In the wake of Spirit Airlines announcing that it will start charging $45 for carry-on bags that don’t fit under seats, five airlines have pledged that they will not follow suit. While this is sort of good news for travelers, it also underscores our desperate need for more transportation options so that there would be real competitors to keep consumers from being at the mercy of the airlines’ whim and greed.

Right now, if you need to travel relatively expediently between two places within the United States that are more than a couple hundred miles apart, airplanes are really your only option. A couple weeks ago, just on a lark, I looked up rail service between Durham and Providence, R.I. We make at least one trip to New England every year to see my in-laws, and we always fly into Providence. We would probably make that trip more often if not for the rising airfare (our last trip was about $400 for two tickets on Southwest around Christmas time, and we booked those well in advance), so I would be open to a different mode of transportation that costs less, even if it takes a few extra hours (flying usually takes about three to five hours including stopovers).

An Amtrak itinerary for the Durham-to-Providence trip

What I found was pretty disappointing. Two tickets on Amtrak from Durham to Providence cost about $200 to $260, which is $100-$200 less than flying. However, the travel time was simply unacceptable. The trip would have spanned two days! We would have to leave in the morning, and it would take more than six hours just to get from Durham to Washington, DC, where we would have to wait until 10 p.m. to catch the connection to Providence, which would not arrive until 7 a.m. the next day. While I’m willing to spend, say, up to eight hours making that 600-some-mile journey, I’m certainly not willing to turn this into an overnight trip, and I doubt many travelers would. Instead of taking the train, I might as well just make the 12-hour drive, save myself a few hundred bucks, and get there a lot sooner. Heck, I can even use some of that money for a hotel room en route and spend the night in a more comfortable place than a train cabin.

Compare that to China, which is busily putting together a high-speed rail network that will eventually run from Beijing in the north to my hometown of Guangzhou on the southeast tip. The section from Wuhan to Guangzhou opened last December and it takes only three hours to make that 600-mile trek. Fares for the high-speed rail are about $70 for second class and $110 for first class (and if the conditions of the cabins are anything like other trains in China, you want to be in first class if you can afford it). That’s pretty comparable to flying, where a plane ticket from Wuhan to Guangzhou costs anywhere from $80 to $160 for economy class. While the travel time by train is doubled (90 minutes flying vs. three hours by train), you’re still talking about just a three-hour trip. Now THAT is a truly viable alternative to flying and real competition for airline companies. Granted, that’s a line between two major cities, so it’s more like Atlanta-to-DC than Durham-to-Providence. Nonetheless, if it only takes three hours (instead of 24) to travel 600 miles, that’s going to make people more willing to drive an hour or two from wherever they live to a bigger city that would be on the high-speed line. If the U.S. can build a competitive high-speed rail network spanning the continent, I think a lot of travelers would flock to it, leaving air travel for mostly oversea or coast-to-coast trips. If nothing else, it would make the airlines have to compete and refrain from constantly screwing their customers by finding new, ridiculous things to charge for.