4 ms·
Isn't transport by plane just cheaper to provide than rail? You don't need to maintain railway lines, bridges, tunnels, points, overhead power lines, signalling
by abainbridge 5y ago
Isn't transport by plane just cheaper to provide than rail? You don't need to maintain railway lines, bridges, tunnels, points, overhead power lines, signalling or intermediate stations. Routing congestion is reduced because planes can move in 3D. There is no rolling resistance and air friction is reduced due to flying high-up where the air is thin. Airports are built away from city centres, where land is cheap. The natural monopolies of rail-track providers are avoided. I think it would be amazing if train travel was as cheap as air travel.
- markus92 5y agoThe energy requirements are vastly different, rolling stock is a lot cheaper than airframes etc.
- abainbridge 5y agoGood points. A 737 costs about $90M and seats about 162 people. Let's say it lasts 10 years and does 4 journeys per day, that's 14600 journeys in its life. So $38 per journey is needed to pay for the plane. A train costs $15M and has about twice as many seats. So, yeah train wins. According to https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_121.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_121.shtml Trains are about 8.5x more energy efficient than planes. So yeah, trains win that too. For context, planes do about 80 MPG per passenger. On the other hand, building HS2 might cost £75 billion. It might carry 100 trains per day, so 32000 passengers per day, if all the trains were full. That's 11.7M per year. If it runs for 25 years without costing anything more, that's 292M passenger journeys, so £256 per passenger journey. I _think_ that demonstrates that the infrastructure costs are larger than the costs of extra energy requirements and airframes. But we're clearly into "it's complicated" territory, so I concede.