4 ms·

In many cases air travel is more convenient and cheaper to operate than rail (no infrastructure needed). Air travel is not going away so there should be effort

In many cases air travel is more convenient and cheaper to operate than rail (no infrastructure needed). Air travel is not going away so there should be efforts made to decarbonise it instead of pooping on it at every opportunity.

orwin 3y ago
Air travel is almost as subsidized as road travel, I don't think 'cheaper' is a good argument for it (not even counting externalities). Convenience though is a great argument for air travel.
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  Air travel is not convenient. How do you get to the airport? How long does it take you? Do you take your car and pay for parking, do you pay $$$ for a cab? Do you take public transportation and take hours? How long in advance do you need to get there? How much time do you waste in ID checks, security checks, taxiing...? Meanwhile, where I live, I take a metro car and I'm at the train station in 30 min. I get there 10 min before the train leaves just to be safe. Then I just... get on the train? And when the train arrives, I just... get off it. And that's it.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    High speed trains in Europe have security checks too. Though they're not as rigorous and time consuming as those for air but you still need to plan for them.
    - uxp8u61q 3y ago
      I must have taken the TGV a hundred times in my life, and high speed trains elsewhere in Europe several times. I have never been through a security check. The only time I had to, it was the Eurostar. I don't know what you are talking about or where your information is coming from.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        Oh here in Spain I've always had to go through a check. Metal detector and baggage through the X-ray scanner.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Convenience really depends. At its most convenient, I think rail wins. You could walk to a station and get exactly where you need to go, right into the city centre. No limit on luggage size or weight or anything. No long boarding/deboarding procedure. In fact, now I think about it I'm not sure how you could call air travel convenient compared to rail. The only advantage is you can go further and cross oceans and mountains etc.
uxp8u61q 3y ago
No infrastructure needed? This must be a joke. Have you heard about the concept of an airport? Airports are humongous and contain a ton of infrastructure, compared to a train station. Gare de Paris-Nord, the busiest train station in Europe, is planned to have a floor area of 120 000 m² after the next renovation. I couldn't find the number for the ground area, but it's obviously smaller than the floor area. Dulles airport, in Washington DC (a relatively small city by all standards), has an area of 47 km². That's 47 000 000 m², for the unaware. Meanwhile, its annual traffic (about 20M passengers) is approximately a fifth of the Gare du Nord (about 100M passengers). And then you obviously have to take into account everything that goes into an airport. How much infrastructure to carry fuel and equipment to the airport? To carry passengers to the airport? Most airports aren't in city centers! Do the roads and rails that lead to the airport count? Most certainly. Runways, terminals, air control towers... All this is infrastructure. So no, you don't need to lay out rails in the sky for planes. That's pretty much where the list of pros stop, in terms of infrastructure. The cons, on the other hand...
- globular-toast 3y ago
  And that doesn't include how you get to and from the airport at either end plus the supporting infrastructure for fuelling, catering etc.
- masklinn 3y ago
  > Gare de Paris-Nord, the busiest train station in Europe, is planned to have a floor area of 120 000 m² after the next renovation. I couldn't find the number for the ground area, but it's obviously smaller than the floor area. Dulles airport, in Washington DC (a relatively small city by all standards), has an area of 47 km². That's 47 000 000 m², for the unaware. Meanwhile, its annual traffic (about 20M passengers) is approximately a fifth of the Gare du Nord (about 100M passengers). Not to detract from the point but Dulles is way oversized for its traffic (so's BWI). Paris-CDG, Frankfurt, Schipol, or Madrid carry near triple (or above in high-traffic years) the passengers in half to 2/3rds the surface. Heathrow moves more than triple on about 1/4th the surface (though it's rather unpleasant IIRC).
  - 3y ago
throw0101a 3y ago
> In many cases air travel is more convenient and cheaper to operate than rail (no infrastructure needed). This is like saying flipping on a light switch, turn on a tap, or flushing a toilet is very convenient because there is no infrastructure needed. There's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in the background that you may not be aware of. See also "Dependency" comic: * https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Not at all, this is disingenuous and a misrepresentation of my comment. You obviously understands my point that railways require massively more infrastructure than air travel, and that their convenience decreases with distance though they do have capacity in their favour.
  - throw0101a 3y ago
    > You obviously understands my point that railways require massively more infrastructure than air travel […] Debatable. First there is all the land, then all the runways that need to be maintained, the terminals, the jet fuel (refinery, pipelines, storage tanks, local pipes and pumps), the entire local/regional/international air traffic control system (controllers, towers, radio, radar, beacons, ILS/GPS). Train tracks take up much less space, train stations are much smaller, coordination on fixed tracks less complicated that managing planes criss crossing the sky, and trains can run on electricity (so you leverage the existing power grid).
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Air travel is cheaper because in Europe at least, we have achieved near perfect competition between many low-cost airlines. This isn’t like dictated by laws of physics. Trains, on the other hand, are a natural monopoly, and Britain’s privatisation efforts have been a failure. These companies contribute nothing to infrastructure investment, most of our rail is 150 years old and trains between Britains largest cities don’t have access to electricity. For like 70 years western governments did not take train infra seriously. This created huge problems - stations in UK are designed for small population, platforms are short so you can’t have long trains. the whole point of a train is that it can be long, longest trains in the world are measured in kilometres. Eurostar is 400 meters long. British trains are often tiny. the new Elizabeth line in London uses 3 different signalling systems because it runs across some track that’s new and some rail that’s prehistoric. But if you look at physics of it, trains are the only vehicle that does not need fuel or batteries, it feeds on electricity directly from the grid. Electrification of aircraft is both fantastic and fantastically inefficient

orwin 3y ago

Air travel is almost as subsidized as road travel, I don't think 'cheaper' is a good argument for it (not even counting externalities). Convenience though is a great argument for air travel.

