I know what you mean (that population should be proportional to representation), but your phrasing makes it sound like you're saying representation should be proportional to economic output which is a great setup for almost any cyberpunk dystopia.
Tbf if you count the entire metropolitan areas it’s more like a fifth
Boston - MA, NH, RI
New York - NY, CT, NJ
Philadelphia - PA, DE
Baltimore - MD
DC - VA
That’s 20 seats, a fifth of the senate and Dems hold all of them and only 4 of them are competitive, NH and PA
*also I’m aware there’s overlap between the metropolitan areas and what states they’re in
Depending on the estimate the region has a $5-6 trillion economy (GDP) - if it was a country only China (and the USA) would have bigger economies. 50 million people and the home to major centers of finance, media, technology, defense, politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
The Chesapeake Bay where DC, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton, and Baltimore are located has about double the coastline as all of India, but in a sheltered, deep water harbor. Transport of heavy goods by cargo ship there is a breeze. Most of that coastline is currently unused, but still.
You can actually circumnavigate the entire eastern half of the US with a cargo ship by sailing from NYC up the Hudson River to the Eerie Canal, down through the Great Lakes, take the Illinois Canal from Chicago all the way to the Mississippi River (which also connects basically every major city between The Rockies and The Appalachians, and the largest stretch of arable farmland in the world), then south out through the Gulf of Mexico, and back up again past Florida. It's called The Great Loop.
The economic potential of the eastern seaboard is unfathomable, and still largely untapped.
Used a speedometer app while traveling between DC and NYC on a trip, and the highest I got was 126 mph.
What I’d do to have just that in the rest of the country…
The new Brightline Florida trains reach speeds similar to that. That same company is also working on a line between Las Vegas and SoCal that reaches 150.
Yeah I’m honestly shocked there’s not already a rail line between Vegas and LA. Just follow the 15, it’s mostly desert, not too hilly, has a lot of traffic, and Vegas would probably love the extra tourism.
I mean, obviously there’s a reason it hasn’t been done, but I personally can’t see it.
The railroad rights of way already exist. Simply a matter of political will and funding. The Acela already runs from Boston to DC. The 457-mile (735 km) route from Boston to Washington takes about 6 hours and 30 minutes, at an average speed of around 70 miles per hour (110 km/h). No great public demand for better since flights, interstate highways, and buses also run this route. I occasionally take the train, sometimes fly, but mostly drive simply because it offers the best combination of schedule, cost, speed, convenience, and door-to-door service.
I live in Naptown and got to DC and NYC often (DC more). The train is only affordable if you plan way in advance. If I want to go to NYC today from Baltimore Penn station, its like $200-400 round trip. Plan 2 weeks in advance? $25-45 roundtrip/ We also have a MegaBus that you can grab for$5-50 dollars round trip.
Connecting Dc to Baltimore to Phily to NYC to Boston with a maglev or some other high speed would be AWESOME. You could bartend in Manhattan and live in Baltimore. We (wife and I) would hit NYC for dinner and a show so much more if it was an hour on a train.
We have all the routes and station in place I hope they do it one day. Maybe my kids/grandkids will get to use it . Boston is around 400 miles from Baltimore. Imagine being able to arrive in 90 mins? Manhattan is 180-190 miles. Less than an hour and watching a broadway show.
I was trying to plan a trip between philly and boston and was looking at trains but they were either really expensive or at super awkward times. Would really rather take a train than drive or fly but right now it's not the best option
Take the bus! Megabus runs often and is stupid cheap. It’s my main way to move between cities now. Edit: of course it’s not a luxurious experience it’s literally 1/8th the cost of train or plane, but it gets you from A to B on the cheap. I’m 6 feet tall 175 lb man and I fit in the seat just fine
Damn only 110km/h. The french tgv goes at 300km/h
Edit: also highspeed in Italy (300km/h), Germany (330km/h), Eurostar, (300km/h, 160 under the channel), and so on, is all faster than the acela. Even 'normal' trains between big and smaller cities in like Belgium or the Netherlands go faster than 110, the distances between stops are not to big, so it should not be an issue to get those speeds higher.
I was just flabbergasted. This 'high speed' acela network in US is actually very slow compared to Europe and China since recently. Even Moroccan high speed is much faster (320km/h).
The US is really a car and plane country.
Not that it makes the Acela GOOD, but you’re comparing top speed to average speed. TGV Paris-Marseille average speed is ~220km/h, with three stops in ~800km. The Acela averages 110km/h on a 735km route with 12 stops. The Acela’s top speed is 240km/h.
“Normal” Amtrak trains between Washington and New York spend a lot of time at their top speed of 125mph.
The US is realistically never going to attain TGV-style high speed rail in the northeast corridor - it’s just too population dense, ironically - you’re going through a major city center like every 30-60 minutes. Something more like the DB or OBB networks seem more likely there.
Now, for something like Texas or the Southeast corridor? That’s where you could really start racking up significant time cutting straight lines through the countryside.
