>>1958944>You usually can't be poor but you don't have to be "rich," at least not by American standards.If you're buying a summer home on a lake, you are rich even by American standards.
>The argument favoring rail presumes that's the volume of traffic that rail could steal from the airline, so anything cutting into that is important to consider.There's more than just that. It's cheaper to increase frequency and capacity through rail lines, rail pollutes far less, requires far less physical real estate in urban and suburban areas, and rail also increases connectivity for the smaller towns along the line, not just the big cities it connects. The OD versus connecting argument you're making is essentially that because a Chicago to Florida rail line wouldn't help someone in Albuquerque, we shouldn't do it at all. That's an incredibly selfish argument. Such a line would connect 5+ metro areas with over 2 million people each to metro areas of 6 and 10 million people. And that's not even considering the demand it would drive for local transit connections to the line. Remember, this would be just one line in a nationwide network connecting large swathes of the country.
>how did those people going to Orlando get to AtlantaSee
https://www.cirium.com/thoughtcloud/aviation-analytics-on-the-fly-what-makes-atlanta-busiest-airport-world/The DOT does collect this data, though it isn't the easiest to parse. For Q1 2022, about 40% of travelers from Atlanta to Orlando originated in ATL, averaging 1232 OD travelers per day. Another 541 connected from smaller cities in numbers high enough for the author to bother separating out, and only one of those, Omaha, is so far out of the way that a high speed rail line wouldn't be realistic. So 1728 out of 3082 travelers per day at the high end, 1335 at the low end looking at only passengers originating in Atlanta, Nashville, Louisville, and Indianapolis (theoretical Chicago-Orlando HSR line).
