Passenger rail systems require the procurement of immense amounts of very pricey land, or the transfer of ownership of existing rail lines. I don’t see that as a similar cultural issue.

Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up).

Using eminent domain or changing the view of the public on land rights is a much higher barrier.

> Boat building can be solved by spending money to build boats (and perhaps waiting a couple decades for expertise to be built up).

I actually don't take it for granted that enough money thrown at a problem can automatically solve it. There's a critical mass of underlying assumptions without which the marginal output of each additional dollar supplied becomes so limited that it just doesn't make sense, even with the government money printer.

Have you tried the new Caltrain? It's getting good reviews even from Japanese.

The US doesn't have effective passenger rail systems for the same reason that Europe and Japan don't have effective freight rail systems: you have to optimize for one use case or the other or else have two completely separate systems, which takes up a lot of extra land.

There is also another reason, which is that passenger rail makes sense only in specific geographic and economic circumstances, and outside of Northeastern corridor, these are very few. Commuter rail requires urban population densities that do not exist in most US metros. Intercity passenger rail only makes sense at a very limited scope until air travel beats it on both speed and cost. Europe and Asia just have different patterns of development.

>for the same reason that Europe and Japan don't have effective freight rail systems

...don't we? I'm not sure about the effectiveness or how to measure it, but I know that a lot of cargo - especially long distance cargo - travels by rail.

Europe has, by proportion, significantly more trucking and significantly less rail freight than the United States. Relatedly, the average American freight train is 2-3x longer than the maximum allowed length of a European freight train.