America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There's a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we've created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
Plenty of places with developed rail networks are still conservative in rural places.
Yeah, but passenger rail collapsed hard. Amtrak is a shell of the former service and most states that kept their systems focused only on commuters into cities.
You also see a lot of rural towns encouraged to spread out far more than before because cars provided transportation. A small town in the early 20th century looked a lot more like a very small city instead of the hollow suburban form they have today.
I meant in other countries. Rural France is still conservative, for example. So is rural Japan.
Yeah, but that conservatism still involves as somewhat competent government helping people out. I don't think they would push for the economics of American conservatism.