Sadly, with commercial air travel the time a passenger spends on the plane between say SF and LA represents only a small portion of their total travel time. This is commonly overlooked or not understood by people unfamiliar with traveling by train.
I’ve flown it plenty of times. Get to the airport 60min before flight, and you’re out of LAX in less than 30 min.
How early do you need to get to the train station?
Not to mention if you miss your train how quickly can you jump on another train?
I’m not arguing it’s not a nice alternative, but there is a reason why flying is still highly in demand even with high quality rail systems like in Europe.
You arrive at the station when the train is about to depart, not an hour or more before like you're forced to when flying. But even better, the station is in the center of town, rather than the middle of nowhere, reaching which again significantly lengthens your travel time.
You can jump on another flight faster than you can jump on another train? I rarely fly more than a couple times a month, but for me this is never true.
> When I took the trains in Europe I’d show up early
Why would you do that? Were you worried the train would depart early? Boarding a train is immediate.
> And stations in the middle of cities? Maybe, but unlikely building new infrastructure in existing cities.
1) "Maybe?" 2) The post to which you responded asked about a hypothetical Shinkansen style train from SF to LA, not one connecting El Segundo and Millbrae.
> And sure, if I want to go from SF to LA, there are 20+ flights per day. Are there going to be 20+ trains?
Going from Tokyo to Osaka is like taking the subway in terms of train frequency, so a lot more than that. There also aren't sprawling terminals to traverse on either end, which you quite likely will be forced to do when changing flights.
Let's talk about punctuality. If you think you're content don't look at the numbers for Shinkansen. As for air travel, clearly if you favor flying narrowbodies between cities only a few hundred miles apart you're an extremely patient person, but did you realize your flights between SF and LA will be lucky to break 90% on-time reliability? As a lifelong non-rev I do everything I can to avoid short flights like that.
Yes, but the airport is not in the center of town. What is usually the case is the public transit takes you to the center, and then you take a second trip to the airport. Meanwhile the train station is generally a lot closer. These aren't particularly good examples because they are from the US and also what I have experience with, but if you look at say San Jose the public transit converges on Diridon and from there you can take the light rail to a vaguely airport-ish location. In SF you can take city transit to the BART backbone down market, then you take BART to the actual airport way down near Millbrae. Meanwhile the actual station (again, we're stretching it because San Francisco doesn't actually have long-distance rail) for, say, Caltrain is well-connected and much closer.
