>I don't really think that was in the cards. The car was already prevalent before the interstate system was built, and the military was much more about a road solution than rail.

These are policy decisions. Other countries chose to invest in rail. The US chose to invest in other forms of transportation and created adverse policy conditions in which rail largely withered and nearly died. I made another comment [1] where I talk about the political milieu that likely contributed to this.

I would also call out the fact since WW2, the US has lost more than half its railroad route-miles (300,000+ to ~147,000 today). Other countries had to rebuild their infrastructure after the destruction of the war. No bombs were dropped on American railroads. Aside from figurative bombs of bad policy by political leaders, competitors in automotive/airlines, and the deeply ignorant idea that railroads and trains are an obsolete 19th century technology.

>As to cost, look at California trying to add high speed rail, as they have failed badly for what was a very modest set of served areas.

I am well aware of the California HSR project and its many failings. It has nothing to do with anything inherent to rail technology. I view it as symptomatic of and the inevitable result of a broken political system, poor project management, a Transportation/Construction-Industrial Complex (similar to the Military-Industrial Complex), monied special interests like construction and engineering contractors run wild with no oversight, capturing the agencies they work for and transferring as many public dollars into their bank account.

Alon Levy’s blog Pedestrian Observations [2] covers transportation construction costs extensively, and generally calls out Anglo countries (UK, USA, CAN, AUS) as the most troubled. There’s also the Caltrain-HSR Compatibility Blog [3], Systemic Failure [4], and others in the technical transportation commentary space.

>Rail has some serious problems with terminal delivery of people in the US. You still need another form of transportation to get people home. Without fundamentally changing where people live or work, it needs something else.
>Electric, Automated trains still don't reach people's homes. You are not going to change the fundamental idea of living in suburbs or the country. In fact, current events make living away from the cities a good option. The cost of rail in the USA is too high even for states that really want it. It will be much easier to alter how the USA builds roads to add cues for automation than try to add rail everywhere.

There is an access problem or first/last mile problem, but rail does not exist in a vacuum. It can work in concert with buses, taxi/rideshare, friend/family pickup/dropoff, biking, walking, etc. as part of a larger comprehensive transportation network. Rail can act as the high capacity core of the network. A pair of optimized, electric, modern signaled rail tracks with has the transportation capacity equivalent of a 8-10 lane highway. This should be taken advantage of, then use lower capacity/higher flexibility transport for the first and last mile problem. Otherwise we continue have a congestion problem with transportation network centered around single occupant vehicles (SOVs), or even zero occupants with autonomy. Autonomous vehicles do not fix that, if anything it makes it worse.

Without getting into third rail politics unique to post-WW2 American suburbs/rural life and notions of “freedom,” historically trains were one of the primary form of mechanized land transport for about century, from the mid 1800s to well into 1900s. Suburbs were originally enabled by rail during this period (e.g. NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA metro areas), many of suburbs grew up around a local railroad or streetcar system, and their historic downtowns are often next to a rail station [5][6]. It was only later, we got auto oriented suburbs where you need a car to get anywhere. These were decisions, we could choose to create transit oriented communities, including suburbs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651127
[2] https://pedestrianobservations.com/
[3] http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/
[4] https://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_town