Public transportation is on a different level and all mayor cities are connected via a high speed rail network.

The latter probably will never happen in the US.

Considering the US has far fewer people far more spread out, with two major sets of mountain ranges just in the continental US probably not. It might be possible to have high speed rail on either coast with a single rail line following along a route near I-10 east=west. Even then it's a lot of nature to overcome.

There's a lot of population centers in the US that could be better connected without crossing the Rockies.

Beijing to Shanghai is roughly the same distance as Chicago to New York City. Travel time via train is 4.5 hours vs 22 hours.

Boston to New York is almost 4 hours on the Acela!

I feel like these are the kinds of excuses that would be ignored with Chinese infrastructure projects. Tunnel through the mountains.

Yeah, nobody in the US is working on that at all...

https://www.boringcompany.com/

I’d strongly recommend that you watch this video: “The Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid”.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/VPjODKUxV5g (22:05)

Where's the high speed rail then? Tunnelling isn't the difficult part.

We have cars... privacy, freedom of movement, independence, flexibility. If you need faster, there are aircraft for that.

This is a very lazy excuse that always comes up. Even Russia has a better train connection and it's even less dense.

So Russia's population centers are on opposite ends of the country?

No and yet they have a working train system

So like in (parts of) Europe?

This also describes nearly all of Europe