The year 2040. Two technologies combine make never a reality.
1. Maglev trains that travel at 350 miles per hour (600kph)
2. Self-driving taxis
Exhibit 1:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/china-fastest-maglev-train-in...
NY to LA in 10 hours by maglev sometime in this century.
The 4 hour maglev between Miami and NYC will be popular.
Problems the US has:
* Lack of spoke and hub railways.
* Cars.
* Cost-per-mile, which if I understand correctly is a political and a union-thing.
* And just politics by itself.
It's not dissimilar in the UK, but somehow we muddle through it. I don't believe that "cheap" maglev will ever help the US, it's been around for decades, and the longest highspeed line built by the Chinese is 19 miles at a cost of "only" $1.3 bn (I'll leave it up to the reader about how realistic that construction cost would be in the West).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#China,_2000-present
The US will still have the same problem huge construction costs, political lobbying from the airlines, no hub and spoke railways, a vast airport style set of car parking around any terminals that are built.
The West now suffers from pointless adversarial politics where the opposition votes the opposite to the government simply "because", and for no rational reason other than "it's the other party". Even once you get past that hurdle, it's how "cheap" is the cheapest bidder. Labour/labor laws and so on.
I would genuinely love to see the US lead the world with high speed rail, but I just can't see it.
If vacuum trains ever happen, then things change. However those are very expensive to build, and have safety issues. We can solve the engineering problems with safety, but the expense doesn't seem possible)
Meanwhile California High Speed Rail (under construction) is planning to build stations in downtown San Francisco (and anther close to the city center, and a third by the Airport in Millbrae), close to downtown San José, downtown Fresno, close to downtown Bakerfield and downtown Los Angeles. Palmdale is the only city over 100,000 which gets a station in the city outskirts in California, and Burbank gets one by the airport.
I’m guessing California High Speed Rail did the work and came to the opposite conclusion of yours, that it does—in fact—work to build mainline stations in many US city centers.
That will improve next year too with the direct Paris Berlin train that should only take 7 hours.
In Europe with we have spoke-and-hub railways - want to get into London? There's almost certainly a local station near you in the suburbs. Then jump on the Eurostar to Paris. Get to Paris, and then get a local line back out to wherever you want to go.
Right now, it would have to be airport like terminals, and a multi-decade (if not century long) plan to connect the city centres.
In the US, drive to the new high speed mainline station outside the city, where there would have to be as much parking as an airport, and then get the high speed line to the destination, and then... hire a car?
Building a mainline station in many US city centres for high speed lines isn't going to work right now. There are too few local lines going in, and nowhere to build super-sized car parks.