It wouldn’t be a suburb, it would be a commuter town.
I imagine neighborhoods like Rexford or Voorheesville would become more playgrounds of the rich than they already are, but the Capital District is cemented in state civil service, and I’m not confident the Metro-North would change that.
Unless it also changes the seat of government, or maybe the distribution of representation.
Honestly, that could be a good thing. Imagine if wealthy liberal folks could more readily commute from rural places. That has real potential to change the shape of the state Senate.
These kinds of concerns will definitely pan out only if this single thing happens on its own. Build a bullet train to Albany? Yeah, that’s gonna happen.
But if we build an entire modern rail network that connects all of the US in an intelligent way, then no, this will not happen.
I’ve seen similar resistance in certain areas I read about in California where rural/exurb areas just completely fight tooth and nail against any further integration with the city. Heck it sorta almost happened in Philly over a light rail out to King of Prussia which is this huge mall area in the suburbs thats 45 minutes from the city and there is a lot of shopping and work commuting in both directions, but the locals were shot down by the state over the overall net benefits to the city and the state at large so its moving forward.
Generally from what I read its a resistance to the idea that light rail will make the are accessible for intercity dwellers and that with that will come renters and everything else bad about the city. Some of it is veiled racism and some of it just classicism. Additionally, some of it very simply a strong resistance to the idea that good public trans might encourage property density and destabilize the suburban everyone owns a half acre split level and SUV sameness and condos, apartment buildings and town houses might get built as the public transit raises property values due to access.
Earlier this year our light rail project finally died with Duke Hospital claiming some bullshit about EM interference or something. They were right in the middle of the proposed route and are one of the places that would’ve benefited the most from it, but change is scary I guess.
My local bike advocacy group has been making some headway though. We’re getting a few more decent bike lanes / greenways and there was a traffic study a couple weeks ago that might convince the city to drop car lanes for bikes on a major road (which I frequently route around as is).
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If we build a massive modern rail network, the entire Northeast coast would become a suburb of NYC 
As someone who loves (fanboys over) the rich histories of both boston and providence, I’m fine with that if it means distance is no longer a factor in all the stupid bullshit I want to do.
Lol, a reason for me to resist.
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My body is ready for Mega-City One.
It’s time.
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Yea I thought Rym was trying to come up with positive reasons to do this :-p
If we had high speed rail, people wouldn’t be as tied to geographic locations for their jobs. It would open up the job market. It would also massively drive rent down on average.
Alternately, if we had Virtual reality offices, we could live anywhere and still met in person :-p
Drive down NYC rents, but raise Philly rents. There’s already been an arbitrage issues with NYC dwellers deciding to move to Philly to start families because of the price differential.
A better rail network would probably be a net good for the US, but I’m just speaking realistically about the possible negative local impacts to Philadelphia if the train was faster and more people could super-commute.
This gets back to a fundamental issue with America.
Any improvement to non-road infrastructure in urban areas causes drastic and immediate gentrification. Any improvements.
Rents are severely (and temporarily) depressed along the L train due to its pending long-term maintenance. People are literally leaving the neighborhood rather than deal with poor transit access for a year.
This 1830s yellow journalism perfectly sums up how most of modern day Philly would feel about a high speed rail line making the city the Sixth Borough.
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This feels very much like a non-issue here in LA. No one that I’ve noticed is pushing for anti-car, we’re just constantly funding more bike lanes and more rail expansion. Of course, the car culture here is 100x stronger than on the east coast, I’ve noticed.
Our only benefit is that some of our stuff is old enough to have existed pre-car.
The East Coast was indeed very settled in terms of the layouts and distribution of roads well before the car. So on the surface it should seem that we shouldn’t have much of a car culture. But we absolutely do here. It’s just, at least in New England, more bundled up and aggressive and confusing. Again, the roads were made before cars and then retrofitted later as the car became dominant. As a result everything is very much CARway or the NOway outside of dense urban areas because they just paved over the walking and horse roads with car roads. So now you’re just expected to use a car to go literally anywhere, and if you are a pedestrian or cyclist you’re completely in traffic and at risk of being run down if either you or the cars don’t take evasive action. This causes the drivers to just feel innately entitled to the road and to have car driving the absolute default. We intuitively develop extreme contempt towards the entire concept of walking places, because it makes you one of the people wandering in the road that everyone has to go around and so clearly if you’re doing that, you’re clearly just a poor, ignorant, asshole.
Its to the point that even I, someone who would like to see a reduction in cars and all that, simply become another East Coast angryman driver yelling loud obscenities in my car at people who don’t get it and can’t understand basic fundamental concepts like passing on the shoulder the nanosecond someone puts on a left blinker, right on red, and doing 10 over the limit always
So we have a car culture out East, but it’s more internal and cold here and we don’t celebrate it in the same way.
Cars and interstates are racist.
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