If the Brightline project can't make this work, then no one can in the US. Florida has a large population, its densest clusters of population lie along a small

If the Brightline project can't make this work, then no one can in the US. Florida has a large population, its densest clusters of population lie along a small number of linear corridors, and it attracts many tourists and a fair number of business travelers. It has attractions and busy airports that will be nodes in such a system. It also has ideal rights-of-way mostly unobstructed. In the northeast there's infrastructure baggage, in the southwest there's unforgiving geography, and in the Midwest there's not a co-linear arrangement of multi-million-population metros, and in the Piedmont there's not a fortunate right-of-way for truly high-speed rail. Texas is the only other place to make this work, and they're trying too. But the problem is always that construction costs for these kinds of projects are way too high. In Europe, EU-wide transportation funds pay for renovating and building EU-designated corridors. Individual countries subsidize it too -- much like you'd expect with roads. This structural subsidy would be absent here, and US construction costs (including materials and wages) are high as well. This is a significant financial hurdle that neither road-based transport nor air transport has to contend with.