> my experience over the last
> few years that in travelling by air one must add a minimum of 5 hours to
> the flight time, sometimes more.
What, do you crawl?
I recently left my house in Berkeley, drove to SFO, got on a flight to Palm Springs, spent half an hour at the airport, flew back to San Francisco, got my car and drove home in just over five hours. That's 421 air miles _each way_ ... you could drive that one way in about 7+ hours (my mapping software says 480 miles the easy way).
Yes, this was post-9/11.
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Ok, as usual, LBO is way off track. All I said about trains is that it's too bad they don't compete well in the US, and that they aren't even all that impressive under the best conditions in the rest of the world, and I always laugh when people talk about how great the trains are in Europe and Japan and how they wish we could have those fast trains in the US too but they don't get that the cities are just closer together there and trains, even fast ones, won't work very well here.
Even if you got a Shinkansen to do the 400 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 4 hours (better than the example I gave before, Tokyo -> Hiroshima), it'd still be WAY faster to fly. Maybe if you could get one to go from Sacramento to San Francisco (and get across the Bay somehow, hmmm) in an hour, that'd be impressive, but you'd be competing with busses, not airplanes. And who would ride it?
Fast trains cannot and do not compete with airplanes, except in very rare circumstances, usually in the 150-250 mile range, and then only if you have a straight shot on a very fast train. Very few city pairs count, most of them starting in Paris.
/jordan