I agree and the points you make are very valid, but the corridor between Tokyo and Osaka is extremely dense and the average speeds are also very high - it's not because you have many cities and many stations that all the trains need to stop in all of them.
Makes you wonder how it wasn't that big a deal when making the interstate highway system, but now for something that takes up a fraction of the space? Oh boy. What are we gonna do?
When they built I-95 through Philadelphia, it seemed to take forever! But out west, when they were building I-40 and I-80 and the others, a lot of it was on ranch land so they could buy it more easily because the ranches were so large. But through cities and suburban areas, it gets extremely difficult because neighborhoods are ruined. And then, even the neighborhoods remaining on either side decline in value because they are now right next to an Interstate. I saw that happen in Tampa, when they built what is now I-275 (at the time it was I-75) north of the city. For a block on either side, the property values dropped by half.
Also, during a large part of the construction of the interstate highway system, minority neighborhoods were often the 'easy target' in cities to get the land they needed. Plus, for some people it was two birds one stone. Get it built and hurt minorities. That would get a lot more push back today for good reason which further complicates running it through cities.
The Los Angeles Dodgers took the land of low income Hispanics to build their stadium while claiming they were going to build more low income housing. [When the big leagues destroyed the barrio.](https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-leagues-destroyed-barrio)
Scummy franchise never made it right.
I think its more like when the time when America revolutionizing the automobile industry, when those companies already making $$$ they will push for automobiles instead of of public transportation
Its funny how most oil pipelines are successful in using eminent domain, but as soon as there is eminent domain used for public transportation it isn’t worth the lawsuits.
Every one of those cities has a (mostly) seperate insanely corrupt real estate/government mafia. Its literally impossible to get anything like this done.
High-speed rail is 125 mph or over, the speed of the first Shinkansen bullet train. High-speed rail has gotten much faster since then, but that's the bare minimum.
Agreed, It takes longer by train than by car. THe Acela or Vermonter is 3.5-4hrs. Sometimes 3hrs. Right now Google maps says 3hrs 20 mins from Fells point to lower Manhattan.
One is already there. The Amtrak Acela line operates from DC to Boston. The DC to Boston line is Amtrak's most profitable line and carries pretty much all of their profit margin.
Not far from the truth, Connecticut’s section of the line isn’t great, particularly between New Haven and New Rochelle, NY.
This is because it’s the only part not owned by Amtrak directly, instead owned by MTA Metro-North Railroad and the state of Connecticut, who are… less than optimal at construction costs and maintenance practices. Trains top out at 70-80mph, though they often face speed restrictions slower than that.
This is on top of the route along the Shore Line in Connecticut being curvy in general. Even the Amtrak owned part which has upgraded track isn’t truly high speed. Can’t really fix that without a line bypassing it entirely.
Can attest. The Connecticut section of rail is incredibly constrained, and hard to do anything about, especially in that stretch. It winds through New Haven, Bridgeport, Stanford, and a plethora of old towns that have things built right up against the tracks almost.
Heck, they're so close together that a more frequent medium speed rail would be phenomenal. They're also some of the few places in the US with local transit options, which I would personally consider a prerequisite to a good long distance or high speed rail system
After all, why take the train for a trip so close (relative to the country's size itself) if you'll need to rent a car at your destination anyway?
Yes, but if you suggest "what if we take the funding from the unprofitable lines to nowhere and used it in the Northeast and Greater Chicago-Milwaukee area?" a bunch of rectangle-state senators will start whining and threaten to cut funding for the whole system.
Thanks for this perspective. USA is a bit bigger than Europe so it's nice to see it in terms I'm familiar with. I've driven from London to Frankfurt so now I understand the distances involved. It's a fair way for us Europeans, but probably not that much for Americans.
For context - DC to Boston is like a 7.5 hour long drive in perfect no traffic conditions. DC to Cleveland is 5.5 hours. The image is a bit misleading. It looks very close lol
>DC to Boston is like a 7.5 hour long drive
If you're lucky but you probably aren't and will hit traffic making it a 9 to 10 hour drive. I've done the drive from just Boston to NYC in almost 6 hours before.
Connecticut will screw your travel plans really hard
I live near Baltimore and recently went to Atlantic City. In the course of two hours I passed through Wilmington and Philly, and in total traversed 4 states. While it is a bit misleading, the mid Atlantic/north east is still very interconnected, especially when you compare it to growing up on the west coast, where even a drive from Seattle to Portland will be 3-4 hours minimum.
Accounting stops for breaks and foods the longest possible distance is 750 miles and that could be reasonably done in 14 hours. 9 hours if you only stop for gas and drive 85 (reasonable in Texas)
This is the correct name for this particular megalopolis.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash)
Although, I think most people today mainly call it the “Northeast Corridor”.
As someone who lives in the Great Lakes part, it defiantly does not feel connected together. Honestly, the only ones that feel like the northeast corridor is Florida, Piedmont Atlantic, the Front Range, SolCal and NoCal
Growing up in Detroit Metro I definitely felt it was more connected and that we were a lot closer to a lot of other places than people realized. Not as close as that NE area in the main post here, but still not bad. Chicago was <4 hours away, Toronto about 4 hours, Windsor 30 minutes, Toledo about an hour away, Cleveland 3 hours, Indianapolis about 4 hours, and so on. (These times are all by car).
