Around the world, high-speed trains zip from city to city, sometimes topping 250 miles per hour before dropping off hundreds of passengers right in a city’s downtown. However, in the U.S., that vision of efficient, fast, environmentally friendly travel remains a dream.
Japan built high-speed trains more than 50 years ago, an engineering marvel then and now. Its bullet trains (a term coined by the Japanese) connect the country’s megalopolises with eye-popping levels of efficiency; the average delay is less than a minute. China has 23,500 miles of high-speed tracks traversing its countryside, linking its coastal megacities like