Beam Me Up Alexandria

Does she support high speed rail? Is that a bad thing? Aviation has pretty much been ruined hasn't it?

Rail is in the Green Deal. It's not bad but it will take a lot longer to travel and is limited to the mainland not international. Aviation is not perfect but it is still the fastest way to travel.

Commercial aviation is reserved for poor people. If you have money, you don't fly commercial. Currently, the U.S. has no truly high speed rail. It's a great solution if workable and uses penny's on the dollar in energy compared to aviation. I can support efforts to introduce high speed rail. This doesn't make her stupid.

Commercial flights can get pricey unless you want to make several stops to your destination. And if you have money you're still going to find a way to fly. She doesn't address international travel. All she said was let's do rail and eliminate air travel. That was my point about using transporters in my meme. And she obviously hasn't thought it all out.

I think you're being unfair to what "to the scale where air travel stops being necessary" means. It's pretty clear that what it's getting at is that a modern high-speed rail will compete with air travel ON THE DISTANCES THAT THE RAIL WILL CONNECT TO.

I don't think anyone seriously expects that it's saying you build a rail line between Washington DC and New York and suddenly people will stop flying to Paris - that's a straw man, nobody's saying that. They're saying if you can get from DC to NYC in 3 hours for half the price of an air ticket, they'll stop flying Dulles to JFK - and, by the way, it's also going to compete with doing the trip by car.

Exactly. People will always fly overseas. She's talking domestic. What I mean by commercial air being ruined, I'm talking about TSA, strip searches, removing your shoes, belt, pulling it out to check length, pooping in a cup so they can smell it...... the long list of BS that has ruined air travel. I'd seriously prefer to go back to boarding a plane and taking my chances with no security at all.

Not to mention the continually smaller spaces, reduced carry on, paying for luggage, long lines, expensive tickets, slow airports, expensive parking, absolutely everything to do with commercial flying sucks. If you can't afford a private plane or charter, todays aviation is the modern version of Titanic steerage.

Remember Elon Musk is working on vacuum tube travel. If this could ever be possible you're talking nearly unlimited speed. There would be no air to pass through and no sound barrier issues. This type of travel could reach 1000mph or more. It might not be possible but without forward thinking people willing to spend the money to research it, it NEVER will be possible.

Imagine having a 200 mile commute and doing it in 15 minutes.

Elon Musk works on a lot of nonsense. High speed rail is a technology that already exists and the USA is just about the only country that hasn't even tried to implement it.

Oh yeah, like space and electric cars. Yeah, those have been complete failures.

I love electric cars. We should have adopted them en masse a long time ago with the Saturns.

Tesla's failure to bring the price down to be accessibly affordable to most people is gravely concerning. And SpaceX has hired many of my friends but I always wondered how exactly space was supposed to be monetized. Still heartbreaking that my friends are losing their jobs, though.