Japanese railway company starts testing 249mph bullet train speeds
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Reality is less simple as price varies as well. In Europe the cutover (in time and price) seems about 200 miles [1] although the CO2 emissions are up to 30x higher by air. Of course speeds are lower, maybe 150mph which would suggest a 450mi cutoff.
[1] https://m.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-of-...
I’ve done Chicago to New Orleans. New Orleans to New York. SF to LA. Each time I wrap up loving my experience.
Train travel, especially in the USA where it’s slow, can be more about the experience than the time to destination.
OK, but let's not overstate things. These numbers suggest it's typically a factor of 10 or less for normal (low-speed) trains.
https://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm
Given the scaling of air resistance with speed, I expect that for high-speed trains the ratio is significantly less, maybe ~5. (Better number welcome.) Once you factor in the larger upfront energy costs of rail infrastructure, trains still do better in terms of carbon output, but only after a lot of usage.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/how-green-hig...
I doubt the GO train's passenger load factor is as good as AmTrak, for example.
And per Carbon Engineering, it also depends on how your hydrocarbon fuel is generated too :)
That article looks at transnational train tickets, those tickets are notoriously more expensive than domestic ones.
And yet thousands of people do every month.
There is a lot about transportation that the HN crowd doesn't understand.
Distance to the airport vs. train station depends on where you live. I'm actually closer to an airport than a train station, though I believe that for most people in cities it's the other way around.
You also need to throw cars in there. In the US, I fear the choice is usually car vs. plane not train vs. plane, as passenger rail just doesn't go enough places. Making trains faster would be great for places that already have trains (say, DC to Boston, which is currently doable by train but a bit slow), but wouldn't help with all the places not currently served. Now, if we were to actually ban or hugely tax planes for environmental reasons, that might spur the creation of more passenger rail. I don't see that happening in the US until South Florida goes underwater though.
Air travel requires security because it's uniquely vulnerable to bombs and hijack. That is why high speed trains require little or no security checks.
It was added because planes kept getting hijacked or blown up in the 70s. Security didn't just magically appear one day because politicians thought it'd be great to annoy more people. The former doesn't really apply to trains and the latter is less catastrophic.
The real way to prevent these attacks lies with intelligence agencies, to stop them wayyy before it becomes the airport's problem.
Well, if the bad guy was denied boarding, then by definition the security is not "pure theater", and at-least as far as the screening is concerned, it did work as intended. It seems obvious to me that at this moment in time, the populace is more sensitive to violence occurring in certain kinds ofplaces. The idea that the same could occur in a park or a train or a bus or a stadium is not lost on anyone.
This is a very American-centric kind of cynicism and myopia. In countries that had to cope with hijackings and terrorist bombings for decades before 9/11, this kind of "theater" is effective and welcome.
If there was an outbreak of aircraft hijacking among men with pierced noses it would probably not be too problematic to profile for it at least initially.
At the Tokyo Narita airport, this Japanese guy in jeans and a leisure jacket standing next to me suddenly pulled out a badge and said (in English), "Police." That was unusual, but he went away after asking me a few questions about where I was going.
When I arrived at Sapporo, I collected my bag and was walking to the bus when this Japanese guy in jeans and a leisure jacket walked over to me, pulled out a badge, and said (in English), "Police." He too asked me a few questions and went away.
When I returned to the airport a few hours later to fly back to Tokyo, this young woman in an Oakland Raiders jacket came over to where I was buying a drink from a vending machine and asked where I was from. I told her that I was actually from northern California and the Raiders were my home team. After chatting with her for a couple minutes, I went to find my gate, and as I was walking this Japanese guy in jeans and a leisure jacket stepped over to me and pulled out a badge and said (in English), "Police."
And yes, it happened again one more time when I got back to Narita.
So the MO was obviously, "Find all visually identifiable persons of non-Japanese ethnicity and conduct a brief interview. And dress casually!"
