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This is exactly the reason why I usually prefer a 6-hour train ride to a 1-hour flight (at least in Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Train: Go to the station (n

This is exactly the reason why I usually prefer a 6-hour train ride to a 1-hour flight (at least in Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Train: Go to the station (near city center), arrive 10 mins before train departs, get on the train, read/work/eat/drink for 6 hours, get off the train. And then you are already at the city center of your destination! The total time spent when flying might be shorter (4.5-5 hours), but that is not worth the hassle.

toothbrush 8y ago
So much this. Not to mention the reduced environmental impact. Flying is absolutely catastrophic in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and the Paris accord doesn't cover even a fraction of it! (because flying occurs in "international space" and so it doesn't appear on any country's "balance sheet"... atrocious.)
- audunw 8y ago
  > Flying is absolutely catastrophic in terms of greenhouse gas emissions Uhm, flying is OK in terms of emissions per passenger mile. Not as great as train, but better than driving solo in a gasoline car. The problem is transcontinental flights. While they're OK in terms of efficiency per mile, the number of miles is staggering. The problem is, those trips can't be made by train. So in terms of flying, I think the main focus should be not to fly long distance if it can be avoided. Sure, it's much better to take the train if possible, but if you fly between countries within europe a dozen times a year, that's not a catastrophe.
  - llukas 8y ago
    Is it still competetive vs car for supersonic flight?
  - cornholio 8y ago
    I know Boeing proposed Methane turbofans, and they were estimated to have 60% less carbon emissions and cheaper than jet fuel - after eating the large development and infrastructure costs. You could take this even further, producing Hydrogen from clean electric energy is about three times more expensive than methane for the same energy content, leading to a moderate increase in the cost of even a low cost ticket. But as with all radically new technology, there needs to be a strong industry, government and consumer push. The program that produced the Methane turbofan concept (SUGAR Freeze) has lost any political appeal.
    - erezyehuda 8y ago
      Costs aside, wouldn't replacing carbon emissions with methane be drastically worse? Doing a casual search says that methane is 2000-3000% more potent as a GHG.
      - ufo 8y ago
        I assume the methane would be the fuel, not the byproduct.
        JamesBarney 8y ago
        I imagine you won't combust 100% of the fuel. So wouldn't it be both.
        rlucas 8y ago
        Pure methane is a bunch of molecules with just one carbon, which simplifies things a bit vs. a cracked and heterogeneous mix of longer chain (10+) molecules. You can incompletely combust a 10-carbon molecule and wind up with other hydrocarbons but if you burn up CH4, you're definitely just getting one CO2.
  - PsylentKnight 8y ago
    > Not as great as train, but better than driving solo in a gasoline car. It was my understanding that driving is better for shorter trips, because the overhead of taking off and landing is significant. I don't have a source. IIRC I read this in "Doing Good Better."
  - schiffern 8y ago
    >The problem is, those trips can't be made by train. Transcontinental flights (one side of the continent to the other, see [1]) can usually be taken by train. You probably mean intercontinental flights. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_airspeed_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_airspeed_reco...
    - ghaff 8y ago
      You're being pedantic. One can travel from New York to San Francisco (well, Emeryville) by train but it's going to take multiple days and, even if you handwave the existence of high-speed rail through two continental divides among other things, it's a very long trip. That's never going to be a mainstream replacement for even a subsonic 5 to 6 hour flight between a multitude of east coast-west coast city pairs.
      - jacobolus 8y ago
        If there were high-speed trains that could make cross-US trips in, say, 15 hours, and at comparable or cheaper cost vs. airplanes, I can imagine there might be demand. I would be willing to take those overnight. But even if we could replace most <500 mile flights along the most popular routes (starting by connecting cities up and down the coasts), it would be a huge win as far as fuel economy is concerned.
      - schiffern 8y ago
