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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

And people still ask me why I prefer taking high speed trains! Flying by plane is so nerve-wracking nowadays, what with dogs sniffing about and burly custom agents and you have to arrive 2 hours beforehand, wait in long lines, sit in an enclosed room and wait even longer, share a bathroom with hundreds of other people.

In euro style fast trains, you arrive 2 minutes before, walk in, you can go have a meal, there is electricity for your laptop, there are toilets everywhere.

For any journey that can be done in 6 hours with the train, the plane journey, which would take between 1 hour and 2 hours actual flying, will take much longer.

That high speed train china built is the way to go. Planes should be used for flying really big distances, and then trains should be used to go on. The entirety of europe should be connected with trains, the U.S should have 10 major airport hubs and the rest done with trains.

Nowadays, flying is just such a bother!

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In euro style fast trains, you arrive 2 minutes before, walk in, you can go have a meal, there is electricity for your laptop, there are toilets everywhere.

Or for those stuck on last Friday's Paris-London Eurostar, not so much toilets everywhere as everywhere a toilet. I payed a premium to use the channel link to get me home this Christmas and, after 3 days of travel hell and sheer incompetence before I finally got on, I can't see myself ever using them again. In fact, after reading what actually occurred under the channel on Friday - tunnel operators seemingly asleep, staff going AWOL, passengers urinating on the floor, not to mention Kent police interrogating those who finally made it out as if they were potential terrorists (save for Claudia Schiffer, who got a police escort home and a free croissant) - I'm not sure I actually trust them to even run a safe service, let alone a convenient one.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/22/eurostar_eurotunnel_...

My faith in international rail travel from the UK has been destroyed completely in one fell swoop, and it has nothing to do with the engineering malfunction that instigated it all.

And people still ask me why I prefer taking high speed trains!

I know! I just love that hourly New York-to-London train service that runs under the Atlantic...

You don't need sarcasm to make fun of rail. Every time I try to get a hypothetical route on Amtrak.com for Dallas to New Orleans, or Florida, it insists on routing me through Chicago. Every. Single. Time.

In fairness, that's basically what the airlines do as well, they just have more hubs and the hub and spoke model itself is less visible because of the higher speeds involved. Presumably a more viable rail service would involve at least more hubs and hopefully also higher speeds.

I live in the Midwest and always have to fly through at least one hub to get anywhere useful, so I'm getting a kick out of this.

(I once was trying to book a flight from Kansas City to Portland, and -- I kid you not -- one suggested route was through Atlanta)

That would likely be a bit claustrophobic should it ever be made. That's what I mean - big planes should be used between big hubs, for example leaving from the ocean beside England and landing in the ocean beside new york, then you take a bunch of trains to the various destinations.

Check-in, security checks and all that can then be distributed amongst all the small train stations. When you arrive at a plane hub, you just walk in with your hand luggage.

I used to think that smaller regional planes were the future, but nowadays I'm thinking perhaps the large titanicesque planes may be the way to go to solve this problem.

No thanks -- keep your security checks out of our train system. If people insist on flying they can pay the price at the airport.

Hong Kong has this system, and I love it. The airport is far enough out, that it has it's own train, (the airport express).

Not the actual security screen, but all the rest of it can be done right at the train station. You can check your bags and even check in for your flight. The lines are short, and you can dump the bags early and enjoy the trip.

To be fair, this would be an amazing engineering project. The technology needed already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen

LHR to JFK would only take about 9 hours. By train.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_tunnel

On the other hand, it doesn't exist, and would be crazy expensive.

It makes me sad how much the human race is capable of and how much of that capability is unrealized for cost reasons.

"It wouldn't be profitable."

Much better to kill each other over religion instead...

It doesn't have to be. Flying for me is fairly painless, but i've been doing it enough so i can optimize the process out. It doesn't take long (or much effort) to make flying equivalent to train travel, for instance (and it's much faster almost all the time).

This might be easy for you to do, but that's also only if you can shake the feeling of worry. I'm some punk kid, with tattoos and ear gauges, and when you combine that with my general distrust of authority, and mix in how terrible the consequences can be, it's not just the process that causes stress with flying. I don't carry a knife, but I do some craft-y stuff sometimes, and I constantly worry if I've accidentally left something in a pocket somewhere.

From my experience European flights are much easier than international flights, typically you only have to turn up an hour before the flight and security is pretty quick at both ends, especially at smaller airports and if you've only got carry-on.

From friends who've travelled business class out of City Airport in London, I've heard you can turn up as little as 20 minutes before the flight time.

Trains are more pleasant, but it's not the huge chore that say flying to JFK is.

I'd say this is definitely true at smaller airports (Munich for example), but horrendous at the mega-monstrosity airports like Charles De Gaulle or London-Heathrow. There's just nothing you can do to move through those places faster. (My last trip through London put a warning on my transfer boarding pass to allow 1-hour to get from gate to gate. I thought they were joking.)

It can vary a lot. I flew from London Heathrow Terminal 5 to Berlin earlier this year, and it only took 15 minutes from getting off the tube to being ready to board.

Yep. Which is why on European trips, when possible I travel by train. More efficient, more comfortable and on the right routes, you get to enjoy some good scenery too. I miss trains in the US, both for local transit and long distance travel.

I don't mind flying, and I fly crazy amounts, but it's become increasingly difficult to justify the headache, especially for some of the shorter fly-in, fly-out trips that I take

Terrorists blow up trains, too.

And yet, somehow, they're still a more civilized means of transit.

The "terrorists" aren't the reason he prefers the train. Terrorist attacks on both are so rare that they're not a real reason to prefer one over the other. However the overly invasive, rude and ineffective airport security is a strong reason not to fly when there's an alternative available. For some reason the trains, malls, schools, libraries, churches and stadiums around where I live aren't getting blown up by terrorists and they have little or no security at all.

