8 ms·

Climate Change: Rail Companies Sign Up to Flight Shame Movement

66 points by edward 7y ago

kortilla 7y ago
(In Europe). This doesn’t have anything to do with the mostly freight and nearly passenger-useless rail network in the US.
- Merrill 7y ago
  The US is optimized for very heavy freight cars moving at about 45 mph. It has fairly sharp curves so that changes of elevation (grades) can be minimized, it usually has wooden railroad ties, and street and highway crossings are allowed. Much of the system is single track allowing train movement in one direction at a time, while trains going in the opposite direction idle in sidings. This is the result of the railroads being charged property taxes on their railways, which they minimized by tearing up double track unless it was absolutely needed.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  In Europe private rail firms are eager to attract customers. In USA the government agency that is mandated by Congress to screw up rail travel is not so eager.
  - sneeze-slayer 7y ago
    All of the European rail companies I can think of off the top of my head (Germany, France, Spain, UK) are owned by the government, so it is possible. It seems like only in the USA is there the notion that the government is completely unable to function on its own.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      Most European nations, and certainly the ones under discussion, are more democratic than USA. It isn't as though Amtrak is failing in the mission assigned to it by those who control Congress and the long-term bureaucracy. It is only failing to do what most USA residents would like it to do: make USA rail travel better, more convenient, less expensive. I'm not saying that private firms in USA don't suffer the authority of TPTB, but they suffer it much less directly than most state-owned enterprises.
lqet 7y ago
> Meanwhile, Deutsche Bahn AG hopes to attract 200 million long-distance rail passengers by 2030, an increase of 35%. Good luck with that. DB neither has the rolling material [0], nor reliable companies to build that rolling material [1], nor the infrastructure [2], nor the personnel [3] to provide reliable service for the passenger numbers of today. It remains a complete mystery how they will solve problems that have been decades in the making since the privatization and increase their passenger numbers by 35% in just 10 years. To anyone who regularly travels with DB (and to much of their own, frustrated [4] personnel) these plans sound preposterous. It's exactly the same kind of growth- and revenue-oriented MBA daydreaming that brought the company down to the alarming state it is in today. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/deutsche-bahn-warum-es-der-deutschen-bahn-so-schlecht-geht-a-1247468.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/deutsche-bahn-... [1] https://www.wiwo.de/my/unternehmen/dienstleister/bombardier-fuer-bombardier-wird-die-lage-ernst/24372184-2.html?ticket=ST-66062673-KQbwmtQ2HyptCT2hbbYb-ap5 https://www.wiwo.de/my/unternehmen/dienstleister/bombardier-... [2] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/handel-konsumgueter/infrastruktur-der-sanierungsstau-bei-der-bahn-waechst-auf-57-milliarden-euro/24062516.html?ticket=ST-61031932-ajQNy40QZvHCtyfM1Z0g-ap4 https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/handel-konsumgueter... [3] https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/deutsche-bahn-zugausfaelle-wegen-lokfuehrermangel-werden-anhalten-a-1281562.html https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/deutsche-bahn-zugausfaelle-w... [4] https://www.derwesten.de/wirtschaft/70-prozent-der-bahn-mitarbeiter-sind-frustriert-id4968216.html https://www.derwesten.de/wirtschaft/70-prozent-der-bahn-mita...
- winkelwagen 7y ago
  It is a shame, France has great rail, the Netherlands as well. My last experiences with traveling long train distances with DB rail were pretty abysmal. Resulting in taxi rides payed by DB themselves. I’ve even considered going back to buses. Although trains as much preferable to buses and planes, Connections are not an issue (usually).
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Meanwhile here in the UK we have a fine rail network suitable for the 1910s. We finally upgraded to 1970s speeds in the 2000s -- deliberately avoiding 1980s speeds. HS2 might not be made available at all, let alone to the more northerly bits of the country. That nice Mr Beeching threw away half the network in the 1960s. It shames us to see our closest neighbours do rail so well -- especially when the demand is there, it's just political will that's missing.
yostrovs 7y ago
The greatest impact would be if the ship companies would join in. Imagine the carbon output reduction of a large chunk of air travel moved to the sea instead.
- rvense 7y ago
  Cruise ships are pretty bad, I hear.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    If moving stuff through the air would be cheaper than moving it by sea (fuel costs are a major part of shipping costs), then everything would be shipped by air. This is not the case; sea is the default, and air is premium. Intuitively it makes sense that moving things through air requires more fuel than moving it by sea, since the airplane has to use fuel to offset its lack of buoyancy, while a ship only has to expend energy to actually move.
    - look_lookatme 7y ago
      There's no way there's a world where everyone who needs to be in Europe next week from, say, New England, heads down to Boston to queue up for a utilitarian passenger ship that takes a week to cross the open ocean. How many people would you need to even justify the cost and environmental impact of moving such a ship? 300? 3,000? Cargo ships have thousands of containers on them (massive scale) and they move relatively slowly. This is not a reasonable comparison. You can't just pluck weight per-mile cost out of the air and apply it to passenger travel.
    - rvense 7y ago
      But people aren't good. They would be on the ships for a long time and need to do people things, like eating and using the bathroom and not being bored. Hence cruise ships become floating cities with colossal energy usage and bad waste management.
      - 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
How much does a transatlantic rail bridge cost?
