I love the concept of the acela and I have always wanted to ride it but anytime I try to book a ride a few things always put me off.

1. It is sooo expensive. A ticket costs anywhere from 120 to 350 dollars.
2. The travel time is still 4 hours which means the track speed is slow. It’s ~220 mi from Boston to New York. So the travel time should be at most 3 hours.
3. Now if I want to take the acela I have to drive from my home to Boston south station which is 40 minutes away. Or i take the commuter and then the T (Boston metro) which takes 1.5 hours.

It takes 4 hours and a half tank of gas (~$35) to take me and my family to New York City. So there’s literally no reason for me to pay hundreds of dollars to take the train. We usually just park up in a garage in the city and use the subway once we get there and even that ends up being just a fraction of the cost of taking the acela.

Hey listen bucko, I have to go into large data centers once every few days and those places already creep me out. So I would really appreciate it if you stopped putting imagery like this into my head.

If you ignore all the nice neon and look at just the cars all you see are a bunch of similar looking cars. They all look like a Chevy Bel-Air to me. Now I am sure a 50s car enthusiasts would be able to name them all, but to your average person there aren’t any significant differences.

This is the same for cars today as well. Maybe 60 years in the future people will reminisce about the good old days of the Mazda Miata, Shelby Mustang, or Toyota Supra without realizing that these cars were few and far between and the streets were actually just filled with cheap Toyotas and Kias and Nissan Altimas.

This isn’t necessarily true. Even back then the streets were filled with shitbox cars that all looked the same. But only the cars that were beautiful and unique are still remembered and the rest are forgotten