People ride passenger rail where it makes sense. The acela line being a good example. But if they built a high speed rail between Texas and Ohio, nobody would ride that, because flying would still be faster. We could build some HSR between major cities in Texas, Florida, California, and the Northeast corridor, but it would account for a handful of straight railways. There are major problems with building these (California is several billion over budget on their high speed rail and I don't think they've even started building), so the criticism of US overregulation is valid, but the main reason we don't have as extensive of a passenger rail system is because it wouldn't be economically viable in a country as sparsely populated as the united states

Many areas of the USA have population densities entirely comparable with large parts of Europe. The upper-central midwest (eastern MN, WI, IL, IA) is a good example - it compares favorably to most of France or Germany.

This is another example of how it is almost always a mistake to use a unitary description of anything when it comes to the USA. Yes, certainly where I live (New Mexico), population density is extremely low and long-haul rail transportation likely makes little sense. But talk about that as if it applies to "the united states" is a category error.

It’s common to travel between European counties by rail instead of plane. In fact I’ve done this myself.

It's fairly common, but even in Europe, it's frequently cheaper to fly than to take a train, unfortunately. I would not point to Europe as a place that does passenger rail extremely well; that honor goes to Japan. Europe might be better than the US at it, but that's not saying much.

In the US southwest, it's not the distance, it's the very small numbers of people who are moving around that is the problem.

Not to mention the other issue: even if it's easy to get into another city via rail, how do you get from the train station to your final destination? Very few cities have public transit anywhere close to NYC's. Of course flying has the same issue, but the airport has a car rental desk.

Or avoid that entirely by driving your own car.

This is another part of infrastructure Europe generally does better: inner city public transport.

There are some European cities that are still car dominated, however quiet a few are easier to navigate via public transport and some have even gone as far as entirely banning private cars from the city centre.

I remember these things called taxis. But I'm an old, and I think they've been replaced by something called "Ubers" and "Lyfts". But don't mind me ...

Which are expensive.

Sorry, I meant to reply to the person before you about how people chose to fly rather than go by rail.

It’s an ironic comment to make, given the U.S. was literally built using railways. Passenger railways covered the entire U.S. long before highways ever did.

The only reason why passenger rail doesn’t exist today, is because the U.S. chose to stop investing in rail, and instead chose to only invest in car infrastructure. There’s was a huge period where auto manufacturers were buying up local rail and trams systems, for the sole purpose of running them into the ground, and forcing people into cars instead.

There’s absolutely no reason you can’t build high speed passenger rail today. High speed rail takes up less space than a highway, for far higher speeds and capacities. And building high speed rail using highway style construction in one of the most cost effective ways of building passenger rail (it’s how countries like France can build high speed rail at such low costs).

For some reason nobody thinks it’s silly to link up U.S. cities with highways, but for some reason, rail is too hard (despite being the faster, higher throughput, and more economical, form of transportation).