> I was speaking as 'in between in terms of population density' not literally in between geographically.

But that's the problem really. Once you get away from the coasts the population density really does fall off a cliff.

> They have cars because they have to have cars because there is no alternative. That's the whole point, you need public transit so people don't need to own cars.

Nobody is building public transit in a farm town. The people there don't even live in the town, they live on their farms and go into the town in their trucks to buy groceries and supplies.

> And guess what, the poor don't actually have to have cars.

If they live in farm country they do.

> And guess what, cars still require lots of government infrastructure that's really costly.

Roads in rural areas are a sunk cost. You need the roads for trucks and there is no incremental cost to using them for cars because there isn't going to be enough traffic to cause congestion regardless.

> A city to city transit system needs to be integrated with a regional and a local transit system.

A city to city transit system is going to have one or two train stops in each city. The city government knows where they are.

> I live in a city with 70k people and there is regular service to many villages and cities with 30k people or less.

How close together are these cities? 30 miles or 300?

> You can read about his recommendations for US travel including high speed rail there:

That map is kind of silly. If you're going to build high speed rail in the eastern US you build it parallel to I-95 from Boston to Miami and I-80 from New York to Chicago, and then they intersect in New York, the largest metro area in the US. Why does he have a separate line going through Springfield and Buffalo? And he has lines intersect in Albany?

Then he's trying to connect a bunch of mid-sized cities in the midwest with non-functional mass transit systems because they're too spread out, where you would get off the train and have nowhere to go.

It's trying to be clever and make it complicated. Two lines parallel to the two highways and you get 90% of the benefit for 30% of the cost.

(It's also adorable that he wants to put high speed rail through Detroit. Come on, guys, think about local culture for a second when you're evaluating prospective adoption.)

And this is kind of my point. You have some sensible kernel of an idea, like hey let's do high speed rail between the biggest cities on the East Coast, and then it turns into this over-complicated boondoggle.

> Passenger rail even in population dense regions is hard to make profitable, specially if you want to have high frequency and allow service from early morning to late night. If you had to build new infrastructure form the ground up its hard to justify.

Offering more frequent service for longer hours makes it easier to build new infrastructure because you have more trains to amortize it over.

You can make something arbitrarily unprofitable by adding unprofitable lines until they consume all of the money from the profitable ones. That's not the same thing as being hard to make profitable.

> Thinking about profitability first is just a generally bad idea when talking about infrastructure.

It's not so much profitability as cost effectiveness. Spending money to build or operate a rail line to the middle of nowhere that nobody is going to use is wasteful and unnecessary. But Amtrak does this.