In addition to what others have said, I would argue that both cars and suburbs (which go hand-in-hand) atomize society and divide people from one another, while trains and dense cities are both pro-social. This may not have been intentional, but it nevertheless plays into the hand of the ruling class by preventing social socidarity.

The single family home in the suburbs trains the homeowner to behave as the lord of their little manor - neighbours are at best an unwelcome intrusion into this manorial fantasy (good fences make good neighbours), and at worst are petty enemies, whose housekeeping, yardkeeping, or decoration could affect my property value. Apartment living doesn’t have any shortage of potential problems with neighbours, of course, but they’re the ordinary interpersonal issues rather than bourgeois concerns about investments and property values.

Suburban living also trains the homeowner to be suspicious of any passers-by, as they could be potential enemies. Are they supposed to be here? Are they causing trouble? Vandals? Casing out targets for home invasions? When you’re the lord of your little manor, any outsiders walking the street are a potential army of marauders looking to sack and pillage. Trayvon Martin was murdered for walking around in the wrong neighbourhood, and his killer was acquitted - after all, why was he there? He looked (i.e. black) like he didn’t belong. Every suburban homeowner has an internet-connected doorbell camera, enabling them to keep watch for potential invaders, and that footage as a matter of course feeds directly into the surveillance panopticon.

Cars work in roughly the same way, in that they’re a little living room that you drive around town. An isolated purely private space into which any kind of intrusion is unwelcome at best and an attack at worst. All the other cars, despite being driven by other people, are faceless things which are once again an annoyance at best (they’re in your way, preventing you from driving at the speed you want) or a threat at worst, and since they’re multi-ton steel machines being driven by fellow self-centred suburban assholes like yourself, they literally are a threat. Every other person on the road could potentially kill you due to carelessness or malice. This promotes an atmosphere of pervasive distrust in which everyone else is an opponent of some kind - either an obstacle or actively hostile.

Cars and suburbs act synergistically to suppress community and social solidarity. You live in your isolated manor and pilot your carriage to your destinations, all the while insulated from the ouside world and from other people. Anything outside the car is not your problem so long as it doesn’t come back to your castle, so any time you see the rot in the poorer neighbourhoods of the inner city you only hope that it stays contained and your neighbourhood stays isolated. Public transit, especially mass transit via light rail, is therefore a potential disease vector for them to enter your neighbourhood. It must therefore be opposed.

Bullet trains are of course not light rail and don’t enable the poors to invade the suburbs, but to the suburban subject, it is still unwelcome - it wastes their tax dollars which could be better spent for them on their private affairs - the manor, the car, and other toys. Overall societal benefit is after all not a concern, the concern is with the private sphere.

The contiguous 48 states in the US cover a total of ~8 million square kilometers. Europe covers a total of ~10 million square kilometers. China covers a total of ~9 million square kilometers.

So… yeah…

I’d suggest to try the same reasoning with planes

Why compare to Japan when you can compare to China?

No. There are no passenger trains worth speaking of in the USA because the car industry likes it this way.

China is a very similar size to the USA and has an excellent and extensive high-speed rail network.

The USA could have this too, if it wanted to, but it doesn’t.

There are plenty of bullet trains in the US, shootings happen on them… like, all the time.

Oh, wait. You meant… nevermind.

my guy, the usa was built on the shoulders of a robust railway system.

the reason why it wouldn’t work now is because the automotive industry has absolutely ruined everything and americans have been conditioned over many years and multiple generations to regard any form of public service and infrastructure as “bad”, “pointless”, and “for poor people”, and so any attempt to actually modernize and fix any of these issues caused by car-dependency is quickly shut down by the ignorant.

California was working on a bullet train (California is pretty big, bigger than Japan). The politics killed it and then they ran out of money, so they gave up.

The US can barely keep bridges from falling apart. The roads are equally as bad. But we can definitely spend money on ball rooms and bombs.

Short answer: The automobile lobby prevents it.

Population density is not really a problem: Most of the country is virtually empty, but there are a series of urban agglomerations that have incredibly high density overall. The North-East corridor (DC to Boston, more or less) is the most obvious one, but Chicago and environment or Coastal California are great options, too.

The “secret” reason why it’s not happening is public indifference and corporate sabotage. A campaign of decades of worsening public transportation has made people convinced that a high speed train would be just for poor people, which they imagine to be someone else. Also, eminent domain land seizures are slow, environmental impact studies slower, and both force costly changes from original plan that the public hears about as cost-overruns.

Final nail in the coffin: in America, for bizarre reasons, passenger rail has lower priority than freight rail. The freight rail companies don’t want to give up the privilege, and obviously you can’t have a high speed service wait on freight trains bumbling by.

Nope

It’s all car lobbies, corrupt politicians, people doing everything possible to get rid of trains for people, get rid of bicycles in cities, everything needs to be designed for cars first, then whatever, turning every US (And Canadian and Mexican) city in a car park.

Hell, jaywalking as a concept was invented by car manufacturers because cars were killing so many people. Instead of doing something about the cars, we now just blame it on this invention from cars manufacturers.

Anything to push cars

Take a look at the Netherlands. It’s been working on less car for decades. It’s enormously densely populated and we simply don’t have the space for ginormous car parks and clogged road arteries. Back in the 1960’s they stopped the carification of cities and pushed for bicycle use and public transportation. Cars can get to most places still, but everything is principally designed for pedestrians, then cyclists, then cars. Most city centers block even bicycles, allowing people to walk only

The result? Moving about in the Netherlands is super easy, and the cities are amazing and safe. There are bicycle freeways, the cities are much quieter, the air is cleaner.

Other European cities finally followed suit in the past decade, with great results

Canada is trying a little bit of this in Vancouver, with mixed results because a lot of the designs they’re trying are designs everyone knew were bad and dangerous since back in the 1980s, but good on them for at least trying.

I know, you were talking about trains, and keep talking about bicycles, but it’s relevant. The two go together and should be implemented together.

Short distance, < 1 kilometers, people can and should walk. < 10 kilometers, bicycles. More than that, you use trains in between cities and busses for the less urban routes and inside the cities.

This is how it should be. People cycling are healthier. It generates less CO2, it pollutes less. Similarly, trains are way WAY more energy efficient and way less polluting than all those cars.

It’s just the politicians who keep being paid and lobbied to make sure car manufacturers can fill their pockets. Electric cars won’t change most of this, they only sort of solve the CO2 problem

China is bigger and has a great high-speed rail network.

wouldn’t being bigger make more sense to have bullet trains. the faster you go the less often you want stops.

The geographical distances also favor air traffic over anything on the ground. If the jet engine hadn’t come around, North America would have a great high speed rail network today.

Ignoring recent events in the middle east and their effect on pricing, even in Japan a flight from Tokyo to Osaka will beat the bullet train fare if you book it a month or more ahead of time. And that’s not on a budget airline. Japan gets a lot of praise for its bullet train network. But it’s really just one cash cow line (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto) and the rest is more often than not half empty. They run it because there is pork barrel politicking and because they can sell the flexibility and immediacy of hopping on a train in a downtown location in this network, on a whim (outside the holiday congestion). Japan is also a centrally organized country where the administrative sub sections (prefectures, cities, etc.) have less say in things.

And no local in their right mind would take the shinkansen to go from Kyoto to Osaka. That’s a 40min ride or so on the normal trains. The cost to time saving ratio is not good enough.

Cars ruin everything. The primacy of cars is upstream from a surprising amount of problems with modern life.