I don’t know enough about the USPS to comment, but I just want to take a moment to hate on Amtrak. I know there is a huge “we love trains!” crowd among urbanis

I don’t know enough about the USPS to comment, but I just want to take a moment to hate on Amtrak. I know there is a huge “we love trains!” crowd among urbanists but Amtrak takes longer and is FAR more expensive on most routes than planes. Ultimately going all-in on airports was probably the better play than high speed rail. I commonly see people say stuff like “what if you could get from NYC to Miami in 2 hours?” That would require a train ~15x faster than our current highest speed rail service, but only a ~30% faster commercial plane. One of the highest frequented routes on Amtrak is NYC <> DC. This usually puts you out 200-300$ unless you can book months in advance (which essentially would defeat the point of a train but I digress) and takes 3-4 hours. By comparison a plane will take about an hour and if I book one just two days out that’s only $200. If I have a week or two of notice it quickly drops below $100. It seems to me that people hate planes mostly because of airports and schedules not being convenient. This is a totally different problem than method of transportation, and one that is far easier to solve. It would be infinitely easier and cheaper to make airports fast and efficient compared to expanding and maintaining high speed rail across the US. It is not fair at all to put USPS and Amtrak in the same bucket as while Amtrak is subsidized by the government it is insanely expensive. Americans are essentially paying Amtrak for the right to charge us ungodly prices in the name of “trains are cool.”