The flight ended up being 3 minutes faster.
But because I‘m super paranoid about missing my flight I would never show up at an airport „just in time“. So I‘d definitely go by train for this route.
Arriving at an airport - even last week in Moscow where's there's convoluted immigration, security, and I was checking a bag, more than an hour before take off seems crazy. An extra hour a flight adds up to days of wasted time hanging round at airports.
Even an inner german (or inner Schengen for that matter) flight has a lot more unknowns than a train:
1. public transport times are often a lot longer to airports. So you usually have to factor in more buffer. 2. what‘s the waiting time at luggage drop? 3. what‘s the wait at security? 4. how long do I need to go through security (I travel with lots of electronics which I usually have to take out)
If any of these things don‘t go as I expected my stress level increases because my calculated time buffer goes down. That‘s why I factor in an insane amout of time before boarding and usually end up hanging out at airports for hours.
For trains: The only unknown is the time that it takes me to get to the station. Every other time is practically zero.
And as someone else pointed out in this thread: the cost (in terms of money and time) for missing a train is a lot smaller.
This isn't true, or at least that's not true in a general sense. IIRC ticket prices of all high-speed services offered by Spain's high-speed train operator, Renfe, increase as we get close to the travel day. In some cases, I assume due to low demand, sometimes prices drop a couple of weeks to the travel day. I assume all prices follow a predetermined progression accompanied by ad-hoc adjustments depending on demand levels.
Source: I've scraped price data out of Renfe's site for fun.
> there is just a certain amount of lower fares (going up in stages, the closer you get to the travel date...
That's true for saving fares (Sparangebote). The train price for Flexpreis (an offer without a binding to a certain train) does not change that often.
1) The trains go every 30 minutes to Munich, so I don't have to wait that long.
2) The price structure of trains vs planes. The standard DB train ticket is flexible, i.e. you can use any train at the given date. Booking a flight on the same day is very expensive (and might be impossible if all seats are taken). There are discount tickets that are not flexible, but the price of the flexible ticket doesn't increase to enormous sums just because I book it on the same day - it's always the same.
With a train it basically never takes more than 10 minutes from arrival to walk to your platform, so you don't need to waste so much time just in case there is a delay. Also if you miss it you might be able to get the next train for free depending on your ticket.
With trains I just factor how long takes for the subway right across the street to take me 8 stations to the center.
[0] for all the reasons cameldrv mentioned, plus the impact on the environment. It may be noted that high-speed trains are worse on the environment than classic ones, although still in a different league from air travel.
I fly frequently but I'm also unable to predict how much time I need. It varies greatly. Security/check-in can take anything between a few minutes and 30+ min each. Usually, late passengers can cut the line, but I wouldn't take the risk.
I regularly take flights that only fly directly from Luton or Stansted, both of which take around 1 1/2 hours of travel time from our office in Central London. But that involves multiple connections, each of which could be missed or held up.
There is no need. You just turn up at the platform before departure time and get on.
The best thing about trains is that you end up right in the city center, and you can often just walk wherever you need to go.
First of all, it's nearly legendary how unreliable the trains can be here during winters and hot summers. Second, flying is actually cheaper (I rarely fly with a big luggage).
Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there. I usually leave my flat around an hour to the boarding time.
Then the flight to Munich is an hour or less. In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.
On the other hand I wouldn't mind taking a long distance overnight international train provided I had a bed there.
But for only one hour of that can you be working, reading, or just relaxing. For the rest you'll either be on your feet or at the very least aware of your next connection.
I use this time to organise my thoughts and take a breath.
You might want to reconsider if slightly more convenience is worth ~80-90% higher emissions.
Anyone has good recommendation of a reliable charity for this? Also, so far all calculators I've seen usually count the carbon emission for economy, but for longhaul flights in business class, I'm sure the actual emissions are significantly higher... I cannot avoid flying but I do think that I should at least pay the actual cost of the carbon emissions I cause.
Its calculation also includes the flight class, aircraft type, flight type (charter, scheduled) and they documented it as well (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/standards/emissions_calculation/...). We use it to offset our business flights. It's a charity and donations are tax deductible under German law.
I've always liked this scheme, because assuming you set the tax high enough for society to - as a fallback - take action to rectify the problem (e.g. hiring more people to clean up in this case), with a punitive margin on top, the tax provides a financial incentive to innovate to drive down the cost of acting responsibly.
