Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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I think if people figure out carbon neutral ways to fly from A to B that are not too expensive, that would be preferable to trains. Installing rail is expensive and takes a lot of time. These air ships look like they should do the job.

Train connections in Spain are nice though.

I took a high speed train between Valencia and Madrid two weeks ago. Pretty nice experience. They have two generations of high speed trains in Spain. On the way to Madrid, the train was doing around 245 km/h between the two stops more or less consistently. It took a bit under two hours. On the way back, I had a different train that did 300 km/h over the same track. That train arrived a few minutes ahead of schedule even in about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Total distance is 360 km (give or take). Both trains did their top speed most of the time and stopped twice. The average speed over that distance is well over 200 km/h for the newer train. That's way faster than the top speed of most normal trains and about the same as a small airplane would do (like a Cessna cruising at 110 knots/hour).

And that's factoring in that getting in and out of the big cities takes some time before it can accelerate. You lose 5-10 minutes on both sides going relatively slowly. The in between stops take a few minutes as well but it gets back up to speed quickly.

That kind of speed is not possible everywhere. You need special tracks and not too many detours/stops along the way. Spain is perfect for this because it's mostly country side outside of the big cities. High speed trains in Germany are a very different game. There are only a handful of proper high speed connections where the train can actually hit its maximum speed. Mostly it never gets over 160 km/h. Still, it's alright when you have the option.

> Installing rail is expensive and takes a lot of time.

And it lasts hundreds of years and is super energy efficient. This isn't Ikea furniture.

Infrastructure cost should be calculated over years of service life.

Rails don’t last hundreds of years. They just do the regular disassembly and replacement tasks at night in a rolling fashion that they look permanent to users.

It’s expensive to be poor.

Like poor people can’t buy bulk, real countries with limited budgets can’t spend freely for a 100-year project. It will be well worth it in the end, but you have to pay it all now.

If you think 'last' means lay down the tracks once and be done with it, you're wrong. To be really usable they need constant maintenance, no matter if freight, or high speed rail.

Spain is mostly countriside but theres a lot of digging tunnels and building bridges. Maybe not outside Madrid, but it's definitely not flat.

True, passing through a tunnel at 300 km/h was interesting when I traveled from Madrid back to Valencia. Basically you feel the air pressure drop in the train. They seem short but when you are inside a tunnel for 30 seconds at that speed, you've traveled 2.5km. And there quite a few tunnels along the way. It's what makes high speed rail hard. You can't have steep turns or gradients. So most hills/mountains have to be either tunneled or designed around; valley need to be bridged, etc.

> Spain is perfect for this because it's mostly countryside

Every time there is free real estate, “let’s use it for terraforming.”

No. Let’s admit we are overpopulated and return more land to nature, before nature and wars do it naturally. It’s not because Spain is a half desert of sand that it’s not important for the Earth.

I live in France and I’m appalled that our ideology is both to be a welcome land for immigrants and “The young generation doesn’t have housing, let’s densify habitat and make fields constructible! It’s a human right!”

It’s a human right in direct contradiction with our kids’ human rights.

I am not clear where this alternative statement leads - "the young generation doesn't have housing, lets try euthanasia"?

“Let’s try not immigrating 400,000 people per year.” “Let’s try instead to raise our sons of farmers to high education levels.” One might notice it was the original values of the French Republic, you know, equal chances, climb the social ladder for everyone, solidarity in the face of changes, yadda yadda.

Our economic system demands unbound growth, and our governments seem to think that people exist to serve the economy rather than the other way around. If the economy demands more workers then the economy must be given more workers, even if that doesn't suit the desires of the populace or the needs of the environment. People who object on either ground will be called xenophobic or ecofascist.

I am looking at this from a global perspective, housing seems to be an issue atound the world. Immigration just moves around a fixed quantity.

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