It doesn't fit.
Railway systems in Japan and France (taken as example in the article) are high quality and last long as well. Yet construction railway is way less expensive there.
Railway systems in Japan and France (taken as example in the article) are high quality and last long as well. Yet construction railway is way less expensive there.
Not only this but the engineering challenges overcome in France and especially Japan are much more than we would likely face here in the continental US. Japan has rail service between islands under the seafloor in one of the most seismically active areas on earth. I have a hard time imagining us in the US matching that engineering achievement without huge cost, debate, litigation.
What do you mean by land use issues?
Japan isn't using maglev for commercial high-speed service yet. Japanese high-speed trains have steel wheels that make contact with a steel track, just like regular trains. Their maglev trains are limited to experimental research and development [1], or low-speed urban transit [2] (which was built as a showcase for a World's Fair).
France's and Japan's high speed trains are based on the same technology as their lower speed counterparts, including American freight rail. How does a differing level of experience maglev technology cause a difference between different countries' quality of infrastructure, when that technology isn't being used?
They can support this because their ordinary transit infrastructure is built out already, the Tokaido high-speed line is at capacity (trains every 5 minutes at peak hours)! Effectively, they have the money and they've run out of more reasonably scaled infrastructure projects to build.