If you’re just one person a train can be attractive if you have reasonable transportation to and from the station. A car gets really cheap once it’s a family of 4. Planes also offer significant time savings for a comparable price.

California seems to be good at infinite money extraction for rail that never finishes.

For context, a flight is already 6.5 hours and cost 350-400. To have comparable speed it would only take building two complete mag level rails.

Chicago to nyc is currently a 20 hour train or a two hour flight. High speed rail would be a massive expense to get a best case scenario of maybe 4 hours. The flight just makes more sense for people. Both cities have good rail options for inter city transport, or even out to suburbs.

America has trains. We use them for freight because it doesn’t care if it sits for a while or takes weeks to cross the country. Much of the US is too spread out for trains to be super useful for passengers. The areas that make sense do have reasonable passenger rail usage, mostly the east coast metropolis and Chicago to nearby cities.