        And you're being parochial. Who said "continent" was limited to North America? The claim was that the trip can't be made, not that it can be made but is undesirable as compared with alternatives.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    > The problem is, those trips can't be made by train. They can't now, but they could be. All that is required is a level of capital investment that can't ever be recovered while in competition with air and sea-surface travel... The transatlantic tunnel has been a sci-fi fantasy since 1895. It could cost as little as $500 billion today.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  I'll point out that although it's indeed atrocious compared to a train ride, flying is still more efficient than driving a car. So if traveling is required and you're debating between driving vs. flying (say SF <-> LA), you should prefer flying unless you can carpool. I don't know the exact numbers since it depends on where you're going and what plane/airline you fly, but I would expect around 50-75 MPG for a reasonably full airplane [1], whereas your car might be more like 25-30 MPG on the highway, so you'd want at least 2-3 (ideally 4) people in the car to make it more efficient. However the thing about flying is of course that it burns fuel at a much, much faster rate, so if it means the difference between you driving to workplace A vs. flying to workplace B regularly, then you'll be burning one hell of a lot more fuel by flying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Airli...
  - Reason077 8y ago
    That’s true today. But in the coming years and decades, ground transport will be largely electrified and it’s per-mile emissions greatly reduced. Hopefully, aviation can be electrified too one day (or it’s emissions reduced with hybrid technology), but unlike ground transport, the technology is not quite here yet.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      With battery capacities being what they are you'll also have to hang tight for the moment when they stretch long enough to allow you to even have the choice of driving to the same place you can fly. (Or swap batteries on the way somehow... not sure how well that would work.)
      - Reason077 8y ago
        This is already solved in technology terms. Battery capacities and charging speeds are already good enough for almost all long-distance travel scenarios. It’s now just a case of getting costs down and infrastructure built out. But that’s the easy part.
kiba 8y ago
All these security for air travel but not for a train which is also full of lot of people felt bizarre.
- dijit 8y ago
  You can't hijack a train and take hostages to some other country; This was endemic in the 80s. You also can't hijack a train and drive it into a building.
  - amelius 8y ago
    But is this still true for airplanes, given the switch to hardened cockpit doors?
    - Uberphallus 8y ago
      Then you get Germanwings incidents
      - amelius 8y ago
        Which can't happen on trains and buses?
        endymi0n 8y ago
        Buses, maybe. Trains: Nope. Doors are locked from the inside, usually aren't accessible while moving and even someone would get inside, well, you can't get off the tracks. You'll get a red signal and a forced braking shortly afterwards. It's really, REALLY hard (by design) to wreck something on purpose with a modern high speed train.
        Uberphallus 8y ago
        And in buses you can't really lock yourself out as a driver.
        8y ago
Numberwang 8y ago
I'm totally with you, but it is truly annoying the amount of subsidies the flight industry get. I've often taken trains across Europe due to my preference, but when the plane ticket is €20 and the train ticket is €400 it seems I'm fighting against the system.
- peteretep 8y ago
  > but it is truly annoying the amount of subsidies the flight industry get Please could you illustrate some of those for me, as compared to rail?
  - yrro 8y ago
    UK here. > Aviation is currently undertaxed, according to economists from the IMF and World Bank, compared to other forms of transport. Airlines pay no fuel duty and VAT is zero rated meaning that no tax is charged on sales and tax charged on inputs is refunded. > ... > CE Delft calculated in 2013 that the shortfall as a result of these two anomalies amounted to around €27 billion annually in Europe. > ... > At a global level, the World Bank and IMF favour a relatively low tax universally applied per tonne of CO2, which could then raise money for climate change mitigation. > In the UK, the Liberal Democrat and Conservative coalition considered in 2010 replacing APD with a per plane tax to include freight aircraft and provide an additional incentive to airlines to fill empty seats. However, this was dropped following concerns, the Government claimed, about concerns that it could be challenged legally as representing a proxy fuel tax (contrary to bilateral air service provisions with other countries). > Another alternative would be a form of taxation that discouraged frequent fliers. https://www.aef.org.uk/issues/economics/taxation/ https://www.aef.org.uk/issues/economics/taxation/
  - Reason077 8y ago
