> This alone tells me you've never lived in a rural area in the US or relied on Amtrak. ad hominem You know absolutely nothing about me. I have lived in rural

> This alone tells me you've never lived in a rural area in the US or relied on Amtrak. ad hominem You know absolutely nothing about me. I have lived in rural areas. I've never relied on Amtrak, but I've used it quite a bit. Most of what I was saying comes from facts out of people like Wenover Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ This video doesn't go into the rural -> plane connection; can't find that one at the moment. But he has another video on it. But yes, people do use Amtrak for connecting to major airports from rural areas. > I'm sure it does. Now shift your gaze westwards, to North Dakota, Wyoming, eastern Montana .... I was not addressing any of those areas. At all. You built some argument I wasn't making. I never said trains would be good for those regions. I think if we did build good rails, those areas would get some service eventually. Australia has a similar situation (a region I have lived in btw). They only over 30M ~ 40M people. I have taken trains intercity and they are very touristy and not meant for general transport. But each capital city: Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney ... they have train systems that would make any US capital be ashamed of itself. The only capitals without any rail are Hobart, ACT and Darwin. Australia has the infrastructure to accommodate high-speed intercity if they ever got around to implementing it. The United States does not and it has a much higher population density and much larger cities. American cities, CITIES (which I've been saying a lot) need real transportation. If we built that, the rest would start to naturally follow into place. We'd see rural rail as a byproduct. We use to have it in the US and it's gone now thanks to GM/Ford/big auto buying rail and bus lines and then killing them. I'm looking back over my comment just to make sure I'm talking about cities. I really feel like your anti-rail stance goes to the hart of the problem. American hate rail and public transport for some fucked up nonsensical reason and it doesn't make any sense to me at all. I lived without a car for five years in three different countries and I simply think American cities shouldn't require cars to be livable. I don't think that's unreasonable.