Arborwayfan wrote:And it is certainly possible that Amtrak could gradually build up NEC capacity by using longer and faster trains and making incremental track and signal improvements that would in tun allow for greater traffic density and higher speed, so that eventually someone at Penn Station NY would have a choice of two or three classes of train (express, regular, commuter) to Boston, Spg, Wash, Albany, Harrisburg, etc., with no more than a 15-minute wait for a decently fast, decently comfortable ride to most NEC destinations, with walk-up walk-on unreserved rarely full service for all but the long-distance trains.
Right now it often seems like we (I am Bostonian at heart) want everyone to ride the subway and they want everyone to drive, but it is really more that different transportation mixes make sense in different places. Or maybe what I mean is that it takes a lot of traffic jams for many people who can afford a car not to want to drive around, so most of the country sees mass transit as an obsolete, slow, inconvenient thing for poor people and rail fans and environmental nuts (I am the last two, but not all passengers are).
Where there is density of both people and traffic jams, we already have a choice of classes of mass transit (why limit it just to trains). Commuter and urban metros already exist alongside Amtrak's intercity train services, plus Amtrak's high speed Acela services to add another class to intercity train services. But that density is localized into specific cities or metros.
Taking your example of the Netherlands, it's relatively small in area not only compared to the whole USA, but to the NEC supermetro.
Per Wiki, the area of the Netherlands is 16,040 square miles.
Here's how it compares to various NEC States:
D.C. 68 square miles
Maryland 12,407 square miles
Delaware 1,982 square miles
Grouping subtotal approximately the same at 14,457 square miles.
Pennsylvania 46,055 square miles (individually almost triple as the Netherlands)
New Jersey 8,722 square miles (individually about half as the Netherlands)
New York 54,555 square miles (individually more than triple as the Netherlands)
Connecticut 5,567 square miles
Rhode Island 1,214 square miles
Massachusetts 10,565 square miles
Grouping subtotal approximately the same at 17,346 square miles
Grouping all the NEC states together for a total of 141,135 square miles, they would be 8.8 times larger than the Netherlands in area.
Additionally, the Netherlands has basically one major powerhouse city of Amsterdam, the NEC has four; Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and D.C. The NEC has seven commuter rail operators servicing those four major powerhouse cities; MBTA, CTA, MTA North, LIRR, NJT, SEPTA, and MARC. We could even throw in an eight commuter rail operator VRE. And we're not even counting the urban metro and subway systems yet.
Let me repeat myself, where there is both density in people and traffic jams, there's very frequent service along the NEC in the USA. Where there isn't, there might be no rail services at all. Not every town in the Netherlands has rail services either.