Let's invest in a high speed national passenger rail system!
Obviously, for a given number of passengers, more space = more cars or larger cars. But I'm curious if giving passengers 8" of extra legroom is cheaper per passenger-mile for trains than it is for airlines. I'd assume so.
IIRC the NEC in America can accommodate 16-car trains but not all trains are that long.
IIRC in its early days JetBlue used to strip out a row of seats in its a320s to get a number divisible by 50. The rearranging of the rest of the seats allowed them to advertise having the largest domestic economy seat pitch in America, which was a happy side effect.
Planes also have higher energy consumption given that they have to move you vertically and horizontally, and electric trains have an even greater advantage since electricity is a lot less prone to swings than fuel.
The Interstate system is not high-capacity enough for all long distance travel to be in hermetically sealed private cars.
The literal footprint of a rail system is also very large; clearing and grading rail lines across the country would have a significant environmental impact.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/drageq.html for the drag side.
There are also a huge number of fuel consumption, economic analysis, and environmental impact studies, but I am sure you can find those easily if you're interested.
This will not be any different nationally. It might actually be quite worse.
A plane is about 5 tons an hour, or 10kg per 300 people per mile, so 30kg of jet fuel per 1000 people per mile, or 1.2GJ
So a cruising a330 uses about 10 times the energy per passenger mile as an ICE high speed train.
Clearly the comparison of polution caused it then affected by how green the electricity source is and the extra environmental impact of burning fuel in the high atmosphere.
citation needed. It helps a lot that (electric) trains do not need to carry their own fuel. Also, trains can run on low-carbon energy, whereas there is no viable alternative to jet fuel at the moment, and producing that from net-zero-carbon processes (akin to biodiesel) is not economical.
* trains are long
* trains travel slower than airplanes, and drag is proportional to the square of speed
* making conclusions solely based drag coefficients from the density of the air is sound reasoning
One of these statements is false. I get that hackernews is just a forum for casual discussion of various technical topics, but overly categorical statements based on a reasoning in a vacuum (no pun in intended) just force the conversation into unproductive threads like this one. I'm kinda sorry I took the bait at this point.
I hear this sentiment a lot, and I don't understand it. Trying to speak the truth isn't just optional outside formal contexts. There's no situation so casual that I it suddenly becomes appropriate to make up bullshit and present it as facts.
That is to say, I agree with your larger point: if nickff wants to make the claim that trains consume more energy than aircraft, he'd better come up with a reasonable source for that information.
I think if you want to make this analysis come out you need to include starting/stopping losses (and maybe fuel hauling, empty car overhead, etc...) to the train trip or somesuch. Naively trains are going to win and it's not even close.
* Transportation infrastructure is a societal investment that produces benefits, it's not just about its cost. Investing in terrestrial transportation like trains, even if it is more expensive can give rise to proportionally greater societal benefits than air travel--think, a long-haul train has multiple stops, providing connection points for economic activity (smaller towns and cities connected through train stations) that planes clearly cannot. I actually think it's totally OK that trains require more investment because they may create larger network effects in the big picture.
* In some sense, all societal spending is make-work. If we're going to have make-work programs, we might as well spend it on the best long-term strategy, which in my honest opinion, having lived in Europe for a number of years, is cities being well-connected with cheap and fast rail, subways, and trams.
* Climate change is a real thing, and it's due mostly to CO2 emissions. It's gonna cost money to fix. We need to stop deploying the "but itz mah dollarzzzes" as an excuse not to act. We need to start thinking about paying back the absolutely massive debt we racked up from cheap and easy energy.
* Carbon offsets are a shell game that we can play in the short run, but ultimate we need to get to zero carbon footprint, which cannot be accomplished with offsets alone.
In summary, we better start paying up.
Put military spending, corporate tax rates, and upper income tax rates back to where they were, and re-allocate that money to productive infrastructure and it'll be fine.
So, yeah, regardless of how you feel about the goal, I don't think it's unfair to say that trillions of dollars in US taxation and spending were chosen primarily for their rhetorical effect. Being able to say "but we can't afford that!" was a top goal in recent tax policy.
Well. I did some basic math. The figures I found online indicate that the 2017 tax cuts reduced total revenues in 2018 from forecasts, by about $275 billion.
The June 2020 deficit was, as noted, $864 billion in a single month. This suggests that the added revenue from restoring taxes to "where they were" would pay for June's deficit over the next ~4 years — well, three and a bit, and you have to account for the revenue drop in a crisis.
This is, of course, on top of the $779 billion deficit in 2018 and the $984 billion deficit in 2019. And, of course, there are multiple months in 2020.
I think the general point stands, unless you're going to raise taxes VERY high or go full "money printer go brr" perhaps?
It's probably fair to say that all this would have a big impact on that deficit.
It's unlikely to cover the 2020 economic-crash monthly deficit, of course... but hard times are the right time to go full deficit-spending to try to prop up the economy. Money printer can, indeed, go brr if it'll slow a collapse. So says mainstream economic theory.
Do you think this proposed investment is being made with conservative, reliable underwriting, such that we can be confident that it will deliver value?
[0] Most likely mass unemployment due to the corona virus.
Yet we are told, no!, do not pay this man, we can't afford it. We cannot get that day back when the sun sets.
Economics has let us down very, very badly.
Since I live in EU that would only make sense for this to be multinational and therefore probably never get built. Also it would require our leaders to think about the future and not just about how to get more votes.
First-and-last mile delivery need the flexibility of trucks, there's no way around it. So an expanded railway system and electric trucks are the way to go I believe.
When travelling on our highway (e-45) I see many trucks which are not first/last mile but more likely in the 1000 km range. I think that we should consider smaller trains which cost more to establish but could use some of the power getting wasted (wind/solar) at times where it is generated but the demand is low.
The only country that I’m aware of that did both great on the same network was China, but they ran into capacity issues so they spent hundreds of billions to move people onto a brand new dedicated passenger high speed rail network and now the legacy slow one has more room for freight.
Another factor to consider is that total time for air travel for the covid context should include sitting on a tarmac and loading / unloading.
[1] https://misc.transport.rail.europe.narkive.com/ffTnAi0D/seat...
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/195131
Trains used to be high speed new technology. If the government got out of the way (I'm looking at you, California high speed train fiasco) we'd be fine and there would be great systems.