this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Given several more developed nations have solved the distance problem using trains, I don't think space between cities is much more than a talking point. Need somewhere to put the farmlands anyhow.
Yes it has been solved in other countries...with 1/5 the land mass of the US. That's the problem as I mentioned.
Every major US city aside from LA has both local and long distance train networks, and they are heavily utilized. These cities were not planned around walking or rail though. Most US cities didn't even hit what constitutes as "Urban" density until after the advent of the car,.so everything is built around cars. Reclaiming land to focus on ped or rail after the fact is in quite difficult.
Case in point, the California high speed rail project which has blown Billions of dollars over more than a decade and has yet to manifest anything usable. That's just one state, and only serving a handful of cities. Doing this in a national scale as Japan has done is just not going to happen when Air Travel is faster.
The priciest bit of rail per mile is in cities because of the stations and land use, but even those are one time costs. If we magically moved two cities in Japan 5x further apart, it wouldn't cost 5x the amount to install the rail to connect them. When considering maintenance costs, a comparison to highways wouldn't be close.
Rail infrastructure across America is mostly dedicated to freight, with passenger travel taking a literal back seat. Comparing rail to air isn't exactly apples to apples considering how artificially cheap domestic air travel is permitted to be.
California's rail situation is an entire can of worms on its own. My underlying point is that the type of cities shown in this post are possible everywhere. All it really takes is willpower.