The other problem is - if we were to achieve some sort of high-speed service between major cities - what do you do for transportation once you get there with the limited intra-city service many larger cities now have. Couple that with many businesses not be located in city-center, it makes it almost necessary to rent a car when you get to the destination to then reach the final destination.
If you think of high speed rail as an airplane substitute (which it certainly is for daytime trips that happen to be under three hours by train for people who have been taking airplanes), it turns out that this is not a problem that is unique to the train that we didn't have before with the airplane.
I also think this makes an excellent argument for having Auto Train like service on the high speed tracks, at least where there is sufficient track capacity left over after establishing all the passenger only service anyone could want. The Chunnel demonstrates that this type of service can be workable at faster speeds than 79 MPH.
If the high speed tracks are built as only double track, it would be highly desireable to make the high speed auto trains go as fast as the passenger trains to maximize track capacity in an environment where passing isn't really pratical, but I suspect building rail cars that will hold at least one level of automobiles and that can go at 220 MPH or whatever speed we end up with for passenger service will probably be doable.
I suspect that high speed tracks from New York to Chicago, New York to St Louis or so, and New York to Boston may be full just carrying a variety of passenger trains, if we assume that each track can carry 18-25 trains per hour, and not providing Auto Train like service in those areas may make a lot of sense for that reason; on the other hand, that also tends to be the part of the country with better intracity rail service.
I'm also not sure if California will have enough high speed track capacity to enable everyone who currently likes to drive between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the highways to bring their very own car with them on the train. This may be an argument that if our goal is to reduce air polution and oil imports, the pricing structure on the train needs to make taking the train plus renting a car for a couple days cheaper than intercity driving. Maybe there ought to be a discount on railfare for people who rent cars, and discounts for parties of more than one person (since the cost of a five person party going by automobile equals the cost of a one person party going by automobile). Maybe a good price structure would be one that provided 80% of the cost of car rental for up to 3 days or so or a local mass transit pass for up to 7 days as a discount on the intercity ticket.
Example: I lived and worked in central Ohio for many years before retirement. I traveled sometime 3 times a week between Columbus and Cleveland or Columbus and Cincinnati. There was talk of rail service between those cities for years, and still is that talk. But my problem would have been - I lived 30 miles from the center of Columbus and the offices I traveled to in Cleveland and Cincinnati were 30 miles from city center in those places. I would have to get myself downtown Columbus to catch a train and then get myself from downtown Cleveland/Cincinnati to the office by renting a car.
Even if there turns out to be enough track capacity for a high speed Auto Train like service from Cleveland to Cincinatti, I'm not sure if it would save time vs driving. Google Maps tells me that's 142 miles, and about 2.5 hours of driving. If loading the cars takes an hour, the train trip takes an hour, and unloading the cars takes another hour, that's going to be slower than driving. Maybe it's possible to get the train time including loading and unloading competitive with driving, though; I'm not sure.
Bottom line, unlike much of Europe, no local transportation defeats the entire process for many, not all, granted, but that needs to be fixed, too.
Many very large cities in the US don't have this problem. Taking a train to downtown Chicago, NYC, Boston, etc allows you to get local transportation to your final destination without a car rental.
Yes, we do need better local transportation.
Even in Boston, which is relatively good at rail transportation as US cities go, there's a lot of room for improvement.
The Green Line is going to be getting about 4 or 5 new stops in Somerville and Medford within the next decade or so. This is a relatively cheap thing; once the Lechmere tracks are rearranged to connect to the existing Commuter Rail rights of way, the rest of the new route is already fully grade separated (I think) and wide enough for the Green Line; no tunnels or bridges needed except at the inbound end of the new segment.
Some of us would like to see the two downtown commuter rail terminals connected so that commuter trains would be through routed.
The Red Line of the subway does not connect directly to the Blue Line; the downtown end of the Blue Line at Bowdoin is about a quarter mile from the Charles/MGH station on the Red Line, and there's a plan to design (but not necessarily build) a tunnel to connect them.
More frequent service would be good on just about all of the parts of the rail system; while the waiting time at rush hour for the subway is typically just fine, subway cars tend to be quite crowded at rush hour. (I went downtown for a medical appointment Monday morning, a bit after 9 AM, and the car I was in was packed full. This can't have been the peak commute time; I suspect there are lots of office workers who absolutely have to be at work by 9 AM who would have been late for work if they'd been on that train.)
There's talk of incrementally upgrading the Fairmount Line of the commuter rail system to have properties that would more resemble the service frequencies and station spacings of a subway line; I'm disappointed that the state is moving so slowly on that, and at the same time, I'm concerned about whether they're designing the stations with the idea that someday we will want quad track along that line, with two of the tracks not ever making station stops on that line (for express passenger trains, and to provide a route for freight trains from Conley Terminal where the container ships unload to the rest of the railroad system).
When the southern part of the current Orange Line was built in the mid to late 1980s, we lost rail service along two corridors. (The truncation of the E branch of the Green Line is ``temporary'', but it makes the whole Sunset Limited thing look like it hasn't been going on for long at all.) It turns out that the buses along at least part of those corridors are among the five most popular MBTA bus routes as weekday boardings go; I think we ought to be looking at building subway tunnels along those routes. (The E branch of the Green Line ran in the automobile lanes, and the removed Orange Line was elevated, so there are good reasons for not restoring service in exactly the same form it used to take.)
There's been talk of extending the Blue Line out to Lynn. The state government is claiming they want to make this happen in a decade or two, but they don't seem terribly anxious to come up with the money, which really would be key to actually making it happen.
Even if all of these things happen, if I want to visit a friend in Framingham, I may still find that renting a car would save me at least an hour of travel time in each direction vs taking the train and getting a ride from the Framingham commuter rail station.