It was slightly annoying, but they were all reasonably polite. I told the fourth cop that I had been stopped four times that day, and asked why they were doing it, and he told me there was some sort of Asian economic summit happening. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm neither American, nor ever been to that country, so I find this quite impossible.
It's even quite funny how someone can visit Toledo and pass big freaking swords through the security check, some of which even sold right in Toledo's railway station, if he bought it there and has the receipt.
>only in the US
Huh? Although processes are not identical to the US, there has been a significant increase in security in other countries. The UK for one is almost indistinguishable from the US. (No shoes off but they actually more rules in terms of removing electronics.
Not a scientific sample, to be sure!
Yet 100 people survived with injuries rather than dying. An airplane crash frequently kills all aboard.
This seems to be happening, though very slowly.
I read recently (late last year?) about an American airport that is once again allowing non-ticketed passengers to greet people coming off the jetway. And another airport that is once again allowing parking near the terminal.
FWIW, in Japan for domestic flights, air travel is quite streamlined compared to the US or Europe (since they have to compete with bullet trains!)
No ID check, no check-in (use QR code on phone). Some airports have automatic baggage check machines.
Boarding doesn't start until 15 minutes before departure (tickets are sold from vending machines until 20 min before departure)
Security is light (liquids are allowed, they have a sniffer device)
Airports can be located centrally (e.g. Fukuoka airport is a 10 minute subway ride from the center, in Tokyo it's more like 30 min)
Living here in Japan, my cutover to fly is around 600 km. Part of that is due to geography (trains have to take a detour due to an ocean), but the #1 reason is that flying is cheaper.
There is more to this competition than raw speed. There is also capacity and environmental footprint (carbon per passenger). Aircraft have different logistical advantages. An airport runway can handle far more people than a rail line. Airports can land a plane every minute. A rail line would never dare have two high speed trains that close to each other. So, as a link between two points, a pair of airports can move more people than a train in most circumstances. That is a type of 'faster'.
Trains would normally win on carbon footprint, but bullet trains don't run on solar power. Their carbon footprint isn't zero. And one must consider total journeys. If the train infrastructure is widespread, great, but it often isn't. Dropping a new airport somewhere is far cheaper (in every regard) than plowing a new rail line through the countryside. It may work in Japan, but I doubt trains will be connecting Vancouver to Calgary anytime this century.
During peak times this is true, but the ramp is still a huge bottleneck for overall capacity at most airports. Listen to the ground control frequency at a busy airport like JFK for a good example of this.
Why the difference? If I naively guessed, I would think that trains were easier to control and more predictable, so the docking rate should theoretically be higher than for a plane.
Is the real limitation not the docking, but the high speed travel up to he docking? Trains all follow the same track, but planes can travel in parallel until 5e final approach?
On top of that, many railroads still operate with a static set of blocks, where the track is divided into areas called blocks that do not change over time. Only one train has essentially a lock on a block at a time. So a train has to own the block it is on, but also needs to get access to the next block early enough to avoid an emergency braking event. This reduces the capacity of a line.
There's a movement towards "moving block" systems, where railroads use sensors to track train movement and create a moving buffer around the train, which should increase capacity.
Maybe not every minute, but the bullet train runs every 10 minutes during peak hour with up to 1300 passengers. I don't think that capacity is adequate for measuring 'faster' here.
100 people per (large) bus at 10 busses per minute = 1000 persons per minute. That rivals a runway full of a380s for shear people-moving power.
China is building driverless low-medium speed maglevs:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-t...
I’d like to see one of your studies to see the assumptions.
60 mph buses don’t really seem like a great way to travel.
Definitely false. The most efficient runways (say Gatwick) manage 8-9,000 pax per hour, with a huge chunk of departures delayed due to runway congestion. The Tokaido Shinkansen line manages more than 20,000 per hour and most are on-time (and could run at night because noise is less of an issue).
It helps that 750-pax trains take a minute to board and can be run every 3-4 minutes if needed.
The N700 shinkansen is the big exception with >1300 seats 16-cars trainsets, though it's on the slow side (tops out at 285km/h). The CR400 comes close with 1200 seats 16-cars trainsets (and an operational speed of 350, which should eventually be increased to the design speed of 400).
