I'm certainly all for, say, taking some of the money we spend on our glorious military adventures and building high speed rail everywhere (though my preference would be for more of a focus on intra-city mass transit), but I think with all the talk about high speed rail people fail to recognize that many corridors don't actually need 150 MPH trains. 60 MPH average speed gets you between
Phoenix and Tucson in 2 hours, 100 MPH average (not difficult to achieve, don't need tilting trains etc.) in just over an hour.