There are numerous feasibility studies in regards to high speed rail system connecting the Pacific NW corridor. You can go see for yourself. Just because you build a rail network doesn’t mean people will stop driving cars. In fact, proliferation of autonomous cars eliminates any prospect of high speed rail in the US. We are talking about investing in a system that could be made obsolete in 20 years.

Autonomous cars are wildly inefficient compared to high-speed rail and would likely require similar sized infrastructure upgrades and ongoing maintenance in order to operate at scale. Assuming the 20 year timeline us actually feasible, their better suited for short distance trace anyway.

I generally agree that one-off projects are a bad investment and that we should be building a nationwide network of high speed rail. But your original comment was to the broader concern of high speed rail’s viability relative to the size of the IIS.

Correct! The numbers are clear not enough people use rail to make it viable and the are numerous examples of the same experiment: dump a few billion into public transport because “if you build it, riders will come”. They don’t. It’s the opposite of green or progressive, it takes tax funds from poor people and gives it to engineering firms to build vanity projects that nobody uses.

The only comparable example to rail networks are rail networks in other wealthy countries, which are great, heavily used systems (barring maybe the UK, where conservatives intentionally sabotaged the system through a badly-implemented privatization scheme).