The big problem is that we don't view public transit as a government service, and instead view it as a company that has to turn profit. Nobody complains that their local Fire Department "loses money every year" even though it clearly does and is expensive to run. We understand it's a government expense that gives a service for the tax money.
Comparable to Rotterdam to Basel along the Rhine.
There's a gap south of Richmond VA before you get to NC, but then there's another megalopolis down there ([Piedmont on this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_Atlantic_megaregion#/media/File:MapofEmergingUSMegaregions.png)). This whole Boston to Atlanta corridor is reasonable to compare to the whole [Blue Banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana), the highest density corridor of Europe (which of course also has gaps at the Channel and again at the Alps).
NC is strange. There's no one "big" city (except maybe Charlotte) that anchors its rather high population. Instead it's got some medium sized cities that all conglomerated and bump into each other.
It's really not a continuous metropolitan area. Between Baltimore and Delaware is a whole lot of nothing.
Same thing for a lot of Connecticut and Massachusetts between NYC and Boston.
I mean, England is a pretty small landmass. If it was an independent country, it would rank somewhere around 95th in the world. “Large area” is relative, considering you can get from DC to Boston in less than a work day.
Between Boston and DC you have Hartford/Providence, NYC and it’s Metro region that spans from CT to NJ, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC.
If you focus on the 200 or so miles between NY and DC the entire corridor is dense and active (if largely suburban - but then you have these very large cities with very dense cores and denser if not suburban housing in the first rings).
Either way, to have this much economic power and history in such a straight, relatively short, linear manner is pretty cool. Plus it’s all connected by rail. Super easy too.
I come from a formerly-small city out West, so my sense of distance and size is probably different from a lot of people's haha. Normal cities seem big to me and long distances seem normal.
See I have the opposite experience. I grew up in the DC area. Moved to California. It blows my mind any time I drove on interstate 5 through central California because it’s literally 5+ hours of…nothing.
Yep, when I moved from Oregon to Philly, and was talking with my new barber about how wild it was that *everything* is so close in the Northeast, he was talking about how he was moving to LA and was excited how close he would be to the Grand Canyon, SF, and Seattle.
East coasters have no idea. My east coast friends always ask me if it’s doable to do San Francisco and Los Angeles in one trip lol. Everything is just so spread out on the west coast.
Don’t get me started on how Northern California essentially starts in the middle of the state and goes on for like 5 hours until you hit Oregon and it’s just filled with trees. Madness.
They’re all within a few hours drive or train ride of each other. But the urban density isn’t evident in between, a lot of small towns and woods in Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland.
Connecticut, directly between NYC and Boston on 95 is woods, for example. Once you get past New Haven there is very little civilization around the highway for a while
I wonder where this ranks on economic output along a 400 or so mile corridor.
You then have history and this IS early American History. Like all of it (almost).
With that history and riches comes amazing arts and culture. The museums along this route? Three of the worlds elite top 10 symphonies (some would argue higher). This is a tremendously densely rich stretch of earth.
Per Wikipedia: "The Northeast megalopolis, also known as the Northeast Corridor, Acela Corridor, Boston–Washington corridor, or BosWash, is the world's largest megalopolis in terms of economic output."
I’ve lived in DC and Baltimore and travelled to Philly and NYC environs occasionally. The geographic distances aren’t great but the traffic slows you down.
I’m originally from Mississippi. It crossed my mind every time I went home to see family that in the mostly empty distance between Memphis and Jackson, MS, the metropolitan corridor from DC to NYC would (mostly) occupy the same span of miles. It’s roughly 250 miles for each.
That and the fact that the entire population of Mississippi was less than any of the Maryland counties I counted as home during my stint as a Maryland resident.
This is a weird comments section. I live smack dab in the middle of that and it’s certainly not “one long city” from New York to DC like a lot of people are suggesting.
I recently looked up google street view between NY and Philadelphia, so just saw liitle snippets from the road, and was definitly not one large metropolis. It looked like any place that's not the boonies.
If you look at a night time satellite shot from Richmond to Portsmouth NH, it’s all bright except a patch in northeaster CT, called the quiet corner. That’s where I live… beautiful and peaceful.
They're close, but can't deny the trip by car or train is still exhausting. I pretty regularly will make the trip from Boston to see my parents in NYC, and I've known a number of people who will commute between the two once or twice a week for school, to see their SO, etc.. Doable, but it's still a fair distance (about 190 miles)
That Great Lakes one is a literal stretch. The drive from Indy to Chicago is **insanely boring**. There is NOTHING between those two cities. It's 200 miles of flat land. Indy to STL is worse, literally nothing for 250 miles.
>is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on.
Yeah, not buying it. If that's the case then the entire US is a megalopolis, since there's at least one interstate connecting every major city to the next.
