In practice for the route I use most, Harpenden - Kings Cross London: Train 25min, Car 1hr -1.5hr depending on traffic. Regular local busses 2.5 hrs maybe but I've never done that and no one does. The train does 90 mph (max) and the express ones stop once. By car, many many stops.

I theory sure you could drive your porsche at 150mph down some superroad that doesn't exist.

You’re saying that a car on the highway is faster than a subway in midtown Manhattan?

How fast can you drive a car in Manhattan?

And you probably don’t realize this, but modern trains go about 200 mph. They just don’t go that fast in the United States.

China managed to build about 18,000 miles of these trains in about 10 years.

Modern cars go about 200 mph as well. This happens in Germany.

So, that really doesn't favor the trains. Both trains and cars could theoretically they could go faster in the United States.

This doesn't actually happen in Germany at any time you'd otherwise take the train to our from work. The road is too busy.

Additionally, driving that fast is stressful and dangerous.

So you compare average speed (that includes all stops) with max speed of a car...?

Ok, so if we ignore one of the major advantages of trains, trains aren't competitive?

I don't think "how fast a car is capable of going" is the relevant comparison in speed of transport via rail vs. bus.

The train between Washington DC and New York City is (slightly) faster door-to-door than driving, without going particularly fast. It’s at least two hours faster than taking the bus. In addition, it’s infinitely more comfortable than either driving or the bus. Weekend commuting would be pretty stressful without it.

Worth noting that this depends a lot on the type of service. The DC area MARC commuter train is definitely faster than driving to DC from where my parents live. The train schedule says 96 minutes, compared against 90 to 150 minutes driving according to Google Maps if one leaves at the same time as the typical train I'd take from there. This neglects other factors of course like the comfort of sitting on a train vs. driving in heavy traffic.

My impression is (for the US) that trains are the optimal way to connect major cities, while buses are good for connecting smaller cities. Ideally, of course, one would have a dense rail network connecting even small towns, as Germany does, but that's never going to happen in the US.

>optimal way to connect major cities

Major cities that are relatively close together. The Northeast Corridor works pretty well for the most part--at least the two ends of it do. The whole thing is a full day and probably costs more than a couple hour flight.

Various city pairs also work but anything longer haul has to be for the experience (or avoiding flying) even if everything goes according to schedule. NY to Chicago is about 20 hours for example. (And would be very hard to make fast because of the Appalachian Mountains.)

We can go straight through them if we have to. Chicago to NYC is 800 miles, and at speeds the Nanjing to Jinan line hits daily that is about 4-5 hours.

Sure, at some point the distances are just too great and flying is the only option

5 hours in train is probably nicer than a 5 hour flight trip (1h to go to airport, 1h in the airport, 2h flight, 1h from airport to destination).

Depends on the traffic and the train -- during rush hour, a Caltrain express train from San Francisco to San Jose is almost always faster than driving. It can take 90 - 120 minutes to drive during commute hours (at 4:30pm, Google says 90 minutes), versus 65 minutes by train.

I don't disagree that a train is better in many situations. I'm more curious about situations where a city is prepared to make a 1B+ capital expenditure. For example boring a tunnel for a train vs. a dedicated bus lane on the highway + exit.

One train can have a capacity of 1000 people. If you run these at 3 minutes interval, you have a throughput of 20,000 people per hour.

One bus takes less than 100 people, and you cannot run 200 buses per hour. Actually about 20 buses per hour is pretty much at the upper limits.

These are rough numbers, but if you need to move more than 2000 people per hour, trains can have the capacity but buses don't.

Is that dedicated lane cheaper? In many cities that are facing a traffic crunch, they've already made all of the "easy" road improvements -- for example, 101 in the SF Bay Area is pretty much all built in to the center median, so adding new lanes means adding outside lanes (which requires rebuilding every bridge and intersection).

It'd be cheaper, of course, to take an existing lane and convert it to a bus-only lane, but that's politically infeasible.