I wouldn't at all agree with that. I live in SF and can get door-to-door to a friend's house in San Diego in 3 hours. I can do similar things for LA, Vegas, Portland, and Seattle if I like.

Even when I fly cross-country to visit family (near DC), yes, the flight out is a waste of a day (unless I take a red-eye and hope I can sleep), but the flight back is just 3 hours after adjusting for the time zone change. I can take an early flight out in the morning and still put in a full day of work, or have a full day visiting and fly back after dinner.

I really don't want to spend several days just on travel, were I to take a train. I would consider that a waste of valuable time that I could be spending at my destination. I might enjoy a long multi-day train ride as a vacation (once every few years, perhaps), but not when my plan is just to get from point A to point B.

I'll usually take the train from DC to NYC, or NYC to Boston, when I'm out east visiting friends, but I recently looked at doing DC to Boston direct, and was disappointed to see that I'd burn 7 hours on a train for only $20 less than a much shorter flight. And some of the trains were more expensive than the flight!

Assuming both you and your friend live in the actual, respective airport terminals.

Otherwise, your numbers just don't jibe with the reality of typical fight and check-in times (let alone the time cost of, you know, actually getting to and from the airport).

15 mins to the airport (I live close to a freeway entrance), 10 mins to the gate, 40 min wait time till takeoff, 90 mins in the air, 10 mins out to the curb, 15 mins to my friend's house near Hillcrest.

Sure, if I'm traveling at the height of rush hour, the car trips to and from the airport will be longer, but the solution is to... not do that.

Cross-country express trips could be done in less than a day.

Takes about a half hour from SF to SFO by car or BART. You need to get to the airport an hour before boarding. Boarding takes half an hour. That’s two hours. Flight time to SAN is about 1.5 hours. So now we’re at 3.5 hours, without counting commute time to your friend’s house.

And that’s pretty much optimal, in my experience. Maybe you can shave a half hour off, but unless you live next to the airport, you’ll miss as many flights as you catch if you try it regularly.

”Even when I fly cross-country...the flight back is just three hours after adjusting for time-zone change.”

Now you’re just making things up. Quick google tells me that’s a five-hour flight, not counting the lead time, taxi, etc.

Feel free to see my other reply in the thread. It takes me 15 mins to get to SFO by car (sure, if I lived in, say, the Marina, it would take longer; but I don't, so it doesn't), and I generally get to the airport 40 minutes before takeoff (arrive an hour before boarding? People do that? I don't even do that for an international flight), so in general I walk up to the gate just as boarding is starting. I usually time it so I'll arrive at the airport about 10 mins before boarding starts, which gives me plenty of time to get through the TSA Pre line (usually Terminal 3 for me, which tends to be pretty quick unless you pick your flights for peak times).

> Now you’re just making things up. Quick google tells me that’s a five-hour flight, not counting the lead time, taxi, etc.

I think you misunderstood. Yes, it's a 5-6 hour flight, as you say. If I leave DCA or IAD at 6am Eastern time, I arrive at SFO at 8-9am Pacific time, and have a full day ahead of me. Or I can have dinner at my sister's place, head to the airport, leave DCA/IAD on a 9pm flight, and be home a little after midnight, at which point I go to bed and have a normal day the next day. That's what I mean when I say "adjusting for the time-zone change".

And sure, there's more on either end for airport transit and boarding, but... so what? If I do the morning flight, I have an early morning, certainly -- I need to leave my sister's house by 4:30am -- but I can close my eyes for a bit on the plane, and it's not so bad when I land. Will I be a little more tired than usual come evening? Sure, but maybe I just go to bed a couple hours earlier.

The original assertion was "[you lose] a day when flying, even for short trips", which is just patently false.

There was a multi-part show I saw on BBC Four about a year ago that explained that Europe's train network isn't the result of some kind of visionary urban planning or anything altruistic. It's because European nations have such a long history of fighting one another. And in the early part of the last century, the continent went on a rail-building frenzy because of WWI.

The United States have only gone to beating each other up once, and that was before trains were viable as large-scale tools of war. Perhaps if the Civil War was delayed by a couple of decades, things might be different.

