Gongol.com Archives: November 2025
November 7, 2025
With the Federal government still in a shutdown, the FAA is having trouble staffing its air traffic control centers. The order to cut air traffic by 10% at 40 of the country's biggest airports, from Anchorage to Tampa, has already caused more than a thousand flight cancellations, and it just took effect. ■ America is unique in many ways, not least of which is the idea that people are free to travel anywhere in a continental-sized nation whenever they like. That's not the case in China or Russia. ■ The United States is also unique in that our population density is a fraction of that in countries we tend to regard as peers and near-peers: Germany is 6.5 times as dense; the UK, 7.6; and Japan, 9.2. In South Korea, there are 14.3 times as many people per square mile as there are in the US. That makes us unusually dependent upon airplanes for long-distance travel -- we're spread too far apart for the alternatives. ■ Culturally, we do love road trips, but their practicality for business travel evaporates rather quickly: Even with the speed and ease of Interstate highways, it's still hard to justify the highway for destinations more than about 500 to 750 miles away (depending on driver tolerance). And as a country with a whole lot of winter weather and strong thunderstorms, road travel is often limited at the same times air travel is delayed. ■ High-speed rail, which remains the dream of countless enthusiasts, could be massively useful if enough technological innovations could be layered to reduce the construction costs, achieve all-weather reliability, and move fast and frequently enough to make sense for interstate travel across entire regions of the country.
The one-two punch to make rail travel work in America (if it ever will again) really does have to be the combination of very high speeds (at least three times faster than highway travel) and impeccable reliability in all weather conditions. That probably means the only real solution is an extremely fast suspension railway -- something that could be constructed without any travel at grade (for safety) and with the actual rail surface sheltered from weather conditions (meaning the trains could run in ice, snow, rain, or wind that can ground air travel). ■ A German installation of this type has support pillars spread about 100' apart, which could theoretically allow a system to be built within the easements for existing Interstate highways. Compared with conventional rails, suspended rails are extremely compact on the ground: They can go in the airspace right over the highway. If it works in high-density Japan, surely it can work within existing land already set aside for American highways. ■ Moreover, with supports typically spaced about 100' apart, suspended rail systems have the capacity to overcome difficult terrain in much the same way that high-voltage power lines do. (Which is also a good place to note that a suspended rail system would almost certainly run on electric power.) ■ But the German version is slow with a top speed of 31 mph. It would need to go seven times as fast to really make any sense in America. China has a 37-mph edition, and Japan has a version that travels at 47 mph, but that again is much too slow for American needs. ■ Could it be done? Undoubtedly the technology is within reach. What it requires is sufficient popular and political impetus to make it seem like a project worth undertaking. The more unreliable air travel becomes (for whatever cause), the closer that day may come.
A paradox we ought to reconsider is that American political parties have become identified with strong ideological alignment while our investment funds are identified with time-oriented outcomes (like short-term bond funds and target retirement funds). We might optimize both sectors of life by reversing those alignments: Affiliating political movements with time-based outcomes and aligning investments with strong belief systems.
