No, it’s all about managing demand and keeping seats in certain O&D markets available for connecting passengers - particularly for lucrative international connections.

Walking up it was fun, too.

Golden Gate. I’ve lived here for seven years now, and it’s still special every single time.

Absolutely. For right turns, the shorthand is “turn from the curb.” It’s really important if you’re around cyclists, as they will often try to undertake you (pass on the right), which can lead to them getting hooked. Yes, they shouldn’t do it, but let’s be honest, neither drivers nor cyclists have ever had any real…

Yes, not a turn notification. Turn signal :-)

Well, it’s also speed limiters set at 65.001 and 65.002.

But what if you’re out of blinker fluid?

All of driving etiquette can be summarized as follows: Don’t be in the way. One example among many:

Yep. PennDOT did the seminal study on when each circumstance works best, and it’s exactly what you describe.

I totally agree BUT: don’t use the lane that’s ending as a passing lane. Match speed with the cars in the right lane (hey, that’s what a merge lane is for!) and move over once you get to the end.

Or it could just be a joke in the comments section of a web page.

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.