3 ms·

The cost to provide a large amount of space is much cheaper for rail.

• closeparen 8y ago
  A train takes three days to do what an airliner can in six hours. So a marginal sqft of train car needs to cost something like 1/12th a marginal sqft of airliner just to break even on a per-ticket basis.
  • ant6n 8y ago
    That's only true for Amtrak in the US, where trains are pitifully slow, and on top of that you picked one of the least favorable relations in terms of distance and speed. High speed rail achieves up to 200km/h (avg) as the bird flies, commercial aviation in the medium range may do about 400km/h on average (e.g. the 960km of New York - Chicago in about 2:30). Consider that the turn-around of an airplane is about an hour, and for a train it's likely less than that, and the 1/12 factor you bring up may end up being much less in practice. Or put another way, there are plenty of medium/high speed rail operations that are profitable while giving a large amount of space to passengers.