It's about to. Texas is going to build a bunch of high speed rail over the next 15-20 years, likely linking every major city in the state and then connecting into a few neighbor states. The first line, between Dallas and Houston, will begin construction within the next year. Unlike California, Texas will actually get this done quickly at a sane cost, and it will act as a model for the rest of the US.
15-20 years is exactly the same timeframe that most of Europe uses for railway planning. That includes things like HS2 in the UK, the Berlin-Munich high speed rail project, LGV Rhin-Rhone, the new Gotthard tunnel, etc.
The main difference is that this planning is done much further in advance (although at least the UK is well behind in terms of rail capacity construction - the UK and the US have many similarities in terms of government incompetence).
Only place that is faster is China, but they work on a different scale.
Hopefully you'll be alive in 20 years too. It's the old adage about the best time to plant a tree. The US has been avoiding high speed rail for decades leaning on excuses about time & cost; it's a form of being crippled by short-term thinking.
Connecting Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, will take at least a decade, more likely closer to 15 years. There is no real scenario where it happens faster.
From El Paso you push to Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque.
From Houston you go to New Orleans.
From Dallas you go to Oklahoma City.
Then if other cities are smart at all and pick up some confidence about what can be done, and at a reasonable cost, you then see eg St Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago all link up. And so on.
The model for the US will be regional high speed rail, rather than massive scale coast to coast approaches. Maybe eventually you get high speed interlinking between them.
Charlotte to Atlanta to Jacksonville to Orlando to Tampa to Miami.
Atlanta or Jacksonville to Mobile and on to New Orleans, which gets you to Texas via Houston.
El Paso to Tucson/Phoenix gets you to Vegas. Properly that's an easy hop to Los Angeles (skepticism warranted because it's infrastructure in California), which gets you LA to Texas to Miami.
If they did it right, Texas ends up acting as the obvious central web that you can tie the country together with high speed rail over time.
We could build all of this for $400 billion perhaps, if it's done as it will be in Texas in terms of time & cost (enter the land & zoning nightmares in some parts of the country); $20b per year for 20 years (non inflation adjusted), which we can easily afford.
Yes, but this is passing through developed land at this point. I've yet to see a european high speed train hit it's top speed in a populated area. Even TGV doesn't do it's namesake while in Ile-de-France.
They're slower in populated areas because the tracks aren't made for high-speed there (eg. too strong curvature, lots of junctions).
The same train takes 12 minutes for the ICE Frankfurt/Cologne to get from Frankfurt central station to Frankfurt Airport (9km linear distance, average 45km/h, 28mph) and then 49 minutes from there to Cologne (150km linear distance, average 183km/h, 113mph).
The latter leg is still pretty close to "populated areas" (just outside various towns along the route), but the track was specifically made for that train (taking required minimum curvature etc into account) and point-to-point connection (fewer junctions).
> The latter leg is still pretty close to "populated areas" (just outside various towns along the route), but the track was specifically made for that train (taking required minimum curvature etc into account) and point-to-point connection (fewer junctions).
How many grade crossings are there on that route? This train, at least through Hallandale/Hollywood, needs to deal with a grade crossing every half mile (800m) or so. Considering the crap that went on during the effort 20 years ago to get FEC to stop using horns at certain times of day convincing people that a train should be allowed to do 100+ mph down that line is a non-starter.
Basically nowhere in Europe allows grade crossings (of any sort, pedestrian or vehicular) at over 200km/h, and it's a 300km/h line. There aren't any.
That said, I can think of a fair number of places in different places in Europe where there's at-grade crossings in built up areas where trains regularly cross at around 100mph. (OTOH, there's no general requirement for horns/whistles at them.)
Of course not all of it is, but at the same time there are limits to how much benefit you can get out of it for the downside. In the West eminent domain's necessity is contestable, and thus it is used very sparingly and only when the benefits are undoubtedly much better than the downside; no modern Western country could get away with evicting 1.5 million people for a sporting event, or appropriating massive amounts of land to build speculative real estate when vacancy rates are in the double digits.
Is the benefit of running at full tilt in cities really worth it? You don't spend a lot of mileage traveling within a city, and cities are generally places where trains slow down and stop anyways. Combined with the very high cost of land appropriation in a city assuming fair market compensation, there's a reason why most places just don't bother with full high speed rail in urban areas.
> In the West eminent domain's necessity is contestable, and thus it is used very sparingly and only when the benefits are undoubtedly much better than the downside