- gumby 7y ago
  Not really cost effective when you can just build a much shorter one across the Bering sea Travel time from the British isles is a bit longer I admit but the route has been valuable for longer.
Merrill 7y ago
This is valid for rail travel in Europe if the energy for electrified intercity rail is not sourced from hydrocarbons. The energy efficiency in MegaJoules per passenger-kilometer are about equal between rail and air. For freight, rail is much more efficient in MegaJoules per ton-kilometer, but passengers are a small percentage of a very heavy rail car. In the US, other than the Boston-Washington corridor, intercity rail is diesel powered and travels at 90 mph max due to grade crossings of roads and streets and due to track curvature. To fix US intercity rail requires removing all grade crossings, realigning the railways to straighten curves and redesigning the roadbeds to support high speed operation.
- tyfon 7y ago
  Do you have any articles or studies where you can see the CO2 output pr passengers with train on diesel vs electric (sourced from various hydrocarbons) vs air travel? It would be interesting to see actual numbers and you seem to have studied this a bit.
  - maelito 7y ago
    If you make a trip simulation in France you'll get the numbers from SNCF. E.g. try Trainline.eu. I couldn't find where they come from though.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    See page 14, 15 of "Energy Efficiency in Air Transportation" by Arturo Benito, Gustavo Alonso. Table 2.3 gives MJ/pkm for the US. Fig 2.8 next page gives ranges of efficiency for both passenger and freight. https://books.google.com/books?id=jJGZDgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=energy+efficiency+by+transportation+mode&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrt9nIucblAhWEpFkKHRfvBFgQ6AEwAHoECAUQAg#v=onepage&q=energy%20efficiency%20by%20transportation%20mode&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=jJGZDgAAQBAJ&printsec=fron... Back when "peak oil" was a thing, I was in several discussions about what it would take to electrify the US transportation networks, both passenger and freight, but I have not worked in transportation planning. Hydrogen-fueled intercity buses will be much easier to implement than anything else, especially if they are autonomous to reduce driver costs.
ekianjo 7y ago
Funny since most electricity powering trains is made with CO2 generating processes worldwide. The only exception being maybe France because of very large nuclear power presence. For the rest, it is basically coal, gas and burning hydrocarbons to power trains.
- mistymountains 7y ago
  yeah, very "funny". Especially since rail, even diesel rail is far more efficient than any air travel. Think about it. Why is air freight more expensive?
  - kaybe 7y ago
    There are answers imaginable that are not related to energy efficiency. (Not saying you're wrong, just thoughts.) How about people needed per ton for example? A train conductor can be far more efficient than a pilot on that metric.
- Already__Taken 7y ago
  You take a distributed problem and consolidate it into 10x fewer areas. Now deploying a 1% improvement to a problem became more feasible. Repeat. I thought HN was more thought through than this kind of glib comment.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  This assertion is reductive and somewhat false. Rail is the most energy-efficient method of hauling freight over land (where no water route is available), and electric trains are powered, on average, by whatever powers the regional grid. For countries besides France, such as the USA, Germany, or Norway, which get a sizeable portion of their energy from carbon-free sources, electric rail is a reasonably low carbon compared to trucking, and perhaps even compared to barge.
  - 7y ago
pjc50 7y ago
http://archive.is/gQ7wY http://archive.is/gQ7wY to bypass the signup and private mode walling.
LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
What a stupid fluff piece... Meanwhile, somewhere in the 'Ruhrpott': [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Datteln https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Datteln [2] https://www.uniper.energy/de/datteln-4 https://www.uniper.energy/de/datteln-4 a new coal generating plant for 'Bahnstrom' is being built against the law, the moving off of coal, with much corruption, while having a defective boiler, which cost them 210 Mio € so far. Ha! YEAH! Paint it GREEN!
spodek 7y ago
The emotions most people associate with environmental action seem to be shame and guilt. I propose paying more attention to emotions and leading with different ones since emotions motivate. The more I act on my environmental values, the more I feel joy, then community spirit and connection with people around me -- including taking the train to L.A. and back from New York. I see that joy in hundreds of conversations with world-renowned people on my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast when they act too (before they act they tend not to show joy or community -- action creates it). I was more than successful when I lived contrary to my environmental values and felt happy then, but these emotions reach another level of depth and connection. They motivate me to act more, and achieve more of value. Meanwhile, guilt and shame seem to disengage people who aren't yet acting -- that is, the people most important to influence. Another emotion I find rising up with experience acting on my environmental values is disgust, the emotion I feel at the thought of a kindergarten teacher smoking in the classroom. It started from my picking up at least one piece of garbage from the ground each day and has spread to fast fashion, factory farming, flying, industrial food, and more. I don't like feeling disgust, but if my environment merits it, I'd rather feel it to motivate me to act. I think it would motivate those not yet acting, as with smoking before, more than guilt or shame. I propose working to connect environmental action with joy, community, and connection, and inaction with disgust. This is the first I've mentioned this idea so I welcome feedback.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  Disgust feels close to shaming for me...or might lead to it. How do you keep those two separate?

