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Comment by namuol | Hacker News Reader

Just give us high speed rail. Who does supersonic travel actually serve?

Most people using these flights would be traveling over oceans that are not serviceable by rail.

My point stands. Who needs to cross oceans so regularly and so fast?

Even with the decline of business travel, there's plenty of people traveling constantly who would pay absurd amounts of money to arrive faster. Celebrities, sports teams, entertainers, the ultra-wealthy, etc. Less flight time allows them to get more rest and spend extra time preparing for the events they're traveling to.

Another approach would be more comfortable travel at today’s speeds (or even slower). Imagine boarding a plane with a luxury hotel like experience. A buffet breakfast, some work/reading in a nice library, followed by some treadmill / stationary bike time, then a shower, lunch, a massage in the spa. Dinner later before a classical concert and finally heading to sleep in a comfy bed. Then wake up and disembark at your destination.

Many of the people I mentioned already travel in luxurious conditions, and the economics for luxury aviation are well-explored. It misses the fundamental issue here though. Time spent traveling is time that isn't spent setting up for an event or meeting with fans/media/business interests. You can't solve that with classical music.

It's two different problems. Yes, if you absolutely positively have to be in London in four hours to Sign The Big Contract, you'll pay whatever the Concorde replacement charges and put up with whatever experience it offers.

But there's a huge market in conventional tourists that have more flexibility and could choose from more options.

A typical tourist-class trip is going to be one day of "Travel Misery Time" followed by "Actual Vacation" followed by another full day of "Travel Misery Time".

Yeah, theoretically it might be less than a full day door-to-door, but if you're not an experienced traveler with expert experience in managing timing, baggage rules, TSA procedures du jour, and navigating the facilities, you're probably writing off the whole day of arrival and departure. Nibbling away a couple hours in the metal death cylinder doesn't solve that.

What if we said "we can swap one day of Travel Misery Time for two days of Resort on Wheels Time?" You might get fewer days at the destination, but an overall more enjoyable trip. Rail can offer that. Even today's Amtrak long-hauls offer a comfortable sleeper room, real food, and actual scenery, and no airport suffering, and there's no reason future offerings couldn't introduce other amenities (i. e. a spa car, or scheduled entertainment).

Two days on a train sounds miserable regardless of amenities.

At human levels of expense, I think it's not. I traveled Amtrak sleeper on a 24-hour ride. There was no shower, so I couldn't have gone 48 hours, but otherwise it was end-to-end way more pleasant than any international flight I've ever taken.

The target audience for this wants to get into, and usually return from, their destination as quickly as possible. The trip is a means to an end. It's not unlike opting to take rideshare when your bus or train is slow.

I can absolutely see tech salespeople using this mode of travel for critical meetings. Fly out at 0600 ET from JFK, arrive into LHR at 0900 ET/1400 GMT for a 1500 GMT meeting, do dinner and such, then fly out at 0900 GMT the next day to arrive at 1200 GMT/0700 ET for a full business day. Minimal jet lag.

What you're describing is high-end private air travel (for the rich and not time sensitive) and cruises (for people looking for a vacation in a box).

Another thing might be crucial equipment. One of my friends works in the film industry, and they told me the insane dance every that goes on every set. A-lister actors, directors, and insanely expensive equipment is flown in from all around the world, and they literally often have hours of having everything in the same place, during which window they have to record the scenes, then everyone flies off to somewhere else, and the meter is ticking to the tune of god know how many thousands of dollars per hour. No mistakes or delays are possible.

He once told me of a story when some exotic piece of equipment broke, and there was NO replacement on in Europe. After a mad scrable, they did find something and they had to fly in that special camera rig thing on a private jet.

That already exists to an extent with private suites on certain Emirates long haul flights. It is extraordinarily expensive, more than regular first class.

One of the issues with supersonic jets (certainly the Concorde), is that their takeoff speeds, and required runway lengths are much higher due to different aerodynamics, about 1.5x of what's needed for a 737.

This means these VIPs might not be able to land where they want.

Another issue is that these planes fly higher and take longer to reach travel speed, which eats into the the travel time benefits for shorter flights.

Very rich people and C-level execs. Ok, maybe not 'need' but they want to.

I would hazard to say very many people, me included.

We had the perfect machine for this. The SS United States.

It’s 2025. I want to live in a future where we do cool things like enable the average person to take supersonic transport. Sure, there are some marginal benefits here and there but going faster shouldn’t need any special justification.

The average person will never be able to afford to take SST. The physics make it so. It's also why commercial airliners are getting slightly slower and using engines with higher bypass ratios.

It's not cool that extinction rates are at 1000+x their baseline. Tech like this is even more energy intense than regular flying.

I think "some marginal benefits here and there" and it's cool bro are not valid justifications for making this planet a worse place to live for all species.

