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Comment by cheerlessbog | Hacker News Reader

Faster trains make longer distances competitive with air travel. Assuming a similar price per mile, the cutoff is T * deltaV where T is the extra time to travel to and from the airport and get through security and deltaV is the difference in speed. Assuming 3 hours and 250mph (500 - 250) the cutover is 750 miles.

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-...

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> Assuming 3 hours and 250mph (500 - 250) the cutover is 750 miles

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.

True. I was pleasantly surprised when I took a domestic flight in Japan and didn't have to interact with anyone until showing up at the gate and boarding.

Narita airport is by far the best I've ever been to. The organization and processing was so intuitive that despite knowing ~zero Japanese I was able to navigate without looking anything up.

That's great to hear. In contrast, I was in Russia last year and it was hard to buy a train ticket and they had this airport-style security checkpoint even for buying tickets (and the security theatre at the airports were even worse).

Slow security is not inherent to air travel; it's something that was tacked on by politicians. It could easily be added to trains. (Or removed from planes, though I'm not holding my breath.)

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.

> Slow security is not inherent to air travel; it's something that was tacked on by politicians.

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.

High speed trains go through city centers and are vulnerable to bombs

Yes, but it's hard to use a train the way the 9/11 attacks used planes. They were able to take the planes and magnify the damage, casualties, and spectacle and they had a high degree of freedom in picking targets. Much harder to pull that off with a train; you'd make the news, but not stun the world.

I have never understood why, post 9/11, planes were not modified to remove the cabin to cockpit door, and make the cockpit door a separate entrance. This would more or less completely remove the possibility of a second 9/11 attack, and would render airplanes no more attractive a target than any other group of several hundred people.

That might be inconvenient, because aircraft staff sometimes needs to talk to pilots or make them sign some documents.

Also, the pilots would need their own bathroom.

The cockpit door was reinforced and can’t be easily broken down now. That has achieved effectively the same thing.

Pilots need access to a toilette, but also there are rare cases where pilots need to look out of side windows. There's also flights with crew changes. And the very rare case of crew incapacitation. A case where a pilot needed to gain access to the cockpit but couldn't, Germanwings Flight 9525.

Likely cheaper to make a tougher door than build a new entrance and moving arm for people thing.

How is that any different than roads and sidewalks?

While there might not be much value in hijacking a train, it’s still a tube full of people packed in close proximity. At the point US train travel picks up, expect to see DHS running the same kind of security checkpoints for high speed rail that they do at airports.

Whether it's the same type/degree of security as airports, which likely adds very little over basic scanning, it wouldn't take a lot for calls to have long distance train travel institute the same level of security as is common at concerts, government buildings, some libraries/museums, etc.

Having people go through a metal detector and scanning their baggage on entering a train station is very viable and occasionally done (I think Paris did that). But usually checks are fast since they have to conform to existing train schedules.

>Or removed from planes, though I'm not holding my breath.

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.

Please, modern day airport security is pure theater designed to make naive people have the illusion of safety, and for politicians to line up the pockets of some contractors. If a terrorist has arrived at the airport with intent to cause harm, security has already failed. It doesn't matter if the guy doesn't get on the plane - he could just do it in the terminal and cause even more casualties.

The real way to prevent these attacks lies with intelligence agencies, to stop them wayyy before it becomes the airport's problem.

>It doesn't matter if the guy doesn't get on the plane - he could just do it in the terminal and cause even more casualties.

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.

If you want to cause a high number of casulties one of the most effective places to plant a bomb would probably be the line in front of an airport security checkpoint. But of course "causing casulties" and "causing terror" isn't nessesarily the same.

There's a lot of places with packed lines however bombs aren't that great in open spaces. A similarly sized bomb on a plane would kill a lot more people. Most mass casualty bombings seem to involve multiple coordinated attacks in dense locations and still don't get near the death toll of a single medium sized airplane.

Please, modern day airport security is pure theater designed to make naive people have the illusion of safety, and for politicians to line up the pockets of some contractors

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.

The US also dealt with a lot of hijackings and bombings decades ago. Mysteriously they mostly stopped once security and metal detectors got implemented.

An American glad to hear this. However, is it the same theater or a somewhat different one?

Mostly a very different one, and there are varied approaches. One of the more successful ones is Israel, where they do the standard bag scanning etc but spend most of their effort on screening for suspicious people and then more thoroughly inspecting them. The US system seems to mostly ignore what's effective or efficient and works mostly as a jobs program.