There is a collective return service you can participate in, but if you find a better alternative you're free to use it as long as you can demonstrate what your return rate is. Or you can pay the tax and leave it to the government, but your margins will be worse than the competitions, as the return scheme is cheaper.
The general mechanism feels like it'd be adaptable to a lot of situations where you want to make sure it gets rectified, but also don't want to trust the government to dictate specific solutions - in this case it doesn't matter if e.g. the fallback solution is severely cost-ineffective; the more costly the fallback is, the stronger the financial incentive to find a better solution is.
This sort of response isn't acceptable here. I would suggest you rephrase.
> Nobody should be expected to make a personal sacrifice to do the right thing.
A toddler can't be expected to do the right thing, but you wouldn't let your ten year old get away with this, would you? "I can't be expected to clean my room when it's sunny outside!".
I am calling out the normalization of irresponsibility here with a re-contextualization. I am not calling the person I respond to a toddler, nor treating them as one.
So it is totally reasonably to argue for making the right choice the obvious one, e.g. by externalising the costs of bad choices. It doesn't help until there's a majority for it, as you point out, but one way to build public support is to build awareness and criticise the current situation.
Political campaigning and change is how you change things.
Of course, for this you first need to win people's minds. But that's just the first step.
I never claimed that you can fix structural problems by individual behaviour. I claimed that you can't fix them without (some) changes to individual behaviour.
Political change never just happens without activists pushing for it. And in order to understand the space they are pushing for, you need both, leading by example and credibility in asking people to pass laws that mandate behavioural changes.
Finally, I see no evidence for the idea that pushing outside the political sphere can not also lead to societal and behavioural change. Meat consumption is way down among younger people. Car ownership is down, too. This is in all likelihood to slow. But if we ever hope to change laws in cities to get rid of cars where they are not needed, well then having a large chunk of the population cycling and using public transport, and having had a gradual build out of alternative infrastructure due to this chunk of the population is going to make things politically a lot easier.
The same logic applies to divestment. If a large enough number of individual actors divest from carbon extraction, the politics of it change dramatically. And once enough people signal by divesting that they believe that the political change will come (thereby making carbon stocks worthless), they can trigger others into such behaviours.
Arguing for political action always has my vote. It's probably one of the best ways to use your time. But arguing against adjusting your behaviour is cynical and lazy. And arguing against people on here advocating for others to change their behaviour is actively arguing against political action. Because that is what political action actually looks like on the ground.
It will never work from the bottom up even if everyone agrees what the right thing is.
This just ends up with you declaring: It's someone else problem to make me.
That's not pragmatic. Unless you personally invest time and effort into political change to address these issues, it's just lazy and irresponsible.
Just own that. I have adjusted some behaviours and still fall short in many other areas. Never said it was easy. But here is actually an example where it is easy. Take the train and little cost in time and money, while gaining comfort and productive time. And you're saying you can't even be expected to do that? That's just cynical and irrational.
When it comes to what transport mode is best for the environment I basically am a toddler. I don't actually know what's best. I need to be told what's best by one having a prohibitively high price.
I don't even need to claim that it won't work, I can just point to evidence and you can see: it does not work. People are taking the plane because they can afford to.
Today, a lot of people don't take responsibility for their actions because nobody external is telling them to. This is being a toddler. You wait for some parent figure to tell you that you have to do something when you dont want to.
Today, most of the western world are toddlers and its being programmed into us through movies and games as well. Because this is a state of mind that is super easy to control. You end up in consumer mode, wanting things that make your life easier. :)
I might have no responsibility for it, but it affects me. If I choose to cycle to work I'll be a second class citizen on the road while people in cars pass me with little regard to my life. Why would I choose this? Why would anyone choose this? The answer is there is no reason to choose it, so people don't.
Penalising medium and long haul, and flights to minor towns or remote towns excluded of course as alternatives are rarely viable. And of course, alternatives can't immediately handle all the passenger load so scaled approaches are needed.
Thinking more of the Paris-London, New York-Boston, etc. Seems it worked with Barcelona - Madrid already, which might be more due to convenience than price?
Though don't think it will happen as the opposition will be too much, and making the taxes/fee rules work easily without complicated red tape will also doom it.
