Why high speed rail hasn’t caught on

1. Your entire country (UK) is smaller than 11 of our 50 states. The several hundred miles between London and Edinburgh pass through many smaller cities and towns, between which people travel. Between SF and LA is a pea soup restaurant and a handful of midsized, mainly agricultural settlements that can't be gotten around without a car (or pickup if we're being specific). SF/LAers aren't going to Stockton, or vice-versa.

2. Your entire continent, minus Russia, is smaller than the lower 48 states (2.5 vs 3.1 million sq miles), with a much higher population density and, again, actual places every 10 miles or so. I've bicycled across the US, there are stretches bigger than Western Europe that are full of nothin in particular.

3. Look at some population density maps. The US is light on corridors of sufficient size & density to make much sense for HSR considering the space between population centers: the Northeast (already served by HSR) and my native Chicago-Milwaukee-NW Indiana corridor (already served by commuter rail). Maybe Florida where they're actually building rail, surprisingly. Detroit area, maybe throw Ohio & Pittsburgh in (Amtrak partly covers it). The eastern 43% of China's land area (~1.6 million sq miles) contains 94% of the people (~1.3 billion people) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line In Japan you can basically draw a single, ~1400 mile line from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south that hits most of the population centers. Actually, they did that for you, it's called the Shinkansen and it is awesome.

4. This is actually the main point but I thought I'd sh!t on passenger rail first. The US has the largest and most extensively used rail network on the planet earth. We just use it to move freight, which doesn't breath, eat, use the lavatory, attempt to explode the vehicle it's on, or (to stay my sarcasm for a moment) complain when it's delayed. I haven't done the numbers here, but that probably offsets a lot more GHG/oil than replacing airports with passenger rail would.

5. To dovetail on earlier points, the US is largely defined by invisible cultural borders. To a disturbingly large extent, city people travel between cities and country people travel around the countryside. Each are often actually afraid of the other places. City people talk about 'flyover country' or make jokes about rednecks, incest, the banjo from Deliverance. Country people talk about 'inner city violence'. This is a newer, still emergent phenomenon and only partially true (hence it's placement last on my list).

All this said, I love Amtrak and ride when I get a chance to take a little time off and enjoy the scenic route. You see the country from a grounds-eye view that you can't from the air, and it's pleasant to walk around the cars and talk to people you otherwise wouldn't (I once chatted with Seth Green's mom - or a woman convincingly claiming to be Seth Green's mom - on the City of New Orleans). On the longer routes eg Empire Builder you can buy one ticket and stopover at interesting places along the way and get back on tomorrow's train with the same ticket. I'm looking forward to taking the train from Anchorage to Denali next year. But I'll be flying home at Christmas, with only 5 days off.

> A typical Japanese maintenance schedule has each segment of rail reground, to exacting tolerances, every 6 months while total replacement is required every 5 years.

Hyperloop is a marketing project which is based on the assumption that a few PR drones can be lowder than anyone with any cursory knowledge on transportation engineering.

The same goes for the boring company, where the company tries very hard to pretend they invented digging holes in the ground while using COTS tunnelers.

This is a silly red herring. Top speed means nothing. The only key factor is door-to-door travel time, and it means nothing if a train goes 180km/m in some sections and 320km/h in others if in the end you reach your destination 1h earlier than b flying.

> They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled.

Things that are completely unheard of in any sort of public transportation service, specially air travel!

Please look at the Netherland's Schipol airport, one of the largest in the world and often used as the paragon of well functioning hub, and how they've been systematically cancelling and delaying flights throughout the year.

> They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.

No, not really. Only the lowest-cost low-cost operators tend to beat high speed railway on price, but they often have flights to airports well outside of city centers or even in suboptimal terminals with all sorts of hidden costs, and ultimately lead to a slower suboptimal experience.