I would imagine UA/ASU students (with families in one population center and who study in the other), business commuters who need to go to either city for daytime meetings (and would appreciate the extra productive time on the train), and people going from Tucson to/from the far-larger PHX airport.

And you cannot use the existing track for HSR. You just can’t drop a fast train on regular old tracks.

It’s not “super irrelevant”. I saw this story and literally thought “holy shit, a 747 got lost? What was it doing flying such a short flight to Germany”?

use of a generic plane

I actually have some doubts about trains serving Las Vegas. I’m sure some people would take it and it would be popular with tourists, but there’s very little population density in-between the two cities, and trains make sense on population corridors, because they can provide tons of extra utility to transport people…

I have no idea about traffic. The point of trains isn’t because “traffic is bad”. It’s to transport people in a way that doesn’t require them to drive themselves in single-occupancy vehicles.

I know, I live in downtown Phoenix and have seen it. Obviously you couldn’t use the exact same building, or you’d need to buy it back. I’m just saying, 90% of the infrastructure to move people from here to Tucson already. It seems crazy to me that the few ideas knocking around talk about building an *entirely new*…

Sure, I retract the statement that it’s “not that big a deal”. It is. I just meant relative to a 747 full of people landing on a different continent, it affected fewer people. But you’re right.

To take your example of France, I took a train last year from Paris to Nice. Of course, I know there are some direct trains, but due to timing I couldn’t get one. I stopped in Dijon on the way. The train itself was incredibly pleasant, high speed, etc. But it still took about 7 hours. I could probably have caught a…

Indeed, they talk about building a dedicated high speed rail line sometimes between Phoenix and Tucson. It’s a straight, flat, heavily traffiked 150 mile distance.

I’ve done the Surfliner and the Coaster down there too, and if the timing is right, it actually does make sense.

Is a photo of the proper ac type involved that critical to the story?

Here’s a fun question - who cares?

There are literally hundreds of licensable photos, not to mention completely free-to-use photos, of BA regional jets like the one used in the story. Instead they licensed a nonsensical photo of a gigantic 747 from the AP.

The problem with that analogy is that they weren’t doing a story about a specific type of plane.

Too much hassle? This took me 10 seconds, it’s the correct aircraft, and it’s free to use commercially with attribution from Wikimedia Commons:

Drives me nuts that reporters and editors are so fucking lazy when it comes to coverage of airlines. If a Jalopnik editor published a story about a Chevy Spark, and illustrated it with a photo of a Suburban, they would get fired.

Oh, I have. Yes, they are flat rates, but I’ve seen (and in one case, paid) a $350 cleaning fee.

Me too. People in service industries don’t seem to understand that many of us outside of the industry don’t really *ever* deal with cash anymore. The only times I regularly carry around cash are when I’m out of the country, and stopped to get some foreign currency at an ATM upon arrival. Otherwise, domestically, I can…

Are you kidding? Airbnb and VRBO hosts just add *insane* cleaning fees to their prices. It’s getting to the point where the up-front price you see per night is basically meaningless: