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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> There is no reason to fly short distance if you want to go from city center to city center.

In France. In nations like the US (outside the DC-to-Boston corridor anyway) without a well-designed and -maintained rail infastructure, 1-2 hour flights are routine and not really replaceable with other options. Infrastructure investment pays off for decades and decades, and Europe has done really well here.

> However, if you're already arriving or leaving on a long distance flight, the whole overhead of getting to/from/through the airport disappears

That's an infrastructure problem too, though! There's no reason rail service directly to and from airports can't be integrated with the system. It's true in many places already, though I know nothing about France.

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The problem is hub-and-spoke approach of many national carriers (Air France included). Covid travel restrictions aside, one can buy an air itinerary that gets them from NYC to Bordeaux (or Nice, or Nantes, or Toulouse, or Marseille, or Lyon, or Strasbourg) all via CDG.

That airport train station is set up to transport the passengers from the airport to the city center, not inter-city travel.

Air France is right to complaint - banning all those short flights just shifts the juiciest international city pairs to a nearby hub, and what used to be NYC-CDG-BOD will become NYC-LHR-BOD or NYC-MAD-BOD, served by a different airline.

That's not fully correct. CDG and ORY have integrated (or close enough) high speed rail stations that serve other large cities, although that's probably not a great bet.

Most importantly, however, the law being discussed doesn't ban connecting flights. So a NYC -> Le Mans (say) would be allowed to fly through CDG, even though Le Mans is at around one hour by high-speed rail.

However, as there would be less traffic on these routes, I do expect some of them to be more expensive or even dropped altogether.

There's also a provision for "zero carbon" flights which would be allowed to operate on short distances.

The actual law (in French): https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/textes/l15b3875_pr...

> CDG and ORY have integrated (or close enough) high speed rail stations that serve other large cities

Uh ? Since when and where ?

CDG (North of Paris) is on the railway that joins Brussels, Paris, Rennes, Tours, Bordeaux and a number of other major places in France. ORY has a connection with Paris suburban railway network, no direct access to one distance train.

Right. ORY is very close to Massy TGV (2 stops or so on the suburban train) which goes to the west (Rennes) and south (not sur if Bordeaux or Lyon or both).

> That airport train station is set up to transport the passengers from the airport to the city center, not inter-city travel.

Which is why in France and other countries, train stations at airports have high speed rail service to other cities. It's the case at CDG( Paris), Lyon St Exupéry, Amsterdam Schiphol. That way you get there via plane, switch to high-speed rail, and get to your final destination.

NYC-MAD-BOD is a bit closer... My advice is to avoid transferring at CDG at all costs, but LHR is slightly worse imo.

Maybe one day NYC-YUL-BOD will be a valid option to shave off a few hundred miles in the air, but that is another border.

AMS is currently a very typical option as there are links between Amsterdam and all major French cities. I used to take the LAX-AMS-BOD quite often before the pandemic.

Yeah, it’s an EU route from Toronto that was never cut during the pandemic. I think it hasn’t dropped from daily. I guess there’s enough freight (or bailouts?) to keep it afloat.

But it ground my gears that KLM was still bussing from the gate to some aircraft to keep up their drive-through ops efficiency.

If you have a disability changing modes of transportation mid-trip is an extreme hardship. I suffered an injury and needed a wheelchair for about a year while I still had to travel for work three times.

You have no idea how hard basic things can be until you're incapable of doing them on your own.

I had reduced mobility for months, many years ago.

Even though I was already aware of just how difficult it would be to get around, living through it gave a shocking amount of perspective.

Some of the disability accommodations (disability parking) were pure bullshit. Elevators and ramps were godsends.

A large, standing shower without steps and room for a stool were musts.

A taste of what’s to come, when I get older. I don’t really see any real solution either, other than prepping.

I think it’s important to remember that accommodations accommodate a wide range of people and so they’re not one-size-fits all. A parking spot might have been a “bullshit” accommodation for your situation but for others it might be absolutely critical. If an accommodation isn’t necessary for someone’s disability they’re free to leave it open for someone who does.

I'm not sure what you mean about parking. I have a disability, and personally, parking is the most important adaptation.

