A bit off-topic but this is a political problem, not a technical one. Trips of 50-300 miles are certainly within the operating range of fast and efficient rail travel as demonstrated in multiple places around the world outside of the US.
Americans are so resistant to public transportation because the public seriously sucks to deal with. There will be no popular utilization of public transit until we implement strong economic safety nets and extensive support/mandatory detention of people that are mentally ill. Those problems are much harder to overcome while maintaining an American standard of personal liberty than even the complications surrounding building rail. As a native of San Francisco and the surrounding area I have tried for decades to utilize public transit. The infrastructure isn’t great, but it’s also not terrible or anything. But in years where my job/living situation have me using public transit every day, my rate of exposure to human excrement or someone who wouldn’t even be aware that they physically harmed me was greater than once a week. In phases of my life where I’m driving everywhere that rate is practically zero. That stress takes a toll on my health that I have a natural instinct to avoid.
The lack of other places for people to go often leaves public transit facilities as a place for homeless people to congregate or seek shelter.
The US also tends to treat public transit as welfare transit in general. A transportation option of last resort for those who can't afford a car, where the primary goal is being inexpensive, instead of being the best and most efficient way to move around a city for all citizens.
Transit stations in the US also generally don't have revenue-generating amenities like food, coffee, or shopping. This makes them money sinks instead of revenue sources that pay for their own cleaning and security etc.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”
But the problem you're not understanding is that we're not Europe. We don't all live in cities within a couple of miles of our workplaces. Even me, I've got a sixty mile commute, I'm fortunate that there is a commuter train -- but I still have to drive five miles to get to the station. There's no other way, it's not even safe to walk if I felt like walking five miles. I can't live where I work, it would triple my mortgage.
I can't go anywhere else on a train. I can't go to the grocery store on a train, there aren't any.
The US is big. It's just the way it is, and it's not going to change.
It also used to have streetcar networks in most major cities and suburbs. And shops you could walk to from your house.
Amsterdam used to have a city center full of cars, parking lots, and no bike paths.
Things can change. It’s harder for them to change when we sit around and say “It’s just the way it is, it’s not going to change”
We have a train network. Amtrak is barely used, costs more than flying, and you still have to rent a car at the end of your multi-day trip on the train. The US is HUGE.
I lived in a mass transit society (Japan) for years. It's fundamentally different, in ways that aren't changeable.
We literally built a nationwide interstate highway system in this country which included bulldozing downtowns and spending the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars to do it. That wasn't that long ago, we're the same country in most ways.
It's a political problem at all levels. Not a technology or physics problem.
Looking at the full scope of the country and saying because the overall problem is large we can't take any steps to improve it is defeatist.
I was specifically responding to a quote that trips of 50-300 miles are too long for public transit. That is demonstrably untrue around the world.
And using that as a justification to try to solve the problem using personal airplanes instead of real working solutions that scale to high capacity at low emissions seems silly to me.
The company is trying to solve transportation for the 50 to 300 mile range (around 80 to 500 km). Trains can easily do this.
Anyway, in China the Beijing to Guangzhou high-speed rail covers the 2200 km distance in 8 hours. Costs $120.
-----
Do note that — while I do understand there's an environmental impact (and I hope technology improves to eliminate this impact) — I'm not against flying. I love flying. In fact I wanted to become a commercial pilot myself.
I'm happy for everyone to fly to and from work if they'd also pay for cleaning up the pollution it causes. We have several options, carbfix and olivine weathering come to mind but there's also at least one company who turns atmospheric CO2 back into fuel, we just need to start doing it after realising that what we're doing is only possible because the climate hasn't caught up with current habits yet
Even if you build the train some people won't give it a try, sadly. A lot of carbon was spewed in to the air to fly him and his suitcase over the capitol corridor tracks.
It doesn't help that the website is terrible at helping you plan a trip, if you say "I want to leave on Monday" but there are no trains at the station on Monday, it just takes you to a page saying "there are no routes, sorry" instead of suggesting the next day a train is available. I found a download link for the train schedule, and it took me a solid 10 minutes to figure out what I was looking at. (If you're following along at home: the big bold date at the top of the page is completely irrelevant. It's just today's date, so you know when you downloaded the PDF. Because of course that's why you downloaded the PDF in the first place.)
I have a friend who is really excited about trains, and he wanted to take a weekend Amtrak trip. The only way he could make it work was to ride the train up and have someone at his destination who was willing to drive him back. And even then, most of the trip was plodding along in the darkness, because the train only stops at our city in the dead of night.
They're supposed to be putting in some new lines in the coming years, one of which will stop by our city. I'm cautiously optimistic, though I'm not sure how useful those lines will be if there's no trains rolling on them at reasonable hours.
In places where Amtrak owns most of the track (ie the Northeast Corridor) service is much more frequent and reliable.
That’s a problem that is solvable by public investment in infrastructure.
They might be more willing to try if the service prices included the cost of the associated emissions.
It would also help if there were integrated ticketing the way there is in, say, Germany. If you buy a plane and a train ticket and miss a connection then you eat the cost of the ticket. Even better would be if luggage were integrated, but that would be asking for a lot more annoying security on trains I think.
I don't live in Europe, but I was there earlier this year going from Amsterdam to Paris. That's 430km/260mi direct from what I can find. I took the train, it took 3.5 hours, direct from central Amsterdam to central Paris, and no security theatre. And I had leg room!
The train is a superior experience to flying in pretty much every way, the challenge is often cost - trains can be more expensive. And, of course, this is really only possible because flying doesn't have its externalities priced in.
I definitely applaud the goal of improving GA safety, there is certainly a lot to improve in that regard even if the end result isn't a huge increase in the number of family roadtrips taken in personal aircraft.
that's kind of how I see it too, the failed version of this is that GA is safer than it is today.
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-ci...
People think of freeways as vital, so it's ok if I-69 through southern Indiana takes over 30 years from initial studies to completion.
If a train route took 30 years to build, it would be lambasted as a boondoggle and abandoned.