Of course, there are many other factors, but this is one that I find interesting and almost never explored.

I would guess that geography and the demographics of the American west are as much to blame as the relative lack of continental conflict in the rail era.

Use of rail in the America conflict prefigured its application the war of 1870 and of course WWI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_railroads_in_the_A...

The city also dug a new tunnel for cars. They decided the best use of the old tunnel was to fill it with rubble. Meanwhile, Seattle has some of the worst congestion in the country.

I have no idea what goes on in the planning meetings for this stuff.

There has been some talk of reviving some sleeper trains, but so far I haven't seen any new sleeper routes. Of course, Europe is a big place, but as far as I can tell, not much has improved over the last decade. If anything, cheap airfare has been on the rise and rail has been declining.

Don't get me wrong, I love trains, and I would like nothing more than a fast and cheap inter-European rail network worthy of the name.

Vienna-Milano for 2 in a cabin with no one else is 190 EUR each way or 240 if you want an en-suite toilet/shower and takes 19 hours. Or you could fly (1 hour 20 minutes) for 50 EUR return per person.

So for the 380 EUR you save, you can go the evening before and spend an extra night in a 5-star hotel room in Milano, even accounting for transportation from the airport.

Assuming two week-long vacations, though, you'd easily spend more than half the time in transit.

Doesn't the US still have pretty cheap long distance bus services? Certainly ~15-20 years ago when I was bumming around North America I could get almost anywhere for less than $100 if I wasn't too much in a hurry.

You pay much less for the porters and stewards. You spend much less on feeding the passengers and attending to their other needs. Your passengers will tolerate being packed closer together.

Air doesn't need regular maintenance and has a much higher capacity. There are also several competing airlines on most routes pushing the price down.

I have no idea about the relative maintenance cost between a train and an airplane, but I suspect they're within the same order of magnitude (but I could be very wrong)

3 of the air routes that cover this journey are in the top 11 busiest domestic routes in the world (#3 Sapporo to Tokyo-Haneda;#4 Fukuoka to Tokyo-Haneda;#11 Tokyo-Haneda to Osaka-Itami).

The highest ranking US domestic route is #30 (JFK-LAX), though by distance it's almost 3X (2827.2 miles).

No transport is free of movement or vibration, cars most especially. Far more get car and air sick than train sick. So unless you're advocating never travelling at all, I'm not sure what point you're making.

From my experience of all, train is probably the most comfortable of the lot, with the best seating, most desk space - you get a proper table and even a mains point. You don't get forced to breathe dry low oxygen air, and avoid the nasty taste of road fumes.

Biggest negative is the relative cost of train compared to all the other forms of transport, which speaks more of relative subsidy than inherent costs.

There might be other reasons to take trains over airplanes, but "so I can comfortably work on it" is a very questionable one.

You can add hours of buffer time if you want (if you're flying to do an organ transplant, maybe that's a good idea); most people can take a 0.5% chance of missing their flight. (I've literally never missed one, though I've been a few minutes away from doing so a couple times, usually because of my own error, once because of unexpectedly long security lines, even for TSA Pre.)

Personally I've never had issue working on trains, and the many friends who use trains regularly seem to do work well enough too.

I haven't experienced any issues with vibration or overwhelming sleepiness and haven't ever heard anyone complain about these things.

The other passengers and background noise are no less distracting than an open plan office, and it could even be much quieter if you have a cabin with just a few other passengers.

A good reliable internet connection is crucial, I agree. I think it should be manageable with proper planning.

Lots of people walk up and down the cars on long trips. You have to walk to get to the dining car, bathroom etc. It's certainly easier and more pleasant to walk and stretch on a train than a plane or a bus.

I've taken that train as well and while it's nice for routes of around that distance, I'm not sure how it would be beneficial if you had to sit on it for days. That wouldn't be much of a sleeper trip.

Also, if we really had bullet trains that could do 200+ MPH, you could have cross-country express trains that take less than 24 hours, so it wouldn't even have to be multiple days.

This isn’t a useful perspective for the majority of people