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Comment by Denvercoder9 | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of an intrinsic problem with transport that needs infrastructure along the whole route (i.e. trains and cars). You need a minimum amount of travel along a route for it to be worth it to construct and maintain that infrastructure. The system naturally evolves to a hub-and-spoke model.

Planes just need infrastructure at both ends, so it's a lot easier to create a point-to-point model.

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It's far from just the infrastructure, if you're looking at HSR; Bordeaux to Lyon as an aviation route is mostly served by E190's, each seating 100 people, whereas a TGV Réseau seats 377 (which I believe is the lowest capacity of any current TGV). Clearly the train can have the advantage of intermediate stops, but you're starting off with much higher capacity to fill.

And sure, you could build a very short train, but a lot of the efficiencies of rail are built on transporting large numbers of people at once.

I'm surprised they're running jets instead of turboprops, but maybe fuel efficiency is too high in my mind.

Only Chalair runs a small handful of ATRs.

Air France Hop and easyJet, the two operators of the route, only fly jets. In the Hop case, post-pandemic they'll be operating ERJs and E-Jets; in the easyJet case, they'll be operating A320 family aircraft.

Note that Hop did have various ATR 42/72s until 2019/20, when they got rid of their (fairly recent) ATR 72-600s. It is perhaps surprising that they now are jet-only, but at least pre-pandemic the plan was for them to long-term be operating only CRJ1000 and E-190s, both of which are notably larger than the largest turboprops on the market. I don't know what their average sector length is, but it's certainly not implausible that the fuel efficiency per passenger isn't that much worse (and easyJet's A320s almost certainly beat any turboprop on a per passenger basis given their average loadings).

You’ll end up main connections and smaller ones to reach smaller destinations. This doesn’t mean it needs a single center like Paris. Compare the map to Germany where there are roughly 3 parallel fast North-South lines not focused on a single center.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#/m...

Population in France is much more concentrated around Paris than population in Germany is. The Paris metro area accounts for 20% of France's population, while you need the biggest three metro areas in Germany to get to that percentage. Also Germany has double the population density, so even the less dense parts have more people.

> Also Germany has double the population density, so even the less dense parts have more people.

That is not causal.

Some countries have a higher population density, but the population is mostly concentrated in one area and the low density areas are really low density.

I presume there is a standard way to compare density distributions between countries.

It's actually not just population density. A big part of it is economic and bureaucratic activity. In France everything is centred around Paris, in Germany that's very different, e.g. Berlin is not a very big economic hub (although that's changing somewhat).

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