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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I guess I wouldn’t have thought that expensive for intercity travel. Certainly doesn’t strike me as such relative to shorter haul European trains I’ve taken.

And in the US, I’m a decent fraction of that ($13) just to take the commuter rail into the city one way.

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Same here, I've taken the London to Edinburgh on LNER and Virgin East Coast multiple times and it runs about £40 each way.

And my 30 mile train into Manhattan is $14

$36 one way for a 5 hour train seems pretty cheap.

The problem is that the train has to compete with 3 hours by car... And then the ability to actually use a car at your destination. The transit systems in either Seattle, or Portland, are nowhere near as good as they are in New York.

If you factor in wear and tear, parking, etc. It’s probably still cheap.

You can also rent a car when you get there for something like the same amount for the day and not worry about the wear and tear part.

Much of my car's wear and tear is from age, so I can discount some amount of that that. Free parking is plentiful in 95% of both cities.

Driving 1 person is already close to the price of a train ticket. Driving 2 people is ~50% discounted. Driving 2 people, and then not having to rent a car/taxi, is something like a ~75% discount.

With a real carbon tax, these numbers would look a lot closer to eachother.

With a real carbon tax these numbers would actually be further apart. I was surprised to learn that in the real world trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius. In fact I'd be willing to bet that there are only a few of city/regional public transportations systems in the world that are more energy efficient than just taking your Prius.

https://theicct.org/blogs/staff/planes-trains-and-automobile...

Interestingly, the Swiss railway system publishes real-world figures on its Co2 efficiency per passenger-kilometer. [https://www.mobitool.ch/de/tools/vergleichsrechner-15.html, german-only, un nfortunately]

They report some 80 passenger-km per liter of Diesel equivalent energy, compared to 13 passenger-km in a modern hybrid. Both values include the energy production, utilization and energy expenditure for infrastructure.

This assumes a modern network with electric trains though. I'm not sure if the article you cited still uses diesel-powered trains to arrive at such extremely different figures.

But that's just looking at fuel efficiency. What about the carbon cost of manufacture? How long does a train car stay in service vs a prius? What is the cost to manufacture a train car vs individual prii for n passengers?

Depends where you want to go in the city and what you want to do. Portland has some hellish traffic at times, and free parking isn't as plentiful as you describe. The inner suburbs all have metered parking on 2+ lane streets, and extremely competitive side street parking. Plus, the west side suburbs have zoned parking to keep out non-locals: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/39277

Taking a bike is a much easier thing to do if you want easy access to the inner burbs and urban core of Portland.

An anytime return London Edinburgh £323, off peak £238, super off peak £147. Anytime first class return is £504.

Regardless of what you think of these fares (it is cheaper if you book in advance), considering HMRC allows you to write off 45p/mile and it is slightly over 800 miles, only the anytime return is really more expensive if travelling for work vs a car. Plus you'll have £30-40/day parking in central london on top, so apart from the first class return the train (even at its most eye wateringly expensive) is cheaper than a car.

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