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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • A lot of people have pointed out the auto industry lobby, but even if it were removed, getting high speed rail in place would still be a tough sell because of the settlement patterns that the postwar car + suburb boom created. Boston to DC is easily dense enough to support high speed rail, but huge swathes of that corridor (especially Connecticut and New Jersey) are so thoroughly suburbanized that getting to the train in the first place is a non-trivial drive, which renders the train much less attractive. New Jersey is the densest state in the country but The Acela, which serves that corridor, only has stops at either side around New York and Philadelphia because Jersey’s density is spread fairly evenly across a functionally infinite suburbia.