The problem is the equivalent driving times aren't crazy on those routes either though.

When you factor in that you need a car in both your departing city and destination city (except for NYC), AND the fact that nearly every household in those regions owns one or multiple cars (which is not true in higher density/higher urbanization countries)...it begins to not make sense especially given the massive upfront cost of construction.

I do take Acela from Central Massachusetts to NYC but mostly because I hate driving into NYC so much. (And don't need a car when I get there.) It basically involves driving an hour in the wrong direction to south suburban Boston. I could drive to New Haven and for a longer drive I'd get a shorter/cheaper trip.

You highlighted it. The real problem is when you get somewhere you still need a car.

It's possible that would gradually start to change, starting around rail stations.

That requires the area around rail stations to be built for pedestrians and bicycles, not cars. That doesn’t seem to be the case in many places in America.

Places can change! American cities were built for pedestrians in the '20s, and Dutch cities were built fir cars until the '90s.

I will speak to the Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis/St Paul region.

Rail is not going to happen until you don't need a car in those cities. Chicago you could do, but the others are not pedestrian friendly. Anyone traveling within that region will have a 95% chance of already owning a car. Unless the train gets you from Chicago to Minneapolis in an hour, people are just going to drive. The risk with car rental and money spent on Uber's isn't worth it.

I feel like these types of comments come from people that live in NYC or LA. The rest of the country is so fuckin sparse. Your "walkable cities" idea doesn't make any sense and is completely unfeasible outside of major metro areas which land wise in the US is like 99%.

For the record, I live in a tiny village in New Mexico.

Also for the record, the overwhelming majority of the US population lives in metropolitan areas, not rural ones.

I don't see why Madison doesn't work. I've taken buses to Madison, you can get downtown. You can usually find some transport. Or you can just call a ride share or something!

I've done Chicago -> Madison by bus, and honestly prefer it to the plane at least (even from the airport). More comfortable seats and I get out just at a station. High frequency bus lines feel like good indicators of where some trains could work, and it's not like bus services are dead.

(Similarly, I did Portland -> Eugene on Amtrak and it was nice and chill! I roadshared to my final destination but I had to get from A to B somehow)

I do agree with the idea of building out strong localised networks (and roll my eyes at the "US rail network" dream maps people post out). But my impression from France and Germany at least is that you have two sort of failure modes:

- For France, rural areas don't really have that good of a rail network. Instead there are several trunk lines that are reliable. But it means that east-west stuff is nearly non-existent. Lots of "drive me to the station and drop me off please". Good enough to put France at number 2 in numbers of km ridden per passenger!

- For Germany, the network is much more evenly spread out. But ever German I've met complaints constantly about the unreliability of the trains, combined with the low rate of service. So you end up with stations everywhere, but if a train gets cancelled you could be stranded for hours.

Anyways I do think the French model makes a hell of a lot of sense (prioritizing train frequency over coverage), but it might not be what people are expecting if they just look at a map of trains.

Also in rural Germany you will need a car anyway, even if all major cities are well connected.

German trains are unrealiable because they spend like 5-10 times less per km of railway than Austria or Switzerland.

This probably has a lot to do with topography of Germany compared to both Austria and Switzerland.