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High speed rail tops out around 300km/h. Average speeds of 200km/h are doable if you don't have too many stops on the way. Five hours or so from train station to train station doesn't sound so bad compared to flying. It depends on the price of course. The Berlin-Munich high speed line is quite popular and takes around five hours. German high speed trains are slower than e.g. Shinkansen, so the slightly longer distance between Melbourne and Sydney should be doable in a similar time.

Personally for the same price I would go by rail - chiefly because of legroom.

I'm not sure the premise holds.

The Sydney<->Melbourne airway is one of the busiest in the world. That means whilst you do have a lot of people who want the fastest time, you also have a lot of people who just want to get there.

You have tourists and families who are willing to give up time if it means they can get other things. Like easy access to toilets, food, and the ability to move around freely. They will doubly be likely to give up on time if it also lets them save on cost. (Flights seem to average $100-300/adult).

High speed rail isn't exactly cheap in terms of tickets. The path I used in the past (Zurich - Paris) is more expensive than the plane. I still choose the train because it's nicer and connects city centres.

Also, it's at 600km, and I do agree with the GP that my percieved benefit of the train would disappear if it was any further. I.e. it's at the limit of what I consider useful.

You can almost always get more planes going on the busy route.

The plane gets subsidies: there are no taxes on fuel for example.

No taxes on fuel isn’t a subsidy, there’s a natural race to the bottom on fuel prices because airlines can easily put more fuel in in a cheaper country.

Meanwhile, in Germany and France nearly 30% of the total cost of rail service is directly covered by the government, and it’s still more expensive than flying.

It's still a subsidy (if the rail traffic is taxed and not supported by govt), except that it's a weird kind of subsidy that's near impossible to eliminate.

Also not necessarily true, you can't land a big plane with too much fuel.

>airlines can easily put more fuel in in a cheaper country.

Wouldn't you then end up using a lot of the fuel just carrying the extra fuel? This cost could negate the tax savings.

> No taxes on fuel isn’t a subsidy, there’s a natural race to the bottom on fuel prices because airlines can easily put more fuel in in a cheaper country.

There is not, simply because the maximum take-off weight is way larger than maximum landing weight - you can't just shuttle around fuel because you can't land the plane when it's loaded. This is also the reason why airplanes have to dump fuel when emergency/unplanned (e.g. due to medical emergency) landing. While the passengers may survive a full weight landing, the plane will incur heavy damage.

> why airplanes have to dump fuel when emergency/unplanned (e.g. due to medical emergency) landing

Though perhaps that's not the best example - for a really urgent medical emergency where every minute matters, an overweight landing would certainly be considered ahead of wasting precious time dumping fuel. Equally, there are a few more other types of emergencies where you'd want to get back onto the ground ASAP even if that means exceeding the maximum landing weight.

> While the passengers may survive a full weight landing, the plane will incur heavy damage.

At least these days, all aircraft certified under Part 25 must be able to land at maximum take-off weight with a descent rate of 6 ft/s (360 ft/min), which is already at the border towards what would be considered a hard landing (at maximum landing weight, planes need to allow a landing with 10 ft/s / 600 ft/min without structural damage).

So of course you still need to consider whether the changed performance characteristics (approach speed, required runway length, climb gradient for go-arounds, etc.) at MTOW will still allow you to land safely in that specific situation, but fear of "heavy damage" is not something you need to consider. You might want to bring the plane down a little even more careful than usual, the brakes certainly have to work harder and maybe the plane needs to be inspected afterwards just to be sure, but otherwise you should be fine.

That's not how it works. Arbitraging fuel isn't as easy as driving to another state/indian reservation and buying cheap gas. Planes have maximum rake-off and landing weights. All that extra fuel you're carrying is freight that you couldn't carry. Planes carrying too much fuel (typically because they're making an emergency landing shortly after take-off) have to dump their fuel to meet their maximum landing weight.

I know of no nation that places a special tax on rubber duckies. Is there a conspiracy to give massive subsidies to the production of rubber duckies world-wide? Not taking action against is not the same as acting in favor of.

When there is a tax on rubber duckies when used by the public or road hauliers, but not when used by aviators, there's a subsidy on aviation rubber duck use.

The lack of a tax is not a subsidy. Just because something isn't as taxed as you think correct does not mean it is subsidized. Yes, you can argue that the lack of a tax is a "relative" subsidies but that's just an exercise torturing words until they say what you want them to.

Whether not taxing a particular thing is right or wrong is a totally separate issue.

The EU consider the lack of a tax on a specific sector to be a subsidy. e.g. The UK government's reduction in tax on domestic fuel bills amounted to a subsidy. That made the UK the EU's largest subsidiser of fossil fuels in the face of EU efforts to phase them out.

Good enough for me.

Edit: WTO definition of subsidies includes "government revenue that is otherwise due, foregone or not collected (e.g. fiscal incentives such as tax credits)". Pdf: http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/24-scm.pdf

That's a crazy definition. By that logic, every dollar up to the optimal point on the Laffer Curve is a "subsidy". Not taxing is not a subsidy. Also, I'm not really concerned how the EU defines any thing; I whole-heatedly disagree with almost every thing they do. The article is about America; we can stick with her definitions. Let's try "government hands you a check for doing something", which is basically what most economists use.

