Pretty much just proposing giving people some options. Right now they have few.
Right now in North America on an enormous amount of routes there's pretty much no real alternative to driving or flying and on many others where a train does exist it's so poor in quality that few use it.
If rail was a real option then more people would use it, and that would be transferring people from a relatively much higher CO2 emission form of transport to a lower emission one. That's a win.
Every where I look I see data that shows that the CO2 emissions per user are dramatically lower for train than air travel.
Now clearly on some big routes flying is a must and train would be so incredibly lengthly that it would be a misery, but there's tons and tons of shorter routes where train would work really well, competing well against car/bus and air travel.
If one wanted to get aggressive about it, once the infrastructure as in place, one could do what France has done and to ban short haul flights.
Right now in North America on an enormous amount of routes there's pretty much no real alternative to driving or flying and on many others where a train does exist it's so poor in quality that few use it.
If rail was a real option then more people would use it, and that would be transferring people from a relatively much higher CO2 emission form of transport to a lower emission one. That's a win.
Every where I look I see data that shows that the CO2 emissions per user are dramatically lower for train than air travel.
Now clearly on some big routes flying is a must and train would be so incredibly lengthly that it would be a misery, but there's tons and tons of shorter routes where train would work really well, competing well against car/bus and air travel.
If one wanted to get aggressive about it, once the infrastructure as in place, one could do what France has done and to ban short haul flights.