High speed rail isn't for commuters - certainly not daily ones. You need cities appropriate distance apart that can occupy the tracks at a decent rate (so 1000

High speed rail isn't for commuters - certainly not daily ones. You need cities appropriate distance apart that can occupy the tracks at a decent rate (so 1000 passengers at 20tph). Commuter trains barely need to go much above 200, maybe 250kph. If you can supply say 20,000 passengers a hour for 15 hours a day - 300,000 passengers a day - then you just need the population centres. A 600kph maglev from New York to LA would take 7.5 hours. A flight takes 5.5 hours, so not much in it, especially if it were downtown to downtown. For New York to Chicago it would take about 2h10, same as a plane. Unlikely to provide 300k passengers, but if you added branches at each end and were routed Boston, NY, Washington branches meeting in western PA, then heading to Chicago (meeting a Toronto branch perhaps), Denver, Vegas then at the Western end splitting to LA, San Diego, Phoenix, San Francisco you might be able to occupy the bulk of the route tracks enough. Crucially you don't need to stop every train at every stop, as that adds big time penalties. Of course you're talking 6000km of maglev track minimum, and maglev means you can't just run it on traditional lines for the last 10 miles into the city.