Japanese rail is almost all privately owned and operated, to the best of my knowledge. It makes its profits off of capturing the increase in land value by being the landlord around its rail stations. That model is illegal in the US so rail has to be subsidised.

That is also how the trans-continental railroad in America was financed.

>Rail is publically funded pretty much everywhere (i.e. it doesn't make a direct profit if you factor in infrastruture costs).

You could argue that there are positive externalities to building high speed rail that make the public funding worth it. For commuter trains it's reduced congestion and cheaper housing (allowing people to move to the suburbs). Thus a train service can operate at a loss while still making money at a societal level.

What purpose does high speed rail serve that isn't mostly covered by planes?

The big problem with planes is that an hour long trip takes three hours. 1 hour to enter the airport, 1 hour to fly, 1 hour to exit the airport.

Sometimes you can drive somewhere faster than you can fly there, entirely because of all the setup and teardown implied by a flight. It’s this intermediate distance travel where high speed rail really shines.

For really long distances across sparsely populated areas like parts of the US, it probably doesn't make much sense.

I think thw biggest win would be in cities. People wouldn't need to take cars everywhere, so you build things more densely, etc.

Planes only make one stop at the final destination.

The high-speed train between New York and Boston could make two or three stops, for example.

I think 9 million people travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles every year. Wouldn’t that be best served by trains?

As the US grows from 350,000,000 to 450,000,000 people, should we add a few more trains every day, or a few dozen airplanes?

Anything can be said to be “worthwhile,” a political rather than an economic characterization commonly followed by handwavy appeals to unidentified stakeholders, intangible dividends, and vague but supposedly urgent need.

If customers are unwilling to pay the asking price for an offering, the value proposition is off. Perhaps the model is bad, the price too expensive, or the terms old-fashioned. “The market” is individuals seeking mutually beneficial trades: greedy capitalists and greedy consumers. If the trades aren’t happening, the necessary mutual benefit is not present. Forcing people to render services or accept services for terms they wouldn’t voluntarily agree to is not freedom.

Yes, voluntary persuasion is hard work.

> If the trades aren’t happening, the necessary mutual benefit is not present.

Then why does the US governement fund roads? Because there's a collective bargaining / coordination problem. It benefits us overall if we have them, but that doesn't mean that a profit could be usefully generated from maintaining them, or that this is the best way of running the system (we want to maximise use of the infrastructure, not discourage use with high usage tariffs).

The is fundamentally an economic argument, albeit one that recognises value beyond monetary value.