For almost 30 years there was a really fast way to fly, but we didn’t buy enough Concorde tickets to keep it going (I didn’t buy a single one).
Over 30 years, we've gone from IBM PC to rMBP: about a hundred times the pixels, a thousand times faster processor speed, a million times more memory, a billion times more storage - all for 1/3rd the price. The physics involved could accommodate such an improvement. If we had likewise focused on travel speed instead of cost, methinks we would not have achieved NYC-to-London travel in 25 seconds.
Yeah, so... NY to London is 25 seconds is about 500,000 mph (~Mach 650) average.
Perspective: Mach 32 gets you to escape velocity, and the nuclear manhole-cover (which may have been the fastest manmade object ever) is estimated as somewhere north of Mach 200 or so. That's right: not even an atomic bomb can get you the kind of speed you're asking for. :P
Hmm. Assume an even acceleration profile, with your first 12.5s accelerating and the second 12.5s decelerating, 1 million MPH peak. That's ~1800 times the force of gravity. Forget physics; the biology involved can't accomodate such an improvement. :P In fact, you could probably put a floor on the travel time from anywhere to anywhere by assuming passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations.
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.
Over 30 years, we've gone from IBM PC to rMBP: about a hundred times the pixels, a thousand times faster processor speed, a million times more memory, a billion times more storage - all for 1/3rd the price. The physics involved could accommodate such an improvement. If we had likewise focused on travel speed instead of cost, methinks we would not have achieved NYC-to-London travel in 25 seconds.