Since you have a new account, I'll vouch for your comment to keep it alive, but please get rid of that disparaging attitude on HN. If you're going within a cit

Since you have a new account, I'll vouch for your comment to keep it alive, but please get rid of that disparaging attitude on HN. If you're going within a city, then home->dest time is roughly equal to home->station->train->station->dest, so if you're going to use a car anyway then you might as well just drive all the way, with more comfort, privacy, and convenience. Stations within walking distance are not realistic except in very dense urban areas like NY (which already has subways). If you're going between cities, traffic is actually not much of an issue so it's again the same equation. Once distance increases to the point of a train being faster (even with stops), air travel then starts to become a better option. Rail requires density. American cities are very spread out and internally sparse internally. Last mile is a serious problem, and that's before considering politics, real-estate, security and defense issues, pricing models, taxes, and other factors. Meanwhile roads are cheap and give people ultimate flexibility. We would all love better transport, but pretending it's simple just because some other country somewhere has some trains isn't very useful.