&gt; To be more exact here, 63% of those surveyed stated an interests in utilizing high-speed rail service if it was available.<p>That&#x27;s asking the wrong question, though. The issue is not so much whether people would, in the abstract, have an interest in using high-speed rail as a hypothetical means of transportation. The first challenge is figuring out <i>where</i> to place the rail - trains can only travel on tracks, so the train routes need to connect highly-trafficked (source, dest) pairs in order to be useful. And the second challenge is figuring out how to do this for a price that justifies the costs. (Even if the project is taxpayer funded, the costs include the opportunity cost - what other projects that tax money could have been spent on).<p>Two-thirds of Americans would use high-speed rail if it connected their home city with their most frequently-visited destination city. But that&#x27;s not the same as saying that two-thirds would use high-speed rail if it connected, say, LA and SF, or NYC and DC. The question is, would enough people use <i>those</i> routes in order for the project to justify its costs?<p>The question isn&#x27;t entirely useless - for example, if only 1% of the country demonstrated an interest in using high-speed rail, we could probably stop there. (Even if it connected NYC and LA, the two largest cities, there&#x27;s no way the traffic would cover the opportunity cost of the project). But as stated, this survey tells us pretty much nothing new - we already knew that there&#x27;s an abstract interest in high-speed rail, but what we <i>don&#x27;t</i> know is how to convince people that we have a cost-effective way of building out the tracks between the most-important destination hubs[0].<p>[0] We sort of do know what the most-important destination hubs are, because it&#x27;s not <i>that</i> different from the most-trafficked Amtrak routes and flight routes in a given region. Yes, you can make the argument that high-speed rail rail should serve the areas that aren&#x27;t currently well-served by other transportation means, but keep in mind that those also tend to be the less-populated areas to begin with, which means that the challenge of recouping the costs of the project is even greater.