Instead we've done the same but with sprawling highways, which doesn't do much for density (and requires cars, and once you have a car you just use it for commuting).
I wish this didn't need to be pointed out, but there are a lot of stupid proposals out there. So be on the lookout - don't blinding support HSR: put support where it will be useful.
Of course, that still may not be enough to justify such a line, but the fact that nobody travels from one end to the other is not an issue.
A train going Chicago to Minneapolis would only lose a few minutes stopping at cities like Milwaukee WI and Madison WI - both fairly large cities. An airplane could stop at each, but the cost of one stop would double the full trip time.
Where a train stops vs go past is a very complex subject full of trade offs. However in general a train that only goes non-stop between two points is a bad idea. I've been in discussions elsewhere in this topic about that - read them for more info. (including those who disagree - they have valuable insight)
This puts the time loss to stopping a train at 3-17 minutes.
(I live in the town that had the first rail line in Australia.)
People prefer not being constrained to the train tracks if they can drive, they prefer to not live near the constant blaring of horns and squealing of wheels on the tracks, and in these days prefer not to be stuck in a cabin full of potentially sick strangers for 2-3 hours a day round trip.
Was it legal and politically palatable to build there, or in the neglected neighborhoods around it? In the USA, unless you're talking about actual greenfield land, rail-supporting development is usually illegal to build.
The reason rail works beautifully in other countries is that you can get off the train and walk to useful destinations, even if where you disembarked isn't where you live. Shinkansen in Japan have tons of shopping, nice restaurants, and hotels all within a block or two of the station. So there's a reason for non-residents to stop as well as residents. And because everything surrounds the station there's no point for residents to go anywhere else.
You don’t provide enough specifics about your local situation, but it’s been long noted that airport rail lines underperform. The author Alon Levy’s blog and others in the transit space have covered this. TLDR: They fail serve the local riders well, in an attempt to serve less frequent airport riders who are more likely to pay for a taxi/rideshare, rent a car, get picked up/dropped off, etc. There are often poor airport connections, like people movers or airport connectors, getting to the right terminals, etc which creates more friction and confusion.
>neglected neighborhoods that never got the rush of development and gentrification rail was supposed to bring
Rail and transportation infrastructure generally is an enabler for re/development and land use, but not a guarantee of it. Necessary but not sufficient by itself.
That would be ridiculous, if it would up to 1 hour round trip it maybe would be more effective.
The other line (running from downtown to the airport) was also a total of 1 hour 30ish minutes including bus from my house to the terminal, then rail down to the airport. It otherwise was a 30ish minute drive, tops, and driving is what almost everyone chose to do if they had the car to do so.
First, there is a fundamental tradeoff between location and transportation. Land is not a produced good, it is owned by landlords and its value comes from location.
Transportation makes prime land less valuable and outlying land more valuable, thus it redistributes value outward, allowing people to escape from the thumbs of landlords and buy their own land. Eisenhower's freeway building project and cheap gas is responsible for the American middle class, much moreso than anything FDR did, as people could move out of apartment buildings in inner cities and buy land of their own, due to the improvements in transportation technology.
For those improvements to work, you have to fan out. A rail line isn't going to get it done, but what a rail line can do is transport people to a remote place and then they fan out with roads. That is a good idea for redistributing people if an area is already densely populated and the land is bought in a large circle around the city. Then you hop on a train to take you to nowhere and there you can buy cheap land. But if the built up area is relatively small, you are better off with a network of cheap roads to carry you to where land is cheaper.
Thus the U.S., which has always had smaller cities surrounded by more open space than Europe, got more bang from its buck with roads. But the same network of roads did not have the transformative effect in Europe as it did in the U.S.
What is interesting is the shift to remote work. The internet has made communication another strong rival to location, providing another threat to land values in inner cities. So it could be that in the future, we will not need so many subsidies for transportation but for things like broadband, to help nurture the middle class and allow people to buy land in remote areas.
People - especially landlords -- are very much aware of these dynamics, which is why historically there was great opposition to roads from moneyed interests, as documented by Adam Smith. And why roads are deserving of subsidies, due to all the positive externalities. In the same way, internet infrastructure is deserving of subsidies today. Whether or not rail is deserving of subsidies in the US depends on how large the disk is of expensive land surrounding cities. In the northeast, it is large, and that's why you see rail in the northeast. In most of the U.S., it's not large at all and you can buy affordable land without traveling too far away from work. In Europe, it tends to be large as well.
With the internet, that is only getting better and both road and rail are becoming less relevant as an agent for the promotion of the middle class land ownership. They are still relevant, but I believe the window has closed on dreams of high speed rail connecting cities in the U.S. High speed internet will get the job done faster and easier, if coupled from a large shift to working from home.
In my opinion focusing on cost versus fares is myopic to the point of insanity. As long as we're laser-focused on the economic viability of rail we'll never see any of the other benefits.
We have a responsibility to future generations to not just keep things the same but to make them better, and I think rail does that. If you look around and you dislike your current mode of living, hate your commute, and want to have access to cities, then guess what rail is a solution for all of that. It takes decades to see any real benefit from it though, which is why nobody ever goes for it.