One example? All of Western PA. Outside of Pittsburgh and to an extent Erie there are no significant connections.
There are tons of rural areas which would benefit from a rail hub nearby. If you are someone living in let's say Titusville, which is right in the middle between Erie and Pittsburgh and for whatever reason you want to travel out east or even to an airport your options are very slim unless you have a car. You will always be reliant on a friend, family member or friendly neighbor to go to places outside of your 10 mile radius.
What I am advocating for is to connect more smaller towns with bigger cities via rail. Especially when said towns already have the existing infrastructure that simply needs some minor improvements in order to support a regional rail system.
Don't get hung up on Amtrak servicing big metropolitan areas. You can travel east to west with connections no problem. Pricing is a different issue that I'm not even going get into. Ideally, to emulate the system in Europe, you would see connections and railways in between all those major hub and off the beaten path.
I completely agree with you that it's an attitude issue, in as people don't think public transportation is a viable option in this country.
I'm not completely delusional to think that we will ever have a German, French style transportation system. But I can't help but feel reminded of it every time I want to travel to New York.
I used to live in Germany and all I literally had to do was walk to the train station in my small town and pay for the tickets and I would be able to ride from close to the Dutch border to Berlin without ever having to call a cab or get in a car in between.
The problem with this is that for all of Europe's rumored "progressivism," Europe actually adheres very strictly to zoning codes. The city is the city, and what's not the city is rural. Variances, etc. don't happen in Europe because they understand that land is a finite quantity, and that what's urbanized is gone forever as unadulterated land.
Most people who live in rural areas (and I have lived in rural, suburban and urban areas in my lifetime) want to preserve their open spaces and way of life, and most prefer driving (driving is actually quite enjoyable when you get away from urban traffic). Public transportation, in addition to being a miserable user experience, has also been used as a Trojan horse to force these areas that just want to be left alone to "develop" in keeping with urban values. Right now you have one major political party that is constantly trying to promote "transit oriented development" and even in some areas (NY state in particular) floating the idea of Albany bureaucrats being able to override the will of local governments to preserve their zoning laws to force multifamily and higher density development in areas that don't want it, and their argument is going to hinge on the availability of public transit in these areas (at least as first).
Couple this with the crime and low quality of life / user experience with public transit, and it is no surprise that people who have worked hard, saved money, and invested in living in a community far away from this type of dystopian development do not want to allow the addition of fixed rail networks in their backyards when they know that these will export the overdevelopment of the city, and possibly even the city's socioeconomic problems, right in their backyard...drawing them back towards a negative lived experience that many of them worked hard and spent a lot of money to avoid. THAT is why people in America are overwhelmingly so fundamentally opposed to mass transit outside of the major cities.
Contrast that to Europe, which understands the city is the city, and rural areas are rural areas, and which does not tolerate antisocial behavior and vagrancy on the transit system. It's no wonder then, that people over there don't oppose transit projects, because they are an add to their quality of life. It doesn't bring crime, filth, and development against their wishes right into their backyard. They build lines to meet demand, whereas America builds lines to meet demand, then builds development around the new line to exceed demand and make everyone who lived there hate it and move, rinse repeat. Meanwhile, the people who've been crowded out from overdeveloped city centers move in to replace them, thinking they've discovered "the suburbs" while a continuous cycle of outmigration to further and further areas from cities consistently takes place that results in the near suburbs ultimately looking like a microcosm of the city they surround, the far suburbs resembling suburbs, and so on. And the congestion is unbelievable, so public transit becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that results in people enduring unreasonably long commutes that far exceed those in Europe, but are used as definitive proof of public transit's efficacy in America as urbanists clamor for ever more development even though 99% of the people riding the public transit actually wish they didn't have to.
The type of development we are seeing in America isn't European at all, in fact, it more closely resembles India and left unchecked, that is what large cities will come to look like if someone doesn't take the toys away from the urbanists at the kid's table who are driving this. 100 years ago, large parts of the outer boroughs were rural. New York City had full blown farms. Now they look just as crowded as midtown Manhattan used to. 40 years ago, Nassau County was a bucolic suburb with plenty of room for one to spread their wings; now much of the county is indistinguishable from Queens Blvd. Parts of Yonkers might as well be the 6th borough.
There is a reason there has been a huge outmigration from cities in America the past few years, and it's not solely because of COVID, but it's also because people don't want the socioeconomic and land use problems they chose to leave behind to follow them to where they are now, and hybrid / work from home arrangements are making it possible for people to live where they actually want to live, while engaging in the type of work that is meaningful to them, and avoiding a miserable, soul-sucking commute while still getting the same amount of work done, which means more time for them to spend with their families and others who matter to them, and less time sitting idly on a train waiting for the ride to be over.
