14 hours across the country—or even 8 hours at nearly twice the viable speed—will never match the speed or efficiency of air travel.
High speed rail can compete in the regional corridors where it makes sense. And it should. But the United States is huge. It's not Europe. We shouldn't expect this or desire it.
1) it's much less cost-effective to make a flight comfortable, in terms of leg room, food, space to walk around, than a train trip; this difference only gets bigger as liquid fuel prices go up;
2) as a practical matter you can't build airports in the heart of urban centers.
If there was a 14 hour train between NYC and LA, with the leg room and amenities of existing Amtrak trains, I think it would give air travel a run for its money. Taking a cab to LaGuardia takes about half an hour from Manhattan, and it's like a $40 cab ride. Another half an hour in LA, probably $50+ cab ride. Add at least an hour at the airport for each scenario, plus the 4-5 hours of actual travel time, and you're looking at an 8 hour trip.
Would you rather have 8 hours of cab -> airport -> airplane -> airport -> cab, or 14 hours just walking from a downtown train station, onto a train, and out of another downtown train station? Would you rather spend 5 hours crammed into an economy class seat, or 14 hours in an Amtrak train with a ton of leg room, where you can get up, go to the snack car, etc?
It's a capacity issue. A plane can carry a fixed maximum amount of people, the same as a train. Finding the economic load for any transport solution is a function of what people are prepared to pay plus the fixed and variable costs for operation. So while weight is part of it, that's only as it pertains to the maximum lift of a plane. Weight isn't as important to a train, but a train still has limits to the amount of people and luggage it can carry.
Even ferries have different price/class levels, some using airplane seats, some allowing cabins. This is totally dependent on what the market pays over anything else.
When I worked in Beijing, trips to Shanghai were greatly improved by booking sleeper berths and catching a night express trains out and back. The entire experience was generally extremely low stress and utterly reliable.
2) As a practical matter, you don't need to. It takes you 30 extra minutes to get from the outskirts of cities to the centers, versus an extra 8 hours for train travel to get you to the city center. Perspective.
Sure, you have some good points. Trains might have something for overnight trips with beds. But that's only a fraction of the market, and frankly, only for the West-to-East direction where redeye flights are most prevalent due to the time zone loss. Going East-to-West, the time advantage is ridiculously good: get on a plane in the morning in NYC and arrive in the morning in LA. You just can't beat that.
It's not. There is a reason Amtrak is absolutely destroying air travel in the Northeast corridor, especially among business travelers. I can get work done on a NYC to DC train trip. I can't get any work done on the corresponding airplane trip, between the tight spaces, the cabin pressure changes, etc.
> 2) As a practical matter, you don't need to. It takes you 30 extra minutes to get from the outskirts of cities to the centers, versus an extra 8 hours for train travel to get you to the city center. Perspective.
But not all trips are NYC to LA. The shorter the distance, the more time spent getting from an airport into the city impacts the overall travel time. HSR would get you from downtown NYC to downtown DC in 95 minutes. Getting from downtown to LaGuardia is 30 minutes and from Reagan to downtown is another 15 minutes best case, possibly a lot more with weekday traffic. More importantly to a business traveler, that's 45-60 minutes they're probably not getting any work done, while the train traveler is getting work done the extra 25 minutes the train is actually traveling versus the flight.
HSR is supposed to do Boston to DC in 3 hours, versus 90 minutes for a plane trip. Add in airport time and time spent in the airport, the total travel time is probably a wash, but again much of the travel time for air travel is cabbing and waiting in line at the airport during which you can't get any work done. So the HSR still wins.
DC to Boston is about 450 miles. There are a lot of major North American cities within ~500 miles of each other. E.g. Chicago to Toronto, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Milwaukee, etc. There's tens of millions of people in a ~500 mile radius of Chicago, and HSR would beat air travel for those trips.
It should connect large urban areas as needed, to bring the megalopolises closer together and easier to access, and in a way that's advantageous over air travel. It should not attempt to compete with cross-country flights, since it's not logical given those conditions. If you change the conditions, then sure, it makes perfect sense!
You're absolutely correct about all the routes you mentioned. Those are perfect. I want HSR on those routes. It handily beats air travel in every way.
But NYC to LA? Seattle to DC? Nope. Sure you could do that, but it would make more sense to fly, and that's simply a logical combination of transit for this large country. The map doesn't show that—it shows routes all the way across the country in ways that make no sense. We don't need to connect the coasts with high speed rail, because it's not logical to do so. That was my point, and I'm sure you would generally agree.