This Future Map Of The United States Is Way Cooler Than Any Current Map Of The United States

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56. Belin to Seville is about 1400 miles, while Boston to Dallas is 1570 -- And Spain is uneconomic

Mileages from http://www.worldatlas.com/travelaids/flight_distance.htm

For one thing, you can't actually get from Berlin to Seville on high-speed trains. There is no high-speed from Montpelier to Perpignan.

Whither Spain’s high-speed trains?

On January 9, the day after the inauguration of the AVE high-speed railway line between Barcelona and the Catalan town of Figueres, engine drivers Manuel Niño and José Luis Herguido boarded an AVE train in Madrid. Theirs would be a historic trip: they were traveling in the first passenger train that would cross the border into France on a wide-gauge European line, ending more than 160 years of isolation and finally making it possible to travel from the Spanish capital, via Barcelona, to Paris. What the two men noticed as they traveled the 131-kilometer stretch between Figueres and the French border was that the 30 tunnels and 60 bridges they passed through and over prevented the train from coming close to reaching its top speed of 300 km/h. The line cost 3.7 billion euros, and will never make a profit, according to recent studies.

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So far, there are no independent studies of Spain's high-speed plans that suggest they will ever be anything other than a money pit. When asked by EL PAÍS if it knew of any economist or transport and infrastructure expert who supports the investment in the AVE network, the Public Works Ministry was unable to supply a name.

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The facts speak for themselves: the Madrid-Seville route attracts around 14,000 annual passengers per kilometer, more than Madrid-Barcelona, but way off the 59,000 for the train between Paris and Lyon each year, or the 51,000 on the Cologne-Frankfurt line. This is not to mention the 235,000 annual passengers per kilometer who use the Tokyo-Osaka bullet train. Just to cover its operational costs, high-speed trains need a constituency of between 6.5 million and eight million passengers a year; none of Spain's routes come close.

Spain's planners seem to have forgotten that the country has closed high-speed routes for these reasons - the Toledo-Cuenca line was used by just a few dozen passengers most of the time. There are days when nobody boards the AVE at Guadalajara or Tardienta in Huesca. Tardienta has a population of just 1,000 people, but yet it has a high-speed train station. Is this the model that will connect up Spain and make it prosperous?

http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/01/15/inenglish/1358253198_135607.html

Boondoggles like this are part of the reason that Spain is near economic collapse.