    1. International airlines pay no tax on aviation fuel, despite their significant contribution to air pollution and climate change. In say, Europe, this represents a huge subsidy compared to ground transport, where fuel is heavily taxed. 2. Airports, particularly regional ones, are often owned by local governments and receive subsidies in order to encourage tourism and commerce in their region. In some cases, airlines receive direct subsidies from those airports in order to fly there. 3. Internationally, some airlines themselves are state-owned or state-subsidised. Gulf airlines such as Emirates and Qatar have been criticised for being significant beneficiaries of state subsidies. This isn’t to say that rail isn’t subsidised too, of course. Even in countries where rail operates on a commercial basis, the physical infrastructure is usually government owned or financed in some way. However, if airlines had to account for (and pay for) their environmental externalities, the costs of airline vs rail travel would work out very differently!
Swizec 8y ago
I traveled with the French TGV a couple times and it is absolutely astounding how amazing it is. Large comfy chairs, quiet train, you can walk around, plenty of room for activities. There's even a bar where you can hang out with fellow passengers! Plus first class tickets are like $20 more expensive than normal tickets and totally worth it. Although I almost missed it because I'm used to all the buffer time you get with airplanes. Train leaves at 10:45, you better be there at 10:40 or you're gonna miss the darn thing.
- maeln 8y ago
  Although I like our (maybe not for long) nationalized train system, I still have to mitigate your praises a bit :) . One of my main issue is that train ticket are really expensive. Regional train are okayish, but TGV cost often way more than any other equivalent (plane/bus/car/...) and are sometimes not faster. The second thing is that the network is historically completely centered around Paris. That lead to some very weird situation where, to go from the north-west to the south-west, you need to go all around France. And because of this, it is again faster and cheaper to just take a plane. Finally, there is often delay or train being canceled, which is normal because lot more problem happen on the ground and such that when you are several thousand feet in the air, but they tend to communicate about it really badly. When your train have a problem, it is often really hard to know when you will have a new train, how much delay will you have, ... On the other end, I agree with you. The train are so much comfortable. I really enjoy traveling in train way more than with any other form of transportation. I assume they are also a bit more ecological than cars and planes. The application of the SCNF to book ticket is also very good nowadays, never had a problem with it.
garmaine 8y ago
Lol, try living in California. 6-12 hour plane ride to anywhere. Trains? We have them. But why would you when it takes literally days to cross the country.
- dewey 8y ago
  That's not a problem of trains it's a problem of the US train infrastructure. As you can see in Europe or Japan trains can be very fast and very efficient.
  - Reason077 8y ago
    Sure, but the distances between cities in a huge country like the USA tend to be much greater than in Europe or Japan. Even if you had high speed rail it’d still take a very long time to cross the continent! High speed trains do exist, or are being built, in more densely populated US regions (eg Northeast corridor, California).
    - nickjj 8y ago
      It takes around 4-5 days to cross the US by train. The problem is, the regular seats are shoulder to shoulder, there's no showers, and everyone shares a bathroom. Plus, they gouge you relentlessly with food rates. It doesn't seem like it would be a fun experience at all due to those conditions (but would be fun otherwise). Of course you could spend $1,000+ each way to get a "sleeper seat" which comes with a shower and meals but then it's like you're essentially paying $700 for a shower and a touch of privacy. It's just off putting to me based on principle.
    - lhopki01 8y ago
      The distances between cities in California or the upper East coast isn't. Both places have a high enough population density to support a good train network. No one is suggesting that you take train from New York to LA but rather that you take a train from LA to San Francisco or Boston to New York. Similarly in Europe most people don't take a train from London to Rome but people will often take a train from London to Paris or Barcelona to Madrid. Any flight of 3 hours or less is usually faster and more comfortable as a train ride.
Uberphallus 8y ago
That's the exact same reason why nobody sane takes a train in France for anything that matters. Schedules violated every day, strikes, poor maintenance, and moreover, they killed almost all of the night trains, that were the cheapest option especially if you account for one night you save on accommodation.