"The lack of a tax is not a subsidy." -- dsfyu404ed

Do you have a reference for that claim? Other sources explicitly count tax breaks as a type of subsidy, for instance

"In countries with well-developed tax systems, subsidies provided by reducing companies' tax burdens are commonplace. Examples include tax exemptions (when a tax is not paid), tax credits (which reduce a tax otherwise due), tax deferrals (which delay the payment of a tax) and a host of other instruments. In common language these preferential tax treatments are called tax breaks or tax concessions; public-finance economists refer to them as tax expenditures."

https://web.archive.org/web/20120905082615/http://www.iisd.o...

I recall doing LON ->EDI 20 years ago

Train was £130 and took an entire day one way. BA was £200 and you could do a meeting at 10:00 in Edinburgh and be Back in London for 17:30.

If you went via Easy Jet from Luton it was < £40.

Well that's not a fast train :)

At 650 km of distance a 200 km/h train would do it in slightly over 3 hours.

Which makes it even more sad because it should have definitely been cheaper than planes ...

If you do London->Edinburgh by train now, then assuming you're willing to book to a specific train and book a couple of months in advance (which is probably what you were doing with your plane ticket) then you can get a ticket for 50 or 60 quid each way, total time of about 4 and a half hours. Of course if you're starting a little further north (say, Cambridge), then the train is cheaper still. Plus you have to allow for the cost of getting from where you start to the airport if you're flying. So the economic argument has tilted considerably since your experience of two decades past (though the plane still wins if time-elapsed is your primary requirement).

Personally I take the train for this journey -- last time I did Cambridge to Edinburgh I paid less than 30 quid for the outbound leg and not much more for the return. And you can get decent prices for first class if you want a little bit more luxury at way less of a premium than the airlines will charge you for that...

No these are walk up fares. I volunteered on a Wednesday and was told to report to the Balmoral hotel on Friday not much scope for powergaming.

And time elapsed is a thing here - at the time internally our internal day rate was £300, externally £600 and our peers in the Big 4 consultancies would be north of 1K (but not as good as us)

I’ve done Beijing to Chenzhou a couple of times on China’s HSR. 8 hours, 1700km, but there is no airport in chenzhou so it works out vs flying into Changsha or Guangzhou and transferring to the train for another hour or two (China doesn’t have many airports with train stations, so the transfer is 1+ hours).

They will doubly be likely to give up on time if it also lets them save on cost.

High speed rail is almost never significantly cheaper than flying between major cities, at least in Europe.

Do you really think a ticket on the potential route Sydney-Mel will be <$100 one way?

No, but it might be less than $300.

Norway has several very long railways -- it's a very long country. Oslo-Trondheim is about 500 km, Trondheim-Bodø about 700 km, Oslo-Bergen around 480 km.

Taking the train instead of flying is a popular and relatively cheap activity in Norway. The rail journey, perhaps the Bergen route in particular, is prized for its scenic views. There's even a television program, famously broadcast on national TV, that shows the train journey in real time, filmed from a camera mounted on the front. (You can find it on YouTube. It's great, and it's spawned lots of imitators in places like Switzerland and Turkey.)

Getting to the rest of Europe by rail (via Sweden) is similarly cheap and convenient as an alternative to flying, even if it's slower.

None of these railways classify as high speed, of course.

Paris-London takes 50% share because it’s 2-3x more expensive than flying if you don’t book in advance. And that’s also including the fact that this specific route also has the same level of security you’d get at the airport.

Isn’t flight industry heavily subsidised, too?

Beijing to Shanghai is 1200km and and the high-speed link there seems to thrive just fine

I imagine it depends on the number and scale of existing intermediate cities. The proposed route in Australia passes through nothing of note.

The Beijing to Shanghai HSR is direct. But the same tracks support other lines that stop at other cities along the way.

I suspect they never had to pay for the capital investment (because it was built or subsidised by the government).

A quick search seems to show that a high speed rail ticket is significantly cheaper than flying. Most high speed rail projects that have to, more or less, cover their own costs tend to cost about the same as flying.

Chinese aviation industry is special, a lot of their airspace is military and is closed to commercial aviation which leads to heavy congestion and thus late arrivals and not a lot of slots. Those high speed trains end up being workhorses for their transportation infrastructure.

Tax air travel proportional to its negative externalities - you can start by taxing the fuel like we have to for cars - and suddenly the price difference becomes well worth spending a few more hours in relative comfort.

Car fuel taxes are largely to cover road costs not pollution. Longer term electric cars will probably face similar taxes.

Airlines more directly pay for airports and air traffic control/FAA which covers their infrastructure externalities. https://www.faa.gov/about/budget/aatf/

I think the main point about taxing aviation fuel is the competition against train industry rather than pollution.

Throw in some global carbon tax and I think that's a fine distance for rail.

We really should only be using airlines for intercontinental travel.