I mean, does the population density in the US support bullet trains? I know that both Japan & China for example have large population density within each city (whether you live in Osaka heading for Kobe or from Shanghai to Beijing, you get the picture) plus the governments of both countries invest heavily on the infrastructure including maintenance.
Distance is another factor between destinations, like from Nagoya to Kyoto it’s only 130km (80mi) and the commute by bullet train is 33 minutes while from New York to DC it’s 226mi taking you 4 hours by car but via bullet train, the commute time is less than it would be from driving alone. The cities in Japan are closer to each other by comparison.
China is a large country (not big as let's say like Russia in terms of land size) alongside varying topography and climates (they can still install tracks in uneven terrain but adjusting how they are installed), although their population is larger than the US (they have about more than 1.4 billion people as a country while the US is about 348 million).
The taxes work differently across countries, like in both Japan & China: they have the funds gathered from taxation allowing them to maintain constant upkeep or make further improvements. Well, what does the US government spend their taxes on? That in itself also lies the question whether the taxes citizens are already paying are worth it.
Taxes exist in all countries regardless, as governments need funding to maintain and improve infrastructure, roads, schools, hospitals, etc. The real question is: how is the government using that money? For example, in Japan the reason why public transport is considered reliable is due to their government using people's taxes for upkeep & bullet trains.
12 Jul 2026 17:18
Tracks are owned buy companies that are moving goods, not people. Goods that mostly don’t need to be anywhere in a hurry as long as a lot get delivered. So you get mile long trains.
The US is big and populations aren’t concentrated. Trains wouldn’t stop where people need to go.
The us had coasts and inland waterways so moving things along the water was cheaper than rail.
The US is young compared to other countries and don’t develop rail for moving people like Europe and Russia.
We built an interstate road system, and had cheap gas and vehicles. No need for rail.
Do we need bullet trains? Yes. But labor is too expensive now. Linking the west coast cities together and getting to Chicago and the Gulf of Mexico somehow makes the most sense. We need a big push from the feds to make it happen though.
If it were me as pres I would make it a matter of natl security and have the military do most of the work.
12 Jul 2026 17:38
Generally the US is pretty anti-climate, especially currently, and pretty anti public transportation. There's been a lot of talk about how the US looks exactly like what you'd get if the car industry did a shit ton of lobbying, like pedestrian-unfriendly urban design, jaywalking laws and that sort of shit. Exact prices and landscapes and such don't particularly matter if nobody ever has any incentive to do the thing.
12 Jul 2026 17:39
Population density is definitely part of it - the only places where it would make sense is on the coasts, and that land is already in use.
If you could get past the land-use issues, where would they run? Boston to Miami is 1500 miles. If a train was built there (again, assuming land use wasn't an issue) - where would it stop? How long could it maintain those speeds?
Anywhere it
didn't stop, why would those towns/cities/states support their tax dollars going to such an investment?
Then there's the Final Mile problem - how would people get around once they got somewhere?
I've ridden trains in Europe - they work there for multiple reasons. One is density, but there's also that Europe infrastructure either didn't exist prior to WWII or what did exist got heavily damaged. They
had to invest in trains,
country by country post-WWII. It wasn't like there was a Grand Europe Train Plan as many countries were still antagonistic at the time, and the train system incompatibilities that still exist reflect this.
What Europe has today is a result of a long, slow development of infrastructure and political relationships.
There's lots more involved, but even these things show how different Europe is from the US - it takes
sixteen OECD countries to equal the landmass of the US, divided between 50 states.
Imagine trying to build the Western Europe rail system(s) today if it didn't exist, and much of that land was currently in use for manufacturing or farming.
Apples and oranges.
12 Jul 2026 17:41
The auto companies successfully lobbied the government to abandon passenger trains and build highways instead, basically. (That way we'd all be forced to buy their products thanks to the transportation ecosystem.)
Lots of cities are getting commuter trains though. Mine just built two expansions to our rail line. It's a slow process, but essential.
12 Jul 2026 17:48
Because the US generally doesn't use passenger trains as transport in the first place, as people use cars or other road vehicles. Those provide some benefits that rail doesn't: the road network is much more extensive than the rail network, so it can provide transport more-or-less directly to a door.
The US rail network is designed around freight transport rather than passenger transport, stuff where the time value of transporting the cargo is lower. FWIW, the US moves more freight
per capita by rail than does Japan or China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage#Tonne-kilometres_of_rail_transport_per_year
The measurement years vary a bit, but it should be about right. For 2020, the US moved 2,105 billion metric ton-kilometers. China in 2025 moved 3,687 metric ton-kilometers. For 2014, Japan moved 21 billion metric ton-kilometers (I'd guess, without looking at Japan's modal breakdown, that given that Japan is an archipelago, it's probably like Europe, which is a bunch of peninsulas, and doesn't use freight rail much, with a lot of the difference being made up by relying on ship with road freight covering the last bit). In
per capita terms, freight rail usage is about 6.17 gigatonne-km/million people for the US, 2.62 gigatonne-km/million people for China, and 0.17 gigatonne-km/million people for Japan.
12 Jul 2026 17:49
You are not informed enough to talk about this.
Do not think the only gaps you had is what I'm addressing, or that this now makes you knowledgeable enough to speak on the topic:
Tracks are owned buy companies that are moving goods, not people
Public funding built the tracks, then railroad corporations bought it cheap saying they'd pay maintenance. Instead they bought insurance, let accidents happen. Then double dip from insurance and federal emergency relief for toxic spills.
The US is big and populations aren’t concentrated. Trains wouldn’t stop where people need to go.
The freight already goes where people are and it comes from another location people are...
And again, they weren't planned/built to just move freight, line were laid to move people between citities.
The US is young compared to other countries and don’t develop rail for moving people like Europe and Russia.
Fucking rail settled the west bub...
We built up faster than Europe, because there's that whole "desert thing" in the middle of America on one half, and mountains on the other.
We built an interstate road system, and had cheap gas and vehicles. No need for rail.
A century after the interstate train system, which was built before the Model T was invented....
12 Jul 2026 17:50
I'm sure the rest of your comment is helpful and informative, but that first sentence got you a downvote from me.
You can add to someone's point or even correct them without telling them they can't talk about something.
12 Jul 2026 17:55
Lemmy
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