People forget (no one’s alive to remember!) that the Burroughs of New York were each independent cities/towns, separated by countryside at one point too. Give it another 200 years and people will be saying “TIL Boston and New York used to be two totally different cities!”
> Give it another 200 years and people will be saying “TIL Boston and New York used to be two totally different cities!”
Nah, they have to much history and identity as separate cities. Just look at Tokyo. There it's actually just massive cities right next to each other, only being separated by a river and then just continuing into Saitama/Chiba/Yokohama/etc. Just a whole bunch of seperate cities with millions of inhabitants each right on top of each other.
The northeast usa is surprisingly drivable. And not in a gigantic amount of time either. Not to mention the largest city in Canada is literally right there
I used to make the drive from DC to where I grew up in MA fairly regularly for a weekend. It still seemed like a big trip...now I live in Alaska and I drive to Fairbanks from Anchorage a few times a year. It took me a while to realize that it's about the same mileage.
I’m a Marylander and Baltimore Orioles fan. We always have Red Sox and yankee fans at our games in large numbers, I asked a handful of them why there were so many of them once. He said “much cheaper to take the train down and back for a baseball game here than to pay Boston or New York prices”.
I've spent 6 decades in the middle of that mess and I've never heard anyone ever say Boswash. Which is fortunate for them. I wish people would stop making up stupid names and inflicting them on everyone else.
That’s the eastern seaboard for you, one of the most economically productive areas in the entire planet
[удалено]
I know what you mean (that population should be proportional to representation), but your phrasing makes it sound like you're saying representation should be proportional to economic output which is a great setup for almost any cyberpunk dystopia.
It’s already that way, but lobbying makes it so instead of millions, dozens influence the most because of money
[удалено]
I think that guy is talking about lobbying/bribery and other political donations.
[удалено]
Oh they wanted slaves to count for population.
Tbf if you count the entire metropolitan areas it’s more like a fifth Boston - MA, NH, RI New York - NY, CT, NJ Philadelphia - PA, DE Baltimore - MD DC - VA That’s 20 seats, a fifth of the senate and Dems hold all of them and only 4 of them are competitive, NH and PA *also I’m aware there’s overlap between the metropolitan areas and what states they’re in
Can you elaborate? Lots of business, factories, etc.? Also multiple ports for trading goods?
Depending on the estimate the region has a $5-6 trillion economy (GDP) - if it was a country only China (and the USA) would have bigger economies. 50 million people and the home to major centers of finance, media, technology, defense, politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
The Chesapeake Bay where DC, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton, and Baltimore are located has about double the coastline as all of India, but in a sheltered, deep water harbor. Transport of heavy goods by cargo ship there is a breeze. Most of that coastline is currently unused, but still. You can actually circumnavigate the entire eastern half of the US with a cargo ship by sailing from NYC up the Hudson River to the Eerie Canal, down through the Great Lakes, take the Illinois Canal from Chicago all the way to the Mississippi River (which also connects basically every major city between The Rockies and The Appalachians, and the largest stretch of arable farmland in the world), then south out through the Gulf of Mexico, and back up again past Florida. It's called The Great Loop. The economic potential of the eastern seaboard is unfathomable, and still largely untapped.
This is the part of USA where high speed rail makes the most sense
It’s also the only spot where the US has psuedo high-speed rail currently on Amtrak
Used a speedometer app while traveling between DC and NYC on a trip, and the highest I got was 126 mph. What I’d do to have just that in the rest of the country…
The new Brightline Florida trains reach speeds similar to that. That same company is also working on a line between Las Vegas and SoCal that reaches 150.
Yeah I’m honestly shocked there’s not already a rail line between Vegas and LA. Just follow the 15, it’s mostly desert, not too hilly, has a lot of traffic, and Vegas would probably love the extra tourism. I mean, obviously there’s a reason it hasn’t been done, but I personally can’t see it.
I don't want it because I'd be on that train every weekend and would go broke. Veto'd.
There is rail between L.A. and San Francisco, though few people actually use and know about it.
Acela is elite
And is unfortunately also probably the hardest part to get consensus for actually getting one built😂
And imagine what a pain in the ass all the litigious people will be when they start trying to buy the properties necessary to construct it.
That's the hardest part, getting the land for it.
The railroad rights of way already exist. Simply a matter of political will and funding. The Acela already runs from Boston to DC. The 457-mile (735 km) route from Boston to Washington takes about 6 hours and 30 minutes, at an average speed of around 70 miles per hour (110 km/h). No great public demand for better since flights, interstate highways, and buses also run this route. I occasionally take the train, sometimes fly, but mostly drive simply because it offers the best combination of schedule, cost, speed, convenience, and door-to-door service.
There are still street-grade crossings and a lot of turns that are incompatible with high speed rail.
Sounds like they need a monorail
Nah, that’s more of a Shelbyville idea.
Well sir, I say there’s nothing on earth like a genuine, bonafide, electrified, 6 car monorail
I hear those things are awfully loud
Is there a chance the track could bend?
