About five hours. Color me impressed.
It is principally about the willingness to use public resources to build out the charging infrastructure. Europeans are generally more open to and used to alternative modes of transportation and their political leaders are more open to investing public funds to support transportation infrastructure. If you have the time, in Denmark you can get to virtually anywhere including small villages on a train. People in the US are too impatient for that. My theory is that this is tied to the marginal income tax rate because we “keep” a much greater share of the next dollar we earn so we perceive that our marginal time allocation has great value and we are less willing to sit on a train. The cost is that we lack infrastructure. Once you get used to being ferried around on a train one discovers all the time they recoup no focusing on the road. Why else do we crave self-driving cars. Plus, we don’t really like each other here in the USA, so being trapped on a train with each other is agony.
I agree with much of what you say. However, I recently took a train from DC to Indianapolis and back. No agony at all, a verpleasant experience, for which I happily paid three times the price of flying to avoid that agony.
The other part is simply the size. Depending a little on what you count, about half the countries in Europe are smaller than the next county 10 miles east of my house. You mentioned Denmark - San Bernardino County in California is about 20% larger than Denmark.
Live long and prosper.
