Yeah, we've hosted a lot of exchange students from Europe and Japan and the car dependency to do anything is consistently the biggest culture shock. Even the Russian kid was like "Dude, wtf", though in all fairness, he was from St. Petersburg.

The primary issue is that American government, at all levels, is pathologically incapable of doing anything whose ROI interval is longer than about a year.

It's not even properly HSR. IIRC Brightline operates in the realm of high(er) speed rail, which is, like 150 mph or something. Faster than conventional Amtrak (a lot of Amtrak's trains and routes technically can get up to 90-110 mph, but rarely achieve or maintain those speeds because they're sharing the right of way with much slower freight rail), but slower than true HSR. Brightline owning their right of way is a much bigger deal than the fact that they can go 40mph faster than conventional Amtrak's theoretical top speed. All of Amtrak's trains could jam hard if they owned their own track. Take the coast starlight from LA to Seattle, for example. It's currently a 36 hour trip, but if they could actually maintain 100mph, the trip would be closer to 11 hours (1135 mi/ 100 mph, miles cancel our, leaving 11 and change hours). I know they'd still have to stop at the stations and slow through towns, but my point still stands. An 11 or 13 hour train trip from LA to Seattle would be a lot more reasonable than 36 hours. As it stands, going anywhere by Amtrak is basically the same speed or a little slower than travelling by car, which is, frankly, fucking ridiculous.