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I'd take the 5 hours of moderate discomfort, because I only get 2-3 weeks of vacation, and I'd rather not burn basically 2-4 days of my vacation on transit. Not only that, but the plane is likely also much cheaper, and I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on greater comfort for a few hours.

Your day isn't any less shot with 8 hours in the airport and on a plane than with 14 hours on a train.

It absolutely is. It's 6 hours less shot to be exact.

1) Comfort is relatively speaking entirely irrelevant to the short air trips within the US.

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.

> 1) Comfort is relatively speaking entirely irrelevant to the short air trips within the US.

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.

Which is why the entire point of my post was entirely in agreement with what you're saying here. I wasn't against HSR at all, just the idea that it needs to span the country.

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.

Totally in agreement. In fact I think the NYC to LA stuff drags the HSR debate into the mud more than anything else. We should instead be focusing on the U.S. mega-regions and pitching how HSR could help revitalize cities like Philadelphia or Detroit by connecting them to their thriving neighbors within their mega-regions.

I want to agree with you, but as a practical matter, Amtrak currently offers service from NYC to Montreal that takes about 11 hours. Instead of offering it overnight, when it would add value by allowing passengers to sleep during most of their journey (and thus reduce their perceived travel time to less than that of a plane), they offer the service only during the day, in both directions! So you spent literally the entire day on the train. I would take a 14-hour train across the country, but not if it runs from 9 AM to 11 PM. And it would, because all those people in the middle don't want to have to join the train at their regional station in the middle of the night.

On your point (1) : making a flight comfortable is just a case of paying more money for bigger seats and better food. However, people are extremely price-sensitive about travel, and will eagerly give up comfort for price savings. You can't argue against this : the market bears it out. A train service wanting to compete will reduce seat size and service to something approximating what air travel does now.

Bigger seats (more leg room) and better food costs weight. Weight is a much bigger problem for air travel than it is for train travel. It's just physics.

Actually, bigger seats reduce weight because it reduces the density of people (and luggage) that the plane carries.

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.

I haven't sat down and done the math, but I'd imagine that if you compared the energy cost of counteracting lift induced drag, it would account for a larger portion of the operating cost of an airplane than the energy cost of counteracting rolling resistance does for a train. Assuming that is the case, it's less important for trains to minimize weight per passenger than it is for airplanes to do so, and space/comfort is directly related to weight per passenger.

This gets even more attractive when you factor in the possibility of taking an overnight train and booking a sleeper berth.

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.