It's hard to justify investing in rail. At best, in most parts of the US it is slower, more expensive, and less convenient. There are some edge cases that it makes real sense for, but everywhere else is better served by cars and airplanes.
>> It's hard to justify investing in rail. At best, in most parts of the US it is slower, more expensive, and less convenient
But that's because we haven't invested in it! Before the 1960s most roads in the US were also terrible, so by that logic we shouldn't have invested in the Highway/Freeway Interstate system.
Evidence from Europe and Asia shows that this is probably wrong. People in those areas strongly prefer high speed rail for trips that are less than 3-4 hours long, and begin to switch over to airplanes beyond that.
We're right back to "remember how big and sparsely populated the US is." 150mph in three hours is good for inter-city transportation in the Northeast, but a lot of other places would have trouble justifying the cost.
And that's nothing compared with what a truly high speed train would cost to implement here.
Again, that's a great reason not to build HSR in Iowa or the Dakotas. But if you look where the population centers of America, this excuse begins to fall down. A huge percentage of America lives on the coasts in fairly dense pockets, far denser than many countries with existing HSR.
High speed rail generally goes a bit faster than 300km/h. At that speed a lot of things are less than 4 hours away. Chicago is a bit less than 4 hours from NYC at that speed, as is Seattle from San Francisco. San Francisco to Seattle is obviously not a great candidate for a high speed rail line because it doesn't pass through much of interest, but it gives a good sense of the scale.
There's tons of routes in the US that could make sense if there wasn't so much NIMBYism, corruption and the oil and auto lobby, let's be honest.
SF-Sacramento, SF-LA, LA-San Diego, LA-Vegas, Seattle-Portland, the whole Northeast Corridor (a better truly high speed Acela), Houston-Dallas, Orlando-Miami, Pittsburg-DC and and and. There's lots of large cities in the US in the high speed rail sweetspot of 400-800 miles (2-4h travel time) apart
You seem to be presenting this as a false dichotomy. The road network can't go away even if we have excellent rail travel. If you look at the incremental costs of additional traffic capacity, road transport is pretty competitive.
