Comment by runako
2 hours ago
> It already takes 6 hours to fly. Add in security, checked bags, getting to and from the airport and it's close to 10 hours.
10 hours is still significantly faster than a hypothetical HSR. Remember that it would also have to stop along the way. Secon, not everyone lives/is traveling to a place that is near a hypothetical train station; you have to keep in mind that American cities tend toward sprawl. HSR leaving from e.g. downtown LA would still be less convenient for e.g. the folks who live in the Valley. It's definitely not a 10-hour excursion for many people to transit the country (source: I did this for years for work).
> Also you waste a day or ruin a night's sleep on the redeye.
Highly dependent on the individual & service class. But the point of this is you're actually physically there in less time.
> Leave LA tonight, shop/sightsee/eat all day in NYC, take in a show, hop on the late train back to LA the following day. This is pretty near impossible today unless you have a private jet.
You're going to get a lot of pushback from people who have been to weddings on the other side of the continent, since they will have done this. Most of them do not have private jets, it's just a common thing Americans do.
> Remember that it would also have to stop along the way
Why?
> Highly dependent on the individual & service class.
There are flights that offer lie-flat seats for most of the passengers on board? I have to confess I haven't ever seen any domestic flights in North America that have lie-flat seats. But maybe I'm just poor.
> But the point of this is you're actually physically there in less time.
And more tired when you get there. I'd rather sleep during my travel and enjoy the destination than waste time recovering in my hotel room. The alternative is to waste your day flying out so you don't lose sleep.
> Most of them do not have private jets, it's just a common thing Americans do.
I'm sure there are individuals who do the redeye consecutive nights. I'm pointing out that doing it instead on a train, sleeping in a bed, will leave you way more well-rested. You might fly out Friday night and return Sunday morning. But you're going to need all of Sunday to recover from those flights.
> Why?
Because (ignoring the middle of the continent for a moment) "LA" is actually a very large area where having a single stop erases many of the advantages cited for trains. LA does not really have the sort of city center of most train-centric cities, and LA has poor public transit. On the other end, "NYC" has the same property, mostly because you would want to include people from other parts of the densely-populated region around NYC and not just make everyone schlep into Manhattan.
The Shanghai<->Beijing HSR has 24 stops over 819 miles, for example. Similarly, it would only make sense for a US HSR to stop in e.g. Dallas or Chicago or other cities in between.
> I'd rather sleep during my travel and enjoy the destination than waste time recovering in my hotel room. The alternative is to waste your day flying out so you don't lose sleep.
Yeah, like I said individual preference. I don't normally want to do back-to-back redeye flights, but I have done it and am glad it was an option.
A large advantage of the train is all the places on the way. I don't actually want to get from New York to Los Angeles. However, I live in the middle of the country between the two cities and by stopping near me, I could get on that train and I could travel, probably not to either New York or LA, but to some other city also in the middle of the country.
Night trains sound like a good thing, but in reality they're not. They work well only in the cases where a city is just far enough that it's an overnight trip, but not much more. Which is to say you get on the train, you brush your teeth, you go to sleep, you wake up in the morning, and you have just enough time to get practice before you get off the train. If your train instead arrives at 4 a.m., that's way too early and so you're gonna be sleeping on the train or they're gonna have to wake you up early in the morning. The other one is particularly a great option. The other way is even worse though if you're on the train go to sleep and you get wake up in the morning and there's still several more hours to do while you're sitting on a train doing basically nothing - except thinking the whole time, you know what? I could have just flown. This would have been an hour to the airport, another hour in line, three hours of flight, and they'd be there. And then they could sleep in a hotel, the cheapest economy hotel room is still much larger than the best luxury train sleeper car.