Outside the NEC, Americans haven't been exposed to higher-speed (borderline HS), frequent, customer-oriented passenger rail since their grandparent's time. If that. All we know, really, is roads and air, and for most of us that does the job: air for longer trips, and roads for shorter or special-purpose trips. So, with little experience or even living memory of what once was and could have been, a perennial crying-poor (and getting there in reality, for the majority) society that has tons of money but not in useful places, and little prospect of any passenger rail, HS or otherwise, actually making money (and therefore being justifiable in a pseudo-private-sector economy) in competition with subsidized travel modes (roads, air), the public will just isn't there to do it on a national scale.

That leaves it for states and subsidized private business (e.g. Amtrak) to experiment with better passenger service. Current state-supported Amtrak service is a good start, but to really improve things we need to build new railroads, not just for passenger but also for freight in some corridors, on the model of the "standard" European lines (110-125 mph service). Nothing wrong with conventional railroads; they will remain useful and probably profitable for heavy haul, long-distance, and other non-time-sensitive stuff, as they are now. But it's just nuts to even think about mixing 125 mph passenger traffic with more than a couple of carefully-timed 50 mph freights a day. Can't be done with modern safety rules and dispatching priorities, let alone the condition and location of the track.

The Europeans that have HSR added it on to or rebuilt parts of an existing system that operated passenger trains at 100 mph or more routinely with frequent schedules. The "conventional" service is still there to serve smaller communities and haul limited quantities of freight (Europe in general doesn't do 2-mile-long coal or 1-mile-long oil trains).

We don't have the basic higher-speed passenger system in the U.S. so there's pressure to have too many stops on the HSR line so it can replace Amtrak. At one time, there was a plan to have HSR connecting with conventional Amtrak in the Valley, so HSR would only have 2-3 stops between SF and LA, and Amtrak and buses would distribute to the smaller places. That seems to have gone away. It would be worth bringing back, and improving the conventional service (perhaps with some dedicated track in congested areas) as part of the HSR package. None of this, of course, is permissible given what was written into the HSR proposition.