Let’s say with High Speed Rail, the time goes from 17 hours to 8.5 hours halving the time between the two cities...
The High Speed Train is still going to stop multiple time and may not be direct, meaning you may have to travel to a hub train station to then take a another train to your final destination....
Either way it’s still going to be slower than air travel and not as convenient it most cases...
The only way around that is to subsidize high speed rail travel lowering it’s cost while simultaneously raising the cost of air and automobile travel....
If gasoline is $10/gallon or more, which it surely will be if we continue down this “Green New Deal” path of insanity....or you have an EV that needs to be charged every 300 miles maybe technology makes that irrelevant..
Thru taxes and other means what happens when the $200 airline ticket goes to $1000 or more but the high speed rail ticket goes to $100 or perhaps $200.....
Government intervention is the only way to make high speed rail work, IMO....and at that point the service will be worth taking.....
We all need to think more clearly about these issues..and stop accepting “their” terms of the argument.
This issues is all about the corruption and greed of its proponents. They each could care less whether by the time they “get theirs” there exists a functional right of way with paying passengers...and in fact from the standpoint of proponents, the last thing any of them want is a completion of the project..ever..
Under discussed: self driving EVs.
Most long drives are mostly on freeways or otherwise easy roads. When people get over the initial horror of driving 1000 miles by napping, browsing, gaming, and enjoying the passing view while enduring just two 20-minute breaks, and arriving at destination already having a vehicle and whatever they want to bring and on their own schedule, trains can’t compete and planes only by sheer speed.
I travel to San Francisco frequently from the Los Angeles area. It's about a 7-hour car trip or an hour by plane. I take both depending on the trip.
Looked into taking AmTrak just for fun, once - it was nine-10 hours and the drop-off is Oakland (NO)- with a bus over to SF. The drop-off was at 10 at night - (in Oakland?) and I'd still have to rent a car and then fly back. The train trip was twice the cost of both of us flying - and that was one-way.
And this new "high-speed train" (oxymoron) is supposed to improve travel between Southern and Northern California?
Since the invention of the motorcar, rail transport has never been worthwhile. Exception being a handful of large cities that were built around a light rail system.
Building light rail in an existing city never works.
Brightline in Florida is private high speed rail being built with government assistance mostly in the form of permitting the route to be built on government owned right of way. There’s great videos on You Tube detailing the speedy and efficient construction. Florida will have HSR long before California does.