The United States would rather let an oil company build a pipeline on your land, then a rail company build a high speed train track on it.

Oil is prioritized over rail because it immediately creates jobs, tax dollars, and the government doesn't have to pay up front for it. If you're a politician, which one would you want to support?

> oil company build a pipeline

This happens.

> rail company build a high speed train track

This doesn't.

There are actually companies that want to build oil pipelines. How many privately funded companies are there that want to (and have the means to) build a high-speed rail line?

How many privately funded companies would even consider doing so in the current regulatory climate? There's a bit of survivourship bias at play, here!

Likewise, if the oil were extracted by the state, rather then a private firm, it would also not have any problems with piping it over private property.

Perhaps, but it's not as though the popularity of oil pipelines is especially high. They still get built! If anything, much of the bureaucracy and public would far prefer to build high speed rail in place of a pipeline. Certainly neither face a particularly positive regulatory environment.

I'm not sure what your second point is getting at. Rail lines face pretty huge eminent domain burdens along with everything else.

My point was mostly that the hurdles of building rail and pipelines are both quite high. The economic benefit of oil pipelines are enough to make them worth the trouble to a private firm. Rail, not so much.

They don't have to be popular, but the regulators are happy to disregard that problem, and fast-track approval.

On the other hand, none of the regulators would even consider doing that to lay a train track.

My point is that nobody tries to build a rail line, because they know it's a hopeless affair - they will never get approval.

There's one in Texas attempting to do so: http://www.texascentral.com/project/

Serious hyperloop contenders may well emerge soon, too.

I'd love to see that rail happen. Nowhere near Texas, but it would be cool. That said, Texas isn't really representative of the rest of the country.

The U.S. has about the same amount of land area as China and less than a third of the population. The rail network in the graphic provided in the article mostly avoids the Tibetan plateau, and so basically covers only very populated areas with relatively friendly terrain (notable exception of Urumqi).

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/china/geog/populationdensityma...

http://www.cgiar-csi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-10-...

Making network for the entire U.S. with those parameters seems almost impossible. You're either plowing through the Rockies or a desert to reach and go through areas an order of magnitude less populous than, say, Kunming or Chengdu.

That's not to say that the USA shouldn't build a comparable network, that it wouldn't necessarily be profitable, or it wouldn't bring a worthwhile benefit. However, there are real obstacles that don't necessarily point the finger at political differences.

Because we don't need one? When did a bullet train become a priority for anyone?

Seriously I have to fly 2000 miles soon and I can buy a plane ticket for $200 and be there in 4 hours. Have you checked the cost of a train ticket lately? It's something like 4x the price and 4x slower.

Gentrified western economies have economic growth of around 2% on average. Developing countries moving from mostly rural or controlled economies to market industrialized economies can, and do, have growth of around 10% or more. That's a fairly big difference in available funds for capital projects.

The same way the US was building trains in NYC, Chicago, etc 100 years ago, China and others are doing so today, but with the advantage of globalization, automation, and mostly solved technical issues for even advanced systems.

Essentially, the point at which your society hits this growth really is going to determine the what kind of infrastructure you're stuck with. The big exception here is being bombed to the point where you have to re-do your infrastructure, which is the case with Europe and why they tend to have newer mass transit infrastructure than the US which saw no bombing on its homeland, and of course has the added problem of a huge homeland which makes more sense to fly around in, than ride around in.

A good example of this in tech is how the US pioneered DSL (Joseph Lechleider at Bellcore) and how quickly the US telcos ran with it. By the time the Europeans and others caught up, DSL had advanced to ADSL2 and ADSL2+ which gave 2x to 5x the bandwidth. Meanwhile, US subscribers were stuck with vanilla DSL for decades because the cost of upgrading was so prohibitive.

There's a problem with innovative countries where they run with revision 1 of some new tech, but then are stuck with rev1 because big infrastructure changes take a long time, and you can expect decades of use before replacement. Or in the case of trains, centuries - the CTA in Chicago is built on tracks originally laid in the 1860's. From a tech perspective its weird to think Chicago was running light rail before homes even had electricity. Waiting until later revisions to build out your infrastructure, either intentionally or not, comes with fairly big dividends. Now is very good time to lay down infrastructure due to all the computing power we have, automation options, lowered costs via globalization, and focus on renewable energy.

That said, infrastructure improvements happens as needed in older economies. The US has an impressive air system, for example, with at least 75,000 flights per day and at relatively low price points. We've probably hit the efficiency and feature maximum with jets as-is, so not much room for innovation here, but its clear for the US, air became the focus instead of trains. You can fly from Chicago to LA in 4 hours. Even a 'fast' bullet train with zero stops would take 10 hours, most likely closer to 15 with stops. Also, air is privatized, so there's no worrying about raising taxes or cutting social programs to pay for a subsidized train expansion, which would take quite a bit political will from taxpayers, most of whom are happy with car ownership for daily commuting and airlines for longer trips.

Thanks for the detailed response. I never realized how much utility the US plane system has.

Politics, lobbyists.