66 points by edward 7y ago

(In Europe). This doesn’t have anything to do with the mostly freight and nearly passenger-useless rail network in the US.

Merrill 7y ago
The US is optimized for very heavy freight cars moving at about 45 mph. It has fairly sharp curves so that changes of elevation (grades) can be minimized, it usually has wooden railroad ties, and street and highway crossings are allowed. Much of the system is single track allowing train movement in one direction at a time, while trains going in the opposite direction idle in sidings. This is the result of the railroads being charged property taxes on their railways, which they minimized by tearing up double track unless it was absolutely needed.
jessaustin 7y ago
In Europe private rail firms are eager to attract customers. In USA the government agency that is mandated by Congress to screw up rail travel is not so eager.
- sneeze-slayer 7y ago
  All of the European rail companies I can think of off the top of my head (Germany, France, Spain, UK) are owned by the government, so it is possible. It seems like only in the USA is there the notion that the government is completely unable to function on its own.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Most European nations, and certainly the ones under discussion, are more democratic than USA. It isn't as though Amtrak is failing in the mission assigned to it by those who control Congress and the long-term bureaucracy. It is only failing to do what most USA residents would like it to do: make USA rail travel better, more convenient, less expensive. I'm not saying that private firms in USA don't suffer the authority of TPTB, but they suffer it much less directly than most state-owned enterprises.

