
I asked her how much better spent that money would be to just make a train that takes people from our distant airport into the downtown. It’s just nuts.
The thing to remember is that there is no “easily” when it comes to building thousands of miles of HSR. Even leaving out the mountains, bridges can be extremely expensive too, and the Midwest has no shortage of waterways. And that’s not even accounting for that even by optimistic estimates you’d be spending the same amount as that airport terminal every few miles, or the fact that you’d have to replace the tracks (cheaper than building them the first time, but still not cheap) every ten years. This is not to say that trains wouldn’t be a better solution environmentally in the longer term (though it would take decades to get it remotely usable), but you’d have to be king to push it through because few people want to pay that much for something they wouldn’t use very often.