uxp8u61q 3y ago
Air travel is not convenient. How do you get to the airport? How long does it take you? Do you take your car and pay for parking, do you pay $$$ for a cab? Do you take public transportation and take hours? How long in advance do you need to get there? How much time do you waste in ID checks, security checks, taxiing...? Meanwhile, where I live, I take a metro car and I'm at the train station in 30 min. I get there 10 min before the train leaves just to be safe. Then I just... get on the train? And when the train arrives, I just... get off it. And that's it.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  High speed trains in Europe have security checks too. Though they're not as rigorous and time consuming as those for air but you still need to plan for them.
  - uxp8u61q 3y ago
    I must have taken the TGV a hundred times in my life, and high speed trains elsewhere in Europe several times. I have never been through a security check. The only time I had to, it was the Eurostar. I don't know what you are talking about or where your information is coming from.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Oh here in Spain I've always had to go through a check. Metal detector and baggage through the X-ray scanner.
globular-toast 3y ago
Convenience really depends. At its most convenient, I think rail wins. You could walk to a station and get exactly where you need to go, right into the city centre. No limit on luggage size or weight or anything. No long boarding/deboarding procedure. In fact, now I think about it I'm not sure how you could call air travel convenient compared to rail. The only advantage is you can go further and cross oceans and mountains etc.

uxp8u61q 3y ago

No infrastructure needed? This must be a joke. Have you heard about the concept of an airport? Airports are humongous and contain a ton of infrastructure, compared to a train station. Gare de Paris-Nord, the busiest train station in Europe, is planned to have a floor area of 120 000 m² after the next renovation. I couldn't find the number for the ground area, but it's obviously smaller than the floor area. Dulles airport, in Washington DC (a relatively small city by all standards), has an area of 47 km². That's 47 000 000 m², for the unaware. Meanwhile, its annual traffic (about 20M passengers) is approximately a fifth of the Gare du Nord (about 100M passengers). And then you obviously have to take into account everything that goes into an airport. How much infrastructure to carry fuel and equipment to the airport? To carry passengers to the airport? Most airports aren't in city centers! Do the roads and rails that lead to the airport count? Most certainly. Runways, terminals, air control towers... All this is infrastructure. So no, you don't need to lay out rails in the sky for planes. That's pretty much where the list of pros stop, in terms of infrastructure. The cons, on the other hand...

globular-toast 3y ago
And that doesn't include how you get to and from the airport at either end plus the supporting infrastructure for fuelling, catering etc.
masklinn 3y ago
> Gare de Paris-Nord, the busiest train station in Europe, is planned to have a floor area of 120 000 m² after the next renovation. I couldn't find the number for the ground area, but it's obviously smaller than the floor area. Dulles airport, in Washington DC (a relatively small city by all standards), has an area of 47 km². That's 47 000 000 m², for the unaware. Meanwhile, its annual traffic (about 20M passengers) is approximately a fifth of the Gare du Nord (about 100M passengers). Not to detract from the point but Dulles is way oversized for its traffic (so's BWI). Paris-CDG, Frankfurt, Schipol, or Madrid carry near triple (or above in high-traffic years) the passengers in half to 2/3rds the surface. Heathrow moves more than triple on about 1/4th the surface (though it's rather unpleasant IIRC).
- 3y ago

throw0101a 3y ago

> In many cases air travel is more convenient and cheaper to operate than rail (no infrastructure needed). This is like saying flipping on a light switch, turn on a tap, or flushing a toilet is very convenient because there is no infrastructure needed. There's a whole bunch of stuff that happens in the background that you may not be aware of. See also "Dependency" comic: * https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

mytailorisrich 3y ago
Not at all, this is disingenuous and a misrepresentation of my comment. You obviously understands my point that railways require massively more infrastructure than air travel, and that their convenience decreases with distance though they do have capacity in their favour.
- throw0101a 3y ago
  > You obviously understands my point that railways require massively more infrastructure than air travel […] Debatable. First there is all the land, then all the runways that need to be maintained, the terminals, the jet fuel (refinery, pipelines, storage tanks, local pipes and pumps), the entire local/regional/international air traffic control system (controllers, towers, radio, radar, beacons, ILS/GPS). Train tracks take up much less space, train stations are much smaller, coordination on fixed tracks less complicated that managing planes criss crossing the sky, and trains can run on electricity (so you leverage the existing power grid).

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

Air travel is cheaper because in Europe at least, we have achieved near perfect competition between many low-cost airlines. This isn’t like dictated by laws of physics. Trains, on the other hand, are a natural monopoly, and Britain’s privatisation efforts have been a failure. These companies contribute nothing to infrastructure investment, most of our rail is 150 years old and trains between Britains largest cities don’t have access to electricity. For like 70 years western governments did not take train infra seriously. This created huge problems - stations in UK are designed for small population, platforms are short so you can’t have long trains. the whole point of a train is that it can be long, longest trains in the world are measured in kilometres. Eurostar is 400 meters long. British trains are often tiny. the new Elizabeth line in London uses 3 different signalling systems because it runs across some track that’s new and some rail that’s prehistoric. But if you look at physics of it, trains are the only vehicle that does not need fuel or batteries, it feeds on electricity directly from the grid. Electrification of aircraft is both fantastic and fantastically inefficient