You may be confusing a lack of understanding with straight up apathy.
Put another way, I don't think people care if the capacity is tripled. They're not interested in traveling with 100,000 of their closest friends that hour. They're interested in getting where they want to go, faster/cheaper/easier.
Pushing system capacity as a feature has a bit of a socialist bent, and that's a hard sell in the US.
>That's 500 lanes of theoretical freeway capacity, or 1000 lanes under realistic operating conditions
Also, I think your calculation are off by at least an order of magnitude. I thought that freeways can carry about 2000 vehicles per hour (on modestly congested urban freways). Assuming at least dual-occupancy vehicles, that's only 25 lanes.
> more than the total capacity between all Bay Area and all L.A.-area airports, even if you operated that route solely with widebody jets, which we don't.
This is an excellent argument against all that extra capacity being some kind of critical feature. If (you may be arguing "when" not "if", but that's not a given) we really need it, we could upgrade airport capacity to use more widebody jets.
In essence, we already have spare capacity (which could, by the way, be used to go other places), and you're suggesting it's critical that we take the opportunity to greatly increase the spare capacity just to go between the Bay Area and LA. I disagree.
100k people per hour per track direction
I'd say 4x that amount for a full-sized HSR train is credible. It's just that that's a maximum. I don't believe that ridership will ever be high enough to approach that number, unless air travel is outlawed.
Trains in the rush hour in the UK are pretty much always full, with people standing up. The tube at rush hour looks like this:
https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2...
If it's not too expensive or infrequent I imagine it will be very popular.
Especially given the picture you provide, I think you're talking about intra-urban rail (subway, metro, even suburban commuter).
That's a far cry from a 350-mile, 3-hour inter-city link.
Show me the picture for the London-Edinburgh "rush hour".
Southend to Liverpool is 3-4 hours on the train.
That's only, what, 240 miles? Which means it's not exactly high speed, is it? It could probably reach the 25k/hr that my sibling commentor is asking for, but not the 100k claimed for HSR.
Additionally, if it's Southend-on-Sea, that's not a major urban area. At 25k/hr, you could move the entire population to Liverpool in a little over 7 hours. I smell a contrivance.
Lastly, the name of that picture describes the train carriage as "busy" not something like "typical", so even then I'm skeptical.
Try again. London to Edinburgh. High speed. Typical rush hour.
This is something that people don't understand when they haven't travelled enough to experience good rail systems. Rail has massive capacity, 100k people per hour per track direction. That's 500 lanes of theoretical freeway capacity, or 1000 lanes under realistic operating conditions, and it's more than the total capacity between all Bay Area and all L.A.-area airports, even if you operated that route solely with widebody jets, which we don't.