>>1690233Meh, not really.
The "perfect distance" is, what? A 2-hour trip for a 4-hour lunch-meeting in a major city? 30 minutes so a condo owner by the station can access multiple job markets?
American businesses that need intercity travel have already compacted themselves to mega-cities with either good metro systems or giga-sized highways that are under-capacity outside of rush hour. You'd have to bill HSR as a lifeline to the dying small towns in between major cities, but they hate trains, government, and admitting they're dying, so that's never going to happen.
High-speed rail makes sense to countries with populations that can coordinate top-down resource saving strategies, which is definitely not America.
The only successful passenger rail lines in America are in corridors from before the invention of e-mail, or tourist lines. California might work, but only as a state-planned real-estate deflator.