The point being, if a few train attacks occur, you can expect similar TSA regulations being issued for that mode of transport.

Not that its very likely in the USA; with a few exceptions rail service is abysmal. It took me 48 hours to travel from Nevada to Chicago last time I took the train, what with mechanical breakdowns and other unexplained delays. Lost my luggage too. Never again.

The uk experimented with metal detector type screening at train stations after our bombings on the 7th july. It doesn't work with you have thousands of people streaming in and out of the gates- all you do is end up practically shutting down the station.

So now they focus on temporary gates and profiling - which turns out to be much more efficient than random screening.

One thing to bear in mind- mass transit terror attacks over the past ten years have probably killed more people directly in attacks on trains (and subways/tube) than plane attacks.

Bombs in london and madrid caused hundreds of lives lost or serious injuries, bombs in the pakistan/india region often claim thousands.

The threat (as also mentioned here) is that a hijacked plane is, in reality, a massive missile and, to use the phrase, a true weapon of mass destruction. This however was resolved after 9/11 with new cockpit procedures and more alert passengers. (c.f. Bruce Schneier's blog for more)

At the moment (for various reasons to complex to go into here) I am sporting a huge beard. Other words that may be used to describe my beard are mighty, magnificent and fearsome. Anyway, showing up at the London side of the Eurostar last month, I was "randomly" selected to have my bag searched.

At the Paris side, I was again approached by staff, this time offering me a Halal meal...

It depends. I've taken train journeys in Spain where the security is almost as strict as the airport, although a lot faster. I am not a fan of security theater either but it's as much about quelling general passenger anxiety by making a demonstration of vigilance as anything else.

Shhhhhh! Don't let the authorities know, or they'll start silly security theatre there as well.

I'm not convinced of that, actually. We have historical precedent -- trains were bombed in Madrid, and there have been all sorts of transit bombings in the Middle East. But riding on the train is still not a big deal as far as I can see.

Passenger aircraft may be uniquely suited to inane security theatre. They're already so inefficient and uncomfortable that it's relatively easy to get away with piling on additional inefficiency and discomfort. And the problem of securing them feels almost tractable -- they're only vulnerable at the start and end of the trip [1], they have very limited entrances and exits, they carry so little stuff that you feel as if you actually have a chance of screening it all. [2] The problem with security theatre on trains and buses, to say nothing of ships, is that you just can't make it plausible without making it so expensive that you might as well just shut it down. Theatre is no good if the audience can't suspend disbelief.

---

[1] Well, technically, there are surface-to-air missiles. But somehow those are easy to handwave away. Theatre is a mysterious business.

[2] You probably don't, of course, but reality is not at issue here.

It's really because trains cost a whole lot less than an aircraft....and that's about it. The theater of security has very little to do with protecting passengers if you notice. I'm always surprised nobody has just blown up the security line at an airport. Easy access to the line, hundreds of people, no security on the way to the line. It's about as soft of a target as you can find.

Both security theatre and terrorism is about managing perceptions. One is just a response to the other in the public + media domain.

Also government will do whatever it takes to seem like it is doing something. Lots of rules, directives with cryptic long numbers separated by dashes, TSA employees with uniforms resembling those of real police officers, etc, etc. This is all very very different than actually doing something or making anything safe.

I agree 110%. I think what I mean is that, the purpose of the security is 2-fold, to prevent the loss of expensive equipment, and to make people think that the security is for their benefit so that they continue to fly/ride/whatever and keep those businesses afloat. It just so happens that lots of the things you have to do to keep an airplane (the equipment) safe are the same things you need to do to keep people safe.

If they were serious about the security of the people on the aircraft, they'd make it really simple instead of complex. Simple things like no carry-ons whatsoever and every flight has a marshal. None of this Monty Python-esque "only 1 carry-on unless it's a 'personal item' in which case you get 2 or it's a Thursday but you can only get in it during the flight above 20,000ft and no later than 60 minutes before landing, but only if your point of origin is Minnesota during the month of November or Kansas during the Spring -- and if it's electronic in any way shape or form, forget about it, unless it has an 'airplane mode', or is a watch that can resist depths up to 60m".

edit the top story on reddit right now has this right "Only two things have made flying safer since 9/11: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers."

I disagree. It's because driving a train into a building is significantly harder than driving a plane into one

At any rate, it's about property protection and not passenger protection.

Yes, but for some reason that extremely rare event doesn't attract the same level of paranoid security theatre that other, even rarer events do.

There's something about planes. Perhaps it comes down to ground-dwelling-mammal hindbrain psychology: We're intrinsically more comfortable when we're close to the ground, even when we're theoretically more vulnerable there. I suppose if birds ran our transportation system they'd think differently. ("I'd sure hate it if someone set off some fireworks when I was on my feet on the ground -- I'd be trapped! Only two dimensions to maneuver in, low potential energy, I can't even move my wings properly, and just think how vulnerable I'd be from above! I'd far rather be 20,000 feet up, where I can jump out a window in case of trouble.")

Small problems cause more deaths in planes. A condom-sized bomb could make an airplane unstable enough to crash and kill everyone on board. On a train, a bomb that size would do little more than burn up a few rows of seats. They would just need to uncouple that one car, move everyone to the car behind, and continue running the slightly-shorter train.

The fear is the use of an airplane to crash against a building with people inside--i.e. to use the airplane as a weapon. The train can "only" be used for terror: to threaten to blow up some people. If you cynically add that government high officials are unlikely to use a train and very likely to be targets of an airplane used as a weapon, you get why traveling by train is still a pleasure.

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