So how come America, with its proven track record of great highways, is totally impotent with high speed rails? The answer can't be just "American government doesn't work" or "the country is too big." Irrational mistrust against railways?
No, I'd say the German Autobahn system is the best in the world, followed by France (expensive) then UK, before USA.
USA is good because they tend to go to central cities, where European motorways deliver to a ring road. You can commute to work on a US motorway, but between cities they aren't special.
This is great if your only metric to measure is "could I possibly get there in a car."
This is terrible for pretty much every other factor, including
- neighborhood desirability: highways are terrible neighbors to live next to due to all the air pollution, noise pollution, visual impacts, and traffic impacts
- transport capacity: roads become congested far faster than other modes of transportation. Another issue is that pre-automobile neighborhoods are generally designed to distribute traffic across a grid, not concentrate it at highway exits and offramps.
- public health: the prioritization of the highway has caused a lot of asthma in high-density, low-income areas. The absolute primacy of the car and the creation of car-centric environments have also decimated active modes like walking and biking, or walking to transit, and this is probably a big factor in why Americans are less healthy than other developed countries' citizens.
- equity: highways today mostly run through low land value areas, because they were the cheapest to build and the citizens living there generally had the least political power. This was also intentional; many cities had the policy where bulldozing and splitting existing poor or minority neighborhoods to build highways was an "improvement" to remove "urban blight". As such, the impacts of highways in the US tend to fall disproportionately on the poor and minorities.
The US highway system is extremely impressive given the low population density.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
2. The US has the best freight and logistics rail system in the world. Existing rail right of way favors freight uses at the expense of passenger trains, which makes the passenger trains even less palatable. This is a feedback loop, where in turn rail ridership is low and gets even less resource share.
Convincing a generation that witnessed two world wars to back a massive defense project wasn’t difficult.
I can only think of highways as secondary runways for planes but I'm unsure as to how much that helps your case.
The interstate highway system was built in part for military purposes and partly designed by the Army:
So the idea that highways would be useful if there were an imminent threat of nuclear attack looks pretty silly.
Lower Manhattan on 9/11 was evacuated mostly by foot and sea, with over half a million evacuated by boat alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_response_following_Se...
>"We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09...
That's the standard story. From what I've read though, Eisenhower wanted to build the Interstate Highway System for a number of reasons of which defense was only one--and possibly a fairly minor one. But he knew that playing up the defense angle was a good strategy to get the plan passed.