Ironically, the plan for the Dallas-Houston HSR line includes razing half of downtown Dallas (the convention center area) rather than building the station on empty land at the airport like Brightline did in Orlando and China did in Shanghai. The urbanists want it to stop in downtown no matter the cost despite DFW being a much more convenient location for everyone who doesn’t live downtown. They’ve managed to piss off a major real estate developer by derailing their plans to build a massive mixed-use complex as well as half of the city council.
The thing is, Texas Central Railway's Houston station is on the site of a dead mall they own through a shell company, about six miles from downtown.
Cars ain't a panacea for everything, there is a rise in popularity of "follow home" robberies where people's vehicles are followed until they park in the driveway and get out. But that shows you how good a big metal box is at protecting people, niggers have to wait for people to stop or get out of their cars first before committing a crime on them.
I said reduced the risk, not completely eliminated it (and that assumes locking doors/rolling up windows). Even so, the network of roads make it easy to know if you're being followed or not (remember, just four right turns). In other modes of transportation, if you suspect someone is following you home your goose is cooked.
Cars ain't a panacea for everything, there is a rise in popularity of "follow home" robberies where people's vehicles are followed until they park in the driveway and get out. But that shows you how good a big metal box is at protecting people, niggers have to wait for people to stop or get out of their cars first before committing a crime on them.
In the "walkable city past" they fantasize about, twilight and night were regarded as universally dangerous and something to be avoided if you could help it. Even the most "walkable" city goes quiet in the wee hours of the night, and in the places that don't (bar/casino districts) are a hotbed of criminals looking for an easy mark.
Having driven through no where land Texas on the US-54 that's all flat and filled with beef factories and wind farms and has a town called Hooker off the freeway, I observed many drivers, even big rigs driving well over the posted 80mph speed limit. Texan highways are wild and there definitely is an argument for higher speeds.
Part of the issue about highway speeds is not understanding how freeways actually move. Yeah, we know about the "induced demand" which demonstrates a poor understanding of where traffic even comes from, but the real slowdowns come from exits and entrances. Traffic slows down on the main freeways when lots of cars enter the highway at once. Due to lots of exits and urban resistance to freeway expansion, trying to even fix exits is a monumental political battle, and usually the quick-n-dirty solution without closing exits is to put in a stoplight to prevent cars from entering the highway at once.
Rural highways don't have that problem, because the exits are so infrequent, and the exits that do exist might be at best lead to a small town or have amenities (a gas station or two, maybe a McDonald's). And guess what? With exits like that, you can have access to a small town that has full access to a network without slowing down anyone else. Can't do that with rail.
