Fredrik Graver (fgraver@hcommons.social)'s status on Friday, 24-May-2024 08:27:47 JST

@strypey @AccordionBruce @Br3nda @tbaldauf Canada, China, and USA are all pretty similar in size — in the world, Canada is no. 2, China no. 3, and USA no. 4*.

But together, Canada, USA, Mexico (which is no. 14 in the world) — ie. North America — are more than twice the the size of China and, in fact, bigger than the largest country in the world, Russia. So yes, North America is so damn big.

Should there be better rail offerings in North America? Of course there should. But the problems posed by sheer size are non-trivial.

* depending on how you count, USA can be larger than China — but they are regardless pretty close.