In pitching his proposal for spending enormous sums of money, some relatively tiny amount of which will go to infrastructure improvements, Mr. Biden blurted out this astonishing claim:
. . . what we’re really doing is raising the bar on what we can imagine. Imagine a world where you and your family can travel coast to coast, without a single tank of gas, or on a high-speed train close to as fast as you can go across the country in a plane.As National Review's Jim Geraghty observes, this feat would require a suspension of the laws of physics. Commercial airliners cruise at a speed of between 550 and 580 mph. The fastest trains can travel on a straight-away at about 350 mph.
Geraghty notes that, "...what Biden envisions, and implicitly is promising, is a train that goes across the continental U.S. at an average speed that is 47 percent faster than the top speed of the fastest prototype trains that exist today."
To achieve the speeds Mr. Biden asks us to imagine would necessitate enormous curve radii. Here's Geraghty again:
“Tracks rated for fifty miles per hour need almost no banking and can have a curve radius of fifteen hundred feet, while a train traveling at a hundred and twenty miles per hour needs a track with significant banking, and a minimum curve radius of more than a mile and a half.”Nor is this the end of the engineering problems. Since Mr. Biden is urging us to use our imaginations let's imagine the consequences of an accident involving a train full of hundreds of passengers traveling at 550 miles an hour, or the invitation to sabotage such a target would present to terrorists.
A train track designed for a train going 550 miles per hour would have to have an absolutely gargantuan curve radius. Our current system and routes of train tracks would be completely unsafe for a train moving at that speed; it would fly off the tracks at the first curve.
The president's king-sized imagination has also created a plane that can fly at 21,000 mph, a fantasy he shared with his listeners recently. Geraghty remarked that this idea "is a strong argument for mandatory drug testing in the White House."
The fastest jet in the world, the SR-71 Blackbird, travels at 2,100 mph. The effects on a plane's structure and the amount of fuel it would take to boost top speeds by a factor of ten make such aspirations as the president's highly implausible.
It's always dangerous, of course, to say that something could never be done. Technology has a way of accomplishing what had previously been thought impossible, but the president is asking us to imagine that if we just spend enough money we'll be able to do what certainly seems at present to violate the laws of physics.
We might wonder if trains that move as fast as planes are worth the cost when we still lack cures for dementia and cancer.
Geraghty concludes his column on Mr. Biden's fanciful proposals with this:
Biden is envisioning a commercial airliner that will travel ten times faster than the current fastest jet in the world. He might as well have promised warp speed, a hyperdrive, or teleportation. It goes well with his promise to cure cancer if elected president.Or the rallying cry of a man who knows that most Americans have never thought about those challenges either and that the media will never do to him what they would've done to his predecessor had Mr. Trump ever proposed something as unrealistic as what Mr. Biden has proposed.
But when Biden talks about advances in plane and train technology, he speaks as if the main problems are that we’re not dreaming big enough and we’re not spending enough money. This is the rallying cry of a man who has never thought about the engineering challenges and who apparently never intends to think about them.