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It's a policy failure that these routes exist instead of passenger rail.

Short flights are exactly what electric planes are meant for.

Due to their environmental damage alone this should be illegal

we should also be aggressively be invested in electric/solar/hydrogen commercial airlines. Last I checked they have limited range and capacity but if we were putting as much money and time into as we were into the military, we'd already be there.

as someone who commuted 100+ miles roundtrip for work every day for over a decade... flying for less than 100 makes me giggle.

It absolutely will not for one giant obvious reason - land. If you think this is going to lead to people being ok with getting their land eminent domain'd to out in support for passenger rail, I have a bridge. And it isn't the fossil fuel lobby that runs the existing tracks. It's the rail lobby.

Sad that we lack the train systems that other countries benefit from.

The perfect replacement already exists

Short flights are stupid.

Some of those spokes should be direct fast rail between airports and an option when flying through a hub airport.

I wondered about that too. As the article points out (contra the headline) it's not that the short flights are popular. They have been subsidized as connections to longer flights, but the math is changing. Rather than raise prices on the shorter flights, lines are just slowly cutting them.

That was never a thing.

Can short flights be important, yes but backbone? Come on. That’s like calling fingers backbone because they’re important.

Greetings from Spain, which built the world's densest high-speed rail network in less than a generation (for scale: Spain is about the same size as Texas, with a population of 49 million). Since then, high-speed rail has almost entirely replaced short-haul flights. Rail is faster, cheaper & greener.

Have you heard of 🚂?!!!

What it means in reality is air travel is going to stop in the immediate term and the barest possibility of a rail replacement would be a decade on the optimistic side. A solution for now needs to be discussed and not just railway pipe dreams.

Nothing ever changes

Muncie, Bloomington, IN, Cedar Rapids, Rochester, MN, Dayton, Lima, OH, Decatur, IL, Nashville, Louisville, Knoxville. Just off the top of my head. ALL Of those places have rail connections to Chicago. ALL OF THEM. Just use them.

If only we’d thought to invest in a network of high speed rail or something. Eh, what are ya gonna do. That’s crazy talk, no one else has tried it with any success.