[normalaccess]

America is HUGE... And all of the big cities seem unable to herd their own cats. People often forget that the USA is really 50 small countries wearing a trench coat. Just look the maps linked below. The EU has all its people piled up close where as the US has HUGE tracts of low population areas. That's why you'll never see a high speed coast to coast rail system here. logistically it's just not possible (at least not on the west coast). I live in one of the unpopulated areas and by car it takes over an hour of continuous travel at 70 MPH (115 KPH) to get to a smallish big city. There's just too much empty space.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/geo/popul...

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/fragmentatio...

I could see local areas like California or New York getting some high speed rail but even then, how many people would use it and where would they be going?

[Jensson]

> People often forget that the USA is really 50 small countries wearing a trench coat

Then why do all of those 50 countries has so extremely similar problems? Not all have the same level of those problems, but the states with the least murder rate are similar to the EU countries with the highest murder rate etc, or good public transit is like EU bad public transit etc. Police brutality in the states with the least is like police brutality in the worst part of EU etc.

Cleary there must be some very shared culture for that to happen, as there are many such extreme stats compared to the rest of the world. Otherwise you would have a lot of states that were like average European countries.

[conor-]

I've seen a lot of suggestions that there should at least be a high speed rail corridor from Chicago to NYC and one from SF to LA because those are 2 of the most highly trafficked domestic flight paths.

The fact there isn't really high speed rail connections across large cities in the Midwest is kind of silly considering there isn't much terrain to contend with like there is on the coasts. Even the 1 new route Amtrak introduced from Chicago to Minneapolis has seen pretty high demand.

[marssaxman]

High speed rail from SF to LA is more than a suggestion, it's an active megaproject which broke ground nine years ago:

https://hsr.ca.gov/

[AnimalMuppet]

Yeah. I'm not sure that it will be rideable from SF to LA in my lifetime (even with generous values of "SF" and "LA").

So, yeah, they're working on it... at a glacial pace. And they haven't even gotten to the hard parts yet.

[rsynnott]

I mean, the EU is 27 small countries barely even bothering to wear the trenchcoat. It is not like the EU has some sort of integrated transport policy, except in the vaguest terms; every country does its own, and they’re often quite different. In many countries it even varies quite a lot between cities.