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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

> Oh, and we need more people to stand up for their local airports. Corrupt local politicians, developers, and fake-NIMBY land speculators are all arrayed to destroy our nation's aviation infrastructure for personal profit.

I'm skeptical the public will stand up for GA. At least from my perspective, progressives and much of the left would prefer the industry fade away entirely. It's been in decline for decades and with the new trend of public carbon shaming I don't think you'll get many who come out in support of it beyond rural conservatives.

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Not all of us are unknowing of how interconnected GA capability is to many other areas of economy, even if we live in countries with less such impact.

Now, landlords looking for more land (especially well communicated) for apartments are very happy to push for everything that removes airports so long as they can reuse the land afterwards...

Airports consume an awful lot of land directly, cause severe pollution issues for even more land (by noise, mostly) and severely limit land use in the flight paths due to safety concerns.

Building out actually capable high speed and regional rail infrastructure is the way forward.

If you get high-speed rail to be competitive with flying a 175 knot piston airplane, piston GA travel will fall off a lot. I love flying, but I’d switch.

French TGV routinely has service speeds of 320 km/h [1] which is about the same as your plane, same for the Japanese Shinkansen [2]. Technically, speeds exceeding 500 km/h on close-to-stock rail are possible, the French have done that as well [3].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Allgemein

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dhoku_Shinkansen

[3] https://www.hsrail.org/worlds-fastest-trains

I’ve ridden the TGV and Shinkansen. They don’t go to my kids’ grandparents’ house, but when they do (or hell, even something like the German ICE does), I’ll use them. I’m not anti-train; I am anti-impractical-train.

Today, Amtrak takes 22.5-27 hours to go 642 miles Boston to Columbus, OH. I can drive there in around half the time (likely less once you add the time to/from train stations) or fly there in 1/4 the time.

That’s a perfect distance for actual high-speed rail.

To the other grandparents, Amtrak can get me 657 miles in 18.5 hours to a place about 100 miles from their house. That leaves once per day at 9:30 PM and still leaves me 2 hours drive from their house (which is in a tourist area near the ocean, not some unpopulated area). Another perfect distance for HSR where I can drive there in less than half the time or fly there in around 1/4 the time Amtrak takes today.

> Today, Amtrak takes 22.5-27 hours to go 642 miles Boston to Columbus, OH.

Agreed, which is why I said that building out such infrastructure is the way forward. A lot of countries, particularly Spain, France, China and Japan, prove that this is possible and that people actually use this kind of rail service if they are provided and affordable, the US just doesn't manage to build the infrastructure required out of a toxic combination of NIMBYs, ignorance, incompetence and utterly absurd construction requirements.

GA doesn't handle mass transport that can switch to railways, so it's a bit moot point.

So GA infrastructure and railway infrastructure is effectively orthogonal and you need both (passenger/cargo airports also greatly benefit from having rail links!)

I share your skepticism, but will still work to oppose what contributes to it.

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