The distances involved often lend themselves to air travel being more convenient even if there are trains. There's a sweet spot for distance where trains make the most sense, but after that a plane will end up being faster even with all the dead time at the airport.

I live in Dallas. Door to door, a train would be faster and more convenient than a plane for me to go to Houston or Austin. A direct flight will always be faster and more convenient for me to go to Denver, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Orlando, Seattle, etc.

Dallas to New York is ~1,400mi. That's like Madrid to Warsaw. It'll take me ~6 hours everything included to go that distance by plane. What's the travel itinerary for Madrid to Warsaw? Is it direct (same level of convenience)? Is it faster?

Some context, the Beijing–Kunming high-speed train takes 10 hours 43 minutes (including 6 intermediate stops) to travel 1,710 mi.

The US is also much, much bigger. Germany is about the size of Nevada. France is about the size of the entire Eastern seaboard.

The US would definitely be better served with better rail infrastructure, but there's no getting around the fact that Seattle to Boston is 200 miles longer than Lisbon to Moscow, and slightly longer than Edinburgh to Aleppo.

If you look east of the Mississippi, the overall population densities aren't really that bad, and should be able to support high speed rail easily.

...except for the fact that within metro areas, US cities are designed in a very sprawly way that's hostile to public transit. This is an entirely unforced error that has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with culture. We deliberately chose to make our cities sprawly as fuck through various regulations.

A park and ride high speed rail system in those cities would probably stand on its own if it actually does save you time and cost.

Park and rides are somewhat of a stopgap measure. You really need walking/biking/bussing to rail to be effective last/first-mile options, in order for rail to be effective and popular too.

Its not perfect but that doesn't mean its the enemy of good, it can do a lot to reduce trips. Its also a drop in replacement for how a lot of people presently use their airports with long term economy parking lots, and it makes it a lot easier to justify connecting that up with more substantial transport down the line once you have that initial park and ride station.

Yeah I'm not against them, but it's very much a modest, incremental measure, like going from no bike lanes to painted bike lanes in the door zone.

You need much bigger changes to truly make HSR viable imo.

I imagine most anywhere that would get an hsr would also have a present day bus system that can have routing better oriented to serve the new infrastructure. Bike lanes are always nice but I imagine not very many people are going to want to start their inter city trip with luggage in tow trying to lug that around on a bike.

You might be surprised. High speed rail isn't always about trips where you need a lot of luggage, and cargo bikes are popular in places with good bike infrastructure.

Of course, the number of places with actually "good" bike infrastructure isn't very high. There's the Netherlands...and that's about it. And even the Netherlands doesn't really have "great" bike infrastructure as a standard (though it does have it in some places).

The Acela corridor is well suited for HSR. A few years ago Amtrak was trying to divest its long haul routes that lose money and reinvest in upgrading Acela, which would make it profitable. Unfortunately the plan fell through for political reasons.