High speed rail is actually inching forward in the United States, with a private company planning to connect the two urban areas starting in 2028. Here are some factoids from this article:

• The route will be built primarily along an interstate highway median. This makes huge sense to me since the U.S. interstate highway system is secretly one of the world’s great feats of infrastructure financing and construction. It might be because we spent so much money and effort on it that we haven’t been able to pull off anything else comparable in the last half century. It might be hard to imagine as the autonomous vehicle hype bubble seems to have burst, but autonomous vehicles are eventually going to increase the capacity and reduce the congestion of U.S. highways. When that happens, we might be able to give over some of the real estate freed up to bullet trains, a true smart grid, solar panels, or whatever else we need to connect the country.
• The Los Angeles end will be at a suburban commuter rail station. I guess this makes sense since most people don’t live in downtown Los Angeles and will need to get to dispersed locations in the metro area. And let’s just face it, people are going to drive to the train station and there is already going to be parking there. It does mean the real trip from downtown LA to downtown Las Vegas will be a lot more than the advertised two hours, for anyone actually doing that trip.
• It got a mix of federal grants and tax-exempt loans. This makes sense too since the highways and airports in the country are heavily subsidized, whether we like to admit it or not. The total is about $6 billion – this seems very low but I guess this is a straight shot through the desert. Estimates for a comparable project linking dense urban areas like LA and San Francisco top $100 billion, and are still going nowhere.
• It will “reach speeds” of 186 mph, comparable to Japanese bullet trains. This sounds good – I would like to know the average speed compared to the Japanese trains (which they poured money into right around the time the U.S. decided to build its highway system.) Again, this is a straight shot on new infrastructure through the desert. Amtrak’s Acela can “reach” pretty high speeds (150 mph according to this article) but it is limited by the condition of tracks and the fact that it has to share the tracks. (I use a suburban Philadelphia commuter rail station that Amtrak blows through several times a day. There is absolutely no physical separation between people on the platform and the train, which is a bit frightening.)
• It is supposed to cut a 4-hour car trip to 2 hours.
• It is supposed to be significantly cheaper than flying (but people don’t think this way – they typically compare the cost of mass transit to the cost of fueling their vehicles only, thinking of everything else as a sunk cost. So hopefully ridership projections will bear out.

All in all, sounds like a great project for the U.S.