Freeing up the Sky

I think the only way by which sky can be free of airplanes in US is if number of flights are reduced. In order to reduce the number of flights, passengers need to be reduced. In order to reduce number of passengers, the flights should become costly enough that most people will desist using it.  A part of money collected here can be contributed to develop interstate high speed passenger railway system (Well, who knows, if some rules are improved around the ownership of the railway track then, airlines companies may be interested in the train business?)