[Broken_Hippo]

A rail network is only part of the solution: It certainly won't visit many small towns. A robust bus service truly needs to be in place as well so that folks can travel from town to town to train.

Heck, trains don't even have to be fast for much of it: Simply making passenger trains a priority would be a huge improvement - right now, passenger trains have to wait for freight trains.

[pharmakom]

Rail networks in the UK once visited even small villages. It can be done but requires political will.

If the settlements are very small then the number of people driving to the nearest station will be low anyway.

I’m optimistic for services that are halfway between bus and taxi.

[maxerickson]

The US is considerably less dense than the UK. We could afford lots more rail in higher density areas, rail to everywhere doesn't make any sense (we have freight tracks, the part that wouldn't make sense is frequent passenger service).

My county is rural but not that rural and has a density of 12 per km². It's a 2 hour drive to a small city.

[bobthepanda]

When we talk about where would rail work there are really only two or three places worth talking about; California and everything east of I-35.

As an example, the Midwest has roughly the same population as France, and the TGV network overlaid kind of lines up with major population centers. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/04/04/european-urban...

[ryandrake]

> It certainly won't visit many small towns.

Some people who constantly advocate for dense urban often would also rather small towns just didn't exist. Dense urban for everybody! They imagine utopia to be a hand full of dense cities, surrounded by wilderness untouched by human habitation, with high speed train tracks crisscrossing that wilderness to get people from one dense city to another. No roads, no cars, no suburbs, no towns or rural villages. Just pack everyone into these urban islands. Things like bus service, and "last mile" are not needed in this utopia.

[bobthepanda]

A lot of Americans (including some density advocates) also do not realize that you can have very small scale density.

Three narrowish three-story houses replacing one McMansion is still a tripling of density on a single lot. Take this Dutch village for instance: https://www.melbtravel.com/edam-netherlands-village-preserve...