I’m pretty sure most flights are regional, not long distance, unless that’s only the us where we don’t believe in trains. There was an article a year or so back, where France started to actually ban regional flights for a few routes with good rail service. That’s where we need to be going.

Between high speed rail, and Zoom, we ought to be able to cut the number of flights in half while making travel better, and we can cut the least efficient flights since they spend proportionally more time climbing to altitude vs cruising

Even in the US, we have Acela and it’s arguably the best way to travel a few routes like BOS—>NYC, for the last two decades. Aside from connections, why do we still have hourly shuttles flying that route? Looking at the entire Acela service area, you probably have hundreds of daily regional flights. Most of those need to go

Edit: and this is part of my argument that California High Speed Rail is worth much higher funding to complete at pretty much any cost