Yes, the geodesic from Milan Malpensa to Cairo is mostly over water. But that isn't so for SF-NY.

The study you cited didn't include purchase cost!

$2500 is way low. I don't think that would even cover insurance for many drivers.

I generally use the AAA's research when filing my taxes. They say $8698/year. Their Your Driving Costs brochure is useful, and here's their press release discussing vehicle cost for 2015.

The studies you cited really say one thing: The U.S. has a lot more poor people than those other places. The Atlantic is very clear on that, income inequality is much more severe here.

That doesn't particularly say anything meaningful about rail vs. automobiles. Just that they still have a middle-class, and we increasingly do not.

Why wouldn't SF to NY be a non-stop? Sure, there will be things that aren't, but the main places you fly aircraft non-stop through today can as easily support nonstop rail. There are several dozens of SF-NY nonstop flights every day.

Well, our freight railroad is the best in a way. Japanese freight lines use electric traction cars. Each car has its own motor, not just brakes, no diesel locomotives. 100% containers onboard. And they have high-speed freight trains for their equivalent of FedEx, etc. OK, it's a small country, but our system looks very backward next to that. But it is bigger.

You will have to figure out how long the blocks are (taking a diversion into how railroads work here) and the stopping distance to determine how close they can actually space trains. 10 minutes could be pushing it. BART has never achieved its design goals on train spacing.

that means 1,000 passengers per hour, every hour, every day.

Piece of cake.

I could just have you count cars on I-5 to prove that one.

BART runs 65 trains at commute time. That is at least 13,000 people per hour, just for a piece of the SF Bay area. Just counting two commutes, it's more than you are talking about.

Hyperloop is not real. Much as I am rooting for Elon Musk's enterprises, he's never built a working train, and his vision for one was a safety nightmare. It would have been perfectly comfortable for someone who flys one of those old Rutan aircraft and nobody else at all (get in the cockpit of one of an "EZ" class plane and you'll understand). Making that idea practical requires scaling up from the little tube and correspondingly little train he was thinking of. And there is still the matter of making the evacuated tunnel safe. Rockets are easy next to this.

Wherever I went in Britain, the trains were at least as good as cars would have been. And I've been on some of the shortlines, etc.

In the U.S. freight lines go everywhere. It's quite common that there's one adjoining a farm in the middle of nowhere, with a working siding. There is no reason passenger lines can't go everywhere, too.

No transportation infrastructure should be subsidized with taxes; it should all be financed by user fees or private investments.

This is sort of old-fashioned Friedmanesque economics. It's the same sort of thinking that imports inexpensive workers from India and puts them to work in Silicon Valley because local ones are more expensive. Eventually, people start to realize that it makes someone's bottom line better, but not theirs.

We need to subsidize an improved form of transport so that it can compete with the heavily-subsidized ones today (you're not going to tell me roads are privatized) and so that people won't have to sustain the totally insane cost of automobile ownership. In this way we put economics on the right track for everyone. We've really had a century-long economic distortion as far as automobiles are concerned, we are now starting to pay the price as energy costs increase and we see the ecological impact, etc. Let's help people get away from that.

The largest taxes you pay today are what you pay for the inflated price of land (indirectly if you are a renter, but you still pay) and the cost of an automobile, which can exceed $50K for 10 years of usage plus the rest of the cost of ownership.

Once place where I was near Zurich, admittedly an expensive area, wanted $2000/year for a commuter rail pass. I calculated that it was actually a very large savings over automobile ownership or even automobile use.

Seismic activity is a matter for bridges, and for very short spans that might directly cross a fault. Regarding the rest of the land, we build buildings on it and put our sweet little kids to sleep in them every evening. We worry about earthquakes, but modern buildings stand up to them without being prohibitively expensive to construct.

LA to SF has one high pass over the entire route, and it's all agricultural. The rest is quite flat, California's central valley is historically marshland.

Funny how there is no shortage of land available for building automobile roads. They go through all of those expensive neighborhoods, without exception. There's room to piggyback urban rail on them. Regarding LA to SF, there is nothing but farmland for most of the way. That's the first thing you learn about I-5, and even 101 is the same for much of its length. Getting the train down the SF Penninsula and into urban LA is a small part of the overall route.

Monterey has an Amtrak bus link to the Salinas station, and they sell it pretty well, including in a package with aquarium tickets. But it's a shame they have that bus, because Monterey had fine train service of its own. One remaining car is in the Sacramento railroad museum while the right of way has become a walking trail. Our country was collectively asleep at the switch while that stuff was shut down and removed.

Boise got its electric street railway in 1890 and it coupled with great intercity lines. All gone.

I don't stay in luxury locations (just because I'm not fancy) and in general I am with the common people. I didn't see that they weren't riding the trains in Europe. Rather, they didn't own automobiles.

Southwest finally got 110 outlets between the seats. Of course Amtrak has had this forever...

My impression was that Stansted was at least an hour's ride from anywhere that I wanted to be. Now, if you happen to live there (and lots of folks do) it might work out.

I'm a little scared about flying on Ryanair anyway. But then again, even Lufthansa screwed up with their discount airline.