> London-Manchester is 210 miles, and trains take only 2 hours

Yes and to further emphasise, this is not a high speed train (though it does use leaning trains making it faster than other lines, and has few stops. Also it's 2 hours 15 mins to be precise).

The proposed high speed train promises London-Manchester in ~1 hour.

It's only 2hrs 15mins if you go the longer way via Crewe, the more direct services via Stoke with fewer stops are around 2hrs 5mins. It also depends on your definition of high speed train, the original definition is 125mph, which the Pendolino definitely is (and is actually the max speed of the British train called the High Speed Train). We keep redefining what High means... HS2 with a max speed of 186mph will be 67minutes.

Good points. By the way just for interest - I take this service regularly and for me it seems to take 2:15, going via Stoke. Furthermore I've actually never seen it go via Crewe, I didn't even know it did. This might depend on the time of day though - I always take it at the busiest times and/or weekends which might increase the journey time a bit.

Is there a solution to the last mile problem? It's every difficult to get to the final destination in sprawled suburban cities even if there's a direct center-center high speed rail line.

Build dense cities.

For example the Tokio-Osaka Shinkansen averages 130 mph over the whole route with 15 stops in between the end stations. You could get from midtown Manhattan to downtown Boston in 1h40min. Make that 1h15min, if the train didn't have stops between NYC and Boston.

So visiting Boston could be almost as fast as visiting the far end of Queens, from Manhattan.

Manchester has a great central tram network. London has the underground.

Driving in London is mainly an exercise in stress and pointlessness.

You hop in an Uber.

The danger when drawing comparisons between England and the US is scale. England is slightly smaller than Alabama.

Overall yeah, but that's why I focused on similar-scale regions. For long distances, like SF-NYC, I think the current US solution of planes is basically the practical one and am not expecting a coast-to-coast bullet train. What's slow and could be improved in the US is regional-scale travel, the 150-400 mile range. I was disagreeing with the person who started this thread who argued that that kind of intercity travel in the US is already solved by autos. It is sort of, but only if you don't mind slow and tedious travel...