Distances you can travel on a European train in less than a day
You commonly hear that it's ridiculous for California to try to build a high-speed rail network, because people are "so far apart". But France -- a nation called out in this article for being well-connected by high-speed trains, is about the same vertical height as California. It's a bit wider.<p>If you place the northern tip of France on the northern border of California, the southern tip of France lands just north of San Diego. We have about 40 million people; France has about 60 million.<p>Japan (another country with great trains), is about the same vertical distance north/south as the west coast of the US. And while Japan's population is crammed into the coastline of an island nation where it's expensive to build, we have gobs of open space where it's comparatively cheap to run rail.<p>There's simply no excuse. Sure, it doesn't make sense to try to make a high-speed train across the country, but we should have <i>great</i> regional rail systems in the US. The east/west coasts, in particular, should be corridors for rail -- if you can get from Kagoshima to Tokyo in 6 hours by Shinkansen, there's no reason you couldn't get from New York to Miami in the same amount of time.