There’s dumb. There’s really dumb. And then there’s this story on how high speed rail from Charlotte through Greensboro, Raleigh, and Richmond to Washington, DC is suppose to solve air traffic congestion problems which takes dumb to a whole new level.

The report from Brookings, a Washington think-tank, counts a combined 3 million air passengers traveling between airports in those five cities. Last year 1.1 million RDU passengers traveled to or from Charlotte and Washington, and Charlotte served 925,000 Washington travelers. The Brookings report does not indicate how many of these passengers were catching connecting flights, but the volume suggests high-speed trains could do well, said Adie Tomer, a Brookings research analyst and co-author of the new report.

Except, of course, you absolutely have to consider how many passengers a day connect. Charlotte/Douglas International Airport is, after all, a hub. This should be obvious but the word “hub” never appears in the article. And Washington’s two airports also function as connecting points. There’s no scheduled air service between the non-hubs in the cities studied.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Domestic Airline Fares Consumer Report for the second quarter of 2008 shows 462 O&D (Origin and destination, not connecting) passengers a day between Washington and Charlotte. That works out to under 168,630 a year — and under 20 percent of the figure cited by Brookings. So much for that massive market. And it’s pretty much a given that as long as you have hubs at CLT and IAD and DCA remains what it is, flight levels between these cities won‘t change much whether or not high-speed rail connect is built.