Futurology

Well it did say it was a milestone flight, as well as 68 miles not necessarily meaning on a straight road you could drive 70mph on.

There are a lot of good arguments for rail or other means of transportation, but the travel volume vs the infrastructure required are vastly different in the US than in many parts of Europe/Asia. Think 'lots of medium distance low volume routes' that aren't economically feasible since there are existing routes. If you went through the effort of building a train route, you would have to charge so much per person to make it pay for itself that no one could afford it and they would take other methods.

I'm Europe, there seem to be enough 'short, high volume routes' that are economically feasible that considering adding other legs to them make sense, or they just already work.