Energy production is quite clean, particularly around nuclear.

We should not be slowing things down.

You want to strap a nuclear power plant to a super sonic plane?

People working for large international companies or having lots of business related interests across continents. There is I think no substitute to physically meeting people at some point ( I’ve experienced this firsthand) so some people travel a lot. They’re expensive people as well, so making trips shorter and less tiring (business trips like these are exhausting ) is a good thing for them.

Yes, tools like zoom alleviate the problem somehow but not completely.

Well, build me a sub-oceanic trans-continental Hyperloop!

Are they?

Sure trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic travel are big routes but there’s also a huge amount of traffic that goes Europe, Asia, Australia / New Zealand

They could be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel

Which btw. could enable a whole bunch of other nice to have things, out there, on the high seas. Global HVDC grid. Communication lines. Pipelines of all sorts. Fish farms. Floating towns at the nodes...Resorts...Casinos...Stock Exchanges...Navy/Coast Guard/SAR bases, research hubs...

Just need to grow that stuff responsible and sustainable. Dunno. Genetically modified 'Turbo Coral', or some 'shrooms' doing in-situ utilization of microplastics? Imagine the possibilities...(Hyping the loop here, harr harr!)

That would be great if it could actually get built in the USA. Too many entrenched interests who want it to fail and/or want to skim off the project.

There's high speed rail in Florida that works.

Aside from the people it's killed: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article310829260.html

(I love high-speed rail; I enjoy it in Europe. I think Brightline's implementation may need some work before it's scaled up.)

From what I've seen the majority of the deaths are either a. intentional or b. really not the trains fault. That's not to say it isn't horrible that it happens, but IMO the solution is train safety awareness (don't stop on a railway crossing!!!), and if anything building more high speed rail in the US will improve public awareness of how to be safe around trains.

> averaging one death every 13 days of service.

Holy Shit. That's beyond just terrible.

Thinking about that more, it's like a "real" version of truck-kun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck-kun

This is ultimately scaremongering. First off, safety was supposed to be addressed by government funds which it sounds like only recently were approved; there’s nothing fundamentally unsafe about rail when you actually build it properly. But even if this were the baseline figure, do we really need to compare the death rate of our highway system?

> But even if this were the baseline figure, do we really need to compare the death rate of our highway system?

Wouldn't comparing it with other high speed rail be a better approach?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record

Brightline is mostly 110mph with a few 125mph sections. Standard intercity speeds in Europe, the tier below TGV style high speed rail.

That’s indeed not high speed - high speed ( tgv) is closer to 200mph.

Depends on your definition of "high speed", considering how slow it is.

Companies that don’t want to invest in new infrastructure.

That’ll always be the blocker with rail. Moving humans, even a lot of them, by rail isn’t cost effective by most company’s definition outside luxury pricing.

Rail wins when you need to move goods in bulk though.

Annoys the hell out of me. I much prefer train travel, even if it’s slower. But in the States, Amtrak is passable at best depending on the particular line. European rail was a lot more pleasant. Neither comes close to Japan though. Their high speed rail is a reason I’d consider living there long term.

Some of us would like to visit other continents. A world that grows ever smaller is one where war becomes ever unthinkable.

A 6000 km long undersea tunnel with a 600 km/h avg speed train traversing it would be pretty futuristic alright :)

You'd think so, but Europe grew ever smaller, with open borders, low-cost flights, single market, until at some point it didn't any more, and that process is since 2016 reversing.

Yeah, this is why neighboring countries never go to war.

If anything, being able to just fly over the ugly parts and arrive directly at your plastic wrapped all inclusive resort is a good way to increase the social divide and drive us closer to a war.

Neighboring countries that trade and are in each other's supply chains + economic zones don't go to war.

See: the US' painful and bizarre attempts at butchering its relationship with Canada. The integration of the two economies means that such ham fisted manoeuvres take money out of people's pockets pretty fast.

In a pre-mass travel world, I can see someone like a certain leader attempting to annex Canada. Now? It's unthinkable. Just saying it causes billions in damage.

This works as long as the leaders strongly favour economic prosperity of their countries. Russia invaded Ukraine, despite that the countries traded a lot, and their supply chains were cross-linked.

You can visit other continents already? If they aren't connected by land, we have aeroplanes - and if you don't like flying, you can go by boat.

If shorter distances were correlated with more peace there wouldn't be a genocide in Gaza, since the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv is only about 70 km. More travel may have other advantages, but peace doesn't seem to be one of them.

That sounds like a false choice. In order to avoid war, people need to burn enormous amounts of fossil fuels so they can personally visit the country?

I don't know. At some point in the not so distant past the west had hundreds of flights to Moscow and St. Petersburg and bought hundreds of millions worth of goods from Russia every day.

Didn't stop them from getting into a war

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