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.

Ehhhh, I tend to think the distances are less important than the fact of the infrastructure being prohibitive to set up.

Trains like that can't just be dropped onto the existing rail network. I mean, even if the rails p tracks we have would allow them to operate at speed, it would be a nightmare getting them to mesh with existing rail traffic. You'd lose the high speed factor, defeating the purpose.

So, even in individual states, where the distances are closer to what you'd see in japan, it's not a net practical solution without some serious rejiggering.

You could likely get some lines done anyway, like from D.C. to a few major cities on the east coast. But would there really be a benefit? Would it reduce highway traffic significantly? Would it be safer and more efficient than existing passenger rail? I genuinely have no idea, but there would be a need for that kind of thing to make it worth building out. If it's just shifting a small fraction of city-to-city commute, I don't know that or would be worth the massive project it would take

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

the reason why it wouldn't work is because the automotive industry has absolutely ruined everything and people 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.

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.

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

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

Short answer: The automobile lobby prevents it.

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.

Owning a vehicle is already a necessity. That and trucking make a lot of the highway infrastructure needed already so there’s less incentives to invest elsewhere.

Also can’t really think of many places a large number of people over the day need to transit back and forth. And if there are cases - there might already be a train or bus route.