Public Transportation and Smart Growth

Thus Europe has, since WWII, always run a better transportation system for passengers then the US. In the US Passenger service was ALWAYS an after thought. In fact the first Railroad across the State of Pennsylvania (The Old Portage Railroad) was freight only from its inception in 1837, it re-construction as a true railroad in 1854 till it was sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1859 (Passengers did take the Portage railroad, but as a tourist attraction, if you actually wanted to go east to west in Pennsylvania you took the Stage Coach till the Pennsylvania Railroad was finished in 1852).

Now, some of the National Ownership is no longer 100% Government owned, for example, the German Railroad before 1992 was 100% government owned, but in 1992 it was "sold" to a private company, that the government owns 100% (The Wikipedia cites gives one comment that the government owns more then 50%, then later on says the Government owns 100%):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bahn

Paper on Swiss Railroads and pointed out, that the rail structure is owned by the State in all of Europe, except Britain, but the actual operations of the train in increasingly done by private companies on these publicly owned rail road beds,

https://wiki.umd.edu/lei/images/3/3a/Cowie1999.pdf

It also points out that Canada (and by implication the US) rail service is primary fright unlike European where it is passenger.

Even Britain has retained government ownership of the tracks, while turning over operations to private companies (Through there is a push to turn over even the tracks to private companies):

http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2010/10/25/comment-public-ownership-is-the-only-way-to-a

The biggest single restrictions on high speed rail in the US are the tracks. The tracks have to be upgraded to take the higher speed, but private railroads refuse to do it, for their profit is in freight NOT passengers (Worse private railroads main haul is primary coal and other energy sources thus it can go 10-20 mph and the customer don't care as long as it gets to where the coal is wanted). Thus the private rail roads have no incentives to upgrade their tracks to do high speed rail and will not do so unless some one else pays for it.