Unless we dramatically increase vacation time or dramatically increase rail speeds, that would mean that many people would not be able to see their families and friends or travel to events.
If you make it a fast train, at 350km/h, it will beat the plane on any trip up to 1700km.
Most trips are short, so no, most trips can be done by train and people still spend less time on them than by plane.
Even more than just the distance, though, is the fact that there would be no practical way to have direct rail lines to every major city in the US.
Trains are useful, but there is no way they could replace air travel in the US.
If trains could go 250km/h on average, that 5000km trip would take 20 hours - that's plausible for an overnight trip, leave 6pm, arrive 10am. A flight over this is distance is probably a much more stressful red eye.
Sure this is quite speculative, but perhaps less so than hyperloop dreams, or supersonic aircraft that somehow have no environmental impact.
I can't imagine how long would it take to tunnel through the Rockies. Look at the map, they are far wider than the Alps. Getting through the Rockies is like getting from Denmark to Croatia.
Think BIGGRRRR! (Aggressively so, instead of sissying around!)
edit: also not to forget about 'Nuclear Tunnel Boring Machines/Subterrene' https://havacuppahemlock1.blogspot.com/2015/06/nuclear-power...
cf. "Trans-Planetary Subway Systems
A Burgeoning Capability
by Robert M. Salter
February 1978"
Again it’s difficult, but possible if a replacement for air travel was considered a necessity.
If there was no air travel, I would just travel a lot less. If you want to argue that the environmental cost of air travel is too great to allow it to happen is one thing, but done act like it wouldn’t make the travel experience a lot worse.
internet foo
Found this. As I suspected, hockey stick graph.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1579/airlines.aspx
Half the people in the US don't fly at all. 25% fly 1-2 times a year. People that don't fly at all, and people that fly 1-2 times year. Probably wouldn't be much impacted if they had to take a high speed train instead of a plane.
> All overland passenger transport should be rail.
Then it was claimed that this is impossible. My argument is saying it’s possible to have rail replace rail, for example if air travel was severely restricted.
Perhaps people/families have spread themselves all over the continent because in the past energy has been 'too cheap' (i.e., didn't price in externalities).
With carbon pricing people may make different decisions in how far they want to travel from their 'home town', and what that would mean for seeing family.
>95% of the population of the US (and CA) are people who moved across an ocean and had basically zero expectation of seeing their families once they left. The only communication would be letters, telegraphs, and later trans-oceanic telephone calls.
Given the realities of climate change, and what it's cost us with regards to damage to the planet, expectations need to adjust.
Living in a poor, rural county with poor schools and few jobs can really mess things up.
Someone I know is getting divorced.
She was a very high earner who moved to a low-cost of living, low wage area to be with her husbands family.
She had previously earned very high wages, but took a significant pay cut to live with in-laws.
As the divorce is concluding, she realizing that the terms of the divorce prohibit her from taking the kids out of state.
Which means until her kids are 18, she’s effectively trapped in a market where her MS in Engineering gets her a job at Walmart.
She had previously worked for a major firm in New York, and then worked for a the local government until she had to resign.
So she’s basically screwed.
Plenty of people have skills and credentials that can only be used with relocation. A MA in Journalism isn’t very helpful outside big cities.
"Travel" or "movement"?
I am the first generation to be born in the country I live in. When my (grand)parents left, they left under the assumption that there would be no, or maybe very little, chance of going back to the Old Country. They took a boat over the course of many weeks to traverse an ocean; an era before cheap air travel.
When people move in the future, to hopefully have a better life than where they current are, it may be that they may not be able to go back (as easily) to where they came from.
The fact that we can now travel back and forth cheaply over great distances could simply be a temporary blip in human history, and we should perhaps consider this era could be ending. You can still move, but it will be more 'permanent' going forward, and travel is will be less frequent/easy/cheap/etc.
Under the current regime of 'cheap' travel in which the externalities of climate change are probably not taken into account.
to be fair, even for short trips trains require a minimum passenger flux before it's more efficient than planes. So even strictly talking about carbon emissions, trains are a net loss for most trajectories, but a large gain for most passengers.
Arriving, baggage claim rarely takes more than 30 minutes. (Delta “guarantees” 20 minutes on domestic flights.) With no checked bags, it’s the 10 minute walk through the airport and then plus/minus ground transport differences vs the train.
I can’t imagine that most people are spotting the train a 6 hour head-start, unless the live upstairs from the train station and are extremely nervous about missing their flight.
With planes, airports are way off the city centre, I think that there are few airports (here in Europe) serving large cities that can be reached in less than 1 hour from the city centre, and that applies to both A and B, to this you add, unless you use a private means of transportation (car-taxi), a half an hour for the timetable of the bus or train you need to take to/from the airport, as it won't necessarily be synchronized with your flight departure/arrival.
[1] https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=11&lat=53.61524&lon...
visiting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_Messe_und_Congress
you'd take
[3] https://geofox.hvv.de/jsf/home.seam?execute=true&date=05.07....
I see no problem here.
(edit: WHAT?)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848
Maybe they will start to organize a few more of these trains, the level of stress was so much lower on (overnight) trains when compared to planes when moving in Europe.
Quick Googling doesn't reveal any obvious authoritative answers (but a ton of guessing and unsubstantiated claims). The most authoritative/unbiased source seems to be this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
But the head-to-head comparisons are mostly gaps when it comes to trains, and the sections on trains and planes are in completely different families of units that makes comparison extremely non-trivial. :(
There's not much generic into about it because every rail route proposal is different, even between the same destinations. Depends a lot on geography and what's already there.
You basically need to do a full Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) for each route.
Sometimes they're included in the EIS for a proposed project. That's prob the best place to start.
But there's a reason most of the rail routes that keep getting proposed in the US are regional. Track and right-of-way is expensive, in both dollars and energy. Even moreso with high speed, where you need grade-seperated crossings and long, wide turns.
Most people think track is shareable or reusable, but the real world limits to track capacity (trains per day) makes economies of scale difficult to implement.
I posted it elsewhere, but the practical limit for non-high-speed rail is 300-400 miles, before airplanes start to make more sense.
High speed is difficult to even estimate, since we don't have much here to base it on.
And when you compare energy, you have to take into account that Rail is already electric, powered directly by grid without batteries or any other efficiency loss in between.
Airplanes use fuel that takes a lot of energy to refine and deliver, and will at best use hydrogen in 15 years which is 40% efficient to produce, plus losses in compression, delivery, engine, etc.
Doing it because China is, isn't really a reason.
You can take into account electrifying rail, but it doesn't really change much. This all gets taken into account.
>other efficiency loss in between.
The grid has plenty of inefficiencies, especially if we have to start designing beyond capacity to account for intermittent sources. But electricity's main inefficiency is in its creation.
LCAs take all of this into account. It's the whole purpose of doing one. Embedded energy involved in manufacture, refining, transport, everything, is all added up based on things like location and present and/or future inputs.
Although I like trains, I wouldn't want to live in such society.
E.g. energy consumption per-passenger-mile for a fully occupied Japanese bullet train while moving at maximum speed, versus for a fully occupied Boeing 737 at cruising altitude?
Obviously there are a million other factors, like takeoffs and landings, and trains stopping, as well as fuel vs electric, but wondering about even just the most basic operation.
however, it's going to happen regardless, since this way of living is not sustainable. The only choice that is ours is whether we prefer to anticipate this change and build a decent alternative, or whether we prefer to have it inflicted on us.
(2680 miles) / (300 kilometers per hour) = 14.3768064 hours
That's coast to coast in ~ 1/2 day.
Ships and blimps represent a much larger decrease in travel time over airplanes than rail. They perhaps pose a to be solved, but rail doesn't.
>"TGV called V150 holds the record for the highest speed on any national rail system - it hit a whopping 357.2 mph "
Only with the many day duration to traverse oceans eihtou planes do I get worried.
I’d still consider a say 48h trip from SoCal to NYC provided I could work over wifi, but otherwise it’s really a nonstarter.