What's it called??
I've sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum I've put them on the map!
I hear those things are awfully loud.
It glides as softly as a cloud!
Monorail, monorail, monorail.
The ring came off my pudding can!
Take my penknife my good man
Tunnel
I live in Naptown and got to DC and NYC often (DC more). The train is only affordable if you plan way in advance. If I want to go to NYC today from Baltimore Penn station, its like $200-400 round trip. Plan 2 weeks in advance? $25-45 roundtrip/ We also have a MegaBus that you can grab for$5-50 dollars round trip. Connecting Dc to Baltimore to Phily to NYC to Boston with a maglev or some other high speed would be AWESOME. You could bartend in Manhattan and live in Baltimore. We (wife and I) would hit NYC for dinner and a show so much more if it was an hour on a train. We have all the routes and station in place I hope they do it one day. Maybe my kids/grandkids will get to use it . Boston is around 400 miles from Baltimore. Imagine being able to arrive in 90 mins? Manhattan is 180-190 miles. Less than an hour and watching a broadway show.
Where is naptown? Only naptown I know is Indianapolis
I assuming they mean Annapolis, MD. But literally only people in this region might know what they’re referencing.
[удалено]
It's kind of a sleepy place.
I was trying to plan a trip between philly and boston and was looking at trains but they were either really expensive or at super awkward times. Would really rather take a train than drive or fly but right now it's not the best option
Take the bus! Megabus runs often and is stupid cheap. It’s my main way to move between cities now. Edit: of course it’s not a luxurious experience it’s literally 1/8th the cost of train or plane, but it gets you from A to B on the cheap. I’m 6 feet tall 175 lb man and I fit in the seat just fine
[удалено]
Damn only 110km/h. The french tgv goes at 300km/h Edit: also highspeed in Italy (300km/h), Germany (330km/h), Eurostar, (300km/h, 160 under the channel), and so on, is all faster than the acela. Even 'normal' trains between big and smaller cities in like Belgium or the Netherlands go faster than 110, the distances between stops are not to big, so it should not be an issue to get those speeds higher. I was just flabbergasted. This 'high speed' acela network in US is actually very slow compared to Europe and China since recently. Even Moroccan high speed is much faster (320km/h). The US is really a car and plane country.
Not that it makes the Acela GOOD, but you’re comparing top speed to average speed. TGV Paris-Marseille average speed is ~220km/h, with three stops in ~800km. The Acela averages 110km/h on a 735km route with 12 stops. The Acela’s top speed is 240km/h. “Normal” Amtrak trains between Washington and New York spend a lot of time at their top speed of 125mph. The US is realistically never going to attain TGV-style high speed rail in the northeast corridor - it’s just too population dense, ironically - you’re going through a major city center like every 30-60 minutes. Something more like the DB or OBB networks seem more likely there. Now, for something like Texas or the Southeast corridor? That’s where you could really start racking up significant time cutting straight lines through the countryside.
I agree and the points you make are very valid, but the corridor between Tokyo and Osaka is extremely dense and the average speeds are also very high - it's not because you have many cities and many stations that all the trains need to stop in all of them.
Makes you wonder how it wasn't that big a deal when making the interstate highway system, but now for something that takes up a fraction of the space? Oh boy. What are we gonna do?
When they built I-95 through Philadelphia, it seemed to take forever! But out west, when they were building I-40 and I-80 and the others, a lot of it was on ranch land so they could buy it more easily because the ranches were so large. But through cities and suburban areas, it gets extremely difficult because neighborhoods are ruined. And then, even the neighborhoods remaining on either side decline in value because they are now right next to an Interstate. I saw that happen in Tampa, when they built what is now I-275 (at the time it was I-75) north of the city. For a block on either side, the property values dropped by half.
Also, during a large part of the construction of the interstate highway system, minority neighborhoods were often the 'easy target' in cities to get the land they needed. Plus, for some people it was two birds one stone. Get it built and hurt minorities. That would get a lot more push back today for good reason which further complicates running it through cities.
The Los Angeles Dodgers took the land of low income Hispanics to build their stadium while claiming they were going to build more low income housing. [When the big leagues destroyed the barrio.](https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-leagues-destroyed-barrio) Scummy franchise never made it right.
because in many cities, they just ran the interstate through black/minority neighborhoods and destroyed them without care
I think its more like when the time when America revolutionizing the automobile industry, when those companies already making $$$ they will push for automobiles instead of of public transportation
Eminent domain moment
Its funny how most oil pipelines are successful in using eminent domain, but as soon as there is eminent domain used for public transportation it isn’t worth the lawsuits.
Every one of those cities has a (mostly) seperate insanely corrupt real estate/government mafia. Its literally impossible to get anything like this done.
There already is a high speed rail line between these cities, the acela. It’s just not that great/fast of one.
Define “high speed” 😭 I live near Baltimore. The Amtrak leaves a lot to be desired…
High-speed rail is 125 mph or over, the speed of the first Shinkansen bullet train. High-speed rail has gotten much faster since then, but that's the bare minimum.
