This is just silly. That route takes 2.5 days and costs $179! You can fly Southwest for $109 with some planning, or $177 if you know a week in advance that you're going.
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I've taken a lot of ideological abuse on this thread, so let me just say that I think it comes down to this kind of conversation: the USA is big and you need an airplane to go further than 300 miles or so. And there are a LOT of places that are further than 300 miles apart. There are very few places in the US that are closer than that and are significant enough to warrant a decent transportation connection. It turns out that Europe is similarly big (well, not the same, but I gave some excellent examples) but nobody likes to talk about that. The resistance seems to be in thinking that an airplane could "replace" a train; romance and sentimentality, if you ask me. I've taken trains on long distances in both the US and Europe: I'll fly everytime if it saves time, and in the long run it often saves money too.
There are some isolated markets where trains make sense in the US, and yes, Amtrak is a mess. But by in large, the Northeast Corridor is pretty decent; the Capitols in Northern California, and the Surfliners in Southern California are also pretty decent. They don't take off more because San Francisco and Los Angeles are just not built like Paris: they are spread out over hundreds of square miles (instead of just 40, like the core of Paris is). If you try to take public transportation in London or Paris outside of the core, you will fail in exactly the same way as you do in Los Angeles.
So I'd prefer to say: European cities are better than US cities and leave the public transportation question out of it.
/jordan