Airplanes exist. The network of infrastructure in Europe isn't just trains...
Part of the problem in North America is that there's not adequate public transportation from airports to city centres (whether it's a train terminal or frequent buses), not enough trains from city centres to suburbs/outskirts and not enough buses in between or from town to town.
I recently went from Paris -> Prague as an example. So I walked from the hotel in St. Germain to a metro station, took the metro to the airport, hopped on a plane, landed in Prague, then took a bus to a metro terminal and the metro to downtown Prague. That's what it looks like. You could have the same in the US... I haven't spend a ton of time there but the airport I'm familiar with in Canada, YYC (Calgary) has terrible access to/from the airport. The cab industry basically has convinced the city to not run a train line to the airport, nor to have a proper bus schedule. You need a taxi or ride for no good reason.
You can do that in the US, you can't do it everywhere, but for the cities on the level of Prague and Paris you certainly can. Most of the major cities on the east coast and West Coast that's applicable and for Chicago.
Philly, DC, NYC, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, South Florida, LA, and the Bay area I've done entirely public transit trips many times to the major areas and that's covering a population larger than any EU country.
That doesn't change the fact that trains and public transportation in the US are crap.
In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?(in most cases you can arrive up to 5 minutes before the train leaves btw, no waiting)
It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries....
> In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?
No, but the way that is worded essentially the only form of travel that meets those criteria is high speed electric rail in a country with little to no fossil fuel usage in the electric grid. For various reasons, passenger rail isnt as viable in the US as Europe (population density, suburban sprawl, etc).
You absolutely can travel >1000km at >300km/h for next to nothing in the US though, since air travel is quite inexpensive.
throwawaynay says >"It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries...."
Certainly public transportation in USA lags Europe but there's no need to overstate the case. <sarcasm>It only took two world wars and innumerable smaller wars before that to get "Europe" to the point where it has "300km/h" trains.</sarcasm>
BTW I question the "300km/h" number: Only a few trains in Europe travel at that speed. Most trains in Europe are 10X slower. Many I could outrun on foot and many more on a bike.
As for "environmentally friendly" I remember when many European trains' toilets dumped fecal matter directly onto the space between the tracks (or do they still?). I'm still careful walking around railroad yards in Europe: one stumble and I could scratch my leg and catch God-knows-what from a 1970s-era Algerian turd dropped on the rails. "Railroad system as waste processing facility" comes to mind as a topic.
A little bit of poo like that isn’t going to hurt the environment to a degree at all comparable to the massive damage done by car pollution and tearing down forests and obliterating animal migration routes.
