yeah I guess other forms of transport may very well eat into the aviation market at a more local level with mediums such as the magnetic train but not for long distance travel to OS places (for obvious reasons). The infastructure for putting such machines in place would be incredible but stranger things have happened over the last 100 yrs or so in all avenues of life.
With aviation as transport you need very little in the way of enroute infastructure but any ground based system would require a continious & expensive set-up that would be almost cost prohibative on the scale that planes move people.
Trains have there places as do all the other forms of transport but it's aviation that has been accelerating ever since it was embraced as a safe & reliable means of getting from one place to another.
I believe aviation will always lead the way in long distance travel the way we know it these days but that's not to say that another form of transportation won't be realised in the future well beyond our current lives. That future is getting less & less of a posibility by the way we are self destructing ourselves though. Possibly the next 4 to 6 generations may very well be the last to 'pilot' a plane as we know it.
What about molecular transportation? science fiction? Perhaps but Jules Vern the father of science fiction may have known something well before we invented the worlds current modern transportation system, now if we could only give him a call on his cell phone:-)
Wmk2