Originally Posted by
saxman66
A 1000+ mile route stops in dozens of cities along it's route though, creating dozens of possible city pairs to travel between or make connections to other services. Most pax don't travel from end to end but make shorter trips on the possible city pairs, many being 200-400 miles apart. Therefore one single seat will sell multiple times on one single run. This way, many smaller towns can be served too, where it is often very expensive to fly.
Airlines gave up on multi-stop flights a long time ago because pax don't have the patience for it. Nobody doing DC to ORD wants to stop at 27 small towns along the way. Defeats the point of "High Speed".