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Much as I love trains, air travel's crisis at hand is predicated on people's widespread and perfectly understandable reluctance to spend long hours in a sealed
by hanoz 6y ago
Much as I love trains, air travel's crisis at hand is predicated on people's widespread and perfectly understandable reluctance to spend long hours in a sealed tube in close proximity to all and sundry, so I don't think this is the cue for trains to step in and save the day.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoDo we know anything about how strong the economic pressures are for airlines vs. trains, regarding cramming passengers closer together? Obviously, for a given number of passengers, more space = more cars or larger cars. But I'm curious if giving passengers 8" of extra legroom is cheaper per passenger-mile for trains than it is for airlines. I'd assume so.
- paledot 6y agoOne competitive advantage of trains is that if they sell more tickets than anticipated, they can (capacity permitting) add an extra car at relatively low cost. An airline has to add another plane or bump passengers. Equally, rail companies can scale more easily to different social distancing guidelines.
- CydeWeys 6y agoDoes this ever actually happen though? I'm not aware of variable length passenger trains along a single route. And the stations for boarding are only so long.
- nikhilsimha 6y agoNot your ideal train system, but happens in India. Quite often.
- robga 6y agoMore often what happens (London) is the inverse. They’ll take two carriages off and squeeze you in tighter. Mornings always 10 carriages comfortably seated? So, Let’s take two off and let them stand for their expensive season pass.
- Asuchug4 6y agoThere is no automatic process but it common to add cars for events, school trips or other organized groups.
- mtnGoat 6y agoAmtrak does this.
- londons_explore 6y agoMany rail networks are designed for trains of a specific length. Primitive signalling systems risk trains colliding if trains are longer than the design length, or there are places a longer train would get stuck (a pair of long trains each cannot move forward because each requires the other to move first due to the design of the signalling and safety systems)
- bobthepanda 6y agoYou can definitely run shorter trains though. IIRC the NEC in America can accommodate 16-car trains but not all trains are that long.
- bobthepanda 6y agoPlanes have flight attendants, and part of safety regulations is that you need a flight attendant per 50 people, or something like that. Trains have no such thing. IIRC in its early days JetBlue used to strip out a row of seats in its a320s to get a number divisible by 50. The rearranging of the rest of the seats allowed them to advertise having the largest domestic economy seat pitch in America, which was a happy side effect. Planes also have higher energy consumption given that they have to move you vertically and horizontally, and electric trains have an even greater advantage since electricity is a lot less prone to swings than fuel.
- z3ncyberpunk 6y agoGood thing trains are more comfortable and we have technology which enables us to reduce the time to travel. We are just ruled by the least among us who refuse to do anything but line their pockets, at least in the US, least of all fix our crumbling infrastructure and decaying railways
- bobthepanda 6y agoAs far as modes of long distance travel go, the train is probably the most comfortable given generally much better ride quality than a bus and much more legroom than a plane, to say nothing of the fact that you can actually get a full size table in a train and walk around and whatnot. The Interstate system is not high-capacity enough for all long distance travel to be in hermetically sealed private cars.