Noise reduction. Platypus shape make two smaller tunnel booms instead of one big boom.
Moving to high speed rail would also raise the profile of rail, and likely make it a stronger target of TSA, so you'd likely have the TSA induced delays for it just like for flying.
High speed rail might make sense on east coast (NY to DC is about 230 miles), but you'd never get the rights of way to lay the kind of track you'd need to approach 200 mph. They gave up on expanding the interstate system in this area many years ago for this reason.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa...
The sole reason this hasn’t happened in a while is that nobody is really making any efforts to mass murder with airplanes, TSA or no TSA.
We should probably just shut it down and save the money at this point.
That's quite the contradiction.
Additionally, it seems you're failing to take into account that high-speed railways also enable suburban and even urban services, which are not possible with airways.
Um .. Russia? Lower population density, larger land mass and vastly larger and superior high speed rail infrastructure. No sorry, for US distances we're still super behind.
Here in the US where jet travel is safe, it makes no sense to get on board a train when you can fly there so much more quickly.
Adding in high speed trains doesn't change that. They're just too slow to make a difference.
California kinda fucked theirs up royally, sadly. I really wish they hadn't, because then at least the US would be on track to having two major new high speed rail systems.
If Florida's system is successful, I can see Virgin Trains pushing to get lines extended to Atlanta and Nashville. I think once people really saw it in wide use, demand would go up and we'd see the East Cost AmTrak corridor upgraded as well.