The American train system is also drastically more expensive than the Swiss train system.

You must be jokin‘. Switzerland paid 11.2 billion in 2016. that would be 600 billions compared in US. But US invested 25.9 in 2016.

Switzerland moved all trucks to the rails to get more capacity on the streets (successfully). So this investments paid out. Fewer traffic = fewer stressed people = more productivity = fewer lost hours

They invested more, which is not the same as it costing more.

Cheaper to just move to Switzerland.

^ Ok I LOL'd at this entire thread

This is true. The USA has over 10x the population and 238x the land area. A national train system = dollar amounts that the human mind can't really grasp.

That is not the reason because if it were, there would be Switzerland-sized bits of the US with Swiss-esque rail service, and there are not. For example, LA County is more populous and five times as dense as Switzerland, but has essentially no rail service of which to boast. It's just a land use choice we are making: we can either have compact urban forms easily served by rail, or distributed forms that are impossible to serve.

I’m not sure that it’s the sprawl either. Many European cities with large suburban areas around them and nearby smaller towns that have effectively become part of them (e.g. Milano) have frequent local/regional rail service out to all the suburbs and associated towns.

I wonder if US sprawl is still structurally different from European sprawl. In Europe even suburban areas seem more likely to have a small mixed-user core on which residents can easily walk to a train stop. The US seems to frequently deter that with zoning dividing residential and commercial areas

You either arrange your town so everyone can walk to the rail station, or you end up with Los Angeles. My favorite example is the Swiss city Chur. This negligibly-populated, irrelevant little town, which is 4% the size of San Francisco, has a 12-track rail station that is much better than the one that San Francisco plans to have by 2050. And, of course, the trains come constantly. In the next hour Bahnhof Chur will enjoy the arrival of 13 trains, and that's their pre-dawn service!