I suppose the system seems efficient as long as you don’t look like a “suspicious people.” I was kind of surprised when in Denmark I was accused of lying about liquids being in my bag, pulled aside, had everything searched and tossed out the bag, and then was mocked for the (potentially excessive) amount of Läkerol candies I had. After they admitted there were no liquids or other contraband I was shooed out while trying to precariously balance my electronics, clothes and other items... So much for efficiency.

Israel’s “successful” system is just racial profiling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_profiling_in_Israel

At what point is it wrong to profile someone? If every terrorist and no one else had a blue crystal at the end of their nose, could we use that as a signal to check these people? What if every terrorist and 1 innocent had that? Where is the line drawn between when you can and can't use a data point to influence your decision? For what it's worth, I'm a man, and it seems that men tend to be more violent and more likely to be terrorists than women. I wouldn't mind if I on average got extra scrutiny because of my gender relative to women.

The problem is when you profile for negative behavior based on characteristics that attract bigotry and prejudice. Whatever your motivation is, you're reinforcing the negative dynamic.

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.

That's sometimes how Japan does it as well. A few years back I had to take a day trip from Tokyo to Sapporo to install a piece of hardware.

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)_/¯

To be fair, you could have been profiled based on your choice of shoes or hairstyle. Without knowing who else they stopped you can't really tell whether it was about etnicity or something else.

Yes, but I have a hunnnnnch...

Racial profiling is a part of it, but a large part is also seeing how people are acting around the airport and reacting to security and questions. Putting down the entire approach just because you don't agree with one facet of it is unfair.

> This is a very American-centric kind of cynicism and myopia.

I'm neither American, nor ever been to that country, so I find this quite impossible.

The Madrid train bombings were pretty catastrophic by any measure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

That took 10 separate bombs across 4 trains and killed 193 people. For comparison, a single Airbus A380 can carry over 500 people. So basically, an order of magnitude more deaths if the same scale of attack was carried out on airplanes instead.

IIRC, Spain introduced airport-style security checks in Spain's high-speed railway services after the Madrid bombing.

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.

The bulk of it was added, only in the US, after 2001.

Screening increased (and restrictions were added) after 2001. But the earlier hijackings caused the debut of metal detectors and security screening generally which had been pretty much non-existent before. Anyone could just breeze up to the gate and it was common to see people off or greet them there.

>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.

In my travels in < 10 non US countries since 2001, the security hassle has varied, but always been substantially lower.

Not a scientific sample, to be sure!

Air travel fails catastrophically when it fails, not just due to attacks but in accidents as well, and I think that's the main difference.

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

> the worst high-speed-rail disaster worldwide

Yet 100 people survived with injuries rather than dying. An airplane crash frequently kills all aboard.

Half the passengers survived the recent plane crash in Moscow. vOv

Look at this list of disasters, it's pretty long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_accidents_and...

Or removed from planes, though I'm not holding my breath

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.

200 miles ? Lyon from Paris is 467km (290 miles) and Marseille is 482 miles from Paris and you'd have to be an idiot to take an airplane (or more likely, have a connection) from those cities.

That article looks at transnational train tickets, those tickets are notoriously more expensive than domestic ones.

Airport overhead varies too. CDG is particularly painful to travel to and traverse based on my experience. SAN is basically downtown.

Getting from the gate to your rental car absolutely SUCKS in any country that's not the US. Easily adds another 1-2 hours to your overhead.

you'd have to be an idiot to take an airplane (or more likely, have a connection) from those cities.

And yet thousands of people do every month.

There is a lot about transportation that the HN crowd doesn't understand.

Which is nothing in comparison to the thousands of people doing it every HOUR by train.

And they probably all have a connection to somewhere else :-). Paris - Lyon for example is only Air France flights for people with a connection.

I just booked a plane 220 miles from London to Paris. Ticket was £38 vs £135 for the train.

The Eurostar is a specific beast.

> CO2 emissions are up to 30x higher by air

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...

That depends entirely on how your electricity is generated, right? For example, French trains presumably do a lot better than merely 10x.

Depends on how many passengers are on the train. Here in Ontario, the provincial trains along the busiest corridor in the province (probably the country) are, anecdotally, about 5% full per average unit distance travelled, even at peak times in the busiest legs of the corridor, you're likely to see about a fifth of the seats empty.

