General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Time for High Speed Rail in the U.S.A. [View all]MineralMan
(146,317 posts)to go from coast to coast on any sort of regular basis. Riding Amtrak from Chicago to San Francisco is something some people like to do, for a vacation trip. But, if you have business at either end of that journey, you're not going to go by train. You're going to hop on one of the many flights between those two cities and get there in under 4 hours, rather than three days.
There is no real demand for long-distance high speed rail transportation. Not enough demand to fill even one train a day. Meanwhile, hundreds of east-west flights from multiple cities make that trip. You fly, take care of your business, and fly back. I remember flying from Los Angeles to New York on a red-eye flight, having a morning meeting with an editor in Manhattan, and flying back to California on the same day. Didn't seem like that big a deal to me, really.
Business is the reason most people fly on a regular basis. Pleasure travel, vacation travel, and family travel is not enough to keep trains full for long distance trips. It just isn't. It's just not practical in a nation as large as the USA. No way.
Now high speed rail might make some sense in the Atlantic states. Maybe. But, in the rest of the nation, there just isn't enough demand to go from here to there on a train. Maybe LA to SF. Maybe.