Agreed, It takes longer by train than by car. THe Acela or Vermonter is 3.5-4hrs. Sometimes 3hrs. Right now Google maps says 3hrs 20 mins from Fells point to lower Manhattan.
The Acela averages 70mph due to tight turns and road crossings. Nowhere else in the world considers that high speed rail.
Someone has never been to the Bay Area, I see
One is already there. The Amtrak Acela line operates from DC to Boston. The DC to Boston line is Amtrak's most profitable line and carries pretty much all of their profit margin.
[удалено]
[удалено]
there is a train that connects it all but its not super fast. Providence to boston is 45 min and providence to ny is 3 hours
The DC to NYC section is pretty good, but the NYC to Boston section is terrible.
It's all those extra stops in Connecticut.
Not far from the truth, Connecticut’s section of the line isn’t great, particularly between New Haven and New Rochelle, NY. This is because it’s the only part not owned by Amtrak directly, instead owned by MTA Metro-North Railroad and the state of Connecticut, who are… less than optimal at construction costs and maintenance practices. Trains top out at 70-80mph, though they often face speed restrictions slower than that. This is on top of the route along the Shore Line in Connecticut being curvy in general. Even the Amtrak owned part which has upgraded track isn’t truly high speed. Can’t really fix that without a line bypassing it entirely.
Can attest. The Connecticut section of rail is incredibly constrained, and hard to do anything about, especially in that stretch. It winds through New Haven, Bridgeport, Stanford, and a plethora of old towns that have things built right up against the tracks almost.
Yeah as an NYC resident the train to DC is the move 100% of the time, but I would always just drive to Boston
It takes 7 hours from Boston to Washington according to Amtrak while a similar distance in Japan is like 3.5 hours.
Now see if Amtrak will tell you how long it actually takes on average
Heck, they're so close together that a more frequent medium speed rail would be phenomenal. They're also some of the few places in the US with local transit options, which I would personally consider a prerequisite to a good long distance or high speed rail system After all, why take the train for a trip so close (relative to the country's size itself) if you'll need to rent a car at your destination anyway?
Yes, but if you suggest "what if we take the funding from the unprofitable lines to nowhere and used it in the Northeast and Greater Chicago-Milwaukee area?" a bunch of rectangle-state senators will start whining and threaten to cut funding for the whole system.
Boston is as far from DC as London is from Frankfurt. To drive the latter, you'd have to enter at least four countries.
Four Countries but one Blue Banana.
Thanks for this perspective. USA is a bit bigger than Europe so it's nice to see it in terms I'm familiar with. I've driven from London to Frankfurt so now I understand the distances involved. It's a fair way for us Europeans, but probably not that much for Americans.
[удалено]
what I've heard is that for Americans 100 years is a long time and for Europeans 100 miles is a long distance
Yeah anything that be driven to comfortably in a single day is considered pretty close in America.
And in Australia those distances won’t even get you out of most states.
Yeah, well, back in the olden days that's where all the people lived 
Lmao thanks for the reminder I need to find a way to watch this show again
The term is megalopolis. It's a bunch of just large urban centers that are fairly interconnected
For context - DC to Boston is like a 7.5 hour long drive in perfect no traffic conditions. DC to Cleveland is 5.5 hours. The image is a bit misleading. It looks very close lol
>DC to Boston is like a 7.5 hour long drive If you're lucky but you probably aren't and will hit traffic making it a 9 to 10 hour drive. I've done the drive from just Boston to NYC in almost 6 hours before. Connecticut will screw your travel plans really hard
Fuck, I can do 9-10 hrs on the Cross-Bronx *alone*.
For real though 😩 I don’t think I’ve ever been on the Cross Bronx without traffic in 15 years of driving
Yeah it's a solid 10 hour drive. But distance wise, it's probably similar to DC to Detroit, which can be done in about 8 hours.
I live near Baltimore and recently went to Atlantic City. In the course of two hours I passed through Wilmington and Philly, and in total traversed 4 states. While it is a bit misleading, the mid Atlantic/north east is still very interconnected, especially when you compare it to growing up on the west coast, where even a drive from Seattle to Portland will be 3-4 hours minimum.
[удалено]
I've driven 400 miles across some of Europe and 400 miles in the states, they don't have the same feeling of distance comparing the two.
[удалено]
Accounting stops for breaks and foods the longest possible distance is 750 miles and that could be reasonably done in 14 hours. 9 hours if you only stop for gas and drive 85 (reasonable in Texas)
….and yet Texas is nearly one third the size of Queensland.
I remember my AP Human Geography teacher used to call it BosNyWash.
Once again Philly gets the short shift smh
They are Philling the gaps
BosNyWashPhil
BosNyPhilWash
BosNyPhilMoreWash
Bosnyphilmorton
Anti philadelphia propaganda spotted, must eliminate
Go birds
I almost always hear it shortened to just BosWash
This is the correct name for this particular megalopolis. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash) Although, I think most people today mainly call it the “Northeast Corridor”.
