Americans avoiding air travel

And for good reason. It's a complete hassle and the already poor airline quality gets worse by the day, not to mention more expensive. Whenever I can I avoid air travel and opt for the train, when I have to but that's not as much of an option in the US. As annoying as it is in Europe I find it much worse in the US. It might be easier to tolerate the hassles if there was a sense of it all going somewhere but the entire process strikes me as just another effort to continue the fear tactics that are so well loved by the Bush administration.

Surely there has to be a better way, but who really trusts Chertoff and his bumbling band of idiots to get this right? Maybe now that business is screaming and losing billions in revenue, someone might wake up and re-think the current (failed) model.