First, with stops factored in, the Acela makes about 75 mph. This is competitive with driving, not flying. There's a lot of room for improvement right there.
Second, I'm not sure that distance between the biggest cities matters. Is there actually a ton of traffic between Philly and Los Angles, for example? You could easily imagine several unconnected networks (SF-LA-SD, for example, along with an upgraded Boston-DC route, or something between Austin, Houston, and Dallas).
In a similar vein, you could imagine connecting one major city to a bunch of somewhat smaller ones. For example, Chicago to Madison, Milwaukee, or even Minneapolis. This wouldn't necessarily replace air travel, but it would integrate those cities more tightly and might replace a lot of driving. Madison to Chicago even becomes a (somewhat) reasonable commute!
I think the reason a hsr line like this does not exist for these routes is simply because the monetary demand/value isn't there.
Going from Tokyo to Kyoto and back is probably the single most used rail line on the planet in terms of value. That one line is enough to drive an impressive chunk of the entire nation of Japan's economy. And along the way on that route, there are tons of other slightly-smaller cities that make the route extremely efficient.
But Chicago to Madison, Chicago to Milwaukee? There just isn't enough value there. Anyone who WANTS to get from Chicago to any of those places on rare occasion can just drive (the US beats probably everyone else, certainly Japan, at that). Anyone who NEEDS to get from Chicago to those places can fly or take the slow train. And that route is not powering a significant portion of the US economy, like the Kyoto-Tokyo route. And besides some suburbs, there's really nothing along those lines to make them efficient. It would be billions of dollars invested to get people from Chicago to a cities that aren't very important to Chicago. And if any of those cities start to fail, that line is basically useless now, since there's nothing else along it, it only goes to one place.
The problem is in the layout, really -- the economy is powered by New York to Chicago, Chicago to LA, Dallas to Seattle, etc. And these are distances where a plane is going to give you advantages over high speed rail -- ESPECIALLY considering there is basically a whole bunch of nothing between the cities, as opposed to the unending line of coastal cities that live along the Kyoto-Tokyo line.
One look at a population density map shows exactly why Japan's rail line is so highly efficient: http://www.mappi.net/japon_densite.gif
You could draw a straight line that goes through 99% of Japan's population. And that's exactly what they did, but with a railway.
I know I didn't talk about Europe here, but I don't know much about Europe. Though my rough understanding of European geography tells me that it is also more efficiently organized than the US, and therefore also more suited for HSR.
On the other hand, we also barely have high-speed rail between New York and Boston or DC, and those cities (and travel between them) do drive a huge chunk of the US economy.
Chicago-Madison is interesting because they're too far apart to commute between: the drive is ~150 miles/2.5 hrs each way and train is, inexplicably, much slower. If it instead took an hour or less to get between city centers, it's suddenly doable. Similar arguments might apply to Boston-Manchester and other pairs of big-medium cities. Someone would have to run the numbers, but I think HSR has the potential to create demand, rather than just shift it from cars and planes.
On the list I provided, where do you see major opportunities for us to build out rail? I know that there are some! I just don't think there are many, or that it will ever make sense for us to have a densely connected HSR network like Europe.
I think aiming for a comprehensive network right out of the gate is bad idea. Instead, build it now where it makes sense now...and build more later where/when/if it makes sense later. You could even add some fairly short routes. If someone can get Boston to Providence/Wooster/Manchester down to ~20-30 minutes, it'd be a huge win for that entire metro area. People already do those commutes but they're on the longish side.
And what is the door to door time? 1.5 hours to fly + how much waiting in line, going through the tsa bs, having to go from the airport to downtown...
For those cities in France, the time travel from city center to city center is about 3 hours and half by train, with 2 stops on the way. It beats both car and air travel, since you can just to show up at the station 5 minutes before the train departs, and don't need to go through security.
Also, the cheap tickets cost less than 50 euro, and you can get between 25% and 50% discount if you are less than 25 years old.
The French train system is expensive and too centralized. You'll find many examples of how great French trains are but everyone only ever talks about traveling to or from Paris. And sure, it's great and convenient for Parisians.
But when you want to connect two mid-size, non-Paris cities that are more than ~500 km apart, travel by train becomes a time-consuming and expensive affair. For instance, taking the train from Nancy to Grenoble costs about 120€ if you're lucky; it forces you to take a massive detour through Paris and change train stations there. Changing stations in Paris is stressful and takes at least half an hour - since there are no shuttles, you must take the subway (and change subway lines too!)
All in all, what should have been a 3 hour journey becomes a costly 7-8 hour ordeal, thanks to the extreme centralization of the French rail network. Many people are getting fed up with this -- carpooling across long distances is becoming popular because it can often be faster and much cheaper than rail!
None of the proposed routes have been that. Many of them have included detouring through cities like Rochester, MN (home of the Mayo Clinic), and taking other weird routes.
That's really not a useful analysis, you could make the same sort of list of London, Berlin, Madrid, Turin, Istanbul, Dublin, Athens, Moscow, Budapest etc, and demonstrate that a high speed network is useless in Europe, but nevertheless it exists. You need to do the same with the 100 biggest cities, that's where the system is most effective. Of course, just as in Europe, most of the journeys will be better done by plane, that's not the point, high speed rail is just another option which is particularly useful for particular circumstances. It would be substantially less useful in the US than in Europe, because as you say the distances are greater, but it definitely seems like it should exist more than it does.
I agree with this sentiment. However, I don't think that connecting large cities together is the most interesting thing we can do with rail ... rather, we can find corridors of opportunity that open up a lot of movement and economic activity that is hindered by being just a bit too far to commute ...
For instance: Duluth->MPLS->DesMoines->KCMO
For instance: Cheyenne->FtCollins->Denver->CoSprings->Pueblo[1]
In each of those instances there is only one large metro area but there are "junior" areas that could benefit greatly by gaining the ability to commute ...
You really can't commute from Duluth (where people need jobs) to Minneapolis (where jobs are) ... or from Pueblo to Denver ... but things change if it's just a 40 minute train ride away ...
[1] With the admission that Denver->CoSprings is logistically difficult due to elevation change on the route ...
So, yes, it's a great system for the people who use it, and I like the fact that we have such a thing, but it's actually supported by taxes and not that used by the general population.
But last time we talked about this, it seemed to me that if you looked into the details, it was clear why we don't have HSR in the US. Even assuming we built a network that operated at Shanghai Maglev speeds, at the distances the network would need to operate, air travel would remain significantly more economical.
In a thread 3 years ago, I made a list of the top US cities by GDP, and then broke out the crow-flies ground distances between them:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8713324
Of the 55 edges on this graph, only 6 were 700 miles apart or less. Several of those are already served by the Acela.
There's a definite advantage to rail over air, in that rail can deposit you right in the middle of the city you're heading to. But that advantage can't make up for the fact that no train is going to compete with a plane for trips between the largest US cities.