I doubt the GO train's passenger load factor is as good as AmTrak, for example.

Agreed, though my impression is that most of the highest speed trains are in Japan, which nationally runs roughly 80% on fossil fuels.

And per Carbon Engineering, it also depends on how your hydrocarbon fuel is generated too :)

Whack thing about Japan and fossil fuels is it's totally untapped geothermal.

I'd gladly trade the extra time for the increased comfort. And, there's likely less parking/check-in/boarding time with trains.

Ditto. Even with America’s subpar train travel, I still love to take trains when I can.

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.

Yes I didn't account for the quality of experience. The TGV is delightful to ride: quiet and smooth. I'd prefer almost any train to air just for the ability to move around. I still have flashbacks to a flight where I was crammed in the corner behind a huge guy.

With the under construction Hokkaido shinkansen extension to Sapporo, a 360kph train along Tohoku shinkansen has estimated travel time of 4 hours from Tokyo to Sapporo, making it competitive with air travel.(Approx. 1100km by rail track)

Tokyo to sapporo with a plane is still only only one and half hour. Granted you still are required to spend some time at the airport.

Tokyo Station to Haneda is 25 minutes transit, Chitose Airport to Sapporo Station is a 45 minute train ride, and you would want at least 20-30 mins before boarding to get through security (even in Japan). Add in a few minutes walking/waiting for trains and it takes that 1.5 hour plane ride up to 3.5 hours minimum.

The market is less of people in southwestern Tokyo and Yokohama (closer to Haneda), and more of people in northern Tokyo and Saitama -- those that board at Ueno or Omiya station.

>>> Faster trains make longer distances competitive with air travel.

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.

> Airports can land a plane every minute.

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.

> Airports can land a plane every minute. A rail line would never dare have two high speed trains that close to each other.

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?

Because if a plane has a problem, those behind it can maneuver around in three dimensions. Trains move in one dimension. If a train has an accident (ie comes to an unexpected stop) the trains behind it must be far enough away that they can also stop. They cannot maneuver around the blockage. Allowing for detection and communication times, at 400+kph that safety margin will be much more than a minute.

That’s technically true, but for any distance that is resembling of a train’s stopping distance, planes are fairly one dimensional, too. Passenger planes feel agile from the inside, but from the outside they’re just about a hundred tonnes on a tube of aluminium hurtling forwards at all costs, with just about as much steering capability as that begets.

The limitation for train capacity is the need to maintain a "block" to ensure that a train has enough time to brake in the case of an emergency, without hitting the train in front of it. For Japan's high speed rail, it takes ~2.5 miles to stop a train.

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.

> A rail line would never dare have two high speed trains that close to each other.

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.

1300 every 10 minutes = 130 people per minute. A normal 2-lane road can achieve better using buses.

You only get at most about 1500 cars per hour per lane. Or 25 cars per minute.

That's why I said buses. This issue has been studied many many times. The dirty secret is that dedicated 'bus only' lanes, with lots of full buses using them, move more people across a point per minute than most any other ground option.

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.

How long does it take to get 100 people in a bus?

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.

China carried 10 billion people by high-speed rail last year.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1149608.shtml

> An airport runway can handle far more people than a rail line.

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.

Not bullet trains. As speeds increase, the safe distance between trains (both in time and space) must also increase. No rail line (line, not station) can handle one bullet train every minute. A large railway station can indeed handle more than a single runway, but apples and oranges. A rail station can have multiple rail lines just as an airport can run multiple runways.

Maybe not every minute, but in Japan, the same track can handle a new bullet train every few minutes, like clockwork. The throughput is enormous. And the footprint of a track is much, much smaller than a single runway, so it's not uncommon for even modest rail stations to have 15+ tracks. Chicago O'Hare has the most runways of any airport in the US, at 8, and they aren't all usable at the same time, since they intersect, and wind direction varies. And that's an enormous facility.

But in the same area for 1 runway + required buffer, you can fit A LOT of train platforms (also including required buffer, which is essentially nil).

I was thinking BART ten car trains carry as many passengers as two 747's or five 737's.

high-speed trains generally have lower capacity (and better seating), usually 300~600 though they're normally designed to be coupled (you can pair two trainsets) into a "single train", passengers can't move from one to the other but the sets are solidly linked and behave as a single train for density purposes).

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).

I guarantee you CN has lines connecting Calgary and Vancouver today.

Not for passengers. Not anything that in any way competes with flying.

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