You're joking, right?
Passenger capacity is part of the design of air travel. Even so, a plane could be at 1/3rd capacity before it's less efficient than a singly-occupied car.
Trains are largely a relic of the Industrial Revolution - except for those places where population distribution has made it feasible to invest in specialised passenger rail, the degree of infrastructure investment required makes them economically infeasible given a blank slate today.
If we were really concerned about transport efficiency, long-distance bus routes are the answer. Per-seat energy usage is comparable to trains, but with a fraction of the infrastructure cost, and significantly more flexibility. Countries that have a blank slate and are only interested in maximum transport for minimum cost (ie, the developing world) have gone that way for a reason.
We accept nearly empty trains, despite them needing at least 30 passengers to be competitive from a fuel efficiency standpoint with a singly-occupied car, because trains are largely seen as a service. Very few passenger trains are economically viable without government support.
There’s an irony where tech folks use a forum to discuss ideas, amongst which involve Generative Language Models which aid and abet political astroturf campaigns that make ridiculous arguments to waste people’s energy when they use tech forums…
It’s like a drain and the usefulness of the forum is swirling around and largely depleted
The interesting problem for tomorrow’s internet is how to automatically root out this nonsense. That’s a browser addin / AI tool that would be useful. Take the comments and probabilistically score the nonsense factor. A new PageRank if you will.
The value is in the well trained bullshit detector. One that could have read the parent comment on everyone’s behalf and saved us all the bother.
Let the corporate/pr/oil industry shills exist in their own space, and enable legitimate discussion to continue
You need to state your premise to enable a reasonable discussion. I've been talking about energy or fuel efficency when it comes to public transport (I see you don't have any return for this, because the facts are indesputible).
However, your premise is that "people must use (I assume, electrified) HSR to stop burning oil". This is an entirely different discussion. In many ways, it is significantly less efficient when looking purely at an energy usage perspective, especially when considering new routes across sparsely-populated expanses with relatively low demand.