Grew up with a father who was in a full-time wheelchair. Issue one was availability of spaces. It was amazing to watch people park, hop out of their car and jog in to the store (Dad would say, "being brain dead is a disability, too.). Second issue was having enough space to open the ramp (I'll never forget the time someone parked next to the ramp side door as we were leaving the store. I asked the guy to move and he said no. Fortunately, on my way out a police officer was coming into the store... the county impound moved the car). Third issue is that sometimes the distance between parking and store entrance was quite far.

My beef with it is that people who don’t need the parking manage to get it.

Meanwhile, I technically didn’t qualify for disability so I still had to move through the hard way once I was able to drive again.

It’s somehow an abused system.

You don't even need to be disabled for this to become a serious problem: just take a trip where you need to carry more than one large, heavy, or delicate item of luggage. Switching modes is easy[0] if you're able-bodied and able to travel light. If either or both of those things becomes untrue it's a different story.

[0] Note that switching modes always costs time, sometimes significant amounts of time. In some cases it's time you may not have or may not be able to easily find.

> [0] Note that switching modes always costs time, sometimes significant amounts of time. In some cases it's time you may not have or may not be able to easily find.

When I land at SFO from an international flight, I’m on BART way before anyone could board a second flight after clearing customs.

Switching modes doesn’t have to cost any more time than switching vehicles within the same mode. You just have to design the systems to do it well. Train to bus isn’t magically less efficient than bus to bus. Neither is Airbus to train.

Switching to and from cars is pretty bad and usually inefficient though, that I think we can all agree on.

Changing transportation modes is also quite difficult for parents with small children. Especially if they have to haul multiple car seats for the flight.

flying with a toddler in and of itself is already hell on earth, both for the parents, toddler and everyone stuck in the metal tube for the duration of the flight.

train journies are also far more practical if you have a toddler or small children considering trains are a very relaxed atmosphere.

Responding to your 2nd point, kind of and kind of not. It's not just that air->train is hard, it's also that air->air is easy. You don't pay the cost of an additional security check or the cost of an additional drive to the airport. Even with a train directly connecting to the airport, the flight option may come out ahead.

Sorry, this is totally not true in Europe either. Yes high speed rail is great for a few routes (I'm a huge supporter of it!). But outside of these key routes flying will always be better.

Europe has absolutely enormous levels of flying. The amount of city pairs in Europe which are a 1-2hr flight and more than 4 hours on trains are very high. Outside of maybe some routes in UK/France/Netherlands/Belgium/(western) Germany basically flying will always be vastly, vastly quicker going between different European countries.

I had jobs where I had to visit clients in Uk, France, Germany and Italy.

It was often plan kinda last minute.

I’m French and was living in Paris at the time.

Of course, for all abroad stuff beside london ( Eurostar ), the plane was preferred.

But for national travel, only one city was too far to reach with a early morning train ride. All other major cities are reachable by a 2 to 4h train ride ( city center to city center )

The city is question is Toulouse. It’s just take too long from Paris. I Had to fly for this one.

Marseille,Lyon,Lille; Strasbourg, Metz, Bordeaux,Nantes, Montpellier, Rennes.

All those cities, I was able to take the first train in the morning. Do the fucking thing. Have dinner there on the client. And fall asleep in the last train. Waking up a midnight or so in Paris.

I had the choice to take a plane. But for the route in question in the article, it was consistently suboptimal.

AFAIK the French rail system is set up so that Paris-X is a good connection for most X, but travel between city pairs that don't contain Paris is much more difficult... because you have to travel via Paris.

That's correct. But as others have noted, Paris is the "center" for most anything. There's very little demand for travel between any pair of two (major) cities other than Paris.

I should look this up for details, but I seem to remember that there's a train route running parallel to the southern border that was abandoned for lack of demand. And there are some major cities there (Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse) which aren't all that far apart.

Exactly that. And Paris is not really geographically at the center of France.

Define center.

Why do you think I was living there? Why is 1/5 and more of our population living there ?

It’s the economical center of the country. And it’s been design intentionally this way dating back to before the revolution.

It’s infuriating in many aspect. But it’s not relevant to the conversation of fly travel for distance under 3h in train. ( you can do Paris-Marseille in exactly 3h with fast train. It’s 80% of the nord-sud distance of the country. And it take 6h by car )

> The city is question is Toulouse. It’s just take too long from Paris. I Had to fly for this one.