toothbrush 8y ago

So much this. Not to mention the reduced environmental impact. Flying is absolutely catastrophic in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and the Paris accord doesn't cover even a fraction of it! (because flying occurs in "international space" and so it doesn't appear on any country's "balance sheet"... atrocious.)

audunw 8y ago
> Flying is absolutely catastrophic in terms of greenhouse gas emissions Uhm, flying is OK in terms of emissions per passenger mile. Not as great as train, but better than driving solo in a gasoline car. The problem is transcontinental flights. While they're OK in terms of efficiency per mile, the number of miles is staggering. The problem is, those trips can't be made by train. So in terms of flying, I think the main focus should be not to fly long distance if it can be avoided. Sure, it's much better to take the train if possible, but if you fly between countries within europe a dozen times a year, that's not a catastrophe.
- llukas 8y ago
  Is it still competetive vs car for supersonic flight?
- cornholio 8y ago
  I know Boeing proposed Methane turbofans, and they were estimated to have 60% less carbon emissions and cheaper than jet fuel - after eating the large development and infrastructure costs. You could take this even further, producing Hydrogen from clean electric energy is about three times more expensive than methane for the same energy content, leading to a moderate increase in the cost of even a low cost ticket. But as with all radically new technology, there needs to be a strong industry, government and consumer push. The program that produced the Methane turbofan concept (SUGAR Freeze) has lost any political appeal.
  - erezyehuda 8y ago
    Costs aside, wouldn't replacing carbon emissions with methane be drastically worse? Doing a casual search says that methane is 2000-3000% more potent as a GHG.
    - ufo 8y ago
      I assume the methane would be the fuel, not the byproduct.
      - JamesBarney 8y ago
        I imagine you won't combust 100% of the fuel. So wouldn't it be both.
        rlucas 8y ago
        Pure methane is a bunch of molecules with just one carbon, which simplifies things a bit vs. a cracked and heterogeneous mix of longer chain (10+) molecules. You can incompletely combust a 10-carbon molecule and wind up with other hydrocarbons but if you burn up CH4, you're definitely just getting one CO2.
- PsylentKnight 8y ago
  > Not as great as train, but better than driving solo in a gasoline car. It was my understanding that driving is better for shorter trips, because the overhead of taking off and landing is significant. I don't have a source. IIRC I read this in "Doing Good Better."
- schiffern 8y ago
  >The problem is, those trips can't be made by train. Transcontinental flights (one side of the continent to the other, see [1]) can usually be taken by train. You probably mean intercontinental flights. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_airspeed_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_airspeed_reco...
  - ghaff 8y ago
    You're being pedantic. One can travel from New York to San Francisco (well, Emeryville) by train but it's going to take multiple days and, even if you handwave the existence of high-speed rail through two continental divides among other things, it's a very long trip. That's never going to be a mainstream replacement for even a subsonic 5 to 6 hour flight between a multitude of east coast-west coast city pairs.
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      If there were high-speed trains that could make cross-US trips in, say, 15 hours, and at comparable or cheaper cost vs. airplanes, I can imagine there might be demand. I would be willing to take those overnight. But even if we could replace most <500 mile flights along the most popular routes (starting by connecting cities up and down the coasts), it would be a huge win as far as fuel economy is concerned.
    - schiffern 8y ago
      And you're being parochial. Who said "continent" was limited to North America? The claim was that the trip can't be made, not that it can be made but is undesirable as compared with alternatives.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  > The problem is, those trips can't be made by train. They can't now, but they could be. All that is required is a level of capital investment that can't ever be recovered while in competition with air and sea-surface travel... The transatlantic tunnel has been a sci-fi fantasy since 1895. It could cost as little as $500 billion today.
mehrdadn 8y ago
I'll point out that although it's indeed atrocious compared to a train ride, flying is still more efficient than driving a car. So if traveling is required and you're debating between driving vs. flying (say SF <-> LA), you should prefer flying unless you can carpool. I don't know the exact numbers since it depends on where you're going and what plane/airline you fly, but I would expect around 50-75 MPG for a reasonably full airplane [1], whereas your car might be more like 25-30 MPG on the highway, so you'd want at least 2-3 (ideally 4) people in the car to make it more efficient. However the thing about flying is of course that it burns fuel at a much, much faster rate, so if it means the difference between you driving to workplace A vs. flying to workplace B regularly, then you'll be burning one hell of a lot more fuel by flying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Airlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Airli...
- Reason077 8y ago
  That’s true today. But in the coming years and decades, ground transport will be largely electrified and it’s per-mile emissions greatly reduced. Hopefully, aviation can be electrified too one day (or it’s emissions reduced with hybrid technology), but unlike ground transport, the technology is not quite here yet.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    With battery capacities being what they are you'll also have to hang tight for the moment when they stretch long enough to allow you to even have the choice of driving to the same place you can fly. (Or swap batteries on the way somehow... not sure how well that would work.)
    - Reason077 8y ago
      This is already solved in technology terms. Battery capacities and charging speeds are already good enough for almost all long-distance travel scenarios. It’s now just a case of getting costs down and infrastructure built out. But that’s the easy part.

