The idea is that if you hop on a plane and go to Columbus, you can get to the major destinations within Columbus and then hop on a train to Pittsburgh or Cleveland and get around in those places without a car. It seems to me that if you made it easy for people from outside of the city to operate without a car, it would make it easier to operate inside of the city.
There are two components, good metro networks and good city high/moderate speed networks. The larger network should connect cities together that are larger but probably don't get as good of airplane service and major cities that generate a lot of short flight trips. The smaller networks should connect, as said before, the major destinations in a region. For example, Denver's transit network is connecting the Federal Center, the Tech Center, Downtown, and Boulder together with transit. To me, making all of these connections should make it easier for creating transit villages where people can walk or bike for many of their trips and make intercity travel easier as well.
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The Federal Railroad Administration has already been doing some of that, in the form of designating various high-speed-rail corridors.
The FRA's map has some interesting patterns; the rail-connected cities form several provinces.
The largest province I call the Atlantic-Gulf province; it extends from Maine to Florida to Texas, with the FRA map's gaps filled in.
The next largest I call Greater Chicagoland, which covers several states near Chicago. It could be linked to the Atlantic-Gulf province to form a large province that surrounds the Appalachian Mountains.
The remaining provinces are California and the Pacific Northwest. They are both very far from the two eastern provinces, and they are separated by the mountains at the California-Oregon border, so they are likely to remain detached.
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