I mean, the NY transit system will take you pretty much anywhere in an area with a population of 8M. For scale, note that New York State alone is about 4x larger than Taiwan. I agree that having walkable cities is a good thing but it's not like all of the US is one giant suburb, and it's not like the US has anywhere near the density that would be required to justify "high speed rail across the whole country, just an hour away"
The US is plenty dense for hsr. The population is highly concentrated on a few regions. For example, a single trunk line from Vancouver/Seattle/Portland/SF/LA/SD would cover, what, 40 million people?
A similar trunk from Boston through to Florida would cover another 100 million.
These are absolute no-brainers. Obviously people going from Boston to Miami may still choose to fly, but all the destinations point to point between will be much faster by rail.
The best time to start doing this was 50 years ago, but now is also a good time.
