More and better trains are great... when they are connecting very dense areas that have a lot of traffic. Madrid's subway is great, and so is rail to nearby tow

More and better trains are great... when they are connecting very dense areas that have a lot of traffic. Madrid's subway is great, and so is rail to nearby towns, and high speed rail to Seville, Valencia and the like. But the value of rail drops precipitously as density decreases. In the US, we are basically allergic to the density required to make trains good. I look at, say, St Louis to KC: a route of ideal length for high speed rail. But on both sides of the train, the density just isn't there, so people would drive themselves to the station, and rent a car on the other side, and suddenly you might as well have driven yourself across. But sure, rebuild dense enough as to make subways, trains and walking the best modes of transportation, and the world would be pretty nice. it'll just cost, say, a few trillion to rebuild US cities that way. And the people that live far from the city center, and whose land values would probably drop massively wouldn't be all that happy.