Yes, they exist in Europe, they ban be dirt cheap, executed by companies run by penny pinchers and mostly superfluous. Going by train is in many cases faster because it gets you from city center toncity center without any airport overhead. But it also costs a multiple of a plane ticket, which should not be the case.
Yes but the cases when taking such short flights instead of trains make sense is when you commute form a small city airport to an international hub for a layover to an international flight and that saves you lots of time as you've already been through security once and you're already inside the airport fairly close to your departure gate so you can arrive pretty close time wise to your next flight as opposed to having to commute from the train station to the airport and be there ~2 hours before the flight to clear security and all.
Nobody takes the plane for 30 min to get from city center to city center, we do it because we have to catch another flight from that city's airport and it's quicker by plane.
We have railroads. The three trips listed by the previous poster all include LAX. LA is surrounded by mountains. The train from LA to SF takes ten hours. The flight is one. California has been trying to build a high speed rail to connect LA to the Bay Area for a long time now, but it's projected to cost 30 billion dollars and the timeline is ridiculous. Last I understood, the project has been shelved indefinitely.
Because the U.S. is a) much less densely populated, b) is very spread out, c) leading to very long distances between cities (which makes rail expensive), but d) very homogeneous in culture and language, so e) families and companies spread out a lot, f) which means train travel is not really practical, but also g) many of these short-haul flights are connections to/from long-haul flights and there's no way we'd take a several hour train ride to then go to an airport, to then take a long-haul flight to then do the whole thing again.
