That's my point: physics+biology just aren't conducive to anything close to a comparable increase in travel speed short of teleportation (read "Flash Crowds" as an interesting tangent). As others note, the best tolerable improvement in travel time is lost amid the fixed overhead of embarking/disembarking times getting people to and on the vehicle.
passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations
Assuming continuous 1G acceleration (halfway there, reverse thrust thereafter), NYC-to-London would peak at 1200km/h with travel time of 34 minutes. Ignoring overhead, that's about 1/15th the time for subsonic travel now; an impressive improvement for sure, yet still paltry when comparing computing improvements.
Flipping the original argument and blathering on, consider if computing improvements over 30 years led to just a 72MHz processor as commercial top-of-the line: indeed in general we'd favor cost over speed. Likewise, the cost of a one-way London-NYC flight has plummeted from a quarter of one's annual salary to just a couple days' pay, a drop around two orders of magnitude; availability is also an issue, with comparable flights happening thousands of times daily at relatively amazing convenience, vs limited to a couple hundred per year.
passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations
Assuming continuous 1G acceleration (halfway there, reverse thrust thereafter), NYC-to-London would peak at 1200km/h with travel time of 34 minutes. Ignoring overhead, that's about 1/15th the time for subsonic travel now; an impressive improvement for sure, yet still paltry when comparing computing improvements.
Flipping the original argument and blathering on, consider if computing improvements over 30 years led to just a 72MHz processor as commercial top-of-the line: indeed in general we'd favor cost over speed. Likewise, the cost of a one-way London-NYC flight has plummeted from a quarter of one's annual salary to just a couple days' pay, a drop around two orders of magnitude; availability is also an issue, with comparable flights happening thousands of times daily at relatively amazing convenience, vs limited to a couple hundred per year.