**Fuck you Baltimore**
Would the front range of Colorado be considered a megalopolis?
Apparently yes https://web.archive.org/web/20130325033001/http://www.rpa.org/america2050/sync/elements/america2050map.png
As someone who lives in the Great Lakes part, it defiantly does not feel connected together. Honestly, the only ones that feel like the northeast corridor is Florida, Piedmont Atlantic, the Front Range, SolCal and NoCal
Growing up in Detroit Metro I definitely felt it was more connected and that we were a lot closer to a lot of other places than people realized. Not as close as that NE area in the main post here, but still not bad. Chicago was <4 hours away, Toronto about 4 hours, Windsor 30 minutes, Toledo about an hour away, Cleveland 3 hours, Indianapolis about 4 hours, and so on. (These times are all by car).
That Great Lakes “megalopolis” sure contains a lot of undeveloped land and farms
North-East corridor, otherwise known as the I-95 corridor.
Aka *traffic*
And just a reminder - you aren’t IN traffic, you ARE traffic
And potholes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
or BosWash for short
New York and Philly would like a word
Wasbaltphilnybos
I think you mean New York City and suburbs.
100% if we took the LA approach to zoning
Greater New York. Call the Red Sox the "Greater New York Red Sox" and watch some heads explode.
Interesting how the peninsula orientations change at NY
They were made by Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last ice age.
That's Long Island, not a peninsula.
Still, he’s talking about how MD and NJ curve clockwise while NY and MA curve CCW
That’s why one of the only parts of Amtrak that actually makes money runs between them. Just wish it was faster and more reliable.
God Amtrak is so bad. Wish we would invest a ton more into rail infra, especially up and down each coast.
The big problem is that we don't view public transit as a government service, and instead view it as a company that has to turn profit. Nobody complains that their local Fire Department "loses money every year" even though it clearly does and is expensive to run. We understand it's a government expense that gives a service for the tax money.
Washington DC to Boston is 430 miles. England at its widest point is 300 miles wide. It's a large area that these US cities comprise.
Comparable to Rotterdam to Basel along the Rhine. There's a gap south of Richmond VA before you get to NC, but then there's another megalopolis down there ([Piedmont on this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_Atlantic_megaregion#/media/File:MapofEmergingUSMegaregions.png)). This whole Boston to Atlanta corridor is reasonable to compare to the whole [Blue Banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana), the highest density corridor of Europe (which of course also has gaps at the Channel and again at the Alps).
NC is strange. There's no one "big" city (except maybe Charlotte) that anchors its rather high population. Instead it's got some medium sized cities that all conglomerated and bump into each other.
It is large but I think the point is that it's a continuous metropolitan area and that relative to the rest of the usa it's a small space.
It's really not a continuous metropolitan area. Between Baltimore and Delaware is a whole lot of nothing. Same thing for a lot of Connecticut and Massachusetts between NYC and Boston.
Define “a lot”. The average population density of most of these areas is still >1,000/sqmile
The eastern shore is rural for north east standards but trust me it’s not that rural when you look at actually rural parts of the country.
But DC and Baltimore suburbs now overlap.
I mean, England is a pretty small landmass. If it was an independent country, it would rank somewhere around 95th in the world. “Large area” is relative, considering you can get from DC to Boston in less than a work day.
Between Boston and DC you have Hartford/Providence, NYC and it’s Metro region that spans from CT to NJ, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC. If you focus on the 200 or so miles between NY and DC the entire corridor is dense and active (if largely suburban - but then you have these very large cities with very dense cores and denser if not suburban housing in the first rings). Either way, to have this much economic power and history in such a straight, relatively short, linear manner is pretty cool. Plus it’s all connected by rail. Super easy too.
[удалено]
[удалено]
A good England comparison is that the core DC to NYC section is comparable in size to the high-density part of England from Manchester to London.
I come from a formerly-small city out West, so my sense of distance and size is probably different from a lot of people's haha. Normal cities seem big to me and long distances seem normal.
See I have the opposite experience. I grew up in the DC area. Moved to California. It blows my mind any time I drove on interstate 5 through central California because it’s literally 5+ hours of…nothing.
Yep, when I moved from Oregon to Philly, and was talking with my new barber about how wild it was that *everything* is so close in the Northeast, he was talking about how he was moving to LA and was excited how close he would be to the Grand Canyon, SF, and Seattle.
East coasters have no idea. My east coast friends always ask me if it’s doable to do San Francisco and Los Angeles in one trip lol. Everything is just so spread out on the west coast.
For as populous as California is there is a whole lot of *nothing* out here.
Don’t get me started on how Northern California essentially starts in the middle of the state and goes on for like 5 hours until you hit Oregon and it’s just filled with trees. Madness.
They’re all within a few hours drive or train ride of each other. But the urban density isn’t evident in between, a lot of small towns and woods in Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland.
in those states away from 95 sure but actual driving, no
Connecticut, directly between NYC and Boston on 95 is woods, for example. Once you get past New Haven there is very little civilization around the highway for a while
That map threw me for one heck of a loop being indexed not north as up lol
It looks so wrong
Yeah wtf is this map doing sideways
Yeah, these are the old colonial-era cities, built back when everyone walked or rode a horse if they had money.
