I went from San Jose to SF which is about 1h 35min for a distance that's slightly less than Basel to Zurich, once you get there. There's two major factors that

I went from San Jose to SF which is about 1h 35min for a distance that's slightly less than Basel to Zurich, once you get there. There's two major factors that make it slow for me: One, American trainstations are often far away from town centers. Two, BART stops everywhere even though it's quite a sizeable distance. For these distances we'd typically have an interregional connection that only stops 3-4 times. Basel Zürich takes about 55min btw. and you arrive right in each city's center, with tons of public transport to connect you further. SF main station by comparison looked tiny to me, with less connections than lots of Swiss towns with maybe 200k inhabitants have. And I'm not even talking about HSR, for that have a look at Paris to Lyon or Tokyo to Osaka for some example.