Tbh - once you somehow figure out who's going to pay for the massive amount of construction, and the land (I know the strips of farmland MIGHT be cheap but the

Tbh - once you somehow figure out who's going to pay for the massive amount of construction, and the land (I know the strips of farmland MIGHT be cheap but the last few dozen miles near each place everbody wants to go get very tricky) - I agree that these sub-400-mile trips are 1000x more competitive with flying, compared to the transcontinental ones. Yeah, I'd love to hop a HSR from Dallas to Houston, or Atlanta to Jacksonvile. I just think a transcontinental HSR would not be a popular enough trip that we can responsibly include transcontinental passenger traffic in economic considerations to justify the build. In other words, if we can only afford the build in general if we can get like 60% of NY-LA, NY-SF, etc. traffic to switch to trains, then it's going to go bankrupt.