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I just got back from 3 weeks travel in Europe, taking HSR from Rotterdam to Paris and Paris to Lausanne, fast commuter (max 170 mph / average 80 mpg but they do
by glup 10y ago
I just got back from 3 weeks travel in Europe, taking HSR from Rotterdam to Paris and Paris to Lausanne, fast commuter (max 170 mph / average 80 mpg but they don't consider that high-speed!) from Lausanne to Zurich and Berlin to Amsterdam, and several commuter trains. For trips under 300 miles, there's no contest with air travel... top speeds are lower but there's a lot less overhead and the experience is uniformly better. Some notes:
1) You can put a train station in the city center. Yes, getting the right of way is a huge pain but it simply isn't feasible to put an airport in the center of a city. This means minimal commute times to the airport—in contrast I have twice spent more time in traffic from LAX to downtown LA than on the plane from SFO to LAX.)
2) HSR requires far less security theater because, you know, a train isn't a deadly projectile (or if it is, it's got a pretty limited set of uses). Couple this 1) and it means that you can arrive at the central station ~10 minutes before departure. I budget 90 minutes these days when flying out of SFO.
3) Volume! A 10 car TGV Thalys train, for example, can carry 370 people. That's almost a 747-400 worth of people. And that's with seating arrangements in 2nd class that are more generous than US business class. With airplane-like density I think you could get 600-650 per 10-car train.
4) Trains are more robust to weather events: thunderstorms don't shut down train stations; snow and ice can be dealt with pretty easily.
5) Electrical outlets are standard in every seat. I know that US air carriers are trying to roll this out now, but this has been standard for a while in trains.
I find the comparison with self-driving cars odd: high speed rail is currently 20 times as efficient, but obviously it doesn't work for final-mile transportation. Maybe that will drop to 5 or 10 times with traffic control / convoying / etc., but really the right comparison for HSR in the transportation ecosystem is plane travel.