Air travel has top speed all tied up, for you can have a plane go from any place to any place, if you have the volume to fill the plane. Even then, most trips between most cities are at least 4 to 5 trips a day.
I bring up FREQUENCY, for the more frequent you make trips, the easier it is for people to schedule such trips. Studies have shown you need at least four trips each way for any rail system to be frequent enough for people to use on a regular basis. To achieved such frequency you have to have a large pool of riders to draw from, and that requires frequent stops, which brings with them speeding up to speed after each stop AND slowing down before the next stop. Thus on trips with a lot of stops (which is the nature of most rail service), max speed is hard to maintain. This is why Europe and Japan have stayed with rail as oppose to Maglev, by the time you are reaching a speed where Maglev exceeds rail, the train is already slowing down for the next stop.
Aircraft pool a large number of people in Airports and go from one Airport to another. If an airport does NOT provide enough of a pool, Aircraft just avoids that airport. Airlines max profits by filling all of the seats in their aircraft and if they can NOT do that, Airlines stop running to that Airport. Buses, cars and rail service are used to get people to Airport, but that also means cars, buses and rail have to stop at a lot of small stations to fill up their seats. Thus speed is not THE advantage for rail or bus service, frequency of service and frequency of stops are of equal importance to rail or bus. A high top speed for rail and bus generally comes at a cost of less stops, which leads to less frequency of service for less people can use the faster service.
Sorry, top speed is NOT the sole factor when it comes to rail service, Frequency of service and stops are often more important then top speed. This has been the big killer of Maglev, to achieve max speed, Maglev must cut back stops, with less stops, you have less passengers, which in turns leads to a decline in frequency of service. This "Circle of Decline" is what killed the Interurban streetcar system, to speed up service, the streetcars had to cut back stops, with cut back stops, less people used the streetcar, which in turn lead to less frequent streetcar runs. Sooner or later the cost to run the Streetcar exceeded the revenue it was producing and had to be closed down. You have to maintain the Frequency of Service and stops, and once you decide on that a top speed of about 250 mph is all you need, and you can achieve that on rail. Faster service means less stops, less passengers, less revenue and finally bankruptcy.
On papers these super fast trains look good, but once you understand how the service HAS to be provided, that speed is quickly seen as more of a liability then an asset.
= new reply since forum marked as read