> It's slower than flying on a commuter airline, but the tickets cost nearly as much, and it's also enormously expensive to build High-speed rail in many non-

> It's slower than flying on a commuter airline, but the tickets cost nearly as much, and it's also enormously expensive to build High-speed rail in many non-US countries is vastly cheaper to construct and much faster and reliable than USian high-speed rail. > You're limited to putting people in a few train cars, as opposed to a continuous stream of people on a freeway. With off-the-shelf railcars and a well-tested train control system rail can get far higher throughput than freeways. If you do the USian thing and have to get extremely customised/bespoke rolling stock and try to make your own bespoke train control system, well, you indeed do get the disaster you're describing. > My perception is that it's a huge money pit for something that's quite frankly inferior to our current infrastructure. We would be much better off improving our current insterstate system. US rail indeed sucks and it needs to be unfucked before more money is dumped into it. None of the suckiness (slowness, high construction cost per mile, high ticket prices) is inherent to high-speed rail, though.