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[quote user="Phoebe Vet"] Two and a half hours from an airport is not my definition of convenient. The scheduled carriers of all sizes serve fewer than 750 airports in the US.  That's an average of 15 per state, though obviously size and population will make it vary from state to state.  If you eleiminate the small contract carriers who just feed the hubs, it is considerably fewer.  Small cities are constantly haggling with the airlines to keep their service because it's not profitable. As far as TSA is concerned, Making you take off  your shoes and put them through the x-ray machine is paranoid.  Prohibiting big bottles of shampoo is paranoid.  Patting women's breasts because their underwire registers on the metal detector is paranoid.  Dumping my 58 year old wife's purse out on the belt because they couldn't tell what the horse head key fob on her key chain was is paranoid.  Pretty much everything TSA does is paranoid, and if you are afraid to fly if they quit doing it then you are paranoid. No one is trying to replace air travel with rail.  The argument is that there is a place for both. Regional trains that go to an airline hub city should stop at the airport or the locality should run service that connects the train station and the airport.  It would probably cost that person from Rocky Mount less to take the train to Charlotte than it would to park for a week at the Charlotte airport while they are on vacation. [/quote] The worse case scenario is 2.5 hours, which would be found in most instances in far west Texas. For most Texans the drive to an airport with commercial airline service is one to 1.25 hours. Paranoid is in the eyes of the beholder.  My experience does not support your experience, and I fly at least once a month.  Moreover, surveys have shown that most airline passengers, whilst they don't like the security procedures, believe the TSA intrusions are reasonable given the threat. Many passenger rail advocates, including the supporters of the Vision for the future, as well as many people who post to these forums, say they want a national passenger rail system that would in effect duplicate the nation's air and highway systems.  Unfortunately, they have put forth few realistic proposals on how to pay for it, other than to run to the federal and state governments with tin cup in hand.  Given the pressing financial challenges facing the United States, I don't believe that we can afford a national passenger rail system unless we are willing to accept European tax levels to pay for it.  And I am not willing to go there.    Passenger trains make sense in a few high density corridors, as well as for commuter operations in mega cities, but these are the only places that they make sense.
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