Robert Samuelson is a columnist for Newsweek and the Washington Post who specializes in economic issues. He is not an "anti-rail" activist by any measure. You can not put him into the same category as a Wendell Cox and then simply dismiss his arguments as rants.
Not saying that Samuelson was equivalent to Cox and those of similar mindset, however this sort of stuff:
High-speed intercity trains (not commuter lines) travel at up to 250 miles per hour and are most competitive with planes and cars over distances of less than 500 miles. In a report on high-speed rail, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service examined the 12 corridors of 500 miles or less with the most daily air traffic in 2007. Los Angeles to San Francisco led the list with 13,838 passengers; altogether, daily air passengers in these 12 corridors totaled 52,934. If all of them switched to trains, the number of airline passengers, about 2 million a day, would drop only 2.5 percent. Any fuel savings would be less than that; even trains need fuel.
Indeed, intercity trains—at whatever speed—target such a small part of total travel that the effects on reduced oil use, traffic congestion, and greenhouse gases must be microscopic. Every day, about 140 million Americans go to work, with 85 percent driving an average of 25 minutes (three quarters drive alone, 10 percent carpool). Even with 250,000 high-speed rail passengers, there would be no visible effect on routine commuting, let alone personal driving. In the Northeast Corridor, with about 45 million people, Amtrak's daily ridership is 28,500. If its trains shut down tomorrow, no one except the affected passengers would notice.
sounds really similar.
13,800 is still something on the order of 100 flights, and I am not sure that he is counting flights between all the airports involved, as I think there are three or four on each end, not to mention to/from or between the several airports at intermediate points.
There are of course a lot of air corridors that due to either length or light density of traffic do not lend themselves to rail alternatives, but that should not be used to discredit the concept in the corridors where it will work, and work well.
I have been in this rail transit stuff too long to believe any of this sort of stuff, anyway. I have heard too many times this mantra, "it costs too much, it takes too long to build, nobody is going to ride it, etc." and seen it disproven. The anti-transit characters then quietly fade away into the woodwork without ever admitting they missed it completely and were conclusively proven to be wrong only to resurface the next time a rail system is proposed somewhere else.
Can anyone picture the DC Metro area functioning without WAMATA? Yet there was a lot of opposition, and, at one point after construction was under way, a scaling back of the system size. Yet now the system is
beyond the extent of the "full system" plan of the early 1970's, with more currently under construction.