[tormeh]

I think it's inner-city transport the parent is referring to. It really is fantastic in Berlin. Nothing beats a good metro for inner-city transport, and Berlin has it. Tokyo and New York is better, though, but then again those are vastly bigger cities.

And yeah, long-range train passenger transport generally sucks but it's not really relevant, as it's not inner-city.

Besides, train travel doesn't need to suck - Maglev may just go fast enough and be cheap enough to maintain to fix most of the problems. The train in the article will go for 40 minutes - that's far less than you need just to check in at the airport. And it will cover 330km - that's 4 hours by car. it would be foolish to pick any other means of transport between the two cities. It could go from SF to LA in 1h15m. Depending on how bad the airports are, it could even be competitive with air between NY and LA. But it won't become truly interesting until these trains go faster than planes (and I believe they will do so, eventually)

[Shivetya]

and I have no issues with inner city travel in Atlanta or Chicago. The issue at hand based on the original article is transport between cities. Hence the point I made is valid, the trope that Europe is some bastion of passenger transport by train simply isn't true, unless you count a few percentage points as an amazing number.