Hacker News Reader

Comment by Leherenn | Hacker News Reader

Rail infrastructure is very expensive compared to planes. An airport is expensive, but once you've built it you're pretty much immediately connected to half the world. With a train station, you need a track to each surrounding stations, maintain them, and so on. Also, train doesn't scale down as well, it quickly becomes inefficient for the less dense routes.

People are talking about subsidies (by not taxing fuel for instance) for planes, but trains are also directly subsidised to the tune of billions each year. The rail network just costs a ton to build and maintain.

View on HN

>but trains are also directly subsidised to the tune of billions each year. The rail network just costs a ton to build and maintain.

Just wait until you hear about how subsidised the infrastructure for cars and trucks are.

Construction of road infrastructure can be compared to construction of tracks and stations, and it's fair to say taxpayers foot the bill in full for both.

The difference is that trains operate at a loss even with high ticket prices and operational subsidies are necessary for market viability. That is not the case with car and truck usage.

At least in the US, local road networks in the suburbs and rural areas bleed money terribly, and as fuel taxes have not kept pace with inflation even the inner city streets and crowded highways can barely break even.

Like a growth Ponzi scheme

Local roads bleed money universally everywhere, because pretty much no place charges tolls for local road use. Gas taxes do not cover road costs, because gas taxes are not by the same entities that actually build the roads, so there is no reason to expect it to be the case. However, and fortunately, road construction and maintenance is universally a small part of municipality budgets in US, typically under 10%, and very rarely anywhere close to 20%, so there is not much reason to worry about affordability of local roads.

In London, both roads and buses are subsidised from the income of the tube lines.

> That is not the case with car

I felt like private cars (the ones that are not taxi/commercial) just stay in one place the majority of its lifetime.

Pre-covid, I had a 45 minute commute. The other 22.5 hours my car just stayed in one place. Engine off. Road trips unfortunately don't happen often for me.

Trains, trucks, planes, and even taxis are probably running/flying more than it's staying still.

Depending on country, they can be taxed multiple times more than investment in infra...

>Just wait until you hear about how subsidised the infrastructure for cars and trucks are.

As others have told you, you are wrong.

US highways do pay for themselves (<https://web.archive.org/web/20130515013017/http://www.rita.d...>) (non-PDF version: <https://web.archive.org/web/20170712175437/http://www.rita.d...>), and help pay for other modes of transportation. Transit receives the biggest subsidy per passenger-mile, with rail and airlines in between.

(For those wishing more detail: From the executive summary (<https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...>):

>*Highways*

>Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000. This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997.

>School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government.

>On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.)

Rail can be used to make routes densify though. Air travel can never do this. The cost of rail has to be thought of in the context of an investment in a city or country (this doesn't mean 'go crazy building HSR' like some countries but then again many countries have no problems with approving road megaprojects that are terrible ideas so why not rail?). This is actually true of road infrastructure too, but there are a lot of negative externalities to roads that don't apply to rail.

The major subsidy to planes is that you don’t have to clean up the CO2 you spew out

But even beyond that - fuel and other power sources have been taxed well before climate change was a political issue, and jet fuel is exempt from all of that. It smacks of regulatory capture.

Yeah, rail infrastructure costs O(distance) while plane infrastructure costs O(trips).

Rail infrastructure forms networks.

Sure, but so are airports and so are roads. And all forms of infrastructure are sometimes prestige projects, and all are sometimes subject to political choices that while legitimate, in retrospect turn out to have been questionable.

It's possible that despite all that rail has higher costs - but it's also quite possible that the dominating factor is the unreasonably subsidized airline fuel. The tax-exempt status is absurd, especially given other fuel and power duties - not to mention that a reasonable accounting should be taxing fuel high enough to cover the costs of the climate-change externalities, which would result in an even higher price (as it happens, due to cloud formation, air travel causes even more warming than ground based fossil fuel consumption, though I'm unaware of whether that's a significant difference).

If indeed an honest accounting were to reveal that flight is still cheaper: great! But I seriously doubt it; and in any case it's certainly time to stop subsidizing air travel like this. Let the sector succeed or fail on its own merits, not by virtue of tax shenanigans.

Many airlines are subsidised, and their pollution (sound, air, sea, land) is effectively a subsidy as the airlines don't pay.

Trains are also noisy, at least as much as planes. As for pollution, consider how much land is taken from nature for tracks...there is almost none for airplanes, in comparison.

When you stand next to a train track yes à train is noisy. But a plane will cover literally a whole town with its noise. Very different.

I was just in Frankfurt yesterday and the noise is substantial, in the residential neighbourhood I visited it was the main source of noise during the day.

I live 600m from a fairly busy train line and ~14km from Edinburgh airport - the latter is much noisier.

Maybe you are under the flight path?

