As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
Unpopular opinion, but I really don't see why we should want high speed rail in the first place.  It's slower than flying on a commuter airline, but the tickets cost nearly as much, and it's also enormously expensive to build.  Then there's also the issue of throughput and last mile logistics.  You're limited to putting people in a few train cars, as opposed to a continuous stream of people on a freeway.  Being a high speed train, stops are necessarily few and far between, so once you arrive at the station you still have to figure out how to travel tens of miles to where you really want to go.My perception is that it's a huge money pit for something that's quite frankly inferior to our current infrastructure.  We would be much better off improving our current insterstate system.