These systems are working as intended. It’s about extracting money from travelers, not time savings or energy efficiency.
I would be astounded if there weren’t overt or covert flows of cash from the taxi companies to the decisionmakers that blockade these projects.
They all really need to be under one thumb.
LGA has several express buses, one linking it to the N/W and Manhattan, the other linking it to the 7/E/F/M/R. The bus that goes to N/W and Manhattan is the "obvious" choice but is terrible and slow, the bus that goes to the 7/E/F/M/R makes 0 stops on the way to the subway and is very fast. Since the MTA added that route, going to or from LGA has been significantly less terrible.
It is not a train, but it's efficient and cheap for the MTA to operate. It is crazy that there is no train directly to the airport, but it's more about NIMBY-ism and cost than any real desire to screw people. People live in the neighborhood around the airport; they don't want their house torn down so some tourists don't have to take the bus. Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know... but in the meantime the express bus does OK.
Soon it will.
It's just been granted authority to expand down to next to the airport. The airport is the next logical step.
The reason the LV monorail doesn't go to the airport is because at the time it was constructed the taxi lobby was very powerful.
Uber and Lyft radically changed that and the taxi companies are now struggling (and rightfully so). This reduced their power, allowing the monorail to expand unimpeded by legacy interests.
If they use the technology, they’ll be saving billions of riders many hours a year.
According to China Railway, from 300 km/h to 350 km/h will increase resistance by 40%, power consumption by more than 50%.
China already has trains with similar speed.
If generation gets cleaner and cheaper that's less relevant. We only know one way to power aircraft and CO2 is intrinsic to it.
Ars rewrites stories for Americans. Of course you’ll use mph. That’s how you draw in readers.
Every design is trying to minimize air resistance. Why not wrap already existing high speed rail lines with a cheap air barrier then create a wind tunnel inside rather than a vacuum? If you could move air at a similar speed to the train you could achieve wind resistance that is effectively negligible or even negative.
Am I thinking about this wrong? Is the energy required to remove all air from a tube significantly lower than pushing air through the tube while a train moves?
You do save the energy needed to part the air aside as the train moves forward, since the air barrier would have a constant cross-section. I don’t know how that compares to the increase in friction due to greater surface.
Finally, other aspect I just realized: when you try to stop the train, you have a rush of air pushing you at several hundred Km/h, and that would be an enormous mass. You could enter a side branch which would then close behind the train and have a smaller mass of air to slow down.
I’m not an engineer and have no experience on the subject, but my hunch is that it could easily end up being even more difficult.
Moving to high speed rail would also raise the profile of rail, and likely make it a stronger target of TSA, so you'd likely have the TSA induced delays for it just like for flying.
High speed rail might make sense on east coast (NY to DC is about 230 miles), but you'd never get the rights of way to lay the kind of track you'd need to approach 200 mph. They gave up on expanding the interstate system in this area many years ago for this reason.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa...
The sole reason this hasn’t happened in a while is that nobody is really making any efforts to mass murder with airplanes, TSA or no TSA.
We should probably just shut it down and save the money at this point.
That's quite the contradiction.
Additionally, it seems you're failing to take into account that high-speed railways also enable suburban and even urban services, which are not possible with airways.
Um .. Russia? Lower population density, larger land mass and vastly larger and superior high speed rail infrastructure. No sorry, for US distances we're still super behind.
Here in the US where jet travel is safe, it makes no sense to get on board a train when you can fly there so much more quickly.
Adding in high speed trains doesn't change that. They're just too slow to make a difference.
California kinda fucked theirs up royally, sadly. I really wish they hadn't, because then at least the US would be on track to having two major new high speed rail systems.
If Florida's system is successful, I can see Virgin Trains pushing to get lines extended to Atlanta and Nashville. I think once people really saw it in wide use, demand would go up and we'd see the East Cost AmTrak corridor upgraded as well.
The design goal was to minimize the shock from entering tunnels.