Because choo-choos are inefficient and too much infrastructure.
Why pay for railroad ROW, redoing tracks at millions (yes, millions) a mile, when you can jump on a Southwest Airlines flight and get there faster, with existing infrastructure, already paid for.
There are three issues tied to this.
1. You need to have a Metro situation that works in city ‘A’ and as you exit in city ‘B’....the same type of structure exists where you don’t need a car. As far as I can see...only NYC and Washington DC qualify in this case. I can’t think of another location that offers city-wide Metro like you’d find in Paris, Berlin, or the Hague.
2. Even if you built a bullet train....it needs to go from city to city, with no stops in between. So you build it from LA to San Francisco....then you inform everyone along the way that they can’t hop on board. Why use it then?
3. Costs and environmental push-back. To suggest building a bullet-train between Chicago and Atlanta, to watch for the twelve-year court battle by environmentalists to prevent it. Why bother? Just build airports and launch planes.
[ Because choo-choos are inefficient and too much infrastructure. ]
Also take Japan, most of it’s cities are in a single line along it’s coast....
The USA is WIDE and LONG....
Plus we have to perform a multiyear environmental impact study before we even lay the first mile of track and if we find some dumb mouse that is living in it’s way we have to build around it or run another impact study.....
WE ARE TOO DUMB TO HAVE ONE WITH LIBERALS AT THE HELM...
Yes. Choo choos are very infrastructure heavy (and constant maintenance thereof) compared to the air that planes fly through, and the small infrastructure foot print of airports compared to rail lines. That fact is part of why rails are loved so much - they cost more to build, have huge infrastructure costs, create way more construction jobs and have far more opportunities for corruption. That is why they are always build as government command projects.
Don’t the airlines still run a commuter flights form LA to SF for little more than the cost of a bus ticket? Oh right, 911 killed that!
Don't you dare let the late great Willie choo-choo Green hear you say that!