In France and England ... even Italy ... one can commute comfortably to a job one hundred miles away ... on a train. And for 5-600 mile trips, try the TGV ... city center to city center at 200+ mph .... better than overall elapsed time and bother of flying.
Of course, Euro trains are heavily subsidized, etc. etc/
You get off the plane and rent a car and vice versa
Europe has high-speed trains, public transit, the whole nine yards. Most American cities don't outside of the largest once. Case in point. I live about 40 miles from work in a rural count east of Kansas City. Jackson County, where KC is, has been trying to establish commuter lines which will run into Lafayette County, where I live. Nothing would make me happier than to trade the daily I-70 hell for a comfortable train ride into work. But my problem is what happens when I get there? Kansas City public transit is a joke, and the commuter terminal is seveal miles from where I work. So it could literally take as long to get from the north part of the downtown to where I work down near Union Station as it would to get from Odessa to KC itself. I work with people who drive in from Topeka or Warrensburg. There isn't any alternative.
I've taken Amtrack. I've ridden the train from KC to St. Louis. I did the City of New Orleans from Chicago to Louisiana. And I didn't enjoy either trip, what with the rough track, the slow travel, and the damned train horn going off every few minutes as we passed another crossing. That won't change without the investment of billions of dollars. If you build it they may come. But nobody is going to invest that much money on spec. The only source for that would be the federal government. And there is no way Congress will vote for that.