lqet 7y ago

> Meanwhile, Deutsche Bahn AG hopes to attract 200 million long-distance rail passengers by 2030, an increase of 35%. Good luck with that. DB neither has the rolling material [0], nor reliable companies to build that rolling material [1], nor the infrastructure [2], nor the personnel [3] to provide reliable service for the passenger numbers of today. It remains a complete mystery how they will solve problems that have been decades in the making since the privatization and increase their passenger numbers by 35% in just 10 years. To anyone who regularly travels with DB (and to much of their own, frustrated [4] personnel) these plans sound preposterous. It's exactly the same kind of growth- and revenue-oriented MBA daydreaming that brought the company down to the alarming state it is in today. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/deutsche-bahn-warum-es-der-deutschen-bahn-so-schlecht-geht-a-1247468.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/deutsche-bahn-... [1] https://www.wiwo.de/my/unternehmen/dienstleister/bombardier-fuer-bombardier-wird-die-lage-ernst/24372184-2.html?ticket=ST-66062673-KQbwmtQ2HyptCT2hbbYb-ap5 https://www.wiwo.de/my/unternehmen/dienstleister/bombardier-... [2] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/handel-konsumgueter/infrastruktur-der-sanierungsstau-bei-der-bahn-waechst-auf-57-milliarden-euro/24062516.html?ticket=ST-61031932-ajQNy40QZvHCtyfM1Z0g-ap4 https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/handel-konsumgueter... [3] https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/deutsche-bahn-zugausfaelle-wegen-lokfuehrermangel-werden-anhalten-a-1281562.html https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/deutsche-bahn-zugausfaelle-w... [4] https://www.derwesten.de/wirtschaft/70-prozent-der-bahn-mitarbeiter-sind-frustriert-id4968216.html https://www.derwesten.de/wirtschaft/70-prozent-der-bahn-mita...

winkelwagen 7y ago
It is a shame, France has great rail, the Netherlands as well. My last experiences with traveling long train distances with DB rail were pretty abysmal. Resulting in taxi rides payed by DB themselves. I’ve even considered going back to buses. Although trains as much preferable to buses and planes, Connections are not an issue (usually).
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Meanwhile here in the UK we have a fine rail network suitable for the 1910s. We finally upgraded to 1970s speeds in the 2000s -- deliberately avoiding 1980s speeds. HS2 might not be made available at all, let alone to the more northerly bits of the country. That nice Mr Beeching threw away half the network in the 1960s. It shames us to see our closest neighbours do rail so well -- especially when the demand is there, it's just political will that's missing.

yostrovs 7y ago

The greatest impact would be if the ship companies would join in. Imagine the carbon output reduction of a large chunk of air travel moved to the sea instead.

rvense 7y ago
Cruise ships are pretty bad, I hear.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  If moving stuff through the air would be cheaper than moving it by sea (fuel costs are a major part of shipping costs), then everything would be shipped by air. This is not the case; sea is the default, and air is premium. Intuitively it makes sense that moving things through air requires more fuel than moving it by sea, since the airplane has to use fuel to offset its lack of buoyancy, while a ship only has to expend energy to actually move.
  - look_lookatme 7y ago
    There's no way there's a world where everyone who needs to be in Europe next week from, say, New England, heads down to Boston to queue up for a utilitarian passenger ship that takes a week to cross the open ocean. How many people would you need to even justify the cost and environmental impact of moving such a ship? 300? 3,000? Cargo ships have thousands of containers on them (massive scale) and they move relatively slowly. This is not a reasonable comparison. You can't just pluck weight per-mile cost out of the air and apply it to passenger travel.
  - rvense 7y ago
    But people aren't good. They would be on the ships for a long time and need to do people things, like eating and using the bathroom and not being bored. Hence cruise ships become floating cities with colossal energy usage and bad waste management.
    - 7y ago

buboard 7y ago

How much does a transatlantic rail bridge cost?

gumby 7y ago
Not really cost effective when you can just build a much shorter one across the Bering sea Travel time from the British isles is a bit longer I admit but the route has been valuable for longer.

Merrill 7y ago

This is valid for rail travel in Europe if the energy for electrified intercity rail is not sourced from hydrocarbons. The energy efficiency in MegaJoules per passenger-kilometer are about equal between rail and air. For freight, rail is much more efficient in MegaJoules per ton-kilometer, but passengers are a small percentage of a very heavy rail car. In the US, other than the Boston-Washington corridor, intercity rail is diesel powered and travels at 90 mph max due to grade crossings of roads and streets and due to track curvature. To fix US intercity rail requires removing all grade crossings, realigning the railways to straighten curves and redesigning the roadbeds to support high speed operation.