kiba 8y ago

All these security for air travel but not for a train which is also full of lot of people felt bizarre.

dijit 8y ago
You can't hijack a train and take hostages to some other country; This was endemic in the 80s. You also can't hijack a train and drive it into a building.
- amelius 8y ago
  But is this still true for airplanes, given the switch to hardened cockpit doors?
  - Uberphallus 8y ago
    Then you get Germanwings incidents
    - amelius 8y ago
      Which can't happen on trains and buses?
      - endymi0n 8y ago
        Buses, maybe. Trains: Nope. Doors are locked from the inside, usually aren't accessible while moving and even someone would get inside, well, you can't get off the tracks. You'll get a red signal and a forced braking shortly afterwards. It's really, REALLY hard (by design) to wreck something on purpose with a modern high speed train.
        Uberphallus 8y ago
        And in buses you can't really lock yourself out as a driver.
        8y ago

Numberwang 8y ago

I'm totally with you, but it is truly annoying the amount of subsidies the flight industry get. I've often taken trains across Europe due to my preference, but when the plane ticket is €20 and the train ticket is €400 it seems I'm fighting against the system.

peteretep 8y ago
> but it is truly annoying the amount of subsidies the flight industry get Please could you illustrate some of those for me, as compared to rail?
- yrro 8y ago
  UK here. > Aviation is currently undertaxed, according to economists from the IMF and World Bank, compared to other forms of transport. Airlines pay no fuel duty and VAT is zero rated meaning that no tax is charged on sales and tax charged on inputs is refunded. > ... > CE Delft calculated in 2013 that the shortfall as a result of these two anomalies amounted to around €27 billion annually in Europe. > ... > At a global level, the World Bank and IMF favour a relatively low tax universally applied per tonne of CO2, which could then raise money for climate change mitigation. > In the UK, the Liberal Democrat and Conservative coalition considered in 2010 replacing APD with a per plane tax to include freight aircraft and provide an additional incentive to airlines to fill empty seats. However, this was dropped following concerns, the Government claimed, about concerns that it could be challenged legally as representing a proxy fuel tax (contrary to bilateral air service provisions with other countries). > Another alternative would be a form of taxation that discouraged frequent fliers. https://www.aef.org.uk/issues/economics/taxation/ https://www.aef.org.uk/issues/economics/taxation/
- Reason077 8y ago
  1. International airlines pay no tax on aviation fuel, despite their significant contribution to air pollution and climate change. In say, Europe, this represents a huge subsidy compared to ground transport, where fuel is heavily taxed. 2. Airports, particularly regional ones, are often owned by local governments and receive subsidies in order to encourage tourism and commerce in their region. In some cases, airlines receive direct subsidies from those airports in order to fly there. 3. Internationally, some airlines themselves are state-owned or state-subsidised. Gulf airlines such as Emirates and Qatar have been criticised for being significant beneficiaries of state subsidies. This isn’t to say that rail isn’t subsidised too, of course. Even in countries where rail operates on a commercial basis, the physical infrastructure is usually government owned or financed in some way. However, if airlines had to account for (and pay for) their environmental externalities, the costs of airline vs rail travel would work out very differently!

