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.
Why these big switchbacks, like atl-jax-orl and orl-tpa-mia? Kind of out of the way for little benefit. Perhaps Orlando could be a hub, with lines going NE, NW, SW, and SE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Central_Railway
https://communityimpact.com/houston/tomball-magnolia/develop...