I guess you could compliment it with a service like Zipcar, but you're right, it makes a lot more sense going city to city in a place like the northeast.<p>In France you can do Paris to Lyon in a little under 2 hours, and a similar system (a relatively slow one at that) would get you between NYC and Boston in about 1.5 hours.  The current options are 4 hours (no traffic) on a $15 Chinatown bus, or 4 hours on a $100 Amtrak train.<p>When you're stuck on a bus in a gridlock in Manhattan trying to get to Boston, and it takes you 1.5 hours just to get out  of Manhattan and over the bridge, is really the time you start to wish the public transit infrastructure wasn't so far behind every other modern nation in the world.