The local version of this in southern California is the Banh Mi, a Vietnamese sandwich on a baguette. Less than 10 years ago you could get a good banh mi for 3 or 4 bucks, and these days even the cheapest I’ve seen are $6.50 and many places are charging over $10 for this perfect sandwich. At least double in under 10 years :(

Reading stuff like this is so crazy. They just go “hey 150k is a nice big number and should be plenty of heads, let’s just just take way the livelihoods of tens of thousands of actual people to make a number look nicer”

It reads like it’s from 98. The references to Blockbuster, Daimler-Chrysler, McDonnell Douglas, and Bill Clinton tipped me off this was an old one.

Sorry I’m too used to transit communities where everyone is in the know about big international projects.

In California they are building the first phase of the high speed rail project through the middle of the state where there is relatively little demand for rail. So we will end up with a high speed line that won’t get nearly as much use if they end up canceling the project. In California San Francisco and Los Angeles both are nearly equally as large and ridership will probably be dominated by trips to or between one of those cities.

I guess the difference in UK is the North has quite a few large cities that are each much smaller than London, so it doesn’t have that same “bi-pole” setup. Building starting in the north would improve connectivity between those cities. But I guess my question is, would there be much demand for travel between the northern cities as compared to demand between the north and London?

California HSR did this technique and honestly it isn’t going a whole ton better. Hopefully they connect Los Angeles and San Francisco with the central valley high speed line eventually, but it would have served a lot of people better to start in the cities and connect them through the valley later. Those lines in the cities could have been used for regional rail services while the valley line was completed. Specifically it would have been great to see a new SF to Sacramento line via San Jose and the LA to Lancaster line via Burbank.