US High Speed Rail Association?

Check out this website: http://www.ushsr.com/ushsr.html. This is a K street lobby operation. How new is this organization?

Pretty ambitious plans, calling for 17,000 miles of HSR to be built by 2030. Their map - http://www.ushsr.com/hsrnetwork.html - has some odd gaps. What no HSR line to Newport News, Hampton Roads, Norfolk, Virginia Beach combined metro area? Since there are already Northeast Regionals go to Newport News, it is not difficult to see an extension of the Northeast Corridor as a main backbone HSR line from DC to Richmond to Newport News. Change the name to the Eastern Corridor to help sell it in VA.

Just commented in another thread on the proposed El Paso to Albuquerque to Denver HSR study. No El Paso, TX HSR connections in their big plan?

That is a somewhat bizarre map, isn't it? It forgets the existence of the northern NEC, the only internationally-accepted high speed rail in the country, until 2020. Among several other oddball aspects (no direct NYC - Montreal link?), there's no Albuquerque - El Paso HSR line, an odd jog in the MSP - KC line to include Omaha, and barely a mention of connecting rail services. Checking the street address, they're not in the same building as the National Association of Railroad Passengers, but they're next to Georgetown University if that matters at all. Aside from the flashy map, the site looks like something thrown together in a few days

The first oddity on that map that I noticed is that it has the Boston - Montreal HSR route there, but no NYC-Montreal route! That just ends in Albany (and heads west to Buffalo). I mean, how can you put Salt Lake City UT to Boise ID on that map yet ignore "The Adirondack"?

I wonder if these dreamers ever get off their computers and look at the topography. The map looks like an airline route map. Seattle is really very isolated from the rest of the country especially in winter with snow in the passes. Its not for nothing that the Coast Starlight is so popular because of its spectacular scenery through a mountain wilderness. Salt Lake City is airline hub and planes flying east have to take off either north or south to get enough altitude to get over that wall of rock east of the city that stretches fro horizon to horizon. On the segment from Denver to Salt Lake City, maybe they can load everybody on buses to take I 70 which will beat Amtrak's time. The airlines were successful after WW 2 because they could get over all this stuff and the weather too.

I think that I did much better than they did in my North American High-Speed-Rail Proposals, like my Google Earth screenshot. I even speculated on why some places have lots of proposed HSR lines and why some places don't. I will concede that some parts of it may be excessively optimistic, but I don't think that I've gotten into the absurdities of the USHSRA, which they don't even try to justify.

Much of the western contiguous US is thinly populated and mountainous, making the routes connecting to Salt Lake City almost too absurd to think about. SLC - Sacramento will require crossing the Sierra Nevada near Donner Pass, which will require tunneling at least as long as the now-under-construction Gotthard Base Tunnel (35 mi). SLC - Seattle is even farther than NYC - Chicago. SLC - Denver is shorter than those others, but not by much.

Connecting the proposed California and Pacific Northwest HSR systems is a long shot, because of the mountains at the California-Oregon border.

Etc.

I've been told by some locals that one of the reasons for the lack of development of wind turbines on what otherwise would be promising sites on Cape Cod is a strong NIMBY mindset by some of the elitists lucky enough to own property there.

And let's remember that the Berkshires, the Lake Champlain region, and just about the entire state of Vermont are populated by people with a similar mindset; not promising territory for an Albany-Montreal HSR.

Elitist NIMBYism, perhaps? Seems perfectly (il)logical to me.