>Switching to cars was not an inevitability, it was a not an obvious choice, we actually went out of our way to destroy existing, functional rail infrastructure and neighborhoods to replace it with interstate highways, and a lot of it was motivated by a massive automotive manufacturing lobby exerting government influence.

That is the often missed point of the movie Roger the Rabbit.

I'm not going to comment on your broader point as I largely agree passenger trains being unsuccessful is a policy choice.

But Indiana particularly is a bad example. 1/3 of the population you mention is in Indianapolis that has tried many times to have commuter trains, the population does not want them! Even modern/modest attempts have failed[0]. If commuter trains aren't popular with the people there why would longer haul passenger rail be? Even if you could magic an Acela route between Chicago and Indianapolis into existence it would not be faster than a car or the many private bus routes that go there and you'd have to deal with the inconvenience of getting to the start and end locations in a city that has rejected public transportation.

The northern population centers which account for another 6th of the population of Indiana are already serviced by regular electric inter urban trains into Chicago, the nearest big population center. That line is seeing about 50% less usage compared to pre-Covid numbers.

So beyond just the policy choices, in Indiana at least there is strong evidence for a lack of desire for inter-urban rail.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_University_Health_Peop...

All that means is that voters don’t want it, not that they wouldn’t benefit from it.

You may have gotten the impression that I hate trains from my comment. I don't hate trains. I hate when people try to propose trains as a solution to transit situations they are completely unsuited for.

Rail is the highest volume mass transit solution. The layout of population centers in the US at a macro and micro level leads to this level of throughput rarely being necessary when all other factors are considered.

There are indeed several locations in the US where high speed rail lines which do not exist would be a very good idea and would obviously supplant short-haul flights which currently serve those routes.

There are also many cases where commuter rail systems which don't, or barely exist would make excellent additions to the metropolitan areas around major cities.

However, this is the exception, not the rule. It is not relevant to the vast majority of origin destination pairs when traveling in the US.

Passenger rail in the US needs to answer the question "How is this tangibly better than the alternatives?". To which the answer is usually "Its not". For shorter distance trips the inconvenience of not having a car once you get to your destination usually ends up outweighing the benefits of not having to drive yourself. For longer distance trips, flying is usually going to be dramatically faster. As mentioned, there certainly are examples which fall into that sweet spot in the middle but in the US they are relatively few and far between.

My argument is that the sweet spot in the middle is incredibly common, and almost every sweet spot in the middle market is vastly underserved.

Texas triangle, Northeast Corridor (needs more speed and service frequency), Florida, California and Pacific Northwest, all need high speed service.

The problem of needing a car once you arrive locally is another correctable piece of policy failure, and that problem doesn’t stop a huge number of people from making a huge number of short hop flights in the United States.

In 2019, 44.5 million cars were rented in the US, so I think people very frequently jump on a medium to short distance flight and renting a car at their destination. Plus, we have ride sharing apps.

> However, this is the exception, not the rule. It is not relevant to the vast majority of origin destination pairs when traveling in the US.

This is I think something where I think you're in agreement with the substance, but not the wording.

If you look at a list of the MSAs in the US, the MSAs in the top 50 that aren't practically serviceable by HSR in some fashion are Seattle, Denver, Portland, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Salt Lake, New Orleans, and Birmingham. And five of those aren't entirely implausible.

So most people actually live somewhere where some form of HSR is plausible. In the Northeast and California, the problem is more that it hasn't been built yet; for the Midwest, Chicago is strong enough that it can drive HSR traffic without concomitant (and probably unlikely) planning changes in other Midwestern cities; Texas probably needs unlikely planning changes to be viable. For the Southeast, Florida would need unlikely planning changes to be viable on its own, but connecting to a strong Midwest and Northeast system via Atlanta could also be viable. Connections past that probably aren't viable (sorry, Memphis and New Orleans).

And I think you recognize that there are several strong areas in the US--I doubt your list of viable HSR routes are much different from them. I just think you're underestimating how much of the intercity traffic in the US that actually entails.

Among "the alternatives" that rail has to be better than: Busses using the existing highways. They won't be as fast as high speed rail, but they will be (in most cases) faster than non-high-speed rail, and the infrastructure costs will be massively less. Also, we can implement the plan this year, not a decade or three from now.

Busses have a bad reputation, as being ugly, uncomfortable, and smelly. So do trains, but with high speed rail, you buy some really nice trainsets. Well, for much less than the cost of rail right of way, you could buy some really nice busses.

Take San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example. Let's say you're flying. It takes an hour to get to the airport, and you have to be there two hours before your flight. The flight takes an hour. Then it takes half an hour for your baggage to arrive, then another half an hour to get your rental car, then an hour to drive to your destination (if you're lucky). That's six hours, which is the same as driving. High speed rail (real high speed rail) would be faster than flying (or driving).

But let's say you're going on vacation. Let's say you've got a wife and two kids. If you fly, you need four tickets. Same with rail. If you drive, you only drive one car. That shifts the economics massively.

> Indiana has the population of Denmark. Texas is almost twice as populous as The Netherlands

Indiana is 36,000 square miles; Denmark is 16,000 square miles. Texas is 268,000 square miles; The Netherlands is 42,000 square miles. The populations may be similar; the densities are not. That matters a great deal for this discussion.