Summary
A new AP-NORC poll shows that Americans’ confidence in air travel has declined after several fatal plane crashes in 2025.
Only 64% now believe flying is safe, down from 71% last year, while the number of those who feel it is unsafe rose by 12%.
Confidence in pilots, air traffic controllers, and the federal government has also dropped. Recent crashes, including a deadly collision over Washington, D.C., have fueled public concern.
Meanwhile, Trump has begun firing hundreds of FAA employees, raising further safety worries.
Quick everyone, start talking about high speed rail!
Maybe we have the slightest shot of actually building out, y’know, cheap, fast, effective mass transit for once?
President Musk will never allow it.
Be prepared for cars in tunnels! And poorly functioning cars at snail pace, at that!
Not as long as the cargo railroad companies hold all the power. America needs an alternate timeline with no fascism, sane governance, and making all railroads public.
You wouldn’t build high speed rail on cargo lines, anyway. New rail corridors need to be established. The LA-Vegas line is being built along an existing interstate, which solves a lot of right-of-way and land usage issues. That’s what you want to do.
Elon is in power and has too much money shame him into building hyperloop finally
He never intended to build the Hyperloop. From the start, it was a lie to shut down a proposed project to build a west coast high speed rail line.
Yeah, and it can be defeated with elementary school level math, so anyone in government who agreed to fund it should be brought back to school (though they are probably just more corrupt than stupid).
Everyone in the industry tries to focus on how fast a hyperloop can go, and tries to keep any criticism focused on the engineering challenges (and to be clear, there are many, many engineering and safety challenges).
It should never be discussed as “LA to the Bay in X minutes”, it needs to be discussed in terms of passengers per hour.
Given that these vehicles travel very fast, passengers will need to remain seated while the vehicle is in motion. Let’s pretend that the occupants of each vehicle are capable of leaving the vehicle with their luggage in under the FAA’s targeted evacuation time of 90 seconds (even though luggage makes it take like 10x that). That’s 40 loads per hour, and let’s be generous and say they fit 40 people, that’s 1600 people per hour.
That puts it on par with a lane of car traffic. Maybe you can squeeze some more people in there, or really crack a whip to get people out quick, but you won’t be able to get to a fraction of the passengers per hour of high speed rail at ~20,000.
When you actually do calculations with all the other factors, you get ~350 passengers per hour.
High speed rail is amazing! Let’s do it
Too bad the California high-speed rail project is being threatened by President Musk.