Comment by _DeadFred_

Why build all that infrastructure when the same use case is already being met with airplanes? The USA serves it's tier 3 cities much more efficiently with a few plane routes than building an entire high speed rail would.

Again, China's high speed rail utilization is not even able to pay for it's initial build out, and is very under utilized as it goes to tier 3 locations that don't justify it. Will be interesting to see how it plays out once 'maintenance debt' (technical debt but for infrastructure) gets added to the 'build out debt'. If those tier 3 cities turn tier 1 it will look like genius investment, but I don't see it happening.