Getting from LA to SF is already quite easy travel wise - a 1 hr flight. It's getting to and from the airport and how crowded they are that's most annoying. More airports would help solve both of those.
Living near an airport is horrible due to noise. Trains are a lot quieter than planes.
You can fit more people on a train than on a plane.
You can load that train with more people a lot more quickly than a plane.
Train stations can be underground if necessary.
You'll have less pollution from the train.
One downside pointed out below, it seems there is a problem with building the rail line. You need to train up high speed rail engineers, create the manufacturing base to make the thing and maintain it, and probably won't have another in the whole country. Or maybe one other in the north east.
Flying isn't optimal for that type of distance (less than 400 miles). You could lay track and get more volume on some high speed trains with comparable times (if you take into account the time for arrival / security clearance / etc at airports), the train could even be faster.
Land rights are obviously the issue (esp in california), but adding more airports as a transit option for end points that are less than 500 miles doesn't seem ideal at all.
And to boot: some of it is easy. You just have to bend one rail segment. Manually (which is doable with basic DIY equipment), or explosively. If you're okay with trying 5 times a large boulder positioned between the tracks where it can't be pushed aside easily has a decent chance of derailing a train. And that is a disaster. The amount of stored power in a train's movement is more than enough to destroy it. When this sort of shit happens by accident, there's usually double, sometimes triple digits dead. Targeted, you could do more. Without a few particular train lines, US oil production would slow to a crawl.
They are also far easier to destroy than to rebuild. Terror attack, and things go back to normal in a matter of hours. Sucks for the 5 people, but the economy is not going to be seriously impacted. With trains, and because there's a lot of cleanup, after which the entire line needs to be checked (and obviously not with a high speed train) a derailed train will take a week or two to fix, more on longer lines. It seems to me that disconnecting small cities in middle America from the train network and make coast-to-coast freight go a LOT slower wouldn't be out of the question for even a small organisation.
The shortest SFO-LAX flight I see right now is 1h25m. Even if you made smaller, local, more efficient airports, I fail to see how you can hit 53 minutes while including commute time to the airport and clearing security.
You have to include that for the rail too, obviously.
Yes. You won't need to leave as much time for the train station as you do for the airport. Why? Because the airport services many more flights and is much more crowded. If we had more airports, it could become similar to a rail-station in terms of time needed at the station/airport.
In terms of time though, flying would still be faster, amazingly.
Flying: 45 mins to airport. 1 hr in airport. 1.5 hr flight. 45 mins to destination. Total: 4 hr
Rail: 45 mins to station. .5 hr in station. 2.75 hr travel. 45 mins to destination. Total: 4.75 hr
A rail line can easily move 20k people an hour, can't say the same about a similarly priced or staffed airport.
I can get to mine in <20 minutes on a bicycle.
2. Airport security. Add 15-45 minutes depending on density.
3. Delays. Frequent & much more common with airlines than trains. (add 1-several hours every hundred flights or so).
4. Capacity. Need 100 more passengers capacity? Add another carriage to the train or schedule an entirely different flight.
4. Also add in that you're wanting to cram in a bunch of airports into a few hundred miles of each other. You have to take into account that planes are moving at 550+ mph and need lots of clearance around each one. It's a lot easier to even schedule another train 10 minutes behind an existing one than it is to schedule another flight (considering the variables of destinations, companies and other logistics involved).
There's a reason why ATC jobs are some of the most stressful in the world. Flying seems easy, but the logistics behind it are intense.
Airports don't address the need for capacity on trips shorter than the SF-LA route (e.g. Fresno-SJ or Bakersfield-LA). Rail lines do address this kind of infill transportation.
More airports by themselves don't make it easier to get "to and from the airport" -- for this, you need more highway capacity. Most calls to build more airports tend to ignore this fact and its associated costs. (Rail stations, on the other hand, are distributed along a line and don't induce the kind of traffic congestion at a single point that you'd see with an airport node.)
The real alternative to HSR is a massive expansion of the highway system, including I-5, and more airports. I would like to see critics of HSR propose a plan that addresses both needs.
Ever been to Grand Central Station in NYC at rush hour?
The Bay Area is mostly low-density sprawl. Pretty much anywhere is a fine place to put it. The problem is the veto rights small groups of people have over projects with regional utility, i.e. there's no way for 9 cities to over-rule 1 city for something that benefits them all.
Watsonville has an airport with plenty of room to better serve south bay and Santa Cruz.
Moffett, of course.
Even San Carlos has an airport with a fair amount of general aviation traffic.
Hayward Executive always looms when I fly into Oakland- it looks more than big enough.
Livermore, Novato, Palo Alto (busiest general aviation airport in the country), the list goes on.
Frankly just getting Concord back into the act would be tremendously difficult. My definition of "good places" differs somewhat from those in power, but that may slowly be changing.
As a result, you experience crowding in SF even before your SF-bound plane leaves the gate or takes off due to air traffic control ground holds. Epic delays then cascade through the rest of the air traffic system, delaying wherever that plane was supposed to go next.
This could all be alleviated if they moved one their runways further apart. I get that NIMBY's won't let them fill in more of the bay to achieve this (c'mon guys, what's another 40 feet or so?). What I don't get is how it doesn't seem to occur to anyone to move the terminal and gate structures back "west" to make this space. After substantial renovations on Terminals 1 and 2 for what is still mostly a ranch-style airport, you'd figure they could do something to free up some space.
And don't get me started on SF's slowmobile, taking you to the rental car center in 10 minutes or more.
3 hrs peak times on the weekend
3-4 hrs rush-hour commute