re: Why can’t America have bullet trains?

I don't have an answer on this one.
But I wanted to give encouragement. Interesting question. Good one.

If it were profitable, we’d already have it

Go look up how the bullet train from LA to Sacramento is going.

10x over budget, already multiple years late, and less than 10% complete.

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We have these. That's why we don't need high speed rail.

Savvy?

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I'm not sure "we should never build any new infrastructure" is the way to go.

You know what the US has that China doesn’t have?

Private property.

In China people don’t own the land so there isn’t any issues with taking land to build the track.

Supply and demand, if a private company saw a way to make money with trains they'd be built. We already throw enough money away on Amtrak on the public side.

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Because America is incapable of building anything anymore.

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It’s going to cost $2B to rebuild the Baltimore bridge. By the time it’s done, it will be double that. When it collapsed, the estimates were $400M.

It’s all corrupt nonsense.

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It’s going to cost $2B to rebuild the Baltimore bridge. By the time it’s done, it will be double that. When it collapsed, the estimates were $400M.

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It took 13 months to build the Empire State Building.

It takes 5 years to replace/build 5 miles of a highway now.

The Baltimore bridge will probably take 5+ years.

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I'm not sure "we should never build any new infrastructure" is the way to go.

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No kidding

I could see why we don't need a nationwide network of high speed rail but there are places where it could make sense

Reason 1-




Reason 2-
The places people actually go are nowhere near each other:
Most visited US cities
1. New York
2. Miami
3. Los Angeles
4. Orlando
5. San Francisco
6. Las Vegas
7. Washington DC
8. Chicago

Even on the fastest train ever built by humans, most of these journeys are still going to be at least 7 hours. New York to Chicago is the same distance as Paris to Sarajevo.