Since last year ( or the year before that) via the LGV to Bordeaux, Toulouse is at 4h and ~10minutes from Paris.

Damn. Of course. Kinda game changer.

The US is pretty exceptional in its lack of rails. There is also a Seattle-San Diego. Enjoyable as a tourist, but probably not suited for business purposes except in the last portions.

In France some high speed trains go now directly to airports (CDG,LYO). So it is becoming possible to chain a plane and a train in a few scenarios.

It's not really that the US lacks rails, we have the largest rail network in the world. The problem for passenger rail here is population density. France is three and a half times denser, and Japan is nearly 10x. I think they would also struggle a bit more to justify rail costs if they were as spread out as the US.

> we have the largest rail network in the world

For freight[1]. Putative high speed rail might go to the same places but generally can't share the same tracks with 30mph long haul trains. And the big gap is the plumbing of rail and transit into the urban cores, which in most US cities is highly decayed and in many of the newer metropolises was never built at all.

[1] Which is unsurprising, because we have the biggest per-capita need for transcontinental land freight transport in the world. The US has been perfectly fine at building out infrastructure it thinks it needs, it's just been making poor choices about what it "needs".

Looking at gross population density misses the mark completely. The US has a large land area where approximately no one lives: most of Alaska, the Great Basin region, even the High Plains are thoroughly devoid of population yet take up millions of acres of land. Cut out that area and focus on places where people live, and the density is now much more comparable. The Midwest is about the same density as France.

The evisceration of the passenger rail market was in large part caused by intentional urban planning. White flight moved a lot of people from city centers to suburbans where nary a black person could be found, and urban planners in turn abetted the process by building freeways straight through urban cores and turning every other city block into a parking lot in all but the very largest cities (well, except for LA). Uncoincidentally, the cities that didn't get turned into massive parking lots retained much more functional commuter rail systems than those cities that did.

Indeed. Even most of the states with low density tends to have most of their population in much smaller urban areas with density comparable to European countries with decent systems.

E.g. Utah has a population density of 14km^2, similar to Norway. But like Norway, Utah has most of its population in a small portion of the area - the Salt Lake City–Provo–Orem Combined Statistical Area makes up 82% of the population.

Nebraska has a density of 9.63km^2, but Omaha-Council Bluffs + Lincoln makes up more than half the population (and that's ignoring the Iowa side of Omaha-Council Bluffs)

There are plenty of metropolitan areas like this in the US that may not have the density to justify much of an expansion to rail between them, but that are dense enough that a more rail oriented infrastructure within them would be possible.

And as you point out, this is with current US urban planning. If an expansion of rail is combined with adjustments to urban planning to encourage construction aligned with expanding transport systems, it'd become even more viable (e.g. near automatic planning permission for higher density near stations would probably in itself do a lot)

I don't think the population density alone explains it. The part of the Finland that is covered by rails is a bit less dense than US, but the overall inter-city train usage is about 3x more than national air travel (2019).

Take into account the confort and speed of the European train. I was shock in my first Amtrak travel. ( then I took a greyhound )

That play a role in usability. It’s a good environment to work, for instance.

There a lot of second tier cities in the US with sufficient population but still have shitty rail service because freight gets priority, slowdowns from track maintenance is constant, and the stations are in unsafe locations.

Population in the US is not uniform. Out east we are as dense as Europe. Even the Midwest isn't much less dense than France for selected areas the size of France. Then there is the vast amount of nothing out west.

There are dense areas of the US where passenger rail could be much better than it is. Around Boston-Washington for example.

In France it's integrated to the point where the TGV has AF Code shares, and you earn airmiles on the train: https://www.airfrance.fr/FR/en/common/resainfovol/avion_trai...

> In France some high speed trains go now directly to airports (CDG,LYO).

... The trains departing from there are mostly low-cost trains rather than trains meant to be connecting with flights, and people taking them have to move to CDG instead of a better location.

It seems to be a service aimed at salvaging the infrastructure rather than an actual useful service.

One of the best examples of air/train integration is Frankfurt, which has the high-speed trainstop underneath the airport. You are much faster on the train than getting into your car and you pretty much have an ICE going to Cologne, Hamburg or Munich (not sure about direct ones to Berlin), going every 45min or so.

