[rickydroll]

And planes go to more places than trains do. You want to add a new destination? Go through a few years of planning and construction for a couple thousand feet of tarmac, and people can go there using existing planes. Best of all, you don't need a large passenger base to justify the expense.

For rail? You're looking at an order of magnitude more for planning and construction, all new infrastructure, all new rail stock. It will take a much larger passenger base to justify the expense and effort.

Airplanes don't just shine for longer trips. There have been some interesting developments with commuter airplanes that are either all electric or hybrid with a 200-plus-mile range. If they are as energy efficient as they promise to be, we could see a resurgence in municipal airports for transportation between regional centers where rail is either unavailable or excessively expensive.

[dredmorbius]

OTOH, there's a lot of stuff that is far more feasibly moved on the Earth's surface rather than in flight. So some sort of surface-level infrastructure will be required: highways, railroads, canals, rivers, oceans.

Some of those are amenable to high-speed variants, some less so. And once you've established transport corridors, much of the hard part (rights-of-way acquisition) is accomplished, so that adding a high-speed route becomes far more tractable.

For the most part, actual construction costs are fairly modest, modulo bridges and tunnels, both of which can of course be quite expensive.

[rickydroll]

Good points. I think that running rail parallel to highways, especially if the rail can travel twice to three times as fast as road traffic, is a good plan.

I think increasing the viability of travel between smaller airports is a good thing for those times when you don't want to spend a lot of time traveling or waiting for a transit vehicle. If the equivalent of micromobility air travel comes to fruition, you'll see two- or three-person vehicles that get up and go when someone wants a ride. Another benefit could be the airport-to-airport delivery of packages with different-sized drone craft and autonomous navigation.

#IFoundMyFlyingCar