[bobthepanda]

The vast majority of Americans live either east of the Mississippi or on the West coast at densities not dissimilar to Europe.

You’ll never take HSR from NYC to LAX but Chicago or Atlanta from NYC is roughly the same distance as Paris to Berlin, and there’s a bunch of cities on the way as well.

[zwieback]

The metro areas are dense and tend to have decent public transport. The problem is in the smaller towns and rural areas. When I ride my bike around in the Willamette Valley I can go miles and miles without hitting even a small town. In Germany the next sizable town is usually minutes away.

[littlestymaar]

> In Germany the next sizable town is usually minutes away.

Maybe in Germany, but France has barely populated areas and yet we have one the biggest high-speed rail network on the planet. In fact, the fact that France is the biggest European country after Russia is probably the main reason high speed rails was invested on back in the 70s: the bigger your country the more you need high speed rail.

[kingofpandora]

Second biggest ... if you include overseas territories!

[littlestymaar]

Right, Ukraine pre-invasion was bigger than France without French Guyana, but now they have a tough fight ahead if they want to claim that title again :/

[bobthepanda]

Most Americans live in metro areas; the figure for the United States is 80% according to the census.

High speed rail is not going to do a lot of good in South Dakota, but we can serve most Americans with some type of decent rail without contorting ourselves. And the bar is on the floor since a lot of Amtrak is not even a single round trip seven days a week.

[lotsofpulp]

I would think the densities are still much smaller since most people live in car dependent suburbs around the city.

[bobthepanda]

Not all countries with large rail networks have great suburban public transport either; the UK comes to mind.

Even in a mostly suburban metropolitan area, most people are still quite a ways from the main airport, which is usually on the extreme of one side of a metropolitan area. You can have multiple train stations per city because of their much lower footprint and nuisance level, and generally speaking most of the time savings in rail vs air is access time to the station/airport. (Truly high speed services can just skip the suburban stations if there truly is demand for this, but generally speaking the time for an additional station is measured in single-digit minutes.)

[laurencerowe]

While the UK does not have great suburban public transport it is far better than what is available in most of the US.

Ironically car dependent cities like LA were built out as streetcar suburbs so they’re not really all that different to London’s ‘metroland’ suburbs built out around tube lines. The big difference is the job centres are far more distributed. When offices as well as homes are widely distributed public transport becomes very tricky.