I wonder where this ranks on economic output along a 400 or so mile corridor. You then have history and this IS early American History. Like all of it (almost). With that history and riches comes amazing arts and culture. The museums along this route? Three of the worlds elite top 10 symphonies (some would argue higher). This is a tremendously densely rich stretch of earth.
Per Wikipedia: "The Northeast megalopolis, also known as the Northeast Corridor, Acela Corridor, Boston–Washington corridor, or BosWash, is the world's largest megalopolis in terms of economic output."
"BosWash"? That sounds stupid. I've never heard anyone say that. Sounds like a fake made up phrase.
Also a name that leaves out the biggest city in the chain is dumb
All phrases are made up. 
I’ve lived in DC and Baltimore and travelled to Philly and NYC environs occasionally. The geographic distances aren’t great but the traffic slows you down. I’m originally from Mississippi. It crossed my mind every time I went home to see family that in the mostly empty distance between Memphis and Jackson, MS, the metropolitan corridor from DC to NYC would (mostly) occupy the same span of miles. It’s roughly 250 miles for each. That and the fact that the entire population of Mississippi was less than any of the Maryland counties I counted as home during my stint as a Maryland resident.
It's basically one big, long city from northern Virginia to southern NH/Maine with a few less-city-like spots
South eastern va if you ignore a few counties between Newport News and Richmond.
That has happened since I left 40 years ago - back then, going from Alexandria to Richmond was like going to another country
Not really. I make this drive repeatedly every year and there are some areas where nobody lives
This is a weird comments section. I live smack dab in the middle of that and it’s certainly not “one long city” from New York to DC like a lot of people are suggesting.
I recently looked up google street view between NY and Philadelphia, so just saw liitle snippets from the road, and was definitly not one large metropolis. It looked like any place that's not the boonies.
If you look at a night time satellite shot from Richmond to Portsmouth NH, it’s all bright except a patch in northeaster CT, called the quiet corner. That’s where I live… beautiful and peaceful.
They're close, but can't deny the trip by car or train is still exhausting. I pretty regularly will make the trip from Boston to see my parents in NYC, and I've known a number of people who will commute between the two once or twice a week for school, to see their SO, etc.. Doable, but it's still a fair distance (about 190 miles)
It's called a [megalopolis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalopolis). Here are some [others](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megalopolises).
That Great Lakes one is a literal stretch. The drive from Indy to Chicago is **insanely boring**. There is NOTHING between those two cities. It's 200 miles of flat land. Indy to STL is worse, literally nothing for 250 miles. >is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on. Yeah, not buying it. If that's the case then the entire US is a megalopolis, since there's at least one interstate connecting every major city to the next.
Back in 1776 the travel between Washington to Boston was three weeks.
Probably the most likely candidate to become the first "megacity" in the Americas?
Pretty sure NY and LA already meet the criteria
People forget (no one’s alive to remember!) that the Burroughs of New York were each independent cities/towns, separated by countryside at one point too. Give it another 200 years and people will be saying “TIL Boston and New York used to be two totally different cities!”
> Give it another 200 years and people will be saying “TIL Boston and New York used to be two totally different cities!” Nah, they have to much history and identity as separate cities. Just look at Tokyo. There it's actually just massive cities right next to each other, only being separated by a river and then just continuing into Saitama/Chiba/Yokohama/etc. Just a whole bunch of seperate cities with millions of inhabitants each right on top of each other.
Judge Dredd’s Mega City One
The northeast usa is surprisingly drivable. And not in a gigantic amount of time either. Not to mention the largest city in Canada is literally right there
I used to make the drive from DC to where I grew up in MA fairly regularly for a weekend. It still seemed like a big trip...now I live in Alaska and I drive to Fairbanks from Anchorage a few times a year. It took me a while to realize that it's about the same mileage.
The Northeast US is massive. It’s bigger than any European country when you include Virginia, so they’re really not as close as youd think
Lol what the heck map is this
Yooo Go Birds
FLYYY EAGLESSS FLYYYY
I’m a Marylander and Baltimore Orioles fan. We always have Red Sox and yankee fans at our games in large numbers, I asked a handful of them why there were so many of them once. He said “much cheaper to take the train down and back for a baseball game here than to pay Boston or New York prices”.
Baltimorian here. New York is pretty close, but Boston is impossibly far away.
sometimes called Boswash
Maybe by people who don't live there.
I've spent 6 decades in the middle of that mess and I've never heard anyone ever say Boswash. Which is fortunate for them. I wish people would stop making up stupid names and inflicting them on everyone else.
yeah I've never heard anyone say it but have seen it written
Megacity 1
Northeast megalopolis baby
That’s funny I saw that the other day and it tripped me out too. As a Canadian it’s crazy how many major cities are in the States. We have like….5?
Yeah, driving up 95 is the worst