If you take a train in France, you are almost guaranteed to be late.

And if you buy a ticket in advance, you are basically making a risky bet on whether or not you will have to change your plans because of a strike.

> That's an infrastructure problem too, though! There's no reason rail service directly to and from airports can't be integrated with the system. It's true in many places already, though I know nothing about France.

That's an infrastructure feature. Trains are designed to serve city centers, and they do it well. Moving high speed train infrastructure to airports just for the sake of fliers would kill train experience for everyone else. Moving airports to city center is an obvious no-go. Duplicating train infrastructure for the few connecting trips is probably economically unviable.

> Trains are designed to serve city centers, and they do it well. Moving high speed train infrastructure to airports just for the sake of fliers would kill train experience for everyone else.

Would it?

If you ever visit Netherlands, take a note on how well Schiphol airport is integrated to the rail network. Its underground railway station, Luchthaven Schiphol, is just yet another station on the Rotterdam - Den Haag - Amsterdam main line, so for many trains (including the high-speed Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam line) the airport is just yet another stop on their route.

It is the best of both worlds.

I also think you underestimate how close schiphol is to most major cities. it is actually becoming a problem because the airport has little to no room for expansion. also, not all trains going the breda - Rotterdam - the Hague -Amsterdam route stop at schiphol airport.

also, the line is sort of infamous for constant delays on the schiphol part of the track.

What Toronto has done, with a dedicated express to the airport on the outskirts to the downtown hub rail station, is probably a sensible infrastructure pattern for many places. But it was a happy coincidence an early 20th century line ran most of the way there already. Otherwise, it would have meant laying a line through upper middle class suburbs. That's a showstopper, politically, whatever the merit might be; rail lines almost never get built in areas that are already heavily developed.

In nations like the US (outside the DC-to-Boston corridor anyway) without a well-designed and -maintained rail infastructure,

The U.S. has the world's best designed and maintained rail infrastructure. It's simply that, unlike every other country with a national rail network, America's rail system is designed for freight traffic, because now and historically passenger traffic in America has always been such a small portion of trips that it has never been worth the investment to prioritize people over goods. If transporting people had ever been more profitable than transporting cargo, America would have more rail lines dedicated to transporting people.

You can't put a 100mph high speed train on a freight line, and those freight lines don't cross with other transit arteries nor enter the urban cores where people are. What you say is true, but other than the fact that they are both "trains", it's not the same infrastructure we're discussing.

Speaking as someone who lives near a rail hub (and indeed, one of the busiest transshipment rail hubs in the world) freight rails absolutely do cross other transit arteries, and enter urban cores where the people are. Indeed, in the U.S., most passenger lines actually run on freight lines (including almost all of the Amtrack network excluding a few lines in the Northeast).

100mph is not a "high-speed" train. It's just a train. Freight engines are capable of going up to 80pm with cars, and over 100mph without (but don't for safety and operational reasons). Freight lines are designed for cost efficiency, not speeds, but generally unless your 100mph train is using specialized wheels, it will run just fine on a freight line, though it will need to slow down for turns due to the shortened turn radius on most freight lines.

How exactly do you propose running high speed transit and freight on the same tracks when one is moving 70+mph faster than the other? You know trains are on rails, right?

> The U.S. has the world’s best designed and maintained rail infrastructure

I don’t think you can really compare the infrastructure freight trains use with high speed rail. Designing and maintaining a rail network where trains go at up to 350kph is a much tougher job.

So, I’d argue the US rail infrastructure isn’t even close to being one of the best.

What kinds of things do you feel make it superior in design to eg central europe?

The U.S. rail system is different from Europe's rail: we chose freight over passengers, so it's difficult to make direct comparisons if (as other HN commenters are) your rubric for superiority is train speed.

But in a nutshell: (a) the US rail system is cheaper. The entire freight rail system costs less than what France pays for its significantly smaller system each year, (b) more throughput. Millions of tons of goods travel by rail every day. It's cheaper, faster, and more ecologically friendly to ship by rail than by air, water, or truck, (c) America's rail system is designed to withstand weather features that would obliterate most of Europe's rail lines, like tornadoes and hurricanes.

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