Back to the Future
So HI, you try extremely hard to convince yourself that a 1970s option (when European InterCity trains reached 120 mph) is the sensible thing to build in the 21st century. On the basis of almost certainly illusory cost savings. For infrastructure that last 50 years or more.
The kind of thinking that you believe might be "economically responsible" and "prudent" or "pragmatic" is really just a contribution to what other observers label "American Declinism".
Clearly no one is arguing against the blindingly obvious physical fact that dedicated tracks are required for anything that pretends to be HSR. The longer you avoid facing up to that--despite the cost of doing it--the more expensive and difficult it becomes. Like the oh-so-slow and fantastically expensive rebuilding of the LA Metro rail system. And of course you can focus narrowly on a few upgrades here and there to marginally improve service to Philly but someone needs to be planning an integrated network for the whole NE system. Do you know that the NYC-WashDC route at 236 km is almost exactly half the (first) TGV line Paris-Lyon (460 km) which takes 1h55m and has carried >2bn passengers in the 30 years it has been running (with about one third the population catchment). A TGV (HST) could do NYC to DC in 1h15m. Who would be so stupid as to fly if you could go city centre to city centre in such a time, in great comfort etc.?
Meantime you wring your hands over a capital cost which represents an investment, of maybe $1tn to build a series of nationwide HSR (about what your oil imports each year are) and who knows what vast sums are put into merely (inadequately) repairing your crumbling road network.
You really believe a bit of patchwork upgrades--that do not achieve what the rest of the world considers the minimum for HSR but merely "catching up" to their 1970s status--represents a vision of the future? Or is it mere declinism in action?
Then there is the politics (or the "optics"). In the poisonous US political cesspit, a mediocre plan like yours still faces all the same anti-progress foes (road & oil lobbies; freight rail owners, NIMBYism) and actually has more weaknesses they can defeat. At least the big vision will inspire some people including politicians who might see it is worth fighting for--like the Californian HSR which even its foes might hesitate about nay-saying its benefits (versus their short-sighted budgetary arguments); and that is why the Californian plan has a reasonable chance of getting up. Imagine if they were trying to upgrade to a .... 1970s plan for 120 mph trains (from our position in the 21st century that is like looking at steam trains as an advance).
It is vision that built almost anything worthwhile, not the Cassandra's narrow focus on costs. Nor marginal improvements.
