What is your opinion regarding building high speed rail lines in America?

You’re quite right, I think, that high-speed rail is best when combined with short-range transportation options at each station so people can get around entirely without cars.

The U.S. has a natural disadvantage of large distances between cities except the NorthEast corridor (Wash D.C. to Boston) and along the California coast. And in general our cities are spead out into suburbs.
But the NorthEast corridor seems like the best area for high-speed rail as the cities along that line do have more public transport available than most. (Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wash D.C. have pretty good public transportation systems)
Seems to me that both the Dallas-Houston and the Miami-Orlando-Tampa have that frustrating combination of a lot of traffic between them (good candidates for rail) but little supporting public transport within any of those cities (not so good).

As a side note my husband and I sometimes use the train between Tampa and the east coast of Florida, and the train stops in quite a few smaller cities along the way. Some of the towns are lovely, the train lets out right in the center of town. I don’t mind that it is a typical slowish train, I mind that the trains need renovating badly. If they just renovated I think it would attract more passengers. I also wish there was cheaper public transportation to get me to the train station, because I don’t live downtown. I grew up in NY and DC where we commonly thought of the train as an option for travel. When I lived in NC and TN, most people I knew rarely considered the train as an option for travel. There is a rail in Memphis that goes north to Chicago and south to New Orleans.

Southwest airlines has traditionally fought hard against any rail improvements in TX for obvious reasons.

Also, I think Amtrak should consider another route for an auto train. There is only one now. Northern Virginia to Central Florida just north or Orlando and back. I took it to move to Florida when I graduated college. My grandmother used to use it with her boyfriend when they came down for several weeks.

I think it would be great, we are woefully behind in this rational alternative to flying. We are facing an ongoing battle over getting high speed rail built in California between San Francisco and LA.

I’m a big fan, but only if we do it right. I really love the idea of the Hyperloop. The LA-Vegas high speed train is going to be super slow compared to every other high speed train in the world. That’s pathetic. We should be pushing the envelope to build things faster, not slower.

I’d like to see a train that paralleled I-95 connecting DC with Boston and hitting Baltimore, Philly, and NYC on the way. If they could get the speeds up, it could compete with air travel for commuters.

@gorillapaws While high speed would be best, I love taking the Acela from NY to DC, much more civilized than the hassle of flying, and when you consider security lines and time to and from airports, it is faster!

Sorry for my ignorance but do you not have High speed rail lines in America ?
I live in the United Kingdom

@andgemvicdyl No, we don’t have real high speed rail, just a few express trains in a few corridors.

@andgemvicdyl ... sadly, “high-speed” rail here just means it’s faster than a freight train.
The Acela does hit a top speed over 150mph between Boston and Connecticut but top speed the rest of the way to Wash D.C. is 135mph.
Compared to European, Japanese, and Chinese high-speed rail this service is a cow.

An article about the Acela service written
shortly after it opened in 2001.

I think that not going all the way out West would be a mistake. The Seattle/Tacoma area is a major port and industrial (especially aerospace) area. so you’d have to hit the Northwest. San Diego and/or Los Angeles would also be required to hit the highly populated SoCal metroplex. In other words, you’d pretty much have to connect the major population centers at a cost comparable to air travel in order for it to be worthwhile.

Sadly, like many other things, the US falls FAR behind the rest of the industrialized world, and would rather fall to Third World status than upgrade it’s crumbling infrastructure even to where many other nations were twenty years ago; there is virtually no chance of us getting to 2014 First World standards before 2039, and even that is optimistic as we seem top be backsliding in some ways.

America being such a vast country with so many states and time lines and climates High Speed rail lines would be a great benefit to the Population , giving grater choice for ways in which you travel and better access right across the USA . I just can not imagine never ever visiting a beach or living in a cold /snow region and never knowing any different ,in UK its cold when its cold and warm when its warm .I belief it would encourage people to visit and relocate to be honest I had this belief that the USA have Bigger , Faster , just about everything .