> Just replace the roads with rails.
Elsewhere in this thread and in previous discussions there has been this notion that there isn't the room for rail, buying up the land would be too expensive and so on.
For a lot of the US interstate there is this huge median between the two directions of the highway. In Europe you are lucky if the median is the width of a lane, in the US it can be a vast distance to the opposing traffic. Why they didn't build the interstate system with rail lines down the middle just for service reasons is a reflection on the car mad thinking that went with the era.
If you are driving in a car then you have to hold this steering wheel thing the whole time. Any moment of inattention and your number is up. Rail just automates that problem away, no Elon Musk needed. It should be a no-brainer. You should be able to hop onto the interstate and put your car on a flatbed railcar and zip along at 125mph until your destination, halving your drive time and being able to read the paper for a couple of hours instead of spending our hours holding that round thing. Even if you had to wait half an hour or an hour for the next flatbed train thing then it would still be worth it.
There is usually some power line following an interstate highway. I know that power gets sent along at 100's of thousands of volts but why can't the train tracks be the power 'cables' too? With some redundancy built in.
As it turned out America has just rubber wheeled V8 things trundling along at 55 mph between cities, at every opportunity for efficiency this was denied. The aero of cars in America during the last century made bricks look like the perfect aerodynamic shape.
As a European the state of the railways is shocking. We know from our history books about the golden spike somewhere in Utah and how amazing the transcontinental railroad was. But then, until you go to America, you don't realise that they haven't updated the network since. The smallest branch line in Europe has two sets of tracks, commuter towns have four to let the fast trains through. But then in America you have thousands of miles where it is just the one set of tracks. The land is not a shortage problem and you just wonder why over the last century or so they haven't bothered to put in an extra set of tracks so train traffic can be 'bi-directional'. It makes no sense at all. Then, through the Rockies the train slows down to something like ten miles an hour to inch over some trestle bridge that looks like it is a prop from an old Western movie. But that is fast. The train - Amtrak - will stop off for an hour to let some coal train chunter through on the single line. That would never happen in Europe.
Once I waited 8 hours for a train in America. There were no other trains on the track of the passenger variety during that time. In the rest of the world 8 minutes of delay means you have been badly let down and deserve a ticket refund. 8 hours - really? No wonder nobody travels on Amtrak. It is a joke, a bit like they only put it on for disabled people and didn't get the memo about accessibility.