Yeah. I recently opted to drive 24 hrs round trip when I visited family over the holidays rather than flying. Return trip was 12 hrs straight through. I actually enjoyed the drive. I absolutely cannot stand airports or airliners or flying in general, it all makes me extremely bitter and angry. Amtrak seems unnecessarily expensive though.
Amtrak is not only ridiculously expensive, but embarassingly slow.
Trains (particularly inter-city trains, which are far more common than larger, high speed trains) are so much more advanced in dozens of other countries. Actually, transportation in the US is one of the poorest of any country I've been to.
LAX and Fort Lauderdale international airports are
worse than Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe (no exaggeration).
I took a bus about 5 years ago in Mexico and was blown away. HUGE legroom (over a foot in front of my knees). Personal tv entertainment system like you get on international flights. Uniformed attendants. Sack lunch handed to me personally as I board. Modern, comfortable ride. Low cost, convenient travel times. Greyhound and all competitors in the US are sad. Even the few times when I considered them, like a one way trip to meet up with a friend, the times have been ridiculous (arrive at 4AM, only 1 trip per day). Buses used to be a huge deal (think of all the 1960s era movies featuring bus travel, and how the civil rights movement targeted bussing--today no one cares who rides the bus, racist or not!).
And the roads, I guess some US interstates are OK (they are hit and miss) but the national highways in most of Latin America, and all of Europe are better.
Flying is only going to get worse, mostly due to poor infrastructure and the capitalistic push for growth growth growth! One cannot easily grow a highway (sometimes you can add a second lane, but only if there is room to do so already, and only once demand doubles to require a second lane. (And of course, the TSA, who refuse to adopt modern crowd screening protocols--look at how Disneyworld processes mass transit versus the TSA).
They could fire the entire TSA, install one of these systems, and have 2 security guards pull people aside who fail the check. Otherwise large groups just walk right on through, no single file, no slowing down, just put this device at the front door to the airport and abolish the TSA (they won't do that because then they couldn't put political dissidents on Do Not Fly lists).
Airports are even harder to expand. If you have one takeoff runway and one landing runway, there's no way to make the traffic faster unless you build an entirely new airport, or double the runway numbers. Either one is a huge and expensive project. Taxi times in some airports are already awful, and will only get worse when populations grow, say 15%, with 15% more travelers all using the same number of flights and runways.
I've waited 45 minutes on tarmac for a 30 minute flight before. This is not an easy problem to solve (it's basically unsolvable as long as you hold on to the "we need immigrants to grow our workforce" idea).
The one good thing we have here with transportation is rural roads, but that doesn't really matter since hardly anyone uses them. This is probably because rural low population no growth counties are well run.
DEI is total trash that will cost many lives in the long run. It is even being implemented in medical schools where unqualified doctors are graduating.
They started it in the medical field first. I remember being surprised and confused seeing the viral youtube videos minorities were making about how to get into medical school as a minority. This was before BLM, and George Floyd, and DEI and everything. It just seemed purposefully destructive for a society to push that, but they will take failing test scores if you are a minority, and turn you into a doctor.
The sad thing is, this only encourages racism. I've used old black doctors before. And just assumed they are competent. I'm afraid to use any younger minority doctor now, and will only assume bad things about them. DEI fails on all levels.