They make air travel sound so...glamorous!

[crenelle]

Because of security concerns regarding flying, I have been thinking about engineering my career and life around not using planes moreso than I have been. It isn't a royal inconvenience when things proceed normally, even with the new invasive searches, but I would not want to ever have to get into a discussion with TSA employees beyond "that tray is

Comments

[isherempress]

I think that a case can be made for fuel-efficiency in air travel when one considers that some aircraft carry several hundred people, and if they were traveling separately by car then more fuel would be required. Trains are much more fuel-efficient, but if you read about the history of transportation in the US you'll see that General Motors effectively killed mass transit, specifically bus & train, between the 1920s and 1950s.

How much longer can Amtrak hold on, considering that it routinely needs government support (and the new government probably won't want to support anything that is for "the masses")? Another factor in the difficulty of traveling in the US is sheer distance. You don't run into that in Europe, or even as much on the East Coast -- it's a simple thing to get from Boston to NY to Philadelphia to Washington.

So what's your Skype address? We could talk sometime, almost F2F. ;-)