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Which fraction of the population need to frequently travel to cities greater than 50 miles away?

How many people needed cellphones in the 1950s?

You can't measure how many people travel to cities greater than 50 miles away today and extrapolate that to a future with high-speed rail, because it may be that the reason they don't do it is: they don't have an affordable way to do it.

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this is a point I can agree with/ponder especially as a techie

the problem is hard though...you could pay for long bureaucratic studies on whether this would pan out or not

or you just do it

problem is that building the cell phone was several orders of magnitude cheaper than plopping down $100B for high speed rail infrastructure. Definitely not the business model of "launch fast and iterate". Which is probably why its hard for this forum to debate it.

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