Swizec 8y ago

I traveled with the French TGV a couple times and it is absolutely astounding how amazing it is. Large comfy chairs, quiet train, you can walk around, plenty of room for activities. There's even a bar where you can hang out with fellow passengers! Plus first class tickets are like $20 more expensive than normal tickets and totally worth it. Although I almost missed it because I'm used to all the buffer time you get with airplanes. Train leaves at 10:45, you better be there at 10:40 or you're gonna miss the darn thing.

maeln 8y ago
Although I like our (maybe not for long) nationalized train system, I still have to mitigate your praises a bit :) . One of my main issue is that train ticket are really expensive. Regional train are okayish, but TGV cost often way more than any other equivalent (plane/bus/car/...) and are sometimes not faster. The second thing is that the network is historically completely centered around Paris. That lead to some very weird situation where, to go from the north-west to the south-west, you need to go all around France. And because of this, it is again faster and cheaper to just take a plane. Finally, there is often delay or train being canceled, which is normal because lot more problem happen on the ground and such that when you are several thousand feet in the air, but they tend to communicate about it really badly. When your train have a problem, it is often really hard to know when you will have a new train, how much delay will you have, ... On the other end, I agree with you. The train are so much comfortable. I really enjoy traveling in train way more than with any other form of transportation. I assume they are also a bit more ecological than cars and planes. The application of the SCNF to book ticket is also very good nowadays, never had a problem with it.

garmaine 8y ago

Lol, try living in California. 6-12 hour plane ride to anywhere. Trains? We have them. But why would you when it takes literally days to cross the country.

dewey 8y ago
That's not a problem of trains it's a problem of the US train infrastructure. As you can see in Europe or Japan trains can be very fast and very efficient.
- Reason077 8y ago
  Sure, but the distances between cities in a huge country like the USA tend to be much greater than in Europe or Japan. Even if you had high speed rail it’d still take a very long time to cross the continent! High speed trains do exist, or are being built, in more densely populated US regions (eg Northeast corridor, California).
  - nickjj 8y ago
    It takes around 4-5 days to cross the US by train. The problem is, the regular seats are shoulder to shoulder, there's no showers, and everyone shares a bathroom. Plus, they gouge you relentlessly with food rates. It doesn't seem like it would be a fun experience at all due to those conditions (but would be fun otherwise). Of course you could spend $1,000+ each way to get a "sleeper seat" which comes with a shower and meals but then it's like you're essentially paying $700 for a shower and a touch of privacy. It's just off putting to me based on principle.
  - lhopki01 8y ago
    The distances between cities in California or the upper East coast isn't. Both places have a high enough population density to support a good train network. No one is suggesting that you take train from New York to LA but rather that you take a train from LA to San Francisco or Boston to New York. Similarly in Europe most people don't take a train from London to Rome but people will often take a train from London to Paris or Barcelona to Madrid. Any flight of 3 hours or less is usually faster and more comfortable as a train ride.

Uberphallus 8y ago

That's the exact same reason why nobody sane takes a train in France for anything that matters. Schedules violated every day, strikes, poor maintenance, and moreover, they killed almost all of the night trains, that were the cheapest option especially if you account for one night you save on accommodation.