Comment by piva00

> but we have a car-centric society here because they are physically required for the majority of Americans to get from A to B, and there is literally no way of fixing that.

The majority of Americans trying to get from A to B are driving less than 60 km/day, a distance which trains can cover pretty damn fast.

For longer travel you could have high speed trains on both coasts' corridors, very few people are traveling NYC -> LA on a regular basis, most people will travel on their surroundings (500-1000 km).

You could have a multimodal system covering the most important urban corridors, rural places would almost always need cars due to the low density but it's a big fat lie that the USA is car-centric because it's the only solution for its size.

The only reason you are a car-centric country in 2024 is because of incentives for the car industry, the design of your cities being stuck in car-centric mindset from the 1950s-1960s.

You don't need to give up cars completely, you just need infrastructure to not require a car for people traveling around your major urban centres. High speed rail corridors between Seattle - Portland - San Francisco - Los Angeles - Las Vegas - Phoenix, another corridor from Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - Baltimore - DC branching out to Pittsburgh - Cleveland - Detroit - Chicago. With those you cover a lot of the major economic centres.

China is also massive and they've managed it.

Except for some new shiny skyscraper, the USA feels more backwards each time I visit, like the country is stuck in the 1980s-1990s and refuses to be updated to how a modern country can be in 2024.