tyfon 7y ago
Do you have any articles or studies where you can see the CO2 output pr passengers with train on diesel vs electric (sourced from various hydrocarbons) vs air travel? It would be interesting to see actual numbers and you seem to have studied this a bit.
- maelito 7y ago
  If you make a trip simulation in France you'll get the numbers from SNCF. E.g. try Trainline.eu. I couldn't find where they come from though.
- Merrill 7y ago
  See page 14, 15 of "Energy Efficiency in Air Transportation" by Arturo Benito, Gustavo Alonso. Table 2.3 gives MJ/pkm for the US. Fig 2.8 next page gives ranges of efficiency for both passenger and freight. https://books.google.com/books?id=jJGZDgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=energy+efficiency+by+transportation+mode&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrt9nIucblAhWEpFkKHRfvBFgQ6AEwAHoECAUQAg#v=onepage&q=energy%20efficiency%20by%20transportation%20mode&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=jJGZDgAAQBAJ&printsec=fron... Back when "peak oil" was a thing, I was in several discussions about what it would take to electrify the US transportation networks, both passenger and freight, but I have not worked in transportation planning. Hydrogen-fueled intercity buses will be much easier to implement than anything else, especially if they are autonomous to reduce driver costs.

ekianjo 7y ago

Funny since most electricity powering trains is made with CO2 generating processes worldwide. The only exception being maybe France because of very large nuclear power presence. For the rest, it is basically coal, gas and burning hydrocarbons to power trains.

mistymountains 7y ago
yeah, very "funny". Especially since rail, even diesel rail is far more efficient than any air travel. Think about it. Why is air freight more expensive?
- kaybe 7y ago
  There are answers imaginable that are not related to energy efficiency. (Not saying you're wrong, just thoughts.) How about people needed per ton for example? A train conductor can be far more efficient than a pilot on that metric.
Already__Taken 7y ago
You take a distributed problem and consolidate it into 10x fewer areas. Now deploying a 1% improvement to a problem became more feasible. Repeat. I thought HN was more thought through than this kind of glib comment.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
i_am_proteus 7y ago
This assertion is reductive and somewhat false. Rail is the most energy-efficient method of hauling freight over land (where no water route is available), and electric trains are powered, on average, by whatever powers the regional grid. For countries besides France, such as the USA, Germany, or Norway, which get a sizeable portion of their energy from carbon-free sources, electric rail is a reasonably low carbon compared to trucking, and perhaps even compared to barge.
- 7y ago

pjc50 7y ago

http://archive.is/gQ7wY http://archive.is/gQ7wY to bypass the signup and private mode walling.

LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago

What a stupid fluff piece... Meanwhile, somewhere in the 'Ruhrpott': [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Datteln https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Datteln [2] https://www.uniper.energy/de/datteln-4 https://www.uniper.energy/de/datteln-4 a new coal generating plant for 'Bahnstrom' is being built against the law, the moving off of coal, with much corruption, while having a defective boiler, which cost them 210 Mio € so far. Ha! YEAH! Paint it GREEN!

spodek 7y ago

The emotions most people associate with environmental action seem to be shame and guilt. I propose paying more attention to emotions and leading with different ones since emotions motivate. The more I act on my environmental values, the more I feel joy, then community spirit and connection with people around me -- including taking the train to L.A. and back from New York. I see that joy in hundreds of conversations with world-renowned people on my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast when they act too (before they act they tend not to show joy or community -- action creates it). I was more than successful when I lived contrary to my environmental values and felt happy then, but these emotions reach another level of depth and connection. They motivate me to act more, and achieve more of value. Meanwhile, guilt and shame seem to disengage people who aren't yet acting -- that is, the people most important to influence. Another emotion I find rising up with experience acting on my environmental values is disgust, the emotion I feel at the thought of a kindergarten teacher smoking in the classroom. It started from my picking up at least one piece of garbage from the ground each day and has spread to fast fashion, factory farming, flying, industrial food, and more. I don't like feeling disgust, but if my environment merits it, I'd rather feel it to motivate me to act. I think it would motivate those not yet acting, as with smoking before, more than guilt or shame. I propose working to connect environmental action with joy, community, and connection, and inaction with disgust. This is the first I've mentioned this idea so I welcome feedback.

throwawaysea 7y ago
Disgust feels close to shaming for me...or might lead to it. How do you keep those two separate?