I have no idea about how reasonable or not their claim is, but I'd note that most of the US population is, while not concentrated only in the East, concentrated heavily. Even in most the lower population density states, most of the population is within tiny part of the area of those states, often in corridors where most of the larger towns are still relatively close to at least a few other large towns. So whether or not they're right, distance largely is an excuse. Trains will not work between every pair of cities in the US, but it doesn't need to - very few US cities are so isolated that train will not work to several nearby cities.
The average distance isn't very important, as long as the cities are clustered enough to create viable lines.
Measuring average distance between cities is incredibly naive, that's my whole point. If countries A and B both have 100 cities in the sam land area, except country A has 50 cities over 1 million people and country B only has 10 cities over 1 million then one of these is still much more viable even if average distance between cities is the same. You're right that if all 10 of those larg cities in country A are really close then it may be viable. But that's not the case in America, save for the Northeast corridor which is already served by passenger rail.
The average doesn't really matter, though (and yes, I get that's a different argument than the other person made).
The threshold where you exceed what is viable does. And hardly anyone in the US live in areas that have so low density that there aren't viable routes, on the basis of comparing with the density of routes that are served in other countries.
Even, say, Wyoming, with an average population density 1/5th of Norway, has half its population in its top 10 towns, most of which, unsurprisingly, has rail going between them because a sufficient number of them are close enough to each other to form viable clusters.
Or, as I mentioned elsewhere, we have Montana, with a similar population density and a size ~50% larger than the United Kingdom, but a population 1/70th, where the lines that used to be used by the North Coast Hiawatha goes through a range of towns and surrounding area that easily covers ~40% of the state population at a density easily comparable to e.g. continental Europe and well above areas of rural Europe that are well covered by train.
There are many pairs of cities in the US between which rail travel is not viable. But there are very few cities that are not within a viable distance of a set of other cities with higher density corridors (than their state averages) in between that combined makes travel viable between them. "Nobody" will travel the full North Coast Hiawatha route between Chicago and Seattle, as it'll take ~48 hours. Plenty of people will travel parts of it (and do travel parts of it, as many parts of that route are still covered by trains). Including through some of the lowest density parts of the route if it is reopened.
To again bring up Norway, because I know the rail network there having grown up there, consider the line from Hamar to Åndalsnes - a line where the two most significant towns on that stretch have populations of around 3k (Åndalsnes) and <30k (Hamar). Compare to e.g. Butte, MT (~34k) to Billings, MT (184k). Both again are within similar distances to several more cities that form similar viable pairs and that that similarly enhances the overall viability of the connecting segments. And that's part of why Hamar to Åndalsnes is viable too - it connects to a couple of other lines at Hamar and at Dombås.
Just like Butte is a viable distance from Spokane via Missoula, and Billings is a viable distance from Gilette, WY, or Buffalo, WY (still larger than Åndalsnes, and has rail) and onwards to Cheyenne, WY.
I'd actually love a map that visualizes which parts of the US are sufficient "islands" that there are towns of any reasonable size that are not within those kinds of travel distances along a reasonable rail corridor to make up a total population size along the route that is large enough to be considered viable plenty of other places.
I can't think of any.
The US as a whole is huge and dispersed and low-density, but almost nobody lives in the low-density places, almost by definition - even as large as they are, they're not large enough for the low-density population that lives in those places to add up to significant numbers. And the upside of a train over planes is that it's not the end-to-end distance that matters, but the population near enough to the stations along any given subset of the route.
> And hardly anyone in the US live in areas that have so low density that there aren't viable routes, on the basis of comparing with the density of routes that are served in other countries.
This is just factually incorrect. The vast majority of people in the US live in places with large distances between population centers.
Of the remaining 20%, it seems unlikely that they’re evenly distributed in areas which are not suitable for rail travel because American history since the early 1800s followed rail lines (and prior to that, canals) because people followed transportation corridors - it was only with mid-20th century subsidies for car travel that people got so casual about ignoring the energy cost of travel.
> This small decline was largely the result of changes to the criteria for defining urban areas implemented by the Census Bureau, including raising the minimum population threshold for qualification from 2,500 to 5,000.
So even a small town of 5,000 people is considered "urban". Again, population density is far more important than "urban" population because a big city of 5 million people produces way more demand for travel than a town of 5,000 even if they're both categorized as "urban". Fast passenger rail has high overhead costs in terms of building high speed rial track, and is mostly viable between large population centers. But even the fastest high speed rail is usually 3-5 times slower than air travel. And in America, rail is powered by fossil fuels anyway so it's not like there's a huge climate win in terms of using passenger rail over Greyhound buses or planes.
First, even many small towns had rail service before the focus switched to rail. Second, it’s rare that your 5k town is hundreds of miles from the next one. If you look at the map circa WWII, there were tons of interurban rail connections between towns like that.
What changed was the massive subsidies directed towards private vehicle usage. Those rail connections disappeared because they couldn’t compete with the heavily subsidized highway system on all but the busiest routes. This also means that things can change if we start taxing carbon or require vehicle users to pay for their infrastructure.
In WWII there was no interstate highway nor widespread air travel. And yes, most 5K towns are not too far from other 5k towns. But a town of 5k residents doesn't have enough people to justify investing in passenger rail. Hence why countries with lower population density (like the US, Canada, Australia, etc.) don't have much passenger rail demand. If it were due to politics, why is train travel ubiquitous in densely population countries, but not sparsely populated ones? We should expect to see a relatively random smattering of train-dominant and car and plane dominant transportation irrespective of geography. Instead, we see that sparsely populated countries don't have widespread passenger rail regardless of politics. I guess it's a coincidence that the fossil fuel conspiracy [1], just happened to take hold in sparsely populated countries like America, Canada, Australia, etc. and not densely populated ones.
The average distance isn't very important, as long as the cities are clustered enough to create viable lines.