The rail situation in the US is woeful and it's important to understand why:
1. Privatization has been an absolute disaster for the rail industry. Privatization has simply become a way to privatize profits and socialize losses. The advent of Precision Scheduled Railroading ("PSR") [1]. It not only decreases safety but leads to massive delays for passenger trains who can't pass the longer trains that PSR results in;
2. A car-centric culture that originated after WW2 that ultimately came from excluding poor people, particularly people of color. There is a strong cultural bias against any form of public transportation because many view it as raising taxes even though road infrastructure is heavily subsidized; and
3. Further to (2), there are some billionaires who capitalize on this attitude and fan the flames by fighting against any form of public transportation and passenger rail (eg [2][3]); and
4. The US suffered from a first mover advantage. From the mid-19th century, the US built a massive aamount of rail infrastructure. This was designed for far slower trains. You can't just put high speed trains on the same track. China in comparison didn't have that problem; and
5. The pre-eminence of private property in the US makes building anything like this difficult and expensive. Yes, there's eminent domain but local and county authorities can hold things up for years. If you look into the California HIgh Speed Rail project, you see a lot of concessions have been made with the route and stations in relatively low population centers just to get planning permission, which increases the route length and the LA and SF travel time.
Large parts of the US are ideal for high-speed rail.
The Eastern Seaboard is basically perfectly laid out for high-speed rail (Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - Baltimore - DC). The Midwest has tons of ideal city pairs, such as Chicago - Detroit or Chicago - St. Louis. Even a line between Chicago and NYC would be practical (3.5 hours downtown to downtown with modern HSR).
The main problems for HSR in the US are: extremely car-centric development, highly individualistic politics, incapability of pulling off large public projects.
That is true in a broad sense, but there are certainly many city pairs / areas where cities are within few hundred miles of each other. For example, there are flights from SF to San Jose, there are flights from Chicago to Madison, there are flights from Chicago to St Louis and so on. All city pairs where a HSR would be faster / same time duration as a plane end to end.
1. Privatization has been an absolute disaster for the rail industry. Privatization has simply become a way to privatize profits and socialize losses. The advent of Precision Scheduled Railroading ("PSR") [1]. It not only decreases safety but leads to massive delays for passenger trains who can't pass the longer trains that PSR results in;
2. A car-centric culture that originated after WW2 that ultimately came from excluding poor people, particularly people of color. There is a strong cultural bias against any form of public transportation because many view it as raising taxes even though road infrastructure is heavily subsidized; and
3. Further to (2), there are some billionaires who capitalize on this attitude and fan the flames by fighting against any form of public transportation and passenger rail (eg [2][3]); and
4. The US suffered from a first mover advantage. From the mid-19th century, the US built a massive aamount of rail infrastructure. This was designed for far slower trains. You can't just put high speed trains on the same track. China in comparison didn't have that problem; and
5. The pre-eminence of private property in the US makes building anything like this difficult and expensive. Yes, there's eminent domain but local and county authorities can hold things up for years. If you look into the California HIgh Speed Rail project, you see a lot of concessions have been made with the route and stations in relatively low population centers just to get planning permission, which increases the route length and the LA and SF travel time.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1165699563/how-precision-sche...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/26/koch-activis...
[3]: https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali...