How trains could replace planes in Europe | Hacker News Reader

How trains could replace planes in Europe

economist.com

293 pointsedward438 comments

The article should have mentioned some of the mega-projects that are already underway, which will improve rail links between European countries.

The Stuttgart 21 project will reconfigure the Stuttgart central station to create a direct line between Paris and Vienna.

Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link will build a new undersea rail tunnel between Denmark and Germany, allowing Sweden to operate night trains to Brussels.

In Switzerland, several new tunnels under the alps beginning operation this year will cut travel time to Italy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_Fixed_Link

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceneri_Base_Tunnel

Well, Stuttgart 21 is not exactly a project you want to dig up when you want to advertise train travel. The reason of course is that most people at least in Germany associate it with the highly controversial rebuilding of Stuttgart main station [0], although the rest of the project is pretty reasonable.

What is also missing from your list is the fact that the main feeder line for the Gotthard base tunnel, and one of the most important railway lines in Europe, the Rhine valley railway [1], is extremely overloaded with over 300 trains per day, and the ongoing extension, which was planned in the 70ies and 80ies and for which construction work started in 1987 will not be finished before 2041 (!) [2]. It was originally planned to be finished in 2002. In 2016, the line was capped for days because the rail company (DB) chopped down some trees which were specifically planted in the 19th century to stabilize the ground (which DB was unaware of), resulting in a massive landslide [3]. In 2017, it was capped again for 2 months because of a collapse of a tunnel under construction by DB and crossing the existing line underground [4, 5]. In 2020, it was capped again because a bridge which DB planned to replace with a longer one crashed onto the rails and into a train, killing the driver [6] and nearly missing a high speed ICE train.

If the embarrasing engineering failures continue at this rate, I doubt they will finish the extension in the 21rst century.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_Hauptbahnhof

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannheim%E2%80%93Karlsruhe%E2%...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausbau-_und_Neubaustrecke_Karl...

[3] https://ais.badische-zeitung.de/piece/07/36/42/b1/120996529-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastatt_Tunnel#August_2017_col...

[5] https://bilder3.n-tv.de/img/incoming/origs19996186/831279596...

[6] https://www.schwaebische.de/cms_media/module_img/12646/63233...

I briefly browsed the Stuttgart 21 article but didn't quite get why people are opposing it. Would you mind to elaborate?

Here is one angle: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/08/31/stuttgart-21s-...

In short, it's very expensive and it will quickly reach peak capacity and need expansion.

Living in the area at the height of the protests, so I can fill in.

Some of the reasons: many people (including experts) argued that the project could have been done for half the price with almost the same effect by upgrading the existing station above ground instead of building an entirely new underground station, for example. Costs kept increasing – nothing new for big public infra projects, of course. But when a multi-billion euro project slowly triples its budget, people start asking questions.

That way it also took away funding from other smaller necessary projects. One should consider here that DB (railway operator) has been shutting down smaller, rural lines for decades making it harder and harder to rely on them, when you don't live on the main intercity network.

There were ecological concerns about the planned changes to Stuttgart's inner city layout and how it affects the already bad micro climate.

Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns. They acted completely tone-deaf to the protests and in one instance used excessive police force to crush a peaceful assembly. Just altogether bad topics, which did not make the project more popular.

> Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns.

A public referendum was held in 2011. 58.9% voted for the project to be continued.

A state-wide referendum was held on the entire project, including the hundreds of kilometers of new tracks, tunnels, and bridges, a long-distance station for the Stuttgart airport, and a new station on the Swabian alb. There was never a referendum only on the new main station.

I would add that the train station part freed up a lot of prime real estate in Stuttgart's city center by moving the railways, and the station, underground. I always had the impression that played a big role for everyone involved (DB, the city, politicians,...) in the decision to not budge on the train station part. The rest of Stuttgart 21, all the new tunnels and bridges and railway lines, are quite reasonable IMHO.

Germany has a history of poorly managed public projects. From the big projects in the last decade, there is not just Stuttgart 21, but also the new Airport in Berlin and the Elbphilharmonie-concert hall in Hamburg which are infamous for taking too long building-time, wasting too much money and offering a poor job for what they are supposed to do.

In similar vein there are many smaller projects which are just waste of money for no benefit. There is even a whole tv-series of such obscure failed projects, as also regularly reports of the fails of Germanys Government in handling Money. So Germans have very low trust in public projects, especially when they are expensive.

I guess such views do exist in most countries to some degree, but this is something that specially triggers German mentally, which usually more composed and on the peaceful side. Similar behavior surfaced in the last year with the different pandemia-rulings, and now with the vaccinations.

Rail is great for freight but what surprised me was that while I was in Europe flights were faster and cheaper. I don't think the right reaction is to tax planes so that people don't use them, as time has value.

Argument is the externalities of carbon emissions have (negative) value, so a tax would bring those two things in line and encourage that only people who really need to fly do so.

All other things equal you need to make a very strong case for externalities as the market is efficient. So far it's just people saying "planes are bad."

It's entirely possible the externalities of having people (and goods) unproductive for longer periods of time is worse than simply getting them where they need to be.

Without putting a price on the carbon externality the market can't figure it out though. Idle time of workers is a pretty well understood market problem so I don't think that is an externality.

Am I misunderstanding your position?

I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "strong case". Flying emits substantially more carbon dioxide (by more than a factor of 100, IIRC). The deleterious effects of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere are well-documented. Isn't that a strong enough case?

I mean, have you ever heard of tragedy of the commons?

1) All people share one atmosphere 2) Well-reviewed science shows that individual decisions like taking a flight make the atmosphere less hospitable for all.

That type of problem is literally the reason the term externality was coined.

Externalities are basically by definition the things that can't be determined by a free market.

Perhaps a jet fuel tax? If we bring the the lifetime cost of atmospheric carbon recovery and disaster response to flight, might we make air travel with using ICE engines less routine?

> you need to make a very strong case for externalities as the market is efficient

Markets are not efficient at considering externalities at all.

By definition yes, but you need to prove the externality is there and actually worse than your proposed tax.

I was worried that was your position. If you still need further proof of global warming and it's deleterious effects then providing proof is impossible.

Not proof of global warming, proof that this is the most efficacious tax to undertake and will not distort the market to be worse.

It’s not practically possible to prove that something is the most efficient alternative – you’d have to exhaustively show that all possible alternatives are worse. It’s more reasonable for you to provide an even better alternative, since you seem to believe that one exists. Once two specific options are named, the two can be compared in earnest.

What makes you believe gaps in productivity can’t be accounted for by caching, converting to making goods closer to the source as much as possible?

Maybe we could train more experts to avoid them needing to fly all over; buy and serve local.

A lot of efficiency options are left off the table sticking with the status quo.

The fact that negative externalities can warp markets or cause them to fail entirely is Econ 101.

Air travel is blamed for up to 3.5% of climate impacts; it's not an insignificant contributor...

The Efficient Market Hypothesis has been effectively disproven; it was proven that it's equivalent to P=NP, and it's very unlikely that P=NP. In other words, if markets were efficient, we could just use simulated markets to solve NP-hard problems in polynomial time. Not surprisingly, that doesn't work.

> The Efficient Market Hypothesis has been effectively disproven

No, the opposite of "effectively". That's like saying you can't plan an effective route because CSP, or you can't use SAT solvers to design things.

Markets aren't perfect, and that's all that proof manages to show. They could still be 99.99% accurate based on that logic. It's a cute thought experiment, not something practical.

i love this philosophy. we can just tax and regulate away all the nice things in life

I love your philosophy. Just embrace entropy, what could go wrong?

I'm as libertarian as they come, but if you're doing $x of damage to the environment, it seems totally fair to charge $x in taxes to cover that damage. That wouldn't stop you from enjoying an activity -- it's just making the price more accurately reflect the true costs.

Flying has a hidden cost that wasn't being charged to the flyer. It was being charged to everyone that will suffer from climate change. Charging to offset the damage that flying does is basically just closing a loop hole. (Assuming that the extra money taken is used to actually offset the carbon impact and not just pocketed by industry/government.)

Ah yes, it is so nice to breathe noxious chemicals exhausted from jet engines.

And CO2 is good for plant growth, right?

CO2 being good for plant growth can mean it's bad for forest CO2 sequestration, since the wrong plants take over.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-strange-case-of-the-liana...

Then do electric aircraft. We can do 500-1000 mile electric air travel. Longer term, >3000 mile. Plus multiple hops. Still faster and cheaper than rail.

We 100% cannot do those things with current technology.

I'm 'commenting too fast' to reply, but show me any of your examples in flight please.

We absolutely can. https://twitter.com/GovInslee/status/1440442441920774146

500+ miles range. Building it right now. Plus Wright Electric, Bye Aerospace’s eflyer 800, etc.

Why do people so easily and confidently claim something can’t be done?

That carries 9 passengers, at ~half the speed of a standard airliner. It's exciting and I want to fly in one, but I don't think it will be faster and cheaper than trains in most cases, yet. But we're almost there.

The technology is independent of scale. If it works for a nine Seater it also works for a 100 Seater.

EDIT: and YES this is true. Battery specific energy is 200-400Wh/kg. That is PER kilogram. And larger planes are NOT less efficient per passenger than smaller ones. Small and large jets or propeller aircraft have a out the same life to drag ratio. If anything, larger tend to be better due to Reynolds Number effects.

There is maybe not one misconception about electric flight that I’ve seen repeated most often by Internet skeptics than this false idea that “bigger is disproportionately harder for electric planes.” It is simply. Not. True.

That's not true unfortunately, batteries are too heavy to make bigger planes workable right now. We need denser batteries and more powerful electric motors, and there are companies working on both those problems, but they aren't solved yet.

Look at the specific energy of jet fuel compared to batteries on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

Specific energy is independent of scale! It’s right in the units: energy divided by mass. Watt-hours per kg. Where are you getting the claim from that larger planes can’t technically be made electric even if smaller ones can?

And no, don’t switch topic to range. That is a known constraint. Focus on SCALE. It is scale-independent to zeroth and first order at least!

This comes up every single time, and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. :D

I mean I'm not really qualified to have this debate, but I'll do my best. Intuitively, if you double the weight of the plane, now you need twice as much battery to fly it. But now you've added a bunch of battery weight, so you need even more batteries to lift those batteries. You also will need more or bigger motors, which adds even more weight. At some point, your plane isn't gonna get off the ground.

I am only a lowly software engineer so I don't know that much about planes or batteries. If I'm wrong then I'm wrong, and I hope I am.

No, that IS how it scales for range to some extent (where if you just add fuel/battery, you now need to add more power, etc), but it’s NOT how it scales for size. To first order, everything scales linearly. If you doubled the size of the aircraft, you already increased everything to compensate. This works for everything with two caveats: 1) Reynolds number means you get more efficient as you scale up in size. The effect is slight and there is nuance with respect to laminar vs turbulent flow, but it is true. 2) larger size means at some point you need truss braced wings. But this is only at pretty large sizes and only usually if you’re also shooting for high aspect ratio wings. NASA/Boeing/etc have researched truss braced wings, and it is most certainly doable.

But both of these are second order effects. And they mostly cancel out.

I am a materials scientist with a background in physics and I have also developed electric motors for electric aircraft. I have a good understanding of how the systems scale. You were mixing up the exponential range equation with simple size scaling. if it were true, then large aircraft of any type would be much less efficient than smaller aircraft of the same type. This is most certainly not true. In fact, usually the efficiency increases with scale. A 777x is much more efficient than a Gulfstream or some smaller regional jet per passenger mile.

You're describing something like the rocket equation, but that's for increasing final speed, not increasing mass.

If you double the weight of "the plane", that includes the batteries and motors.

If you start with doubling just the structure, then you might need to add 50% more batteries, not "twice as much". Then to lift those batteries it takes another 30%. Then you add bigger motors which adds even more weight, etc. etc. By the time you finish, the total weight will be about 2x your initial weight.

There is difficulty in scaling planes, but it's not because more mass requires more fuel. A fixed percentage devoted to fuel works fine, if you're assuming the same route for both planes.

Airplanes are sadly not infinitely scalable in this way. If you attempt to naively scale up an airplane you need stiffer materials, eventually you run into the issue of the weight of the structure increasing more rapidly than the area, and this is exacerbated by heavy batteries. We sadly cannot make large battery powered airplanes with a usable range and speed unless we get up the gravimetric density.

I don't think battery airplanes are going to be a big thing, but I think hydrogen powered airplanes could well be a big thing. It's certainly something I'd invest a lot of R&D into.

Also, the airplane manufacturer business is ripe for disruption. You have an extremely bureaucratic and dysfunctional Airbus battling an even more dysfunctional and mismanaged Boeing. Surely there is room for a hydrogen startup to come in and devastate these two monopolies. Often I wonder how much the world would be different if we had 100 Elon Musks instead of just one.

I agree that hydrogen in airplanes has some potential, though there are certainly issues - you need cryogenic cooling to avoid super heavy pressure vessels, and if it fails..., but there are similar fuels that could work.

As far as disruption, the issue is that there is no opportunity for competition. Countries are rabidly protectionist about their airplane industries, and any newcomer even with a completely superior product (See: Bombardier C-Series) will get absolutely destroyed by sanctions, tarrifs, or even secondary export controls (Gripen, Avro Arrow, etc...). You cannot succeed unless you are American, and even in America Boeing has massive undue influence.

All true. I do think there is a window to succeed in the U.S. In Europe it's just much harder to innovate more generally.

Also the SAFs are looking pretty good. Point is, I don't think we should decide that planes are bad of all sudden, that doesn't seem like a very wise thing to do given the massive benefits of air travel. Rail is also great but rail shines for cargo and large volume traffic between urban cores

One of the fields that isn't true is civilian aerospace. Innovation cycles are long, regardless of country, regulations are more or less the same. Nobody only certifies according to EASA or FAA, everyone does both. And with Airbus and Boeing forming a duopoloy on civilian aircraft, both sides have equal interest, and funding, for innovation.

Throw in all the current eVtol start-ups and I don't see that much difference between the US and Europe.

Airbus and Boeing have plenty of competition in the smaller jet range: Embraer, Comac, Sukhoi, until recently Bombardier. If it was easily to scale up, it would have happened by now.

I do agree that an electric/hydrogen jet is the kind of disruptive tech that could upend the market, but due to the long lead times, stringent certification and very political markets it's an arguably even tougher market than cars or rockets.

Bombardier Aviation was bought by Airbus, Embraer almost by Boeing. Funny enough, there was always a lot more competition in the regional market then for bigger single aisle planes (B737 and A320).

No, this is false. The stiffness issue is a second order issue (which is why larger conventional planes actually have LOWER dry mass per passenger than 9 seat passenger aircraft) and IT AFFECTS ALL PLANE TYPES, and can be addressed via truss braced wings as I said. There are more important minimum gauge type issues at small scale that tend to dominate and make small scale worse performance than large scale.

The claim that larger size in particular is a problem is false. Efficiency, including structural efficiency, actually tends to improve with scale beyond 100 seats.

> We sadly cannot make large battery powered airplanes with a usable range and speed unless we get up the gravimetric density.

This, again, is often repeated but false from a technical standpoint. 9 seater and 100 seater, for the same range, scale just fine between them and with clean sheet design we can use existing 200-400Wh/kg gravimetric density. Scale. Isn’t. The. Problem.

Large planes tend to be used on longer routes, in fact. Smaller planes are needed for their granularity on short routes.

The reason we see 9 passenger electric planes first is pretty obvious: cheaper and faster to develop small planes than large. Big aircraft manufacturers are much more risk averse as well. A large new clean sheet aircraft can take literally decades to develop. Not true for small aircraft. And again, generally the granularity of small planes means they’re more useful than large planes for shorter routes. This all reinforces the false notion that there is some technical reason why we “CAN’T” make large electric planes when there really, truly isn’t.

For instance, consider the Learjet 70/75. 8 passenger, dry mass of 6 some tonnes. Over 700kg per passenger. 14 passenger Falcon jets do better at about 500kg per passenger. 737 Max8 with 210 passengers gets about 215kg/passenger. So if anything, overall structural efficiency improves with scale! At least up to ~200 passengers. (Caveat is that these are typically private jets with a different seating arrangement... but so are the example electric aircraft. So they'd similarly benefit from scale up to larger seat capacity.)

I think you seriously underestimate the mass of a 100 seater with 500 mile range.

The 737 Max8 has a massive advantage over the LearJet of massively lower surface area per passenger. It's not comparable at all. In an electric aircraft where the bottleneck is the battery as far as weight goes this is not a relevant comparison.

You have two regimes. One where the dominant factor is structural efficiency is mass. One where the dominant factor is area. You cannot compare the two. It is simply a completely deficient comparison.

Do you want an actually correct comparison? Keep the 737 Max 8. Now compare it to a PAC P-750XL, dry mass of 1.6 tons over 9 passengers. That's 181kg per passenger, less than the Max-8.

Now that's the aluminium version. The Max-8 uses a massive amount of composites - the composite version of the P-750XL is expected to be significantly lighter still.

It's absolutely not a fiction. A 787 Max-8 consumes 18 liters (!!!) of kerosene at >60% thermal efficiency, per passenger, per hour. That's 175kW of useful energy consumption per passenger. To fly one hour at 400Wh/kg assuming 100% energy efficiency you need to add 437 kg of batteries PER PASSENGER.

PAC P-750XL Is unpressurized so is able to significantly lower the dry mass per passenger. I noticed this difference while researching the different dry mass numbers. The low speed unpressurized utility aircraft like the P-750XL ARE able to get lower per passenger mass, but the experience is not comparable as they are unpressurized. Among pressurized jet aircraft, the larger jets do universally better per passenger than the smaller.

The real key to making electric aircraft feasible is to increase the efficiency dramatically. (Also, jets don’t have >60% thermal efficiency if you use the HHV of the fuel.) just a swap out of the fuel for battery gets you to a few hundred miles of range at best. Enough maybe to compete with the California HSR, but not much more.

It’s like how a Tesla Model S is not a battery swapped sedan. It’s a custom clean sheet design. That’s why you can get 400 miles of range in it instead of just 150 miles.

Likewise, you need a clean sheet battery electric aircraft design. That’s why the Eviation Alice is able to get significant range. Incorporate 777x-like folding wingtips and possible truss braced high aspect ratio wings, natural laminar flow like sailplanes, you could increase L/D to about double current aircraft. Things like that allow 1000 mile range. Substantial enough for short haul trips, which are about half of all passenger miles.

If you're actually trying to scale aircraft up and down, you can do the math and figure out that a scaled down aircraft will be slower. It's a perfect comparison.

A Tesla Model S doesn't have any more weight efficiency than a battery swapped sedan. It's just as heavy as a battery swapped sedan, it's just built to handle the weight better.

The main factor in the Alice having a lower L/D is flying at less than half the airspeed and thus drastically reducing parasitic drag. There are no easy gimmes. You're going to have to sacrifice range and speed.

So far electric airplanes are somewhat worse than piston aircraft. They will never rival jets until we drastically increase energy density.

The turbine efficiency of modern turbojets is actually around 60% and there are turbines with more than that. The overall efficiency is actually lower because of propulsive inefficiency, but electric aircraft have that exact same problem.

This doesn't seem right to me as it goes against my intuitive sense of how other factors generally scale with size/weight/volume (e.g. rocket equation), but I admit I'm definitely not an expert. However Wikipedia claims [1] that 250-300 Wh/kg is sufficient for small aircraft but something the size of an Airbus 320 would need 2 kWh/kg. A random recent paper about scaling electric aircraft [2] seems to imply that there are challenges to scaling size as well:

> All-electric designs have been demonstrated for small air vehicles. However, such prototypes have not been scaled up to more than ten passengers due to the specific energy (E*) limitations of current battery technology. [...] A significant proportion of the energy expenditure would be used to transport the mass of the batteries; this mass would not decrease during a flight as would that of conventional fuel.

Are these sources wrong, or too simplistic in their analysis, or am I misinterpreting what they're saying?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft#Batteries

[2]: Structural Power Performance Targets for Future Electric Aircraft - https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/19/6006

The rocket equation, or its airplane cousin the Breguet range equation talk about ratios of mass, not absolute mass. These larger airplanes (eg an A320) often fly much faster and longer distances

Not to diminish the accomplishments shown there, but that plane seats maybe a dozen people? Most airliners can seat 100+, and their range is sometimes an order of magnitude higher than that. The problem is that batteries are significantly less energy dense than jet fuel, both by weight and by volume. To reach capacities and ranges of modern airliners you'd need batteries that are much more dense, compact, and light, and afaik there's nothing even close to the improvements needed right now.

Wrong about capacity but correct about range.

I have no idea why people keep thinking that batteries would work worse for 100 seats rather than nine seats. The technology is independent of scale except in the trivial sense that you need proportionally more battery and cost since you’re 10 times larger. True the range is less, but we have built jets that can go 40,000km. We don’t need that much range to do short flights, comparable in length to the California HSR project. Existing battery technology is more than sufficient for that.

That's... not really an argument? Electric aircraft are not economically viable until we account for externalities, so we're moving in the right direction.

Even after carbon tax, electric aircraft is still a technology in its infancy, compared to electric trains. Are you proposing that the government should spend billions of $$$ on an experimental technology when a proven alternative exists?

> We can do 500-1000 mile electric air travel.

We can? Present tense, certified, operational aircraft in service? Or do you mean that people are working on building them now and hope to have them in service at some point in the future?

The latter. I think we can have them in service before we could complete a new HSR line starting from scratch, at least in the US. (I think Europe is better at this kind of HSR infrastructure, so maybe it wouldn't be as bad.)

then the (really poor quality, high pollution, not just co2 that jets exhaust) airplane fuel should be taxed, not the flights themselves. the price will get adjusted accordingly.

That would be ideal. As I understand it, it has been tried, but without reaching an international consensus, and leads to airlines filling the tanks of their planes in countries that don't tax the fuel, and flying with more fuel than needed (and therefore having to burn more fuel) so they don't need to refuel in countries that do tax the fuel, thus defeating the purpose of the tax.

I don't know if it was widely reported, but in the days before the COP meeting in Glasgow, Britain removed the tax they had on internal flights.

> Argument is the externalities of carbon emissions have (negative) value, so a tax would bring those two things in line and encourage that only people who really need to fly do so.

If we charged $100-200 per ton of CO2, which is supposedly more than recapture would cost, that would only be about $1-2 per 50 miles. From the numbers being quoted here, it sounds like that would do very little to bring prices in line.

EU is already trading CO2 at 60€/t.

In a limited way, sure. But with massive quotas that are free. That's the price of the very easiest CO2 to deal with, and the rest pollutes for free.

Either charge for all the carbon, or start harshly dropping the quotas.

While flights are often cheaper than rail in Europe they are not always faster when you include travel time to/from airport/train station (airports tend to be outside of town and train stations are typically center of city) and that you have to be at the airport earlier. I lived in Munich and a number of times it was faster to take the train. Me and my GF both went to Paris; she flew and I took rail from Munich and my train was slightly faster or at least break even. Also, traveling by rail in Europe is a nicer experience in my opinion.

That is nice if you travel between big cities having direct connection via rail and big airports.

Not to disregard your example but from my perspective it is not representative to most of travelers in the Europe.

While taking train for me was more comfortable, most of the times it is not feasible and definitely a lot longer than taking an airplane.

Especially if you live in smaller city where you don't have a major train station couple bus stations away.

I'm not sure I follow - if you are in a smaller city, chances are you live far from an airport, but still very close to a train station. Unless, of course, you fly private charters to minuscule landings.

I live in such smallish city (Geneva, 500k folks in central part). Yes its nice to get to Paris in say 3.5h by direct TGV, faster than plane if you count center-center, although more expensive.

Well, and that's about it. I don't care for Paris that much, there are about thousand other places I prefer visiting. Its not that exotic to Europeans compared to Americans, and Paris' painful and obvious drawbacks (its a mega tourist trap, rampant crime, french are often rude if you don't speak perfect parisian french etc.) remove a lot of its allure.

Currently we travel to nearby islands with small kids (balearic, canarias, sardinia, corsica, greek ones etc.). We travel home which is 1500km away (1:30 flight to +-nearby airport, or 15h+ multi-train galore), we travel exotic (0 options for trains).

Heck, being Swiss, we use practically 0 Swiss trains. They are super expensive even for us since we don't commute by them to work every day, and Geneva being border town literally at the edge of confederation surrounded by France has little use of rails for us. France has pretty bad rail situation in comparison - our usual way to Chamonix takes 45mins by car, and 2+h by train. Family of 4 with 2 tiny kids? Never, ever, with all necessary luggage, even for free.

You can't have cheap good reliable railway network even in dense Europe, unless its heavily subsidized. Its a pipe dream, nice one but unless they tax flights into oblivion they will remain as easier and cheaper option for most. Options will be different for rural living and different family settings obviously.

> we use practically 0 Swiss trains. They are super expensive

I guess you know that, but if you live in Switzerland you're supposed to have the discount card ("demi-tarif") which makes the train way more affordable. It's still not cheap, especially if you compare with a car trip not taking the price of the car and maintenance into account (which is reasonable if you need the car for other reasons anyway). But in my case at least, without kids, it's really worth being able to use my time to do something productive rather than driving.

Also curious about the Chamonix example: I've never lived in Geneva, but aren't there a ton of other options in Switzerland that are way more connected than the French side? Why choose this example over Swiss resorts?

Any mountain in Switzerland is minimum +1 hour compared to France, when looking for comparable awesomeness as that Chamonix for example, that would mean Zermatt, 3.5h. Or Grindelwald, 2.5h. Why do that to yourself for weekends?

Besides there are pretty places much closer in France. France is also much cheaper, food better. Not that many reasons to chose otherwise for short weekend trips.

Car is unfortunately a must for family of us, any alternative is world of pain and limitation, even ignoring the prices of trains (just like any other family we know). You need so much equipment for whole family and small kids especially, that using trains means we wouldn't be traveling at all. People we know that don't own the car rent it out every weekend they need and waste tons of time and energy on chasing lower prices. Even with demi-tarif/halb-tax (which makes you waste 200 CHF/USD per head per year for no services), the prices of Swiss trains are properly bad. It still is marginally cheaper to take one's own car even if driving alone, and often much faster.

Frequent experience from times before when I was using Swiss trains for commute/traveling around - you end up standing for quite long amount of time during normal times, many people travel everywhere. Not nice if you are ie tired after long hike/skitour. With small kids, just a horrible experience.

All this ignoring current covid crisis and the fact that in trains here you are stuck in long narrow tube with 100 other people, few coughing, few sneezing, few not wearing masks on nose, or at all because they hold that can of beer for 2 hours to have an excuse, kids not wearing anything at all etc.

Also if you do commute to work every day by train, it probably makes sense to buy a GA (a yearly ticket that gives you unlimited travel on all swiss public transport for that year) for 3800chf. Almost anyone I know commuting some distance does this.

Of course if you work in Geneva that's a different matter. There aren't any trains in Geneva as it just isn't big enough, but unireso's tram network is widely used.

This is particularly timely because right now there's a hole in the line between Lausanne and Geneva. Consequently you can't currently take a train either way and have to use a replacement bus. The autoroute is seeing stupid levels of traffic right now as a result as all the people who usually take the train get in cars instead.

Chamonix is almost certainly slower by train unless there are traffic issues. This is also likely true of the Swiss resorts too because personal motorised transport avoids the inconveniences of waiting and changing that trains inevitably have. But the article is about eliminating short haul flights in Europe, not this.

3800chf is an amazing price for that.

By contrast, that's roughly the same price as an annual ticket between central London and a town about 30 miles away.

Chamonix is just an outlier in many ways though. Overly touristic but fantastic off piste and mountaineering. Rail networks always have some poor journeys and this is definitely one of them, in student days I remember once having to bivi by one of the stations and wait for tomorrow's train

International trains don't stop just anywhere so you still have to go to a big city to get such train.

If you want to go with train from east Germany to Amsterdam you still have to go to Berlin. It still takes ~6.5hr of train ride from Berlin to Amsterdam. Where flight is ~1.5hr - of course getting through security and all it is at least 2.5hr and then depending on which side of Berlin you live transfer from your place to the airport. Which I would say does not matter because for train you still have to get to Berlin HbF. You might have direct connection to Berlin HbF but as well some people might have direct connection by bus or train to the airport.

Where East Germany? From Erfurt, Dresden, Leipzig, the train is either over Magdeburg/Hannover or over Frankfurt am Main.

> Which I would say does not matter because for train you still have to get to Berlin HbF.

Most trains/ICEs will stop at 2-3 stations in Berlin. Usually they stop at least at Spandau and Hauptbahnhof, and sometimes Gesundbrunnen as well. You should be able to reach one of these stations in at most thirty minutes regardless of where you start.

All of these stations are major transport hubs and thus easy to reach.

Airports not so much: It takes me more than 90 minutes to reach BER[1], meaning I should probably depart from home at least 180 minutes before takeoff if I want to catch my plane most of the time. Note that it is usually recommended to arrive at the airport two hours prior to takeoff (or even three hours for international flights).

Following all the best practices and accounting for delays in public transport would mean I'd have to depart almost four hours prior to takeoff for a domestic flight.

To catch an ICE I usually depart from home about 40 minutes before it leaves Gesundbrunnen, which gives me enough time to grab some sandwiches at a bakery and a coffee that doesn't suck (DB is clearly taking their inspiration from airline food).

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/MTK64gv.png

Heh. Funnily enough, My partner and I missed an FEX from Gesundbrunnen a couple of weeks ago (it's 3 stations from where we live). Because the transition time b/w S-bahn exit and FEX entry was 1 minute, clearly not enough time to find the correct platform and arrive there to board.

Of course, one guy was prepared and literally _ran_ to the FEX. We walked and then waited 30 mins for the next one to arrive. :)

Not at all: Secondary airports are easy infrastructure to build: They don't take all that much land in the grand scheme of things, and from one of those, you can connect to 3-5 nearby hubs. Trains, on the other hand, require infrastructure to go all the way to your destination, so even if you do have a train station, it's quite possible that it's not going to take you even in the general direction of where you want to go.

Let's take, for instance, my hometown in Asturias, Spain. There's technically a train sttation... which will get someone to Madrid in about 8 hours. If someone wanted to go to Barcelona, the fastest route is still via Madrid! Going to Bilbao via the northern corridor by train is a whole 10 hours: The route is prohibitively expensive to tunnel for high speeds.

However, let's look at plane options. There's a single runway airport about an hour away with direct connections to Madrid, Barcelona, Las Palmas, Malaga, Valencia and Tenerife. Pre covid, it also had direct flights to Paris and London. The typical planes that land there aren't private jets, but just the typical narrow bodies that do short routes everywhere in the world: A319 or so.

So yes, there absolutely are plenty of cities in Europe where the train doesn't even begin to be competitive, in either price nor travel time.

You need a minimum number of high speed lines (high speed =300 km/h, about 200miles/h) for trains to be competitive with planes - it sounds like you do not have any around.

> Especially if you live in smaller city where you don't have a major train station couple bus stations away.

So these small cities don't have train stations, yet they have airports?

No international trains don't stop in the smaller cities.

To get from Poland to Germany or from Netherlands to UK you have to go to major city. Some towns have luck being on the way of such train and you could benefit from it but it is rather exception than rule.

Which in the end makes it basically the same as getting to the airport for most of the people.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are more airline connections among cities than train connections.

At least in Norway there might easily be 5 hours drive to the nearest train station. In the northern parts I guess there might be 8 or more unless (and maybe even if) you drive into Sweden or Finland.

I remember my wife (who I'd just met back then) being somewhat surprised when I told her there were no train stops nearby.

I had two airports within an hour drive though, so we managed.

>While taking train for me was more comfortable, most of the times it is not feasible and definitely a lot longer than taking an airplane.

well personal experience is not always representative - but anyway isn't one of the ways how trains could replace planes by increasing number of connections and speeding them up so that it does become feasible?

Even if the train adds a few hours, I'll choose that option over flying any time. With a train you just go to the train station, board and sit in your comfortable chair with a nice desk to work on. Everything is stable, and so quiet you can even sleep. If you take a plane it's just maximum stress and discomfort. Waiting in line to check in, waiting in line to go through the security gates, waiting in line to board, waiting for the plane to take off, waiting for the plane to dock, waiting for luggage, etc.

spot on.

I am from Italy that geographically is not very easy to connect to the rest of Europe because of the Alps.

Still, below a thousand kms train beats flight 100% of the time!

I travel a lot throughput Europe to meet my special other who travels a lot due to her job.

I used to fly to meet her but , pandemic aside, I discovered that traveling by train was a much better option, mainly because you're on the ground and everything works almost like you're not moving at all.

internet connection is hit and miss of course, but compared to the very tight seats on a plane with no internet at all, it seems like a moving office.

Truth is I rarely work on a train, I mainly read, but having the option and the opportunity to book a solitary seat it's such a luxury that I gladly pay the extra money.

Other benefits include: no baggage limit, no early show up routine for no reason, no security or "show your face" checks, no packed up load-in load-out lines, being able to walk away if you need to (a phone call, for example) or because you simply need to stretch a little bit, but my favourite one is night trains where you book a bunk bed, sleep and wake up at the destination. A friend of mine calls it teleportation, you are not traveling between two places, you are waking up in a new place, far from the starting point, without even noticing it.

Trains are a great way to move, especially now that they are so fast.

They aren't cheap in general, that's true, but it's worth it, especially if you compare train fares with low cost offers that are undoubtedly cheaper, but don't even include a real baggage or the option to chose your seat for free (had to pay 6 euros for a seat just two days ago flying from Barcelona)

> compared to the very tight seats on a plane with no internet at all

I can't remember the last airliner that I was on that didn't have WiFi. Is WiFi uncommon in Europe?

I think it’s starting to become a thing, but even in the US the last time I tried it just wasn’t working.

I haven't had Wifi in any of my flights between Thailand and Amsterdam (KLM). Maybe I've always had older planes on this route or something. I haven't flown between any other 2 destinations for the last couple of years.

It really depends on the airline, but it's fairly common to put newer aircraft with WiFi on more business-heavy routes, and put the older aircraft on more tourist-heavy routes where passengers are more cost conscious and probably won't pay for the WiFi or other amenities either.

Is WiFi uncommon in Europe?

It's pretty rare, and when they do have it it is incredibly expensive, limited or both. On trains they basically always have it and it's free.

(with the caveat that it's been 2+ years since I was on a plane so I don't know how things have changed)

Also worth noting that cell phones work normally on trains, what with them being on the ground, so you're not even at the mercy of the operator - you can just use your normal service.

Yes it's because there's no pan-european ground network yet so airlines are limited to expensive and slow satellite internet.

However this is coming soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Aviation_Network

There is one aspect where flying beats trains: checking luggage. If you have big suitcases it's a PITA to get them on and off the train. And changing trains means taking the bags with you, unlike flights where bags are (usually) transferred.

I had that issue last time and I used a service to send my luggage to the destination. They came to pick it up at my place and delivered it to my other place.

I disagree; taking whatever bags you like and having access to them through the whole journey is much, much nicer than having to hand them over and hope they arrive in the right place, and potentially paying extra or even having to book ahead if you've got anything other than a standard suitcase.

Well, that’s European airlines which have the worst customer service. In most of the rest of the world luggage is never a problem.

What? In the US you have to pay for your checkin luggage.

Not typically for international flights, and even for some US domestic carriers. Same goes for most of the rest of the world (e.g. Asia) which is what I was actually thinking about. Brazil has free luggage mandated in law.

Even when you do have to pay in the US it is typically very generous. Larger size and weight allowance, and you won’t get dinged for being even a few kilos over. And the bottom tier of frequent flyer programs (which is usually trivial to get and keep) waives all these fees anyway. I can’t remember the last time I paid for luggage allowance outside of a trip to or through Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

(It's a song called United Breaks Guitars that you may remember from over a decade ago).

Specially love those tourist traps, who "loose" your bags so they can sell you cloths and "find" it, upon your return trip.

You were the local shopping stimulus all along.

I wish that service was more widespread. The Swiss SBB will pick up your luggage at your door before your trip and deliver it at your destinations door afterwards. For a few of course, but still.

Wish there was a hack for this.. like selling them to yourselves with same day delivery on amazon.

That is the dream, the reality given the way DB allows for overcrowded ICE trains, is fighting to get the booked place, not being able to move anywhere, noise depends pretty much the neighbours, and if it eventually becomes easy enough to manage to go to the wagon bar, it is a matter of luck if they are there at all.

If you don't have luggage. Modern trains have cutted costs with luggage space.

For all those saying that there are no security checks on trains: perhaps you have never been on the Spanish Alta Velocidad from Zaragossa to Barcelona. When I took that some years ago my luggage had to go through an X-ray machine and I had to go through a metal detector.

I don't know if they still do that but it is certainly something that could be instituted if governments wanted it.

I had to go through security and customs getting onto the Eurostar in London, but that makes sense considering they weren't part of Schengen.

There is of course some history and justification for that.

2004 Madrid Train Bombings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

> Everything is stable, and so quiet you can even sleep

That depend on the quality of the rail and train. I have had nice experience in Germany, but here in Sweden it is the opposite. The side-to-side movement triggers motion sickness that is only compare to really rough ocean trips, and while the noise is lower than on a plane it is also less regular and higher pitch so it can be quite hard to ignore.

The problems stems from rails and trains here being 30-50 years old and long history of poor maintenance. To make matters worse, almost no lines has redundant tracks so if there is a problem (which there often is because to the issue of maintenance), the train get replace with busses. Night trains in particular tend to have a rather terrible experience with trains that are by now around 50-70 years old. Because of the motion sickness, the handful times I tried it has resulted in me basically being sick for a full day afterward. This doesn't occur if I take a plane or drive.

Never mind the miserable experience that is flying. Even more so with the cheapo airlines. And airport security. I’ll take the train any day but it’s sadly not always practical because too slow or requires a million changes. But when it works it’s amazing.

Opposite view here - am I gonna get mugged on a flight? Have my things stolen while I sleep? Are there homeless junkies in the airplane? No? Alright, airplane it is then.

What kind of train are you talking about ? Where is this ?

I've never seen any situation even remotely insecure in the years I have been taking the train regularly, either in Europe or in Asia.

Unless you conflate 'urban' train (like subways) with long distance train ? But in this case it seems like an unfair comparison : I cannot take the plane to go to work.

Sounds like an American subway. I never had any concerns about safety on German U-bahns. Although the undercover ticket police were a surprise.

The stealing was rampant in Poland when I lived there, but muggings or drunken fights happen on trains here in Germany too.

I have taken a lot of trains... and I've never ever experienced what you're saying. Junkies or homelesses on trains? What?

I think you raise an important point though about the safety of the environment. On some trains (mainly local), they can be no staff on at all apart from the driver. Even on larger express trains in the UK, you are likely to have 1 Train Manager and maybe someone at the buffet. They even sell a lot of alcohol and won't keep people off the train if they are drunk leading to various unsafe conditions (mainly late at night tbf)

I do wonder how the railways justify that even people who are paying first class tickets (which are really expensive) only have, at most, a single attendent for possibly 50 passengers. First class on the airplane and you might have a ratio of 1 to 10.

In Germany, they always seem to have at least two Ticket Collectors so the chance of not having your ticket checked is very low. On many services in the UK, you could get away without a ticket travelling later in the evening when many ticket barriers are left open.

Only time that happened to me was in Bulgaria / Romania, 10 years ago, on a sleeper train. Not homeless, just a grifter who we suspected paid off the conductor.

this has been the case for years and the convenience gap is only growing bigger for air travel. this is a huge reason why rail is not going to be such a huge development in america. we have air infrastructure that already surpasses what the not even built rail would be

I was unpleasantly surprised about the train price when I decided to take a train to go from Liverpool to London around 2008. I think at that time the rail ticket was around £200 while the flight would have cost me around £50 (and MegaBus was I think £6) ... That gave me the impression that train in the UK was for rich people.

At present, a walk-up (no advance booking) peak-time first class ticket from Liverpool to London is £255. Standard class is £171. A walk-up off-peak standard class ticket is £66.10, and you can get it cheaper if you book a day in advance. At peak times, or for longer distances (think Scotland to London), planes can be cheaper, but not often. Coaches can generally be cheaper though.

The UK is a basket case when it comes to rail. The country that effectively invented the bloody thing, completely lost its mind in the 70s and started scrapping its extensive network. Then the Tories got in power, and at that point heavily-unionised public service like rail simply "had" to be eviscerated. Now it's an embarrassment, when compared to most European countries: expensive tickets, poor reliability, obsolete and polluting trains, continuous inability to pay for itself... I could go on.

I'm Italian, I thought "our" trains were bad, but in the UK it's much worse. Barely 40% of the network is even electrified, in 2021!

Frequency of trains is generally higher in Britain.

> Then the Tories got in power

What I find particularly funny about this, it that Maggie Thatcher was a strong proponent to keeping the trains in public ownership, believing that privatising them was a bridge two far, even for her. Her successor on the other hand, they weren’t so bothered.

However the recovery of passenger number after privatisation is undeniable. While the private model wasn’t great, the previous public ownership was even worse. Hopefully our second stab at public ownership goes better, this time we have very successful models like TfL to work from.

The way it was privatised essentially guaranteed monopolies, though. Each segment is available ona multi-year lease for one operator. There are actually some segments that have multiple operators, but that's actually the exception.

When Sweden privatised rail traffic, it still kept the track ownership in a single entity, and train operators bid for slots on the existing rail network.

This gets you into a somewhat healthy competition between operators, hopefully (longer-term) driving down the price and driving up the quality for consumers.

Comparing air and rail, a first class train ticket between Malmö and Stockholm (most direct car route seems to be 613 km) is (with the ex-monopoly train operator) 895 SEK to 1 735 SEK , and is about 4.5h city centre to city centre.

A flight seems to be between 862 SEK (RyanAir, one carry-on luggage, 168 SEK with nothing, they say) and about 300 SEK. Listed flight time is 1h 20, airport would either be MMX or CPH (the latter has really good rail from the same rail station as the train in the previous para, taking about 21 minutes, then maybe 3-10 minutes at the airport). On the Stockholm end, you have either the fast airport train (ca 15 minutes), the slower (but cheaper) commuter train (ca 40 minutes) or airport buses (probably similar price as the commuter train, about the same speed at no traffic at all).

Total travel time for "same start, same destination", train 4h 30m, airplane maybe 3-4h. I don't, genuinely, know what "class of service" the plane would be, ut short-haul you get pretty much the same seats and you may have the middle seat unoccupied for "business".

And for reference, London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley is 645 km by car, using the same route planner

UK trains are even more expensive than Switzerland and this says a lot. Look at the rest of europe... you can take an Italian fast train and travel to major cities in the country very quickly, with wifi, arriving comfortably in the centre for a reasonable price.

Lived in London for a year and a half and almost never took the train because of that... it was soooo expensive.

Privatisation destroyed rail as a cost effective means of rail travel in the UK. In fact it all fell apart during the pandemic when the government had to take control of a number of franchised routes and temporarily re-nationalize them.

Rail should not be a for-profit business, it is a public service and a natural monopoly. 100% of the money the public pay to make a journey should go back into maintaining the network and running the trains.

I'm happy for a few execs to get their 100k+ salaries and for it to be justified by all the "hard work" and "value" they bring. But taking money from ticket sales, calling it profit and handing it to shareholders has to stop, it means the public get a dysfunctional rail service because there is no investment. Or it works, but the ticket prices are stratospheric.

The Transport for London corporation is a good example of how it should be done.

It is very weird as someone who studied British economic history and privatization to see this view so commonly. I am not sure where it has come from (although tbf, the media does not report accurately on this subject).

The main benefit from privatization was a significant reduction in fares combined with massive growth in availability (people take for granted things today that were huge problems then: punctuality, safety, etc.). The rail network in the UK is publicly-owned, what is private is the franchise to operate on a certain route. The lack of investment, if any exists, has come from the govt...and I am not sure there is a lack of investment either...HS2 is going to cost £100bn...£100bn is a large number (as ever, I think people mean...London and the area around me isn't getting enough, this is also false, London receives obscene amounts of investment relative to the rest of the UK).

Also, trains in Europe aren't really cheaper. Tickets are subsidised in Europe, in the UK passengers pay. The main constituency for subsidising the travel costs of wealthy commuters is...wealthy commuters. I am not sure why that idea is inherently attractive (and again, it is worth mentioning...our safety record is best in Europe, there is no real difference in punctuality, our fares are marginally higher but the ecosystem we have is far more robust).

TfL is a great example: sucks down tens of billions in public money to subsidise the wealthiest people in the country...the North-East is still missing motorways and we are spending £20bn on the Elizabeth line...okay. The cost of a fiber roll-out for the whole of the UK is less than the Elizabeth line. The problem is that this has no end because the more infrastructure you build, the more agglomeration, the more infrastructure...London had this problem in the late 19th century with slums, the solution wasn't more density (also, we had to bailout TfL twice I believe, they are not an example of the system working, tbf there isn't a lot management can do with the workforce).

> TfL is a great example: sucks down tens of billions in public money to subsidise the wealthiest people in the country...the North-East is still missing motorways and we are spending £20bn on the Elizabeth line...okay.

TfL no longer receives any central government funding (beyond COVID money, but every aspect of public transport in the U.K. got buckets of money for that), this is despite being required to maintain a significant chunk of London surface roads and bridges. Something that councils normally receive central subsidies for.

Additionally for Crossrail, the Dft only provided £5b in direct funding. The remainder is either loans TfL will have to repay, or has come from locally collected taxes like council tax, and business rates. All of which only impact London residents and businesses.

> also, we had to bailout TfL twice I believe, they are not an example of the system working, tbf there isn't a lot management can do with the workforce

That’s hardly fair. London is the only capital city in the world where it’s public transport get zero subsidies, and costs have to be covered entirely by fare collection and advertising. The central government told people not to take public transport, then forced TfL to run a full service, despite there being 60% fewer passengers. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that isn’t going to be financially possible, despite TfL always having 6 months of emergency operating capital on hand. Additionally TfL’s status as a local authority means it can’t operate in a deficit, ever. So it can’t borrow to cover short term cash flow issues. Long story short, government rules and requirements placed TfL in a position where it was either getting a bailout, or collapsing. Nothing short of 3 years of spare operating capital, approximately £30b, would have prevented this situation.

Also worth mentioning that every other public transport operator in the U.K. also collapsed, and needed to be bailed out as well. So it’s a little unfair to single out TfL.

TfL has also become a partisan issue because the Conservative government sees it as an arm of the usually Labour controlled Greater London Authority. For instance, when commuters were begging for TfL to take control of the garbage South Eastern routes in the South East of London during Boris Johnson's Majorship (the area most neglected, transport wise), the transport minister at the time vetoed it because it could mean it fell into the hands of a Labour GLA.

I'd say TfL is far far more popular than any of the private companies and for good reason.

If we funded it properly and extended this approach (running things for the people, not for shareholders) to the rest of Britain it would be a good thing.

In theory this is what Great British Rail will do. They own the network and trains, and use a concession model to bring in private entities to actually drive the train and manage the details of day-to-day operations. Exactly how TfL manages their entire network.

You can guarantee that if you make any comment about TfL on here, you will be dogpiled by all the Londoners explaining how their lavish subsidies are actually justified. Every. Single. Time.

I covered most of what you replied to in my answer.

> Londoners explaining how their lavish subsidies are actually justified.

What subsidies? Please be explicit. London contributes £36b more each year to public purse than it receives in public spending [1]. I’m not sure how a net £36b fiscal contribution to to the tax pot can be considered a subsidy, unless your saying it’s unfair that London subsidies the rest of the U.K. to the tune of £36b a year.

I would also point out that Londons contribution to rest of the U.K. has grown £10b over the last 4 years. So London is receiving even less for its tax pounds than ever before.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...

> I covered most of what you replied to in my answer.

I can’t see how that true. I pointed out that a number of things you said were either untrue or misleading.

> The rail network in the UK is publicly-owned, what is private is the franchise to operate on a certain route. The lack of investment, if any exists, has come from the govt

It would be the same story if it were the government operating the trains and private company maintaining the network: of course you're not going to get one organisation to put in more effort when it's a different organisation that sees the benefits. The big success story of privatisation is Chiltern, where there was a long-term arrangement with a single operator that took responsibility for the integrated system of trains, stations and so on. (Though it's notably also one of the few cases where there was real competition between rail lines).

> London and the area around me isn't getting enough, this is also false, London receives obscene amounts of investment relative to the rest of the UK

A smaller proportion of London tax revenue is reinvested there than anywhere else, and projects with a lower objective outside London BCR get funded while higher BCR projects in London get delayed.

> The main constituency for subsidising the travel costs of wealthy commuters is...wealthy commuters. I am not sure why that idea is inherently attractive (and again, it is worth mentioning...our safety record is best in Europe, there is no real difference in punctuality, our fares are marginally higher but the ecosystem we have is far more robust).

The amount of public subsidy going on rail is trivial compared to the amount of public subsidy that explicitly or implicitly goes to roads (such as the huge amount of public land taken out of productive use), and that's even more biased towards the wealthy and carries much bigger negative externalities (pollution, much worse safety record).

> The cost of a fiber roll-out for the whole of the UK is less than the Elizabeth line.

No it isn't, you're comparing the concrete realised costs of Crossrail with the made-up estimates for fiber rollout.

> The problem is that this has no end because the more infrastructure you build, the more agglomeration, the more infrastructure...London had this problem in the late 19th century with slums, the solution wasn't more density

Density is the solution; it's the reason why London is so much more productive and ends up subsidising the rest of the country.

If true, these improvements will certainly only be available on frequent routes. To maintain a train connection to more remote places is often not financially viable so some subsidies or regulations have to be created.

I agree on the "density solutions" however. This just isn't viable, we need other solutions and getting rid of individual transport is a fantasy.

While unreserved peak-time travel is absurdly expensive in the UK if you travel off-peak or book far enough in advance it's much less. I used to regularly travel between Manchester and London (about the same distance as Liverpool) and it was £200 peak / £60 off peak for walk up return fares. That was 10 years ago. Looking now it's gone up to £370 peak (!) / £95 off peak return.

While I did meet one person who regularly flew Manchester/London he lived very close to the airport so it wasn't too much extra hassle for him. It's only 200 miles / 2 hours on the train so the flights were mostly for connecting at Heathrow to international flights. Flights tended to be more popular London/Scotland where you're looking at 4 hours on the train.

Air travel is severely under taxed compared to other modalities. Its right to start taxing air travel normally, because otherwise trains can't expect to compete on a level playing field.

The main culprit is tax on kerosene. Electricity is also taxed in france.

Kerosene must be taxed because it emits a lot of CO2 per flight.

Planes are actually surprisingly fuel efficient. The short haul flights in Europe are often served by Airbus A320 or A321 Neo, with fuel consumption per seat at 2.19 L/100 km. A mid-sized petrol-powered car consumes three times as much. And that figure ignores that planes take a straight route - taking that into account, the emissions are close to a single-occupant electric car

> the emissions are close to a single-occupant electric car

I'd imagine the emissions would be infinitely greater than an electric car. For an ICE car with two people, you'd be closer.

I think they mean the emissions from generating all that electricity, which isn't always clean. You'll get a lot of hydro and renewables in some countries at some times but then also coal and gas at other times.

>the emissions would be infinitely greater than an electric car.

Not if you include the emissions caused by generating the electricity.

The point is this is not a useful metric, because it depends on something that varies from place to place and from time to time.

The thing is that the chemical effects involved at the altitude airline planes fly is way more greenhouse impactful that the same consumption for a car, so you can’t compare that way. Also, trains are way better than this. French trains drive you around on nuclear energy.

But that increased impact is a short term difference, right? The changes to air composition we cause by digging up in a few decades what had been sequestered off in millions of years are forever changes.

Good questions, I don’t know enough details. CO2 stays in the air for a long time, but not forever either. For sure though, it’s absorbed way too slowly than what we’re outputting now.

That figure excludes take off and landing, which adds quite a bit on short haul flights.

No it doesn’t. Landing is far more efficient.

why does landing take more fuel?

Planes are most efficient at high altitude. Landing necessarily involves slowly descending into thicker atmosphere - well, a good landing, anyway.

At a slowing speed and typically at near-idle thrust. The aircraft exchanges gravitational potential energy for velocity through most of the descent.

The only high-trust portions are when reverse thrusters are engaged, typically for a few seconds following landing, or if TOGO power is invoked for an aborted approach.

You've never been on a plane that had to enter a holding pattern?

Which is effectively level flight / continued cruise, a low-power flight segment, not a high-powered one. That last would only apply if the aircraft had aborted an approach, which typically gives priority.

Again: the original claim was that both take-off and landing were high-fuel-consumption flight segments. That's untrue. Under normal conditions only take-off is, and even most deviations from a nominal approach have a fairly minor impact.

You're going to extreme lengths to avoid admitting this, and are making the issue personal to boot. Any particular reason for that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186605

Except it's often a high drag portion of flight, flaps and gear extended etc.

Asking if you've been on a plane that entered a holding pattern isn't "making it personal".

Please cite your sources specific to fuel consumption in landing and holding patterns.

Again: You're going to extreme lengths to avoid admitting error.

I'm trying to correct the implied claim repeated in this thread that the ideal descent can be used to model every descent.

From the ICAO manual on CDO: https://cfapp.icao.int/tools/ATMiKIT/story_content/external_...

> 1.1.4.6 With the need to ensure that CDO does not compromise safety and capacity, it may not always be possible to fly fully optimized CDO. As well, it may be necessary to stop a descent and maintain level flight for separation or sequencing purposes. The aim should be, though, to maximize CDO to the extent possible, whilst not adversely affecting safety and/or capacity.

Obviously level flight near sea level is less fuel efficient than at cruising altitude.

Likewise, descending into a significant headwind, or avoiding adverse weather will require more fuel than the optimal.

I'm not saying that a continuous descent is actually guzzling gas like crazy. There's very many smart people that have been optimising fuel usage in planes for decades.

I just want to emphasise that while the ideal descent is very fuel efficient, not every descent is ideal.

And of course, it varies significantly based on the plane.

This paper shows that interestingly, some A330 models used equivalent, or even more, fuel on approach than takeoff. Although I speculate that's more due to very efficient takeoffs rather than inefficient approaches.

https://www.mit.edu/~hamsa/pubs/ICRAT_2014_YSC_HB_final.pdf

I'm trying to correct the implied claim repeated in this thread that the ideal descent can be used to model every descent.

Oddly enough, nobody asked that question.

I'm not saying that a continuous descent is actually guzzling gas like crazy.

Well, at least you're admitting as much.

For a trip segment, takeoff and climbout are the initial high-fuel-flow phase. Note that LTO (landing and take-off) data are based on flight segments at and below 3,000 ft. AGL, which is 1/10 or less of cruise height of FL30 -- FL40. See Fig. 1 of your reference. The LTO data (limiting climbout / descent phases to <= 3000ft) are relevant to local emissions concerns near airports, the focus of the paper, but not to total fuel / emissions of an entire aircraft flight profile as we're discussing here, and omit 90%+ of the relevant climb/descent characteristics. As discussed in the paper.

Figure 2. also provides a strong clue as to why the LTO data show lower total fuel use in the approach vs. climbout phases, again, <=3000 ft: the aircraft monitored are spending 2-5x longer in the approach phase. That is, they're climbing out steeply, with very high fuel-flow rates, whilst they're descending slowly (and hence, spending more total time <=3000 ft) at a much lower fuel-flow rate.

Again: you're wrong, given your own cited reference.

https://www.mit.edu/~hamsa/pubs/ICRAT_2014_YSC_HB_final.pdf

The slowing isn't using gas - its not like they put the plane in reverse to slow it down. They're descending and trading potential energy for energy to maneuver at low altitudes. The thrust is near idle.

True, but not every approach to an airport is a nice constant vector.

Continuous descent operations are the optimal, but there's plenty of suboptimal airport approaches that require level flight at a height where fuel efficiency is far less than at cruising altitude.

Do you have any statistics to say it happens so often that airplane landings are so suboptimal that they use anywhere near climbing fuel rates and times that it matters to the overall discussion? It seems unlikely to me.

They don't.

Nor can they actually read and interpret the sources they did scrounge up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207783

It doesn't.

Air-travel fuel consumption is typically given as a per-trip total. That's averaged over a range of trip lengths.

Though yes, take-offs add considerably to the consumption. Landings don't, as aircraft are typically gliding in at or close to idle thrust.

Efficiency for very-long-range flights is actually reduced as total take-off weight (TOW) must be reduced, exchanging payload (passengers) for fuel.

For very short flights, fuel burn is about 10l/100km-passenger. At intermediate ranges, that falls to about 3l/100km-passenger. See:

https://www.fzt.haw-hamburg.de/pers/Scholz/arbeiten/TextBurz...

> A mid-sized petrol-powered car consumes three times as much.

Average ICE bus consumes order of magnitude less per seat than planes. The only reason planes win vs cars is that cars aren't public transport and planes are. So you divide by many more seats.

Try taking 1000km trip on a diesel bus once and tell me if that metric matters to anyone.

You know, I've actually done a few multi day trips by bus, around Croatia and its many places to visit (all the way from Plitvička Jezera to Baska, Krk and Vrbnik, then over to Venice), as well as Egypt (Hurghada to Luxor and later to Cairo). Oh and also a bit around Norway (though i only have Flåm tagged on my map, don't remember the route).

I would say that longer trips by bus are not as unpleasant as you might suggest - as long as you don't attempt to do them in one go, but rather make stops along the way and get some fresh air, walk around and stretch, get something to eat, or maybe do some shopping if needed.

There's probably something to be said about travelling more slowly and enjoying the locales along the way and maybe using motels for the longer trips, as opposed to viewing travel as purely getting from point A to point B as fast as possible. Of course, to be honest, that might not always be possible either in our fast paced culture.

Now, there can be certain drawbacks in practice:

  - certain places will only have old buses, so no Wi-Fi
  - for some reason many buses don't have USB outlets for charging
  - many buses also disallow you to recline your seat, what's up with that?
  - some of the older buses also have pretty poor AC, then again, the weather in Egypt was pretty hot to begin with
  - for some reason the head rests are always smaller when compared to those in planes, making sleeping less comfortable
  - some of the drivers really love to drive in ways that appear unsafe to the passenger (perhaps due to the long wheelbase and suspension)
  - this feels especially uncomfortable mountainous roads

In short, try to take the newer buses whenever that's possible but otherwise just hope that the old ones will get replaced eventually.

Though personally I'd still say that trains feel like the safest mode of travel, followed by buses and then planes feeling the least safe of all, regardless of what engineering excellence goes into making them. That's enough to sway my personal choice.

And if that's somehow better for the environment, then why not? Plus, the food in roadside eateries seems better than airplane food.

Does the toilet ever work?

Is the seat same size as Ryanair?

Vibration so bad that $500 noise cancelling headphones don't cope?

> Does the toilet ever work?

No need to use bus amenities outside of emergencies, just go to them at your nearest rest stop, far more comfortable than any plane!

> Is the seat same size as Ryanair?

I'd say that depends on the bus - many of the older ones or cheaper ones can be cramped, but most are fine. Plus, the chances of having two seats to yourself are higher.

Where planes are better: premium seating options, akin to getting a ride in a car.

> Vibration so bad that $500 noise cancelling headphones don't cope?

That's never been an issue for me headphones or no headphones. Depending on the roads, motion sickness could be a bigger problem for some folks, especially depending on the suspension, much like how some folks also get sick in planes.

I'd say that good buses or trains are amongst the most comfortable in regards to vibrations, followed by planes like Airbus cruising in clear skies, followed by most other buses. Whereas most planes would be less comfortable than those during takeoff, landing, climbing, or whenever there's turbulence or the planes are just older. Older trains would also take one of the latter positions, but they're probably not as bad as planes that are gaining altitude.

Actually, should probably mention boats while we're at it, those can be better in regards to sleeping, but otherwise the experience varies based on the conditions in the sea and size. Of course, the environmental impact is debatable, especially cruise ships.

> Try taking 1000km trip on a diesel bus once and tell me if that metric matters to anyone.

I did some such trips. Never bothered asking if it was diesel or petrol but whatever. Don't see much difference from a car (in fact it's more convenient than a car cause there's more space).

Guess you never used electric bus?

I’m tall so I prefer to be squeezed for 1 hour instead of 14 hours.

I'm using electric buses every week but they are driving inside my city, never seen them used between cities nevermind countries - it wouldn't make sense cause of small range. Also inside they were exactly the same as normal buses so I don't understand what you wanted to say.

> I’m tall so I prefer to be squeezed for 1 hour instead of 14 hours.

Add 2 hours of standing in queues without your shoes, but yes, planes are faster. I was talking bus vs car though.

> fuel consumption per seat at 2.19 L/100 km. A mid-sized petrol-powered car consumes three times as much.

It seems like you are comparing fuel per seat for planes with fuel per vehicle for cars. At five seats, that would be equivalent to 11 l/100km, which almost all modern cars should beat. Even if you only count four seats for the car, it would still be 8.8 l/100km, which many cars can beat.

I would expect planes to be usually almost full. I would expect passenger cars to average 2 people per car.

If you want to compare a large passenger plane to a land based vehicle you should pick a train. Both the train and the plane can only go certain routes and are mass transit vehicles.

The emission of gases in the upper atmosphere by airplanes also worsens their climate heating effect by 300% (source: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/umwelttipps-fuer-den-alltag/m...)

I'd agree on the basis of efficiency arguments.

If you want to discuss actual practice, though, 75% of European international ground travel is by private car, not train.

That said, we can simply state the per-passenger-distance efficiency of different transport modes and leave the "you shoulds" to others.

I agree, we should switch to trains where feasible. I'd like to see more long-haul trains set up with affordable sleeper cars. But most land transportation over long distance is still by car.

But what's the average occupation rate of the plane and the car?

using air travel is like driving a small individual car to reach the same destination. the car will travel slower, but the carbon stays the same.

not really efficient.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29192094

Also of note, not sure about the cost or availability of wifi/internet on planes but it can/could/should be included into the equation, in fact I'm sure there's a place/market for groups working traveling...and besides it does seem reasonable to tax plane travel more, their ?lead filled fuel is ?tax free ? and in a world which global warming is an (ignored)issue carbon tax shouldis be mandatory...

Turbine engines burn Jet-A (basically kerosene), which does not contain lead. The leaded fuel concern is for piston engined aircraft burning 100LL avgas. Almost all commercial aviation is done using turbine equipment. Some of the small island-hopper type airplanes are piston-engined.

They are not replacements - they are complementary. I think trains should be cheaper than they are now to be more appealing than airplanes (I prefer the view from the airplane, but the cabin pressure and silence of the train is a plus), but it's not an either/or situation.

When we count externalities such as the carbon footprint, trains easily beat planes.

Finally, TGV and Ryanair are not comparable experiences.

The best use of trains for me is as overnight sleeper. Combines the cost of an overnight stay with the travel ticket.

The few times I have done it - lowest class with an actual bed - it was pretty minimal as a hotel experience but great to be able to wake up, step off the train and go to town!

But that's probably less than .1% of active routes while title says "replace"...

A healthy living environment has value too. The point about taxing short-haul flight is that otherwise their pricing does not account for externalities that we collectively have to pay for. The absence of tax is effectively a subsidy.

Rail has several advantages, time-wise. Airports are far from city centres and security theatre takes a lot of time. Cheap flights also tend to use smaller, more remote airports because they are cheaper to use than big hubs close to large cities.

The main advantage of rail is capacity, not price. Roughly speaking, a railway station can handle 10x more passengers than an airport using 10x less space. In a densely populated area with a high passenger volume, it's not possible to build enough airports to handle intercity passenger traffic.

Capacity also means flexibility. When the service is frequent enough, you don't have to plan in advance. You can buy the tickets just before departure for a reasonable price. You don't have to adjust your schedule to make it to the specific train, as you can also take the next one 30 minutes later.

Different modes of transport have their own strengths and weaknesses. Switching to another mode never makes things unambiguously better. If you want to switch to another mode, you also have to change your habits to take full advantage of the strengths of the new mode.

Time is not as valuable as the value of the damage from emissions both to public health and to the climate.

Also... Business travel should be entirely eliminated in favor of Zoom and video tour calls. Only when someone needs to vacation or do actual physical work should they travel by plane.

Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, then use that money to clean up the pollution, problem solved. No one gets to cheat by making a cheap service that pollutes for free.

Taxing? Stopping to subsidize them is already a good idea. Also: climate goals and airtraffic don't mix well, so a regulators goal should definitly be that the most climate-friendly ways to travel are also the easiest, cheapest and most comfortable and reliable.

As a European who has taken more than one 16 hour train ride where I could have taken a 2.5 hour plane trip, I really think night trains done properly could be a game changer.

Both tunnels in Switzerland have already been operational. The Gotthard basis tunnel since 2016, and the Ceneri tunnel since 2020.

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica

Our brains went to the same place. I posted the same link 3 minutes later haha

:) For 'reasons' I would love it if that line opened up, it would make my life a whole lot easier. Better still if they make it run all the way to Amsterdam or Brussels.

The Baltics are terribly isolated from the rest of Europe and it would be great if there was better connectivity.

I'll add to your resources one more rail project. Rail Baltica which will connect Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Finland with Poland and therefore the rest of Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica

I still find it weird that planes are cheaper than trains even for quite small distances. London -> Berlin? Paris -> Madrid? Hell even Rome -> Milan is cheaper to fly.

I would love to start contributing less to emissions and take trains even though they take more time but they gotta start taxing planes and making trains cheaper to make people start doing it.

What we need to do is make planes more expensive, instead of making trains cheaper. That would be relatively easy, but people wouldn’t like it because they want change that doesn’t affect their lifestyle. But if we’re to take climate change seriously, all lifestyles have to change radically.

We should subsidize one and tax the other. Yes, flying needs to suck, but travel doesn't need to suck. Don't be too self-flagellist about this.

If we really subsidize trains, we will induce enough demand to make investments look better in nominal terms and shift the culture/politics by normalizing way more rail travel. Easy victory.

A problem is the Europeans are prudish about printing money with their bad ordoliberal EU Constitution.

Trains over long distances are always going to suck relative to planes, unless they're something like maglev or other ultra high speed design.

"Suck" for certain dimensions. Travel is slower. Which can equate to cheaper (e.g. long distance buses) or can equate to roomier with more luxury--and more expensive. But there's not a lot of market these days for expensive, luxurious travel that takes a long time.

City center to city center transport with lots of room and good internet I can realistically work during? Sign me up.

I don't think people realize how much more travel we all could do with good cheap comfortable HSR everywhere. Stuff like go to Miami from North Carolina every weekend.

But planes are cheaper.

The infrastructure alone for trains is insane. We don’t need rails in the sky.

Not only that - but we’re talking about staff for half a day instead of a couple hours.

What we could use are electric planes, for short distances. Plane usage isn’t going to stop. Only the select few with the luxury of time to kill are going to pick a 12hr train over a 2-3hr flight for the same distance, even at half the price.

Business travel alone makes the idea of increasing flights costs a serious no-go.

> The infrastructure alone for trains is insane. We don’t need rails in the sky.

Airports past a single runway and hangar also cost a lot of money. Not to mention all the related infrastructure ( road, public transit connections), ATC, etc. Airplanes are expensive and need maintenance, luggage handling, etc. and fuel. Tons of it, to be stored, transported, refueled, etc.

Planes don't have to pay any fuel taxes in Germany and other things. The government-owned train company "Deutsche Bahn" increased the prices shortly after government lowered taxes on train tickets. For fuel and electric, trains still have to pay full taxes. So not suprising that planes a cheaper with better tax conditions.

Also, the environmental impact of planes is not accounted in the cost.

Not to mention the ethical implications around sourcing oil-derived fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_war

And with a six-fold difference in carbon footprint of traveling between flying and taking a train, that's borderline criminal.

I know you really don't mean it but... Criminal?

As lover of flying I might have my feathers ruffled but there's certainly other pros to flying (the view, the feeling of takeoff).

Maybe I'm just trying to justify my love of flying, still though.

Well, maybe the criminality isn't obvious in your own life (or mine). But to a person who lives on, say, Tuvalu, I'd imagine it's a lot more obvious, even if it is "death by a billion small cuts".

So "lovers of flying" should just push environmental costs onto other people not just by not paying carbon taxes, but even by paying no fuel taxes whatsoever?

And why don't I "mean it"? As far as I know, there are already some investigations in progress against major oil companies.

Polluting it's like firing a shotgun with tiny bullets in the air.

People are being killed by pollution, both directly and indirectly.

But the bullets are invisible and the financial interests are very big so most people accept it as a necessary evil...

> Planes don't have to pay any fuel taxes in Germany and other things

> For fuel and electric, trains still have to pay full taxes. So not suprising that planes a cheaper with better tax conditions.

Aviation is heavily taxed in Europe and Rail is heavily subsidized. One fact taken out of context shouldn't be used to paint a picture that is the opposite of this basic reality.

The problem with taxing aviation fuel is that EU directives make it hard for a country to tax fuel on cross border flights[1] (you can tax domestic flights, but almost all flights in the EU are cross border).

Therefore what European nations do instead is apply exit charges to flights as a special aviation tax. They still collect the money, but as a departure tax, not as a tax on aviation fuel. Those exit charges were just increased in 2019. It's just a lot easier to add a departure tax than go through all the bilateral tax-agreements with other EU nations to impose a tax on aviation fuel for all flights out of Germany, so this is really an issue of minimizing paperwork rather than not taxing aviation. And Aviation exit charges are higher in Germany than in any other EU nation - each passenger pays an average of 33 euros per flight leaving Germany[5], from 13 euros for short-haul to 60 euros for long-haul. (Britain has higher exit charges, and because it's not in the EU, it is able to tax aviation fuel pumped in its own borders).

And of course there are already taxes on carbon in the EU, so not sure why there should be a special singling out of one particular use, just because it gets some people riled up. Those taxes have to be paid by aviation fuel producers, so they still go into the cost.

Deutsche Ban, on the other hand, is heavily subsidized -- they are getting a special covid subsidy 6 Billion euros[3] atop regular subsidies over 11 billion[4] and an extra 50 billion euro subsidy for long term capex[2].

[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-to-inject-extra-50-billion-int...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-deutsche-bahn-bailout/ger...

[4] https://economics21.org/html/europes-flawed-addiction-to-rai...

[5] https://www.fccaviation.com/regulation/germany/aviation-tax

The subsidies reflect the belief/position/ideology that the train brings a net benefit to all of society, and so should be paid for by everyone, not just those who ride. This is intended to be in contrast to flying, which brings more costs than benefits.

You can certainly argue that these beliefs are incorrect if you feel like it, and it's not as if there isn't a case to be made. But it's not just a simple matter of "we tax this, and subsidize that".

The parent post I was responding to was saying that the reason trains cost more is that that aviation was being subsidized at the expense of trains. That's just wildly incorrect. They supported that position by taking one out of context fact. I remedied that by providing the overall context.

I was not making a judgement as to whether trains should be subsidized or not. That's a whole separate discussion. But since you bring it up, I'd say that in general, transportation of all kinds provides such massive positive externalities that it should probably be subsidized. Then we can debate how much more trains should be subsidized over airplanes, but both create massive net positive externalities, IMO.

I think it's really hard to argue that for planes. In saying that I don't mean that I think it's clearly not true. I mean that the case for net positive externalities for air travel is dependent on things like (a) the geographic scope you consider (b) the temporal scope you include (c) value judgements about time-efficient travel and much more. One could legitimately take quite opposite positions on all these aspects (and more), and would end up reaching very different conclusions.

Something like this applies to trains also, but much less so because their inherent geographic scope, environmental impact, sociological impact and effects on reducing travel time are much less than flying.

So you are correct that externalities is something that is really ill-defined, which is why all claims to impose externality-based taxes should meet a high bar of rigor.

In most cases, that's just impossible and the taxes end up being applied for political or emotional reasons rather than objectively taking all costs and benefits into account.

But when it comes to a few areas, we know that there are massive positive externalities in anything involving transportation or communication. Anything that makes the world smaller generally has big positive effects.

Even if you never buy a foreign good, the fact that a good was brought in will lower the price and raise the quality of the domestic good you do buy. That generates employment and income. Anything that lowers the price of bringing in that good will have a huge positive effect on the economy.

With planes, the fact that they make transportation easy and affordable generates massive revenue for tourism, trade, employment. European Airports alone generate about 675 Billion in GDP -- 4% of the EU's GDP when both passenger and freight is taken into account[1]. And that's just airports.

An older FAA study concludes that civil aviation generates 5.4% of US GDP[2] and that's a fairly conservative study not even trying to measure too many spillovers.

Then there is a third effect, which is the superiority of point to point designs. Miami Beach was developed in the 30s and 40s because some developers saw its potential as a great beach destination. But it was only with plane flight that the rest of the nation had a chance to enjoy it. Or Las Vegas, another center that sprang out of nowhere.

The fact that I can fly from pretty much anywhere in the country to Miami for $100 massively increases the tourism trade to Miami Beach. To do that with rail, you'd have to overcome n^2 problem. That alone would require laying down ~50,000 miles of track, requiring God knows how many tons of steel, trainyards, and workers. And it would take days to travel there with connections, stopovers, etc. Those are all frictions.

And once you laid it all down, suppose you didn't want to go to Miami, but to Corpus Christi. Thus air travel allows places to spring up in response to market demand, whereas in the old days, cities along the track became the important centers -- e.g. development was infrastructure constrained rather than allowing the infrastructure to meet the needs of development flexibly and quickly. That increased flexibility and convenience, together with the reduced frictions of point to point travel provides trillions of dollars in positive externalities.

[1] https://medium.com/geophy-hq/airports-as-a-positive-external...

[2] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/media/2014-econ...

> Then there is a third effect, which is the superiority of point to point designs. Miami Beach was developed in the 30s and 40s because some developers saw its potential as a great beach destination. But it was only with plane flight that the rest of the nation had a chance to enjoy it. Or Las Vegas, another center that sprang out of nowhere.

I don't think that these are particularly good examples for you to cite. Neither Vegas nor MB developed under the wing (so to speak) of air travel, but rather the interstate system. Air travel made them more accessible and accelerated their growth, but it was not responsible for their development, and the many folks who visited either of them in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s without flying would likely not say that they could not enjoy them without planes.

In addition, although it's clear that Miami Beach and Vegas have benefitted from cheap flights, that doesn't mean that the net result for the country (let alone world) as a whole is positive.

> Even if you never buy a foreign good, the fact that a good was brought in will lower the price and raise the quality of the domestic good you do buy.

This sounds like an incredibly hand-wavy claim, and also easily refuted as a general rule. The easy (flight-based) import of foreign goods has, in many cases, led the complete decimation of various US manufacturing sectors. If you hadn't noticed there are essentially no mass-market US electronics companies any more, very few clothes manufacturing companies, and in many manufacturing sectors that do still nominally exist as US companies, their factories are no longer US based. It's false to lay this all at the feet of relatively cheap air freight, but it certainly plays a role, and refutes your overly broad claim that "Anything that lowers the price of bringing in that good will have a huge positive effect on the economy."

> Anything that makes the world smaller generally has big positive effects.

Yes, the positive effects are well known and oft-discussed. The negative effects are less well known, less researched and rarely discussed. This means that it's hard to have a well-informed discussion about the balance between the two.

> In addition, although it's clear that Miami Beach and Vegas have benefitted from cheap flights,

Yes, I am not saying that air travel created Miami Beach, but that Miami Beach benefits from it. This is the definition of an economic externality. We are counting the financial benefit or spillover of some technology, meaning the extra value-add created beyond the purchase of the plane ticket itself. For flight, it's huge.

Then there is a switch to a different argument:

> that doesn't mean that the net result for the country (let alone world) as a whole is positive.

This is not an economic argument. Perhaps a moral argument - it's not clear, as no details were provided. But speculating as to whether some value-add spillovers should or should not be present is not how we count externalities in a pigovian tax. It seems what you want is a sin tax for flight, which is not a pigovian tax.

In fact most people, when they use words like "externalities", actually want sin taxes. They are not trying to come up with some objective measure of economic value-add spillover effects. And that's fine -- we have lots of sin taxes in the world, but then advocacy for them should be honestly labelled as such.

> This sounds like an incredibly hand-wavy claim, and also easily refuted as a general rule. The easy (flight-based) import of foreign goods has, in many cases, led the complete decimation of various US manufacturing sectors.

Now is not the time to get into a debate about trade theory, but suffice it to say that I disagree. Trade is great. Deficits are not great. You can have lots of trade without trade deficits, and trade is welfare improving. If you want to stop trade deficits, then add a tax to net foreign capital flows, not cross border flows of goods and services. But on this point we just have to agree to disagree.

> > that doesn't mean that the net result for the country (let alone world) as a whole is positive.

> This is not an economic argument. Perhaps a moral argument - it's not clear, as no details were provided. But speculating as to whether some value-add spillovers should or should not be present is not how we count externalities in a pigovian tax. It seems what you want is a sin tax for flight, which is not a pigovian tax.

It's not necessarily a moral or an economic argument alone, though it could be. For example, perhaps the massive shift in summer vacation travel from all points of the US towards FL was (while very good economically good for FL) both bad economically for the rest of the country and created substantial externalities within FL itself (environmental, social etc.)

Comparing these costs and benefits can't be done in a value-free way, which means that establishing the overall cost/benefit is not likely to be a task that will lead to a consensus outcome.

> For example, perhaps the massive shift in summer vacation travel from all points of the US towards FL was (while very good economically good for FL) both bad economically for the rest of the country and created substantial externalities within FL itself (environmental, social etc.)

When I said an "increase" in value add, I meant an economy-wide increase in value-add, so the argument of taking business away from other tourist destinations doesn't apply.

If you want to claim there is some economic loss as a result of "social losses", then you need to again demonstrate that loss in terms of economic value-add and it will roll up to the economy-wide value add figure above, otherwise we have once again left pigovian territory and are back in "sin tax" land.

Transportation just has huge positive externalities, and I don't see any of them being entered into the equations when claiming that more taxes are warranted because of externalities.

I don’t get how trains help everyone. By their very nature, they draw lines blessing certain areas with infrastructure, blessing certain cities, while bypassing others. It must be hard for smaller cities in Europe to get much traction when the big cities all have fancy rail. In the US? Even small, super remote places (Aspen, Steamboat, Bar Harbor, Bozeman, Spokane, Jackson Home) have airports and that makes them equally connected to the country as anywhere else.

Europe is more densely populated than the US. Small cities are rarely far from major cities, and they are usually connected by regional rail. Small remote cities don't really exist in areas where rail traffic makes sense.

That’s a very Western / Central European bias. In fact it probably is a big reason why there’s such a major east/west split that persists today, the rich countries keep building themselves more and more of this type of luxury infra.

Trains require a lot more infrastructure, which is why they are at a cost disadvantage. The miles of constructed track, power lines, bridges, etc cost a lot of money to build and maintain, while planes just use the air, which is basically free.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, for very short flights, we still used planes once they convert to electric (which is relatively viable for short flights now).

Heathrow have plans for a air taxi service by 202

"Vertical and Heathrow Airport partner on air taxi services" https://www.airport-technology.com/news/vertical-heathrow-ai...

Competition.

London-Berlin flying takes 1h50m. The train takes ~14h. (edit: replies say 9h can be done)

You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer, and need safely maintained local infrastructure every meter of the journey. It's tough to make that cheaper.

And then the service is less valuable since it's so damn long. I love train rides, but 14 hours costs a whole day, and 2h costs an early-rise morning.

I don't think 2h is exactly accurate - you have to get to the airport ahead of departure time to allow for security check/etc. Then there's transfer to/from airport on both sides, whereas train stations are usually in convenient spots to continue the journey (office/home/whatever). Nonetheless, the base argument holds true - flying is cheaper and quicker...

Sure. But for anyone who isn’t already in the city center it’s probably close to a wash, since getting from home into the city has to happen. And airport to city is likely to be pretty optimized.

You can get a coach (bus) direct to Heathrow from almost any town in England. Getting to Waterloo [1] (London’s international) station from outside London could easily be more time consuming and tough with luggage.

But of course UK is gonna be an outlier in European train value discussions. It’s an island on the periphery with a single rail connection. The mainland capitals are more competitive.

[1] edit: now St. Pancras, which is closer to other London rail stations so likely better on balance. Thanks user sbuk.

In most European capitals there are great public transportation options to get to the central train stations and they are almost always better than to get to the airport as it is more far from residential areas

Exact, because the local residents drive to the local train station way more often than to the local airport. I think that’s a factor 10 difference approximately. Probably different figure for big airports hubs that serve mostly connections of course.

London’s international station is now St Pancras, which is much easier than Waterloo. It’s closer to Euston and Paddington, while Kings Cross is literally over the road.

> But of course UK is gonna be an outlier in European train value discussions. It’s an island on the periphery with a single rail connection. The mainland capitals are more competitive.

While UK train prices are an outlier, London and the South East are very much part of the high density economic core of Europe. A box drawn around London/Paris/Amsterdam/Cologne contains roughly a quarter of the pre-Brexit EU population (and a substantially higher proportion of economic activity.)

Rail is already very competitive between these cities - it's only 2 hours on the train from London to Paris or Brussels and since the tunnel was built Eurostar has captured the vast bulk of travel between the cities it connects. The bigger challenge would seem to be making rail competitive to more dispersed cities like Berlin/Vienna/Barcelona/Madrid.

From where I used to live in Greater London, to Heathrow, by cab, was about 1h 30m. Same route, using only TfL, was probably 2h. Same route, using HEX between Paddington and LHR, was about 1h15m. I have no idea what the ull opening of LizPurp will do to the transit times, but chances are it would bring them down to maybe 50 minutes.

Getting to LHR from where I was, it was always quicker to get to any of the major rail stations in central London than to either LHR or LGW, but LCY was relatively good (only really works that way if you're east of the centre though).

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done the Berlin-London trip early Monday morning before work. 2h might be an underestimate, but it really is quite fast.

In the US, Acela--which is as good as it gets in the US--is still a full day trip from Boston to Washington DC while a flight is less than two hours. It's not as just-roll-up-to-the-airport as it was pre-9/11 but it's still something you can do to catch a mid-morning meeting.

The train is pretty much a full day. I've done it when schedule allowed but going down the day before, working on the train, and spending the night in a hotel as opposed to doing an out and back in a day doesn't work for a lot of people.

Of course, shorter segments of the Northeast Corridor work pretty well by train. I pretty much never fly Boston to NYC unless I'm under unusual constraints.

That distance would be perfect for sleeper train. Hop on in the evening, sleep while you traveling and arrive in the morning well rested. You have the entire day for work, and hop on the train back on the evening.

It's not what a lot of business travelers want. And it usually costs multiples of what hopping on a short flight costs because you need a sleeper compartment to do the well rested thing.

I'm not sure about Europe, but certainly in Canada, even the very best of our train service (Toronto <-> Montreal) struggles to compete on convenience. Flight time for that route is 80 mins vs just under 5hrs for the "express" train that still makes 5 intermediate stops.

And those are on twinned, dedicated passenger tracks where you never have to wait on a siding for a freight train to go by in the other direction, like you do with the Toronto -> Vancouver train that takes multiple days end to end.

Anyway, they keep studying HSR for the route, so much so that a prominent Canadian comedian made a joke video about it almost a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W32klYkTxCQ

But it's definitely a chicken and egg thing; it'll never gain significant market share under current conditions, but no politician can justify the money required to properly build HSR with current ridership numbers. But of course billions [1] for a new toll highway directly through protected greenbelt farmland (Hwy 413)? Ram it all through! Will it lose money and eventually be sold off to a foreign interest for pennies on the dollar similar to how Hwy 407 was twenty years ago? Probably!

[1]: Even without accounting for a likely sell-off, the gov't of Ontario has been super cagey about the planned costs of 413: https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/10/08/the-hugely-contr...

The tracks between Toronto and Montreal are owned by CN and freight has priority over VIA. VIA trains are often delayed having to wait for freight trains to clear and can only be scheduled for times and speed that do not interfere with freight.

It takes 3 days to travel the 4500 km of rail from Toronto to Vancouver because the first 1500 km are through muskeg and around lakes where building straight, flat, protected 200 km/h high-speed tracks is just not an attainable option. Even if you managed 200 km/h the entire way, it's still 2 days travelling.

Planes travel about 800 km/h and can go in a relatively straight line without fear of a moose or a washout. It's 5 hours Toronto to Vancouver and 4.5 hours the other way because of tail winds.

I used to somewhat regularly take Toronto <-> Kingston, and I don't believe I was ever delayed by freight on that leg. Maybe the CN ownership prevents them from doing other kinds of upgrades on them, but they seem to get pretty decent priority during the day, particularly compared with the Toronto -> Vancouver route where you can sit on a siding for 4 hours. And it's not even really a matter of priority; the issue is that the siding is only long enough to accommodate the passenger train— the freight train going the other way is way, way longer.

In any case, I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested HSR for the train out west. VIA has simply embraced that it will always be slow and impractical, and they market and price it accordingly— it's supposed to be an experience, like going on a cruise, not a practical means of getting to a destination.

> And those are on twinned, dedicated passenger tracks where you never have to wait on a siding for a freight train to go by in the other direction

In Europe passengers trains have priority over freight trains of which there are very little anyway. Freight mostly goes by road while trains are mostly used to transport passengers. It is very different from how the network is used in North America.

That's not entirely true - rail freight in Europe is widely used, but usually uses different lines ( e.g. the old Paris-Lille line is used exclusively for freight, while the new high speed one is for passenger trains only), and yes, it has lower priority when its shared.

However, according to statistics i found, rail freight in the EU is at 17% for 2019[0], while in the US it's at 9%[1] for 2017.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

https://www.bts.gov/topics/freight-transportation/freight-sh...

> I don't think 2h is exactly accurate - you have to get to the airport ahead of departure time to allow for security check/etc.

We could honestly skip these checks for no-risk travelers.

And it also assumes that you are headed downtown and not to an adjacent town.

> flying is cheaper and quicker...

In Europe, notice how it's a bunch of private businesses competing with one another vs state ran rail monopolies?

> We could honestly skip these checks for no-risk travelers.

How to decide who is a "no-risk traveler" and how do you identify them?

Maybe by looking at historical data?

Many suicide bombers have an excellent prior travel record.

Does Europe not offer a Pre-check type program? In the US, travelers can pay a fee and pass a background check to go through a shorter and less rigorous security check at the airport. My local airport is pretty efficient either way, but it probably saves me 15-30 minutes on my departure time.

My fastest check-in was in Phoenix. I think it took me 11 minutes from curbside drop-off to sitting in my seat at the gate, including dropping off a checked bag (Southwest Airlines). I don't think I ever stopped moving forward from the moment the machine printed my bag tag until I hit my gate. This was pre-Covid too, so the airport was somewhat busy.

> Does Europe not offer a Pre-check type program?

I'm not aware on any European wide unified airport security structure. The closest to that would probably something EU related [0], but I couldn't find anything related to "pre check" type programs being a thing.

My personal international airtravel experience, living in Germany, has been rather limited in the last decade; I flew on vacation to Turkey for a few weeks. There was pretty much zero security theater.

The biggest time waste was the slowness of everything, waiting in lines for luggage, pass/ID clearance, traversing the long distances across the different airport wings, really long time window for boarding.

Apparently the same airport also offers an "evening before pre-check in", but the website for that seems to have become another pandemic victim. It seems to be the biggest thing that skips is luggage check in and formalities/getting boarding pass, by allowing passengers to do that the evening before.

[0] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/security-and-em...

I don't think the 14h is correct either. I've done that journey a couple of times and I'm sure it wasn't that long.

Additionally, I can find 6am flights, which means that I can be at 8am at the destination and have a full day ahead of me. By train the whole day will be dedicated to travel. Same on the return. Losing 2/3 days on a business trip is a big cost to pay.

> By train the whole day will be dedicated to travel

Or the whole night with sleeper trains, which is a decent workaround for that problem.

Sometimes. But if I'm flying out to somewhere at 6am, the alternative is often that I'd just be spending the night in my own bed. Now, to be honest, I'm sometimes fine with heading down somewhere the day before and having a relaxing evening at my destination. But that may not be ideal for people with families and isn't really justified from a business standpoint.

Agreed, if there were sleeper trains available. But finding a sleeper trains from A to B is much harder than finding a plane from A to B.

In a lot of ways, the airport is actually more convenient. Like in New York City, there is 1 Amtrak station in midtown, and 3 airports within an hour. If you’re in many parts of Manhattan it’s just as easy to get to La Guardia as it is to Penn Station, and if you’re on Long Island JFK is far more convenient.

That depends IMO. For local city destinations such as Boston, Philly, DC, etc. trains are much quicker.

The NEC is nice but it’s still pretty slow. I wouldn’t want to go much more than New York to Boston. I took Boston to DC once and it takes 8 hours .. it’s like a 1 hour flight.

Yep. The Boston to NYC train is almost always my choice compared to flying. (Driving would be faster but I hate driving into Manhattan though I could drive to New Haven and take commuter rail from there.)

But, while I've done it, Boston to DC doesn't really make a lot of sense unless I'm looking for an excuse to do some reading, etc. for a day.

For domestic travel I show up 40 minutes before the flight and I’m out of the airport in 30 mins usually.

I don’t take TGV in France anymore because of trouble in each journey, even in first class. It’s a bit like flying United: The cheaper it is, the less classy people are…

And agents onboard do absolutely nothing upon them. Last time after my complaint for noise, he asked them if they had a fare, they said no, and the controller didn’t even give them a fine (on a 2hrs Paris-Lyon).

I’m over with train and I’ll ride my diesel as long as they mix us with them.

While that looks correct at first glance I'm not sure if the calculation is so simple.

You have exactly 1 destination with a plane flight, right ? A to B. But with a train you have A + all stops along the way + B so if done correctly you could potentially serve a lot more passengers with a single trip than you can with a flight. It could be that monetarily doesn't work out still, but it could be because of an inefficient market.

And you should also think in terms outside of just transportation. I imagine plane flights have a centralization effect on where people choose to live while trains allow them to be more spread out.

14 hours? A quick search on bahn.de gives several connections from London St. Pancras to Berlin Hbf that take 9 hours.

> The train takes ~14h.

You probably hit over night travel. If you leave early enough the time goes down to ~9 hours.

> You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer,

You also cover over a dozen stops in one trip instead of two.

> and need safely maintained local infrastructure every meter of the journey.

The German rail infrastructure is so outdated that it probably is at least partly responsible for the last big train crash (no automatic lockout).

The last big airplane crashes on the other hand were caused by much needed efficiency upgrades that forced Boeing into using engines that were way too large for the half a century old frame they needed to remain compatible with on paper.

> The German rail infrastructure is so outdated ...

If DB updates infrastructure, that's on their budget (and while 100% publicly held and lots of politicians involved, it's nominally private). If it breaks down so much that it needs to be repeated, that's coming from federal funds. We have some perverse incentives in infrastructure maintenance.

I think there's a difference been taxing, and banning. Surely you should still take a plane in this case, and 99% of folks still will, no?

A couple of years ago, there was someone who went from somewhere in south England to London by of Berlin because that was cheaper than taking a train directly to London. Took way longer, but planes are somehow ridiculously cheap.

We should stop subsidizing fossil fuels, and start taxing them by how much they pollute.

London city center to Paris city center is 2h15m by train. The same trip by plane will take you twice that time at least.

"You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer"

The train is several times cheaper than a plane, seats 10x more people and some of machines used in UK were built in the 70's. How many airplanes keep flying that long?

Infrastructure? Hs2 is the first track of rail in UK in over a century! Most track is 200 years old, so it has paid for itself a hundred times over.

It's a little disingenuous to suggest that rail is a one-and-done affair.

The UK does have plenty of track: 20,000 miles worth, along with 6,000 level crossings, 30,000 bridges and viaducts, 2,500 stations...

Track needs constant maintenance through ballast redistribution and compaction to maintain track geometry; the rail itself needs to be ground regularly to maintain its shape; points systems need to be maintained, as well as signaling systems, earthworks and embankments, even vegetation.

Network Rail spends billions of GBP every year maintaining the railways.

> How many airplanes keep flying that long?

Many.

> Most track is 200 years old

And have been relaid about 30-40 times since then.

About the only thing that dates to 19th century are the rights-of-way.

"> How many airplanes keep flying that long? Many."

No, it's zero. Commercial airlines last about 30 years, they have metal fatigue from pressurisation cycles.

"And have been relaid about 30-40 times since then."

Are those expenses comparable to earthworks and contraction involved in laying down new line?

> No, it's zero.

Look, I just opened up flightradar24 and clicked a random plane. That was G-DHKC, a 757-256, first flight 1989. 33 years.

And that's just a random pick. There are many airframes from mid-late 1970s still flying commercial.

> Are those expenses comparable to earthworks and contraction involved in laying down new line?

What do you mean by that?

The aircraft you found was created in 2000 [0]. The 757-200 does date back to 1983, but definitely not this one. The owning company (DHL Air) was founded in 1989, perhaps this was the date you found?

Your random choice also did hit an interesting quirk in aviation that cargo airlines tend to use old aircraft that are no longer fit for passenger operations.

There are several reasons for this, but cargo ops are able to use their aircraft in ways that maximise their life [1]. Passenger airlines try and maximise the time each aircraft is airborne (i.e. earning revenue) whereas cargo operators often schedule differently. This sometimes allows for operation of aircraft that have very few pressurisation cycles left in their lifespan.

The specific aircraft you found was retired from passenger ops in 2016 (after being in storage since 2015) from Icelandair when DHL purchased it [2]. This is when the airframe was 16 years old. It was converted to a freighter variant at this time - the 757-256.

You can look at fleet ages to get an impression for the age of aircraft, and generally passenger airlines (especially in developed countries) are using newer planes and cargo airlines have a much older fleet. You might have noticed this when you see old fashioned designs like tri-jets, or four engined jets like the 747 only in cargo livery at airports.

[0] https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/boeing-757-200-g-dhkc...

[1] https://simpleflying.com/cargo-operators-older-planes/

[2] https://www.airfleets.net/ficheapp/plane-b757-30052.htm

Time has value. Trains make a lot of sense for freight. I don't think taxing planes to make people not use them is the solution.

More taxes seems to be the go-to solution for people of a certain mindset. I understand where they're coming from, to a point. But I certainly don't agree.

The taxes are not to encourage people not to use them. They're to make sure that the full cost of the flight is paid by the people taking the flight, rather than them just freeloading because the externalities are unaccounted for.

If that happens to discourage people from flying, well, that's just a side effect of having a properly functioning marketplace, where there are no externalities and the participants all have full information.

>The taxes are not to encourage people not to use them.

The grandparent comment of the one I replied to specifically mentioned taxing planes to get people to take trains instead.

The mindset is simply that the market fails to price in the negative externalities associated with CO2 emissions. So taxes in some form make up for that. I'm not sure what there is to disagree with there. All such people are advocating is that flights are priced at their true cost, not the "lol let the next generations/people in the third world pay the difference" cost.

We should do electric planes. Perfect for these shorter routes.

Do batteries that can power a plane for routes like this exist yet? I know nothing about aviation, but I always thought the energy needed to spin up a turbine, or prop, is immense.

We’re building such planes now. https://twitter.com/GovInslee/status/1440442441920774146

The batteries are plenty powerful. We’re limited in energy to about 500-1000 miles unless we use better aerodynamics, etc.

There are a lot of aircraft designs in the pipeline at the moment, using current tech as far as I know.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EVTOL

I wonder if we should focus more on gliders with electric auxiliary engines only, and use a launch system that stays on the airport of departure. Kinetic aviation, if you will.

It certainly reduces the weight of the plane if it doesn't need to carry its initial propulsion system for the entire flight.

There’s a kernel of a good idea there, particularly for cargo. I’ve had similar thoughts.

A linear motor the length of the runway? I wonder what the 0-300mph time could get down to.

They do something like that for aircraft carriers. But sailplanes use winches, which are a lot cheaper.

I doubt a static launch system would introduce enough energy to make the battery savings worth it. Most of the energy during flight is spent maintaining speed while climbing to altitude. The linear rail gives you a lot of speed, but zero altitude.

Still, there might be some weight gains that come from reducing the motor's peek power requirements, and those multiply across the entire flight.

I was wondering if it could worth implementing a two-stage system. The booster stage contains a lot of batteries, extra motors and a beefed up landing gear. The booster batteries contain enough power to get the aircraft up to it's cruising altitude before detaching and more or less gliding back to the departure airport. All the second stage would have to do is maintain cruising altitude for the rest of the flight then land.

Infrastructure is ridiculously expensive today and train is the most expensive form of static infrastructure. Roads aren’t as expensive as railways and you can always take another route in case of maintenance.

In UK we privatised rail to get free market to run it more efficiently. Now the rail is back to being government run and it's some of the worst it's ever been.

Except it is now foreign governments that bought our rail on the market and are now creaming it.

https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/70-of-uk-rail-routes-now-owned-b....

Afaik that went both ways, some private UK companies now run rails in Germany.

>and it's some of the worst it's ever been.

I'm not so sure about that. British Rail was dire before it was all privatised.

Rome -> Milan is 3hrs (+15/30 minutes if the train has intermediate stops) and less than 100€ on standard fare (you can get a discounted fare of around 60€ if you book a month or so in advance), seems quite competitive with plan both time and money wise.

> Hell even Rome -> Milan is cheaper to fly.

This one is unlike the others because at 3 hours it's faster and more convenient than the plane city centre to city centre. Building that high speed line helped put Italy's national carrier out of business:

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/italy-high-speed-trai...

Why would I want to spend 12 hours on something I can do in 1 hour for less money. Trains are a regression unless it is freight.

A high-speed train is about 40% the speed of an airplane.

So a 1 hour flight is comparable to a 2.5 hour train ride. However a quick check shows that, on average, it takes over 2 hours (133 minutes) to get on the plane after you've arrived at the airport. Then of course you've got to get off the plane, but we'll be generous and not count that time.

In summary, taking the train is about 30 minutes faster than flying. As for cost, well, the emissions from flying make the cost somewhat irrelevant. Any reasonable government would tax flying so it's more expensive than rail travel.

That's a really slow train.

The benefit of trains (for what would be a 1 hour flight) is that you don't need to get to a distant airport and go through the usual airport nonsense. You just arrive 5 minutes early and board the train. You get off the same way, at the central terminal of a large city.

In general it's mostly a behavioral thing, if you get used to train trips they become easier and the way you use your time becomes very efficient.

Two weeks ago I traveled to Antwerpen from Nuremberg in Bavaria and back in three days. A plane might have saved me three hours in real time, but that is not worth the carbon emission or the lack of "place" for me.

Of course I would't take a 40 hour train trip to Portugal, but I took a one day trip from our home to Bordeaux with two small kids and that worked quite brilliant.

Next week I will go by sleeper train to Neapel, visit Pompeii stay for a night and go back by sleeper train.

I don't know, it has it's problems and there are a lot of things that go wrong but it also has feeling of "place" of change. Even on business trips I don't have the feeling of somehow switching between arbitrary grey meeting rooms with a plane.

I think there are a lot of things that can become better but the international lines have already become much better in the last years and one reason is just that you have Apps to navigate any kind of public transport.

I must be missing the punch line here... it's only been the last decade or so that planes became cheap to travel across Europe, whereas train travel has been ubiquitous for decades, if not a century. Sure, they might not be as fast as planes, but they are part of the experience.

Sometimes I enjoy the experience, but sometimes I just want to not waste more than 40 minutes on travel time. I suppose that's just comfort/ease at the expense of emissions.

Totally agree - this perspective that one replaces the other doesn't make sense as while they both provide "travel" they do so with different tradeoffs.

How realistic is it that existing train lines get upgraded to super speed trains like they have in Japan?

Not realistic.

utter fantasy in the near term (10 years or so), a far fetched idea long term unless serious EU-wide legislation is introduced, which will surely be opposed by every single nation.

With Brussels and Belgium in the middle of the grid? Unlikely. (belgian here)

Belgium, as much a wonderland for trains as it is for beer? Brussels, which is a stop on several bullet-train-equivalent high-speed lines (Thalys, Eurostar, ICE, TGV)?

If anything, putting Brussels in the centre of the high speed rail net is a good reason for it to succeed.

> Brussels, which is a stop on several bullet-train-equivalent high-speed lines (Thalys, Eurostar, ICE, TGV)?

Yep, that one with such tight schedules you have to systematically compensate for delays happening 3 out of 5 times by booking a train earlier than your planned connection. It cost me many hours and stress for three years when I was regularly going from East belgium to Paris/Lille.

Getting to Brussels or going from Brussels should be okay but may god help you if you want to make a connection in Brussels.

> If anything, putting Brussels in the centre of the high speed rail net is a good reason for it to succeed.

I doubt it. It's often said of the Brussels railways hub that it is totally saturated: not enough lanes and it's impossible to add more. Among commuters it's said as a fact but I don't know if it could be improved and if it's an urban legend rehashed to ramble on late trains. My personal experience reflects that though.

It's hard to upgrade existing routes that far - the normal maximum for upgraded 'classic' railways will be <225kph, while new high-speed railways (like the Japanese shinkansen) can go over 300kph.

That said, Europe already has quite an extensive high-speed network - especially in its Western parts. The French TGV, for instance, has comparable speeds to the Japanese high speed services, and there are similar (if less complete) networks in Spain, Germany, and other countries. So a high-speed network between major centres is entirely feasible and, in fact, currently being built.

Not necessary.

I thought Japan's bullet trains were built from the ground up as high speed passenger rail on dedicated lines. Not really "upgrading".

Completely unrealistic. Older lines are built to older standards, with shorter-radius curves, and steeper inclines. It is more practical to just build high-speed lines separately.

The boarding and departure adds a fair chunk of time to that too.

Trains are a lot more convenient in that regard.

I agree that it's more convenient, generally less time wasted in security theater and enforced shopping experience.

That said, at least when you get on an airplane and it leaves the gate you have a pretty decent chance of making it to your destination when you expect to.

Certainly with British trains it feels like your chance of arriving on time (to 15 minutes or so) are about 50/50.

Actually >90% within 10 mins (long distance) or 5 mins (short). [0]

Very dependent on what route you take, though. And far from Swiss or Japanese levels of punctuality.

[0]: https://www.networkrail.co.uk/who-we-are/how-we-work/perform...

Yeah, lies damn lies and statistics and all that. I'm sure the majority of journeys aren't long distance journeys you'd otherwise replace with flight. Certainly 50/50 was a bit of a exaggeration but when I regularly traveled between Glasgow/Edinburgh and London it wasn't far off. I received a lot of vouchers for free travel.

It's a National Statistic (subject to auditing and rigorous oversight from the ONS) so 'lies' is way off the mark.

What it may do is not match your experiences (it varies a lot by time of day etc.), or be perfectly defined for the replacing-flights question. Both LNER (east coast) and Avanti (west coast) are fairly ordinary in long-distance terms. If the question was, say, Exeter to Newcastle by Cross Country I'd expect more extensive delays.

Anyway, you can explore the data (including breakdowns by quarter, by long distance vs commuter, and by operating company).[0]

[0]: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passeng...

> it varies a lot by time of day etc.

That _may_ explain the difference. The officially reported percentage is per train, not per passenger. Passenger onboarding can cause delays (for example, a rural station may, some days, have a school class enter a train. If you make room for that in the schedule, customers will ask why you stop for 5 minutes. If you don’t, the train will be late at its next stop, if that’s only a few kilometers away), so chances are trains with fewer passengers are more punctual. If so, the per passenger percentage of on time trains will be lower.

It also is measured only at final destinations. That percentage almost certainly is higher than that measured at each stop (a train that’s late half-way through can try to make up for lost time, but it can’t make up for being late at stops it already had)

Finally, there the question how cancelled trains are measured. Possibly, they aren’t counted as late, but do delay passengers.

There was this really great talk on the Chaos Communication Congress some time back on the punctuality of German trains. I searched for it and even found the English voice over translation [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGCmPLWZKd8

Remember to add time waiting for luggage. In Frankfurt today, it took 45 minutes from touch down until luggage arrived.

Big luggage that would be checked on planes is often a pain to handle on trains though. Especially if they're busy and there's really nowhere to put them. I'd actually be inclined to argue that dealing with larger luggage, whatever delays in baggage pickup there is, is easier on planes than most trains.

So airlines generally recommend you get there 1 hour for a EU internal flight before your flight for security/etc. Pre-covid you could usually get away with less at a lot of airports, but even if that didn't eat up your time, I think for up to almost two hours of extra travel time I'd rather avoid the airport and all the hassle associated with modern air travel.

If you travel often, it makes sense to invest in fast track. You skip all the security theatre. Also, for example TGV requires you to be at the check in 20 minutes before. You’re a bit late, you’re screwed. Even if the train hasn’t arrived yet.

> Also, for example TGV requires you to be at the check in 20 minutes before.

Where?

For TGV Inoui (the main brand) you have to be in the train 2 minutes before (written on any ticket, also here: https://www.sncf.com/fr/offres-voyageurs/voyager-en-train/tg...), and that's all. People flow through the gate up to the last minute. It has been like this for at least a decade.

For TGV Ouigo (low-cost brand), it seems to be 30 minutes according to https://www.ouigo.com/faq?question=ai-je-pense-a-tous-avant-...

I never understood this constraint with Ouigo though; it's obviously possible to skip it as shown by Inoui trains... and both are operated by the same company from the same train stations.

> Where?

In Brussels.

The only case I have seen like this is the Eurostar, but that is because of customs checks, border controls, etc, which don’t exist within the Schengen area. This is a very specific case and is not representative of how most people travel by train in Europe. You don’t have to come particularly early for the Thalys in Paris, for example.

The constraint on OUIGO trains is because tickets have to be checked before onboarding. So you have hundreds of passengers to check in line. This takes time. So people are required to come earlier.

However in practice most people respect the 30 minutes, so that you can arrive 10min before the train and get your ticket checked without waiting in line. This is not guaranteed. But often works. I take a lot of OUIGO and never respect the 30 min, because you often wait 10min in line. Once I arrived 5min before departure, had my ticket checked but had to run in front of the correct car. When train arrives nobody is allowed to pass the checkpoint.

For the InOui you can always come 5min before departure, because tickets are checked on-board so there is no wait line.

That's not really required, I've recently boarded a train just a few minutes before departure.

So I need to correct myself, thanks kergonath. This was about Thalys in Brussels, not TGV.

Airports are often an hour outside the city center and approx 30 euro (by cab) to get to where you need to go.

Not everyone lives in a city center.

For me, the are two international airports ~20 euro by cab away, while the rail stations are like ~30-40 euro away through unpredictable traffic.

Sure. But most visitors want to go to the city center. They probably aren’t that interested in visiting your house.

1h is really cutting it short and will be infeasible depending on the airport. For reference, two days ago i spent an hour just queuing for passport control at Charles de Gaulle, the bigger Parisian airport, for an inter-EU flight ( outside of Schengen though). Getting to my gate took another 15 minutes.

Trains already beat planes in practice for city-to-city journeys with a train time of <3h, because of the time of getting to and from airports, checkin etc. London-Paris flights were decimated when the channel tunnel opened, for instance. And rail will have a decent share (on price, atmosphere, or ability to work while traveling) up to about 4.5h. Beyond that it's much harder to justify.

> Trains already beat planes in practice for city-to-city journeys with a train time of <3h, because of the time of getting to and from airports, checkin etc

...and then politicians such as Ursula von der Leyen hop in their jets. This summer the EU Commission President took a 19 minute(!) flight from Vienna to Bratislava (the two cities are ~60km apart) in a private yet, but still managed to be driven ~60km by road during the transfers from central Vienna out to VIE airport and from BTS airport back to central Bratislava.

https://www.diepresse.com/6055894/kritik-an-19-minuten-flug-...

Did she continue her trip from BTS on plane?

> A spokesman for the EU Commission justified the flight to the "Bild" newspaper: "With departure and arrival in Belgium, the President's trip took seven countries in two days. Alternatives were examined, but there was no other logistical option." That same evening von der Leyen flew to Riga in a private plane.

That's a weird one. I wonder what the details of that case were. Without any context it seems pretty dumb to drive 60Km and Fly 60Km when you could have just driven that 60Km of flying instead.

Who could possibly care about that? She's attending meetings and events in professional and political capacity as the Commission President, it's not personal holiday time. The climate cannot possibly suffer some meaningfully negatively impact from her transportation means between events, whereas there could be meaningfully positive impacts from her maximizing presence in certain events.

It's difficult to convince people to change their habits when the person delivering the message is doing the complete opposite.

But she's the Commission President—an executive position for a very complex and powerful international institution. If she were an MEP, then fine, I could accept that an MEP does not have anywhere the representative power such that their time could be so important as to need chartered flights... But I do not accept that for major executive operating in that capacity should be beholden to mere messaging politics. You cannot predict the traffic situation ahead of time, whereas you know to the very minute what any flight times are, which makes them vital for planning at that level.

Why would you want the Executive leader of the EU risking event and meeting timings when she's representing almost the entire continent all in order to "deliver a message"? Should the US president take a taxi when going from DC to New York?

In any case the message is clearly not dependent on this since basically only the AfD and British tabloids are feigning outrage over this.

Ideally, they're servants of the public/people. Not modern kings/queens, which is what most people see them as (even if temporary ones). So yes, they should be setting examples.

>You cannot predict the traffic situation ahead of time, whereas you know to the very minute what any flight times are, which makes them vital for planning at that level.

That's a bit of a red herring. Air travel is often disrupted, probably as much as trains.

>In any case the message is clearly not dependent on this since basically only the AfD and British tabloids are feigning outrage over this.

Well we are discussing it here and this is definitely no the Daily Mail.

People who don’t want to change their habits will take any reason not to.

Which is perhaps all the more reason for spokespeople to act beyond reproach rather than an excuse to justify a 60km flight.

It’s hopeless. It boils down to “I am not going to listen to you because you don’t follow the arbitrary standards I just set, and that I am going to redefine if I feel like it”. It’s the same mental gymnastics as brexiteers and trumpists who justify their behaviour because Londoners and liberals are mean to them.

Besides, she is not a spokesperson. She is the head of the civil service.

A 60km flight is terrible, no doubt about that. However, had it been 500, you’d have heard the exact same complaints.

Five hours on a train between two cities are five hours of focused work on a laptop for me. With an enjoyable view and a lunch break.

Compare it with flight where you spend half of the time not using your laptop or without connectivity.

After COVID, how many people can do remote work? Don't underestimate the percentage of population that can use the time on a train in good ways.

Yes, that! On Monday, I will travel from Basel to Berlin. By train, that’s eight continuous hours of work or whatever. By trains it’s a bus, security controls, a somewhat stressful waiting period for birding, cramped seating, waiting for luggage, waiting for a train. The three hours saved are likely to not be all that useful, since I always have a somewhat higher stress level when I fly. So, train it is.

> Sure, they might not be as fast as planes, but they are part of the experience.

Recently had to plan a trip from Germany to Portugal. It would have been a full 48 hours by train. I think I would have stopped at almost every significant Spanish city on the way there.

Going by the map in the article they are already working on some much needed additions to the rail network in that area.

Its the same problem with long haul trips in the US. Chicago to Seattle is something like 44 hours, with nearly 40 stops. each one of those stops the train has to slow down, stop, wait for a time, then accelerate. Most of those towns are TINY. These 5 in WI are within about 90 min of each other:

    Columbus, WI (CBS)  
    Portage, WI (POG)
    Wisconsin Dells, WI (WDL)
    Tomah, WI (TOH)
    La Crosse, WI (LSE)

There are 7 stops in ND. Can you name 7 cities in North Dakota? But for political reasons, they have to have stops in all those towns, to get congress to approve their funding.

Living in Chicago, it always surprised me how, despite being a rail hub, it was totally impractical to take a train to another city (except Milwaukee). Flying or driving was almost always faster, and often cheaper.

If you live in the burbs you're probably still better off driving to Milwaukee. Parking in Chicago itself would be more than the fuel charges and you're not reducing emissions since the track isn't electric anyway.

I've ridden this route several times. The main riders of that line are to or from the small towns along that route to a big town a state or two over. People drive or get dropped off at the station from the whole region. Remove those and you aren't going to have many customers.

I feel like there's some realization crystalizing for me in this thread.

Something like "planes are point to point transit, trains facilitate a linear flow of people".

There are high speed trains that only stop at a limited amount of stations along a track. Of course that requires that the track itself is rated for a high enough speed and going by the map in the article that is still a work in progress in several European countries.

French here: I think the conclusion is flawed. Many operators won't simplify the life of the EU citizen, per the article itself:

> Then there is ticketing. Because systems are incompatible, only a few agencies sell rail tickets across the entire continent. As for refunds, operators are responsible only for the portion of the trip on their own trains.

So if your DB train to Frankfurt is late to your french TGV to Strasbourg, then your TGV won't be compensated. And you'll have to buy a new ticket.

Some guys tried their hands to be a European train ticket reseller (Captain Train, now owned by Trainline and way less effective than it was before), but it is not an easy feat.

> Some guys tried their hands to be a European train ticket reseller (Captain Train, now owned by Trainline and way less effective than it was before), but it is not an easy feat.

Jungan weird how I came across this tweet yesterday: https://twitter.com/Signez/status/1458054003795939332?t=FtMB...

That's a political issue, not a technical one. And one that can be solved with political will. A decade ago, I would not have been so optimistic, but these days, even politicians are talking about the necessity of transcontinental rail routes.

I've heard that there was some sort of a standard being developed on the EU level, but it basically drowns in bureaucracy, and the API calls are effectively free-for-all key-value objects where everyone can implement them as they see fit.

As much of a cynic I can be, I believe that if there's a supra-national organism capable of addressing such a problem as cross-country rail coordination, it's the EU. As many ills there are in the banking system in the EU, transferring money even across countries between individuals is a much more seamless experience than in other places, in large part, if not entirely, thanks to EU legislation. Things like abolition of roaming fees is another example.

You can of course point at the fake "bendy bananas" UK tabloid bullshit pushed by the likes of their current PM for easy laughs, or at the cookie banners prevalent on every site that collects more than a service level log of visitors to be skeptical, but I still think improving the situation of rail in Europe can be done in reasonable ways.

The EU is great when you need a technical solution to a very complex problem. The people at the commission just love that stuff.

https://www.eurail.com/en/eurail-passes

As a European resident, you need to use Interrail, which in turn doesn't cover journeys in your home country unless you buy the more expensive Global pass, and even that only covers one single return journey in your home country.

If you want to do some more extensive train travelling in your holidays, they can certainly be worth it, but for a simple there-and-back-again journey those passes tend to be somewhat on the pricey side and I wouldn't view them as a satisfactory alternative to real through-ticketing.

> a simple there-and-back-again journey those passes tend to be somewhat on the pricey side

A simple there-and-back-again journey should easily be able to be planed ahead, which usually gives the most affordable ticket choices. Many countries even offer weekend passes for those needs, tho they will not always cover all and everything, particularly not more exotic privatized public transport.

But on regular there and back again tickets, the pricing ranges there can be extreme; As long as you are willing to book some days in advance and stick to a specific connection and specific trains. Savings on that directly translate to international routes, and those savings are usually quite extreme.

Yes, but then you're back again with the original problem, i.e. that there's often no through-ticketing available, especially if you need to make connections on both sides of the border. E.g. while the DB–SNCF cooperation means that both companies will sell tickets for the direct trains between France and Germany, at least online DB doesn't sell through-tickets involving a connection in France, and SNCF likewise doesn't sell tickets involving a change of trains in Germany.

How about the Brenner Base Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel

We've been lucky enough to visit the tunnel system just south of Innsbruck, it's really impressive. We were taken in by bus(!) and allowed to explore on foot during an open day. Amazing stuff, the kids were blown away... :)

On the positive side, the Austrians are pressing ahead with expanding the rail lines through Tyrol towards Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Lower_Inn_Valley_railway

On the negative side, the Germans seem to have done nothing much to expand the railway on their side of the border. Once you cross over the border from Kufstein(AT) to Kiefersfelden(DE) heading north you're back down to a pair of tracks...

Die Bahn is an unmitigated clusterfuck[1]. The money comes and comes, gets wasted, yet no heads ever roll.

I met someone who managed a local train station (network) for a few years. He told me a story of hilarious bureaucracy, metric gaming (mostly for evasion of sanctions for missed deadlines), people just not showing up while being covered by their union, construction firms delaying construction because it's just "Die Bahn".

Then he quit and was paid for months despite expired contract. Later he got a legal threat for owing them wages...

Although pay seems quite good and you get 40days vacation, well good for them I guess.

[1] You might even call it a slow-motion trainwreck badumm-ts

Sure, let’s share stories. I’ll counter with the recently opened new BER airport. The construction process disaster even got its own podcast.

There's tons of crap like that.

Just now found there's yet another public transportation-related money sink in Berlin currently: https://www.schwarzbuch.de/aufgedeckt/steuergeldverschwendun...

It's a frustrating affair quite frankly and bad for my heart.

I find it curious that one solution to improve these networks suggested is to unbundle infrastructure from operations.

Sure on paper it makes sense, but neither Japan nor Switzerland went that way and those are the best rail systems in the world (at least as far as my personal experience goes).

and moreover, the UK did go that way, and by all accounts it has been a total disaster.

I don't think they will be able to make it work. It's becoming ever more obvious that trains are monopolistic, require extensive infrastructure et cetera. On top of that they are slow, people just don't have the time to waste it on trains. I don't think we should be going backwards in time towards slow sleeper trains (where only perhaps an experienced Russian will catch a bit of shut eye). We should be moving forward towards high speed train moving at 500 or hyperloops that stand a chance versus a plane. Or just cleaning up the airplane space through more extensive use of biofuels, hydrogen and electric (for distances smaller than 300km).

Don't worry. Europe is great at making monopoly, backwardness and technological regress "work"....

I know it's not so easy here policy wise. The general debate is a discussion on how to shoot ourselves in the foot with the most elan. But then you look at other places. And there maybe they are still growing and people have the right priorities. But that might be because these places are mostly just dirty and poor and everywhere is filled with cheaply built appartment blocks. At least there's something to look at here on your lazy Sunday afternoon.

Air travel also requires extensive infrastructure, only at airports.

Are these train plans outlined not bullet trains?

As the article says it's too expensive to do much of that. Maybe a little will be done, but those will just be slightly faster trains running at 200 kph, not like a bullet train. The EU has little money and the nationals invest mostly in national infra.

Often more than 200kph. This website has a speed option in the menu, on the currently operating lines. HS2 for instance will have initial-use/design speeds of 3/400kph.

Conventional HSR is generally feasible up to about 1000km distance. The largest city in EU + UK/Switzerland (Paris) is within about 1000km of 13 of the next 19 largest cities (and connects 16 of the next 20 largest!), with Budapest, Katowice, Warsaw, Athens, Naples, and Lisbon all much further than 1000km. And Paris isn't exactly centrally situated.

HSR routes that connect all of the major cities in Europe together is a completely feasible proposition, although obviously the extremities of that route aren't going to be viable for thru traffic. Most of the population of Europe happens to live in a relatively compact region, and so most of the intercity traffic could easily be captured by a conventional HSR.

1000 kilometer in a 100km/h average German ICE (average on the trip I took including stops in between) is ten hours. Plane flying 900 can do it in one and a half. Even if it's the ideal center center trip and allowing for two hours of boarding and an hour to and from the airport, flying is nearly twice as fast. Now if it were to be the much faster French Thalys they can average 150 (including stops) on the route I did but it's still an hour difference. I'd say French Thalys is competitive up to 700km for direct center center trips. German style HSR is interesting only as an alternative to a car.

100km/h is very slow. China is running 350km/h lines all day every day. So with proper investment that train ride is more like 2 hours 40 minutes.

Which, per your numbers, is nearly twice as fast as the plane.

IMO we're thinking too small. Properly fast trains are a significant QOL improvement.

I'd love to see the Orient express being revived. I'd much rather take a train than plane. The trip itself is more like an adventure.

They won't, there's no train that can transport me from Bucharest (where I live) to Northern Italy (Bergamo, to be more precise) for just 15-20 euros, and this if we decide to ignore the big time differences between a plane flight and riding the train.

I love trains and I'm still a little afraid of flying and I would love for this advent of train transport all over the continent to be true, but the reality of the matter is that the physics go against it. What will probably happen is that the lower-income people will be forced to travel way less while being promised (through articles like this one) that the incoming changes won't be qualitatively different from what we used to know before the pandemic came. The same goes for car transport, which will also start to become more and more a luxury.

last I knew (went the other way), there should be a night-train to Vienna (only seated, because not fashionable anymore) and then there is definitely a route you can book to Bergamo.

Problem for the first part (no straight way): rail in yugoslavia is dead except for CCP construction. Problem for the second part the alps.

Still, one could probably do Bucharest-Belgrad-Zagreb-Triest-Verona with a very cheap nighttrain (there are rails, so there's no insurmountable problems: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/38581/train-from-...). Should be fine for travelling, I think noone should need to commute such a distance anyway...

At which point you could just forget the train and take a bus. Bucharest has buses to practically anywhere in the EU.

I know that some part of it is doable, technically, it's only that increasing the prices of plane tickets until making them non-viable for most of the population will most probably kill the city break industry in Europe.

I know it sounds like a first world problem, which in a way it is, but (very) cheap flights combined with no roaming charges were one of the few, concrete things that were actually helping make the European Union an actual distinct political entity. Almost no-one here in the EU actually cares about the European Parliament or about the European politicians and the like, but we greatly appreciate that we can go from Bucharest to Madrid or from Prague to Stockholm almost at a moment's notice and without paying an arm and a leg for it (or at least that was how things were before the pandemic), all this while using our phone in all those locations like we were on our couch at home.

I'm afraid that taking that all away will greatly reduce the little European spirit cohesiveness that had managed to get built as a result of what I described above (cheap European flights, no roaming fees), and we certainly need the best and greatest European spirit cohesiveness in these interesting times.

Well, yes. But actually, no. Unless someone can completely change the way train companies operate across Europe. Getting somewhere on time? You have a 50:50 chance when traveling with DeutscheBahn and the likes.

I think it would make a lot more technical, economic and environmental sense to make air travel greener and quieter through regulation and investment in Europe's world-class aerospace industry rather than attempt to build integrated high-speed rail across the continent at vast cost and over huge delays spent negotiating with different landowner every 200 meters.

I wish there was peace in the region I live in and I could’ve taken a train to Europe instead of a plane.

Article I read in 2014:

> Trains are such an indispensable motif in Atlas Shrugged, that, when some of Rand’s acolytes produced a slavishly faithful film adaptation of her book set in the present day, they had to invent a convoluted rationale involving resource shortages and industrial disasters to explain how railroads had once again become the dominant form of long-distance transportation.

Well… that aged… interestingly.

https://harpers.org/2014/06/ayn-rands-rapture-of-the-rails/

Night trains are a great idea for tourists. They are usually very comfortable and you can save on a hotel night if you can find a place to store your bags. And kids seem to tolerate them better than airplanes.

There are at least two tourist-y routes where planes cannot feasibly be replaced: Northern Europe to Greece and Northern Europe to Spanish resort regions (Andalucia and Canary Islands).

Taking a train from Stockholm to Málaga or Athens won't be realistic for years, if not decades. Taking a train from Stockholm to Tenerife is out of question entirely.

Without tourists, these places will become a very, very bad periphery of the EU. Already the nominal unemployment is high, but lots of locals are employed "under the table" in catering and accomodation.

In the US, self-driving cars on highways can effectively replace a huge amount of short hop flights.

Way cheaper (especially for EVs)

Faster for flights under 300-400 miles (especially if you need to get a rental car on the other end).

More cargo/luggage

Leave when you want

Have a car (your car) when you get there

Once highway driving is sufficiently safe to sleep at night, look out. With convergent evolution of infrastructure, good AI, it will be pretty safe.

And if you have a small RV so you don't even need a hotel on the other end? With Starlink and a fold-out solar array so you can charge without even being hooked up?

In the article : "Yet only 8% of the distance travelled by land in the EU is by rail. Even in the most train-happy countries, Austria and the Netherlands, the figures are 13% and 11%. In those countries, more than 75% of land travel is done by car. " Yes, more than 75% of land travel is done by car because trains are incredibly expensive. yet I see in the discussions that we should make flying more expensive. Trains are not really competing with airplanes, but personal cars!

Certainly anecdotes abound, but I once took a German Wings flight from Cologne to London for US$18.

The taxi from the airport to my hotel, less than 5 miles from the airport, was US$27.

Trains routes are great as individual entities. I shouldn’t need to fly from Boston to New York or Philly to DC. Individual pairs of cities might benefit from rail. Rail as a total societal solution seems crazy to me, like how is someone in Norway supposed to use a train to get to Greece?

What are people using to book/look up train travel? I just tried to find a London to Belgrade route and absolutely none of the planners I found via DDG were capable.

They'd all gladly sell me a pass, but none told me what station to leave/arrive from what time the trains were, etc.

Midnight Trains[0] plans "hotel style" sleeper trains radiating from Paris, first train launching in 2024.

[0] https://www.midnight-trains.com/en/home

Another base tunnel is the Mont d'Ambin [1] one between France and Italy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_d%27Ambin_Base_Tunnel

Wonder if all of this is about to become obsolete in 20 years. Consider the following:

- Electric cars will very soon have a lower total cost of ownership, and dramatically lower cost per mile.

- Self driving cars are coming. They may have restrictions at first, but they're coming.

- The Boring Company is quietly working on fast tunneling. This doesn't get nearly enough press, but it's the last very important ingredient. Not for the whole way, but to solve congestion in and around cities.

So when I picture the future I don't think we'll be taking trains. I think we'll take cheap, save and extremely convenient driverless ubers as far as a few hundred miles away. As for farther away? We'll take the same uber to an airport. Sure, you can fuel the planes with carbon neutral fuel, but we're still over 30 years away from replacing jets as main transportation for longer distances. Nor should we - it simply makes sense to fly that far.

but how is uber more convenient than train?

I can walk, go to toilet, buy something to eat on a train. Can't do in in an uber

> but how is uber more convenient than train?

Different things are good for different people. I can get in an Uber and take a nap or take phone calls and know that I'll arrive at my destination, eventually. No need to keep track of connections or transportation to and from a station or anything else.

Having all options presented robustly grants everyone the best of both worlds.

An uber drops you and your stuff off where you want to go?

Kinda like those taxis waiting outside of central stations and airports?

It actually picks you up from your starting point, and drops you at your destination.

I don't think we'll see "long distance ubers" as a separate service - you'll just get into one and have it take you an hour away. Which, with proper road infrastructure, will naturally get to be about 100-200 km in less then 10 years or 200-300 later. You don't really need a toilet for that - or if you do, you just make a stop at a gas station, and have it wait or get another.

Remember that Europe is not US - it's pretty much urban space next to urban space, not hundreds of miles of nothing.

And for longer distances you fly (or yes, you get a high speed train)

Electric VTOL craft for short- and medium-distance are another nail in the coffin for regional rail.

I certainly hope not. Can you imagine how loud it would be hearing a few thousand of those things buzzing overhead?

Nah, point is to get uber cars to cost under 10k, not up the price to what is basically a next gen helicopter.

What do you say to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACXaFyB_-8s ?

Trains are and will be the most efficient way to transport lots of people. There is not enough space in big european cities for everyone to use their own vehicle. (And in my opinion that is good).

It's snarky, but misses the point. The "pod" concept has already been abandoned. The project they're currently working on in Vegas is using Teslas as rented cars.

What clicked it for me was seeing price comparisons between a train and a bunch of Teslas of equals capacity - they're about the same. Yes, subway trains are hugely expensive - either because they need to be, or because it's all government contracts. And Tesla is pretty much a luxury vehicle so we can easily expect an order of magnitude of decrease.

> - The Boring Company is quietly working on fast tunneling. This doesn't get nearly enough press, but it's the last very important ingredient. Not for the whole way, but to solve congestion in and around cities.

Tunnels already exist around most cities in the EU, it's nothing new. The ground is already swiss cheese from 20+ rail/metro/tunnels there, a small tunnel isn't going to help in any way.

And also it's harder to dig because of environmental and archeological concerns. I know. It's a problem.

Trains like Shinkansen can run at 200mph while offering more space than a business class flight. They're already electric (and pretty much self-driving).

I'd rather have that than a 50-70mph journey in a toilet-sized space. Rolling resistance of tires is a limitation here that won't go away with electric/self-driving cars.

Most if the investment in trains is the terrain under the rails, which is already made. Converting all existing routes to high speed is a no brainer, which will be delayed beyond all reasonable duration just because they're all government organizations. Probably much longer than it'll take us to have driverless medium-distance ubers.

I compared trains to airplanes recently - from Vienna to Swizerland by train because a plane was a bit too expensive. I like trains, but it was not a pleasant experience:

- boarding was about as fussy as with airports, maybe a bit more so since I had to stow my own luggage.

- I had to change trains 3 times, moving a 20 kg luggage and a 10 kg backpack with often as little as 8 minute leeway in an unknown train station

- did not have significantly more room, surprising enough. A seat is a seat, and you can go to the bathroom just as easily in a plane

- did I mention it took 8 hours?

I don't think cars will be a contender for the long range, not soon. You're right with rolling distance, and also air drag. They don't go well over 100-150 mph. But if their range increases enough, they might just squeeze trains out of their niche.

Trains lose hard to ubers on short trips, and to planes on longer ones. They're already subsidized by the government. With any less passengers, and a strong need of upgrading to very high speed, it may start to make sense to drop a lot of them and focus on the rest.

> Converting all existing routes to high speed is a no brainer, which will be delayed beyond all reasonable duration just because they're all government organizations.

It varies between "not easy" and "not possible", certainly far away from a "no brainer". High-speed train routes are very sensible to curvature and have to be built as plain as possible. Second problem: if other, slower, trains also use high-speed routes all kinds of ugly things happen and the high-speed trains are not so high-speed in anymore - it is one of the main reasons why german DB trains are so slow and unreliable.

In practice, countries with good high-speed train networks (Japan, France, China) have separate high-speed routes which are used only by high-speed trains. Which turns the necessary investment up to 11.

Yet another reason why we'll end up with ubers + planes. Separate lines is not really feasible in most of EU.

I'm mostly pissed at the subsidizing part. There is a comment in this thread saying we should tax air companies more to convince people to take trains. I hate this with a burning passion. If an industry isn't working anymore, the solution isn't to throw money at it. It can find its own place, probably a mix of cargo and dedicated high speed lines.

Anyways, it's still early - right now there are precious few electric ubers, and none that are self driving.

I think it is certainly true that planes are subsidized - they are not paying tax on fuel, for example, and I can't think of any good reason why it should be the case.

I am not so bullish on trains, however - it takes a long time to build the lines and it will again benefit only few big cities. As with bikes, it is a discussion of city inhabitants for city inhabitants, for the rest of us car is still the only comfortable solution because it can take you anytime anywhere.

This sounds great in theory. But rail services are very inefficient monopolies. Here in Germany, DB Services are routinely affected by strikes leaving no alternatives. So no trains cannot replace planes unless this situation is improved.

As traveling a lot on trains in Germany - it’s a joke. Trains are are late so you miss connections, cancelled on short notice, etc. I never know if get to airport on time when I use train. You can easily half hour late on 1 hour trip…

From Amsterdam to London takes about 4 hours by train. More or the less the same with a plane. And you can actually sit comfortable with internet in a train.

I wish we'd spend more time trying to electrify planes, and less time trying to replace faster means of transportation with slower ones.

Rail is like twice as expensive as plane, even in Europe.

A few years ago I was visiting in Switzerland, and thought I'd go and spend a few days in Paris. I could not do so because SNCF (French rail, basically) was on strike and it wasn't clear whether I'd be able to get back in time for my flight. I was told by a friend of mine in Zurich this happens quite a bit with SNCF. Which is to say that if I were in Europe, I'd prefer to have several transportation options, which hopefully would not coordinate their labor strikes, rather than be stuck only with trains.

Bikes could replace Trains. The world is literally devolving into the stone age.

They cannot scale to achieve the airplane QoS, stop this insanity.

Planes not only are faster, but they require far less infrastructure, and we can stack vertically and spread horizontally their routes, having multiple parallel trips without sacrificing precious land.

How many hours does it take to travel by train from Italy to the UK accounting all of the stops? A multiple of the 4 hours trip that a plane does.

It’s like asking whether bicycles can replace airplanes for continental travel. Theoretically yes, practically no.

Every year EU is becoming less and less livable for a middle class engineer.

The writing has been on the wall for some time already but it is time to consider other options.

Could you explain how this news relates to your point? I'm curious.

Simply the fact that trains can replace planes is laughable. In EU? That’s just hilarious.

There is an increasing amount of policies that decrease quality of life.

How exactly is improving train infrastructure decreasing the quality of life for you?

Maybe he's an aerospace engineer...

The message is literally about "replacing planes with trains". It's not about improving the infrastructure enough to go toe to toe against planes.

Rail is not being improved for the sake of improving it. It is being improved because they eventually intend to make air travel too expensive for most people.

Nobody is going to suddenly outlaw planes if a trip by train would be 5 times as slow. Of course the intention is to replace them with high speed trains that are providing a similar level of comfort and efficiency.

In Europe? In EU where most of the countries are blatantly discriminating against each other?

It will replace only for us the peons. Rest assured our leaders will keep on flying.

Most of my European dev colleagues prefer train rides because they can hack on the train.

Most of my european dev colleagues prefer cars.

So what do planes or trains have to do with the subset of the euro dev demographic that you're familiar with?

They don't really defend their point, they just restate it.

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