My point was that train lines are millions of miles/km and run through the center of settlements, by design. Almost everywhere in the world, unless you live in a suburb or village, you have a high chance that you will hear trains multiple times a day.

I think there are less people under flight plaths than near trains.

I guess it depends on luck how noisy they can be. I used to get woken every night at 2am by one fucker.

From what I can tell it is take offs - aircraft coming in to land, even though they are much closer, tend to be inaudible.

It might be because we are relatively high up (about 100m) and most of the distance between us and the airport is over the sea.

Edit: Just checked on a map and when most aircraft take off from Edinburgh's runway into the prevailing wind they are pointing pretty much directly away from us which might make it more noticeable.

As far as I know, airports try to setup the operations to have planes descend over cities, and climb away from them, to minimize noise. Sometimes this is not possible because of winds, so there will be a reversal.

Sometimes it's not possible to avoid climbing over cities because the city ended up engulfing the airport (e.g. Heathrow) - so they will alternate directions to give various towns a break.

Yeah the only use case where trains make sense to me, is really heavy cargo, where the lower friction of the wheels make it more efficient. That's a use case where both flying and trucks will be at a disadvantage. Transporting people in trains doesn't really make sense to me. You can fly if you need to go fast, take a bus if you have time, or drive a car if you want flexibility.

According to the Brussels Institute of Statistics and Analysis [1], in 2017, 34% of all commuters in Brussels commuted by train versus 36.2% by car. It might not make sense to you, but it does to other people.

[1] page 30 of https://bisa.brussels/sites/default/files/publication/docume...

The train itself has to be heavier than the load just to stay on the tracks. It would only make sense if you already have an established cargo route, and you can in addition also reuse a large part of that track for people transport.

> The train itself has to be heavier than the load just to stay on the tracks.

Why would that be? A typical 110 ton capacity freight train car weighs 33 tons unloaded. It has no problems staying on the tracks.

Besides both buses and planes typically weigh much more than their freight (and planes need to lift all that weight 10km vertically), so I fail to see how that is an argument against trains.

> Why would that be? A typical 110 ton capacity freight train car weighs 33 tons unloaded. It has no problems staying on the tracks.

I'm guessing at the numbers here but just to illustrate my point:

If an empty bus weights let's say 10 tonnes, and an empty train 33 tons. And the load of the passengers around 7 tonnes. So in total you'd transport 40 tonnes of train as opposed to 17 tonnes of bus.

Then obviously for that load rubber tires would be more efficient, and rail would be a bad fit.

There's a minimum load per cubic inch for trains to make sense, you have to have really dense cargo.

Like I said in another comment, subways in Paris run on rubber tires, it becomes especially inefficient with rail when there are frequent stops.

It would make so much more sense, especially in the US, to develop premium Tesla buses that could use the existing freeway infrastructure, than to expand rail.

The rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails is much, much lower than rubber tyres on an asphalt road.

From [1], the only comparable figures are the American train and the American bus. The bus is about half as efficient as the train.

There are similar figures further down the page ("German environmental costs") -- 0.25MJ/passenger-km for long distance rail, 0.85MJ/pkm for regional rail, 1.14MJ/pkm for bus service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

> The rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails is much, much lower than rubber tyres on an asphalt road.

Exactly, and you need rolling resistance for traction. The heavier the load, the lower resistance you need, and vice versa, because the weight of the load increases resistance. Which is why you don't ship hay on trains, and don't ship iron on trucks.

> Exactly, and you need rolling resistance for traction.

No, you don’t. Look at e.g. gears: almost no friction, perfect traction.

> Which is why you don't ship hay on trains

No. You don’t ship it on trains because that is uneconomic. You keep your cattle close to your hay producing fields, where they can also graze.

Also, by your reasoning, an empty train would not be able to move?

Also the reason why trains can't run uphill, while cars and trucks can.

Where there is enough population density and 'right of way' for trains, trains almost always make sense.

Flying is better for NYC -> Colorado - LA but trains are better for NY -> DC corridor, and frankly, probably all the way down to Florida.

There is the issue of 'downtown' and 'walkable cities'. If you arrive in Baltimore near an airport, you have to rent a car. In European cities, you hop on the Subway to the Hotel, that makes a big difference as well.

But Boston->DC is ripe for train transformation.

And 'established circuits' SF->LA->Vegas should be high speed - that California can't sort that out is really sad, it's a matter of organizational/systematic incompetence.

There needs to be kind of a 'civic buy in' for it to work

> Where there is enough population density and 'right of way' for trains, trains almost always make sense.

You will come really close to that if you build a road that has the same level of right of way, and drive buses. The benefit of (expensive) bridges and tunnels are not unique for trains. Some of the subway trains in Paris run on rubber tires.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com