> Meanwhile the modern train is nigh-uncrashable with modern safety technologies, even if someone wanted to.
Your comment is super misleading because it makes it sound like trains are safer than planes, but in fact, trains have several times more fatalities per passenger-mile than planes do.
I can walk into an electronics store with 300$, walk out with a drone, unbox it on the train to Heathrow, and then shut down the airport by flying the drone over the tarmac, delaying thousands of people for hours and causing millions in damages from forcing diversions and planes to circle. It's just such an incredibly fragile infrastructure and ecosystem.
61% of this year's accidents come from the U.S. and Europe. Unless you want to play the 'no true Scotsman' game with "modern" safety standards that no one really meets for more than a few miles. (For that matter, I'm not aware of current networks that can reliably defend against operator error, let alone actively suicidal operators.)
> not to mention incidence of suicide,
Dozens of accidents and hundreds of deaths a year on that list, even though it explicitly excludes individual suicides.
> (the modern solution is just not have trains at surface level, either above or below).
Talk about colossal $$$$$ for tracks running outside of urban centers.
> Talk about colossal $$$$$ for tracks running outside of urban centers.
Well, that's the opposite of what I mean, I'm talking about urban centers. Which, really the actual solution is just stop letting cars into cities where they can drunk drive crash into people and streetcars, which they do so often you'd think it's their hobby. Anyway, plane infrastructure is still more expensive, still a worse experience, and still has a higher environmental cost. There's just no sensible justification for maintaining all this plane infrastructure. It's an accident of capitalism that it's gotten this far.