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Many American cities, their suburbs, and their surrounding region have little to no public transportation infrastructure this forces everyone to drive everywhere for everything consuming vast sums of oil and generating vast sums of CO2. As well as also generating constant low density urban sprawl as more roads with very finite capacities must be built to keep pace.
Too often public transit planning in the US is left to local counties and city councils creating a very haphazard approach, curiously this doesn't happen with roads, what is needed is a statewide public transit authority to design and administer networks of:
* Regional and interurban rail linking regional population centers and rural areas with one another and cities.
* Commuter rail to and through a cities suburbia.
* Metro rail where appropriate in cities that warrant it but if they don't because a combination of commuter rail and streetcars working together make an adequate substitute in medium to low density cities that don't need a metro.
* And streetcars/lightrail on the road in and around city centers and surrounding urban areas and they can also be quite good in regional areas too - a large town might have a network of 3 or 4 or 5 routes and this can connect to the mainline railways and provide additional services in between the regional and interurban trains. The tram-trains in Germany have been very effective.
HSR should only come after this. Its seen as a fixall in America where there isn't any rail to begin with but you cant have HSR without conventional rail first - how do you get to the HSR? How do you get around when you arrive?
