While Japan and France speed along at 320 km/h, the United States remains hostage to a political, financial and technical labyrinth that turns the dream of HSR into a mirage on rails.

Modernity is not abstract. It has ballast, gauge, energy and direction.

This truth, sharp as a pantograph on a live catenary, defines the paradox of the American relationship with passenger transport. While the Japanese Shinkansen and French TGV routinely operate at 320 km/h, the Acela Express, pride of Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor, can barely sustain 265 km/h on minimal stretches of its route.

Hochgeschwindigkeitszug, the German term for high-speed train, is almost an exotic abstraction on American soil. The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CaHSRA) embodies this schizophrenia: it plans trains at 355 km/h that would connect San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2h30, versus the current seven hours by car.

However, the project has become a cruel mirror of the weaknesses of US infrastructure planning. Approved by referendum in 2008, with an initial budget of 33 billion dollars, the estimated cost has skyrocketed to the stratospheric figure of 105 billion dollars, according to a report by Trellis.

The federal government, which should have contributed 12 to 16 billion, poured only 3 billion dollars into the California authority's coffers. This anemia of federal resources is a symptom of a larger disease: political resistance that treats every major railroad project as a socialist delusion, while highways and airports continue to receive blank checks.

The paradox deepens when examining the numbers of Brightline West, which will connect Los Angeles to Las Vegas with trains at 290 km/h. Estimated to remove 400,000 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere annually, the equivalent of 3 million fewer cars, the project moves forward with mostly private capital.

Even so, California remains stuck by another classic bottleneck: the judicialization of the landscape. Farmers in Madera County filed a lawsuit claiming the railway would slice through fig and walnut orchards, an imbroglio that the German newspaper Der Spiegel compared to the German Stuttgart 21.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, maglev train technology pushes the boundaries of speed to almost unbelievable levels. Using superconducting electromagnets cooled to -267.8°C and levitation without contact with the tracks, a Japanese prototype has already reached 603 km/h in tests.

The elimination of wheel-rail friction and the use of regenerative braking make the maglev not only a speed marvel but also an energy efficiency machine. Aerodynamic drag, the great villain of consumption at high speeds, still imposes limits, but the absence of mechanical wear drastically reduces the maintenance costs of the dedicated infrastructure.

In parallel, automated control systems represent a safety leap that Americans are reluctant to universalize. Positive Train Control (PTC), which monitors trains in real time via GPS and automatically intervenes to prevent collisions, and Automatic Train Operation (ATO), capable of managing acceleration and braking with millimetric precision, already equip a good portion of the world's leading railways.

According to a detailed survey by the blog Alice Technologies, each 1 billion dollars invested in high-speed generates about 24,000 direct and indirect jobs. The math is attractive, but it runs into the absence of a state industrial policy that sees standard gauge as a vector of development and not as public expenditure.

The distance between rhetoric and reality becomes even clearer in the face of visionary projects like Hyperloop, which promises speeds of up to 1,100 km/h in low-pressure tubes with magnetically levitated pods. Although it still needs at least seven to eight years to mature, according to the platform KnowHow, the proposal exposes the chasm between disruptive innovation and bureaucratic paralysis.

The average Californian, stuck in traffic on Interstate 5, may not even know that their trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas could be solved with a silent magnetic levitation train. They also do not know that smart catenaries and modern pantographs already allow powering trainsets with exclusively renewable energy, cutting emissions by half compared to regional flights.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the Californian saga is precisely what it does not deliver: a phased deployment plan, with prioritization of high-density segments and stable financing tied to decarbonization goals. Brazil, which periodically flirts with the idea of a high-speed train between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, finds in this American mirror a valuable warning.

Like the USA, the country suffers from the discontinuity of public policies and the eternal fiscal war between road and rail modes. The absence of dedicated infrastructure and the difficulty of articulating stable funding sources keep Brazilian HSR projects on paper, while the conventional network withers.

The crucial difference is that Brazil can still observe others' mistakes before mortgaging decades in empty promises. The choice of standard gauge corridors with PTC and ATO systems from the project's genesis, combined with public-private partnerships that do not cannibalize the collective interest, could shorten the distance between the dream and the train whistle.

The world does not wait for the legislative myopia of the Capitol or the complaints of almond growers in the Central Valley. While the USA debates whether the Hochgeschwindigkeitszug is viable, China expands its 320 km/h network by thousands of kilometers annually and Europe integrates the continent with night and day trains with an extremely low carbon footprint.

There remains a feeling that the American locomotive, capable of sending telescopes into deep space and building three-nanometer semiconductors, simply refuses to solve the equation of steel on rails. The result is a nation that continues to read the future through the foggy rearview mirror of an SUV.

Modernity, after all, does not forgive those who treat it as an abstraction. It exacts its price in delay, inefficiency and emissions – and in this bill, the cost of doing nothing has already exceeded 105 billion dollars.

The American dream of high speed collides with a stubborn reality. Editorial staff.