I never thought of the High Speed Rail as a commuter exclusive option. While that may be the intent, looking at the routes that have been brought up so far I wa

I never thought of the High Speed Rail as a commuter exclusive option. While that may be the intent, looking at the routes that have been brought up so far I was under the impression that this was intended as a general attempt to make the US more interconnected. That said, most of the routes are not places that are terribly feasible to commute back and forth to by car. Just eyeballing the routes, most of them look to be in the 3-4 hour highway driving time. Like its been mentioned elsewhere, if they can do highway travel times, that becomes a feasible replacement for the short commuter flights. If they can run at a reasonably high speed, rather than having to slow down all the time (like the existing high speed rail in the US, which rarely reaches highway speed) it may become reasonable as a daily commute. There are several people I work with (in Tampa, not a huge metro area at all, but with no real public transportation) who have close to hour long driving commutes. If you can do that and live ~100 miles away on the high speed rail, that would greatly increase the reasonable mobility for commuting.