Trains and roads in Europe and America

This was in reply to a comment in YouTube about trains.

The reason that European high-speed train routes from London to Athens and Paris to Athens are not there, is, because they have not been built yet. A lot of it had, and still has plenty to do with world history.

Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, and this formally connected Greece with the rest of the Union on contiguous land. Romania and Bulgaria have yet to join the Schengen Area.

Italy's problems have more to do with mismanagement of their money, and Greece is only slowly emerging from its debt crisis (due also to then-really-bad finances).

Now that there's Brexit, the UK's position with regard to future rail connections to the rest of the EU is uncertain.

In the U.S., the Insterstate Highway System was built, because Dwight D. Eisenhower and other leading politicians noticed, that existing roads were below standard to support a modern state; the historic Route 66 was particularly overused. While the congestion of Route 66 supported all manner of roadside businesses and livelihoods, then it was also an infrastructure bottleneck.

On the other hand, the flipside to having built the Interstate Highway System is, that a large number of private traffic and short-haul business moved to the asphalt, with rail infrastructure displaced — "thanks" in no small part to then-the Big Five automakers greasing the wheels of politicians. Perhaps less intentionally, but with greater disruptive effect, rail got sidelined by airplanes and jumbo jets. The latter reduced travel times so much, that the jets and the Interstate in combination substantially decreased demand for passenger rail services, reducing the status of rail in America the even further.

To the best of my knowledge, California's problems with high-speed rail have been related to the politics almost anywhere in the U.S. of habitually not wanting to dish out enough taxpayer money for any large project, while at the same time, nursing pipe dreams of federal funding, when the state (any state) is legislated and governed by one party, and the federal government by another.