alt Hacker NewsI would argue that high speed regional rail would address this as well. How many flights from regional airports to major hubs could be eliminated with a decent train?
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High speed rail is only cost-effective between major cities that are within a few hundred miles or so. Otherwise you don't have enough passengers to recoup the cost of building & maintaining the rail system.
For example: Spokane to Seattle is about 230 miles in a straight line, or 280 miles driving. A flight takes less than an hour (not even 40 minutes of which is spent in the air) and costs $80-130 one way. A train traveling 200mph nonstop would take 1 hour 24 minutes. Building high speed rail costs $20-$200 million per mile (the upper end of that is California HSR). If we optimistically assume $20m/mile, constructing the line will cost $5.6b. If all SEA-GEG passengers (677k per year) choose to take rail instead of flying, and we want the project to pay for itself after 50 years, then each ticket will need to cost $165. This also assumes no cost to maintain or operate the rail line.
If you're comparing HSR to air travel with post 9/11 security then there's a a moderate number. However, once you have HSR that moves a significant amount of people, you WILL get post 9/11 security there as well, taking the number to approximately zero.
Regular rail is already this, and for much of the Northeast is already roughly at or near time parity with flying, all things considered. If you have to arrive at the airport 2 hours early, and it takes 30 minutes-1 hour to leave by whatever means (renting a car, waiting for a bus or Uber, etc. + baggage return and simply walking through the airport), and then another 30 minutes-hour to actually arrive at your destination, arriving at your local station 10 minutes before departure and arriving in the city center/local destination station starts to look really attractive for flights of <2 hours/train rides of <6 hours.