--- Jordan Hayes <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com> wrote:
>
> Miami to Atlanta is over 600 miles as the crow
> flies. 600 miles is
> longer than *any* fast train route in the world, if
> you don't include
> connections through Tokyo. Ok, let's include one:
> Hachinohe to Osaka,
> about 600 miles, is over 6 hours by Shinkansen with
> only a 15 minute
> connection in Tokyo. That is: this is the best
> case. That's just about
> 100mph average.
[WS:] You forget one thing, Jordan. Trains or planes do not transport potatoes (couch potatoes, maybe :)) but people - the main difference being that for the latter the organization of time matters as much if not more than duration.
To illustrate: it may take 6-8 hours for a fast train to cover a 600 mile distance. For the plane it is 3 hours, when we include getting to the aiport, going through the gates etc. But the train can still beat the train. How?
Very simply - by leaving in the evening and arriving in the morning. If I have a 9Am meeting in Chicago, I would need to leave Baltimore before 6 AM to barely make it by plane. Or take a fast train that leaves say at 10 PM, sleep confortably overnight and arrive at 7AM - and walk to the meeting well rested. If such a choice at a comparable price were available, why would someone want to wake at 4AM, rush to the airport, jump through the hoops, and then rush from the airport to make to the meeting is beyond me.
If you start thingking outside the box of "faster is better," as US-ers tend to do, you can suddently discover that with some planning and rearrangements of daily schedules there actually are viable alternatievs to cars and planes. But that requires planning and behavior modificaiton - something that most US-ers tend to be incapable of doing.
Wojtek
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