Maybe get out of the damn left lane?

And used more energy than.

Yes. Caltrain has pretty “safe” infrastructure but it goes through some rich neighborhoods (e.g., Palo Alto) that produce a lot of teen suicides via stress.

Typos: "Amtrack" should be "Amtrak" and "Caltrain" is styled without a capital "T."

Eh, cost is just a matter of subsidy levels. It’s a reflection of our values.

Please don’t recommend TSA Wait Times. It’s all based on user-submitted data, which means that the dataset is small and full of outliers. Nobody’s going to go online to use the wait time website if everything went just fine, so you’ll mostly have the wild worst-case ones. Even if not, people are pretty bad at judging…

Your experience is not typical when factoring in the items I discussed above. There’s a lot of great research that’s been done over the past decade, most of it in the Transportation Research Record of the National Academies, which go beyond just the fare. I’ll find my notes and add some links later.

Would you mind responding to my paragraph 3 and below? Most of my argument isn’t about coast-to-coast systems, and indeed I write: “So... for a subset of people going from center city to center city in certain regions at certain spacing, HSR makes all the sense in the world.” - which matches your response.

It’s not the raw size of the country, it’s the population density. In the U.S. the median person is much less likely to be surrounded by dense population than the median person in China. It’s just a numbers game - the proportion of trips is just out of whack.

Help me out here. I’m a huge fan of HSR, but I do believe that the country is too big to make a nationwide HSR network work. We might be able to get it to work in the northeast corridor (if we could figure out how to straighten the Connecticut coast), and probably between LA and San Jose, but that’s about it.

It’s a mixed bag. Yes, if you’re flying with no luggage and you’re flying to and from a major metro area, it can be much cheaper than it has historically.

And remember, fees aren’t taxed like fares, so it’s also a way for the industry to underinvest in infrastructure.

Once you get to that point, yes. But as I’m sure you know, most pilots have to spend years in training, and more years getting experience at a regional carrier (a system invented to avoid labor costs) before getting called up to the majors.

As a proud not-southerner, I believe that the term “y’all” is the south’s only valid contribution to gender-neutral language.

The Edmunds article explains it in more detail, but all modern engines can detect knocking from lower-octane gas and derate the engine to make up for it.

Try Italy. It's this to the extreme. But I don't have any problem with it - the merging traffic has the responsibility to find a gap; people on the road already don't have to yield to them.

PennDOT did a study of this years ago. If traffic is light, the most efficient thing to do is merge early. It's only when traffic is already stop-and-go that the zipper merge is better. And anyway, doing a zipper merge doesn't give you license to cut people in line.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a California stop. We have way too many stop signs and so it makes a lot of sense to yield the right-of-way to everybody and then go without stopping. Saves time and fuel.

TVMOCABBSAO
“The vast majority of cops are bastards but some are OK.”

Once more the desire to keep gas prices low runs directly against government plans to combat climate change.