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Comment by coolhand2120 | Hacker News Reader

So now anything that was on a plane must now travel on the roads. It's not like the need to move from point A to B has been removed. Road travel has a much higher net impact on climate. How is this in any way good? The law of unintended consequences really applies here.

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https://parisbytrain.com/tgv-map/

The purple lines are the high speed ones, and the (very few) yellow lines would be considered high speed in America.

The system is a miracle.

Will it manage to handle the capacity of the air travel that is being removed?

A TGV Duplex carries 510 passengers at 300km/h. For instance the TGV line going to south east France carries 75000 passengers per day with a theoretical capacity at 350000 passengers per day. I let you convert that into airplanes ;)

Air France domestic backbone is home-grown a320s. Standard layout in their use of those is 174 pax.

TGV Sud-Est is 350000 / 174 ~= 2012 flights per day.

There's no airport in the world that handles traffic like that. ATL comes close at 1970 flights daily, but this 2012 is only the capacity on TGV Sud-Est. This doesn't count any of the other lines, of which there are many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TGV_services

Trains are really intense.

France’s train network is pretty good if you’re going towards or away from Paris.

But if you’re going from Brittany (in the NW) or Nantes to the SW (Toulouse or Bordeaux), driving is going to beat the train.

There is direct train between Nantes and Bordeaux, but you are right driving is about 1:30 faster.

Very, very much yes. There's no mode with more capacity than trains.

Not only is train much better at handling large amount of capacity, it do so with a lower carbon footprint. Looking at the transportation sector in EU-27:

"Within the transport sector, aviation was responsible for 13.2 % of GHG emissions(144.3 megatonnes CO2 equivalent (Mt CO2e) and rail for 0.4 % (4.3 Mt CO2e). The latter refers to the emissions by diesel trains only. This compares with a share of 71.8 % for road transport and a share of 14.1 % for navigation (EC, 2020b)" (EEA Report No 19/2020)

There is a good reason why trains are commonly used between mines and ports. A single train can have around 70-100 of cars, each loaded with 100 tons of Ore. To do the same with planes would be impossible expensive and the emissions would be insane.

The only thing that can get near in terms of capacity and emissions are boats, although that sector is in large need of modernization. They discussed this in an other article about France, since they got several large rivers that could see increased utilization by the transportation sector.

Obviously in both cases, transportation will take longer. I would assume that some delivery services will be exempted when a slower transportation is not suitable.

In France, people take fully electric high speed (150-200mph trains.

Spain also. Far nicer way to travel. Often faster when you account for travelling to and from the airport and air travel waiting times

What do you mean by "anything"? There can't be that many things that can be transported by planes and cars/trucks but not by trains. Are you allowed to take pets on the TGV?

>So now anything that was on a plane must now travel on the roads.

Tell me you know nothing about France without telling me you know nothing about France.

Or Spain, for that matter. Or Germany. Or...

Amazing that they missed the point that you are raising /s

Assuming that the only alternative to air travel in Europe is to drive wins "most American comment of the day" for sure :)

Wait until it results in longer flights that are still quicker than taking the roads or the train.

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