Maybe it's just Tegel airport, but every time I have to pass security in Frankfurt Flughafen (last time a few days ago), I feel violated. I travel quite a lot and it's the strictest security I've seen in an airport.
The ICE trains in Germany are not that great either. I remember buying a ticket from Hanover to somewhere in the south and to save money I bought a non-registered seat ticket. Imagine my shock when upon entering the train there were dozens of people sitting on their suitcases or on the floor, and I proceeded to spend the next 3 hours in similarly miserable conditions.
Regarding ICE's: That's one of the trade-offs. Either guaranteed (cramped) seating after being "violated" or un-violated uncertainty.
Every time I use one mode of transportation, I'll damn myself and vow to always use the other mode from now on.
Unless you live north of Tegel though, it's going to be faster to get to either Hbf or Südkreuz, and when you get there, you just walk to the platform, wait for the train, walk on, and sit down.
The decision to close it is just a way for insincere and short-term thinking politicians to gain some cheap points.
Now I live further away it's much more variable. If I'm travelling from Heathrow T5 you have to be into security at t-35, so off the train at t-40, so out of Paddington at t-62, add a bit of leeway means leaving Paddington at t-80 to t-90 depending when the trains are due.
If it's a long haul where there only one flight a day I may well push it out to plan to arrive at an airport as early as t-75, which while excessive, is just in case there are problems like punctures or whatever.
Heaven forbid someone invoke Poe's law!
So, I took the old ICE a couple of times which took over 6 hours and indeed never really gets anywhere near it's maximum speed. They had a particularly slow variant taking nearly 7 hours. The new one should be a bit under 4 hours. So, the new line is very competitive with air travel and I'd prefer it over taking a plane. It's a much more relaxed way of traveling. German trains are pretty comfortable.
They could improve things further by eliminating stations from the route and improving the track. https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ has a nice visualization of the speed limits on different routes. There are only a handful of segments where trains can go full speed in Germany. If you look at the Berlin-Munich track, it only goes full speed about half of the route. IMHO, Berlin-Munich could get to about 2.5 hours but it requires a lot of investment. Faster if they get proper high speed trains. Compare this to France, which has proper high speed tracks and trains ride at 300 km/hour there.
That‘s also what happened with this new Berlin-Munich connections. The route makes little sense when you want to connect both cities as fast as possible. The detour only makes sense if you understand that the route needed buy-in from the states in goes through, and it was galling to state governments not to have their biggest cities connected, as well.
But it‘s not just influential elites. When Deutsche Bahn recently mulled killing the IC stop (not ICE - a category lower) stop in my town I was very unhappy. Fortunately they decided against it. But just from the plain numbers I can believe that it shouldn‘t have an IC stop.
The hidden times you mentioned depend heavily on where you live and what your destination is. Going to the train station can be painful in the first place.
Another thing to consider: I regularly feel sick when I work on trains not so when flying. That’s why I prefer a long plane flight to a train ride.
I've got <20 minutes by car to airport, about an hour by public transport to central train station - even though the train station is closer as the bird flies, and this is Europe with "good" public transport.
I've personally never been on a German train that was on time. Of course this is anecdata, but still...
[0] https://www.citymetric.com/transport/are-german-trains-reall...
Especially if you're flying into Berlin. I spent an hour in the air from Munich to Berlin, and then an hour waiting for my baggage to be unloaded and placed on the conveyor...
On a scale from 1 to 10 (being the best), airplane food ranks -5. ICE restaurant brings home a solid 0.
ICE's bigger cooking compartments (relative to the everything cramped airplanes) allow for better options. Plus, you have real tables to eat from and elbow space.
The ratio of "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other" vs. "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other because of the ridiculousness of the food" is way higher in ICEs than in planes.
Long story short: In an ICE you have to know what to order. Most meals will be optimized for their type of kitchen (stews; the most ordered item must be Chili con Carne). At least ICE meals don't shy away from their humble origins of being heated-up like airplane food does ("Sansibar Airplane Currywurst...").
The food is known to be quite expensive and not great thought, I wouldn't recommend it
- "same speed as the "high-speed" train" - are you deluded
- "Only with the car is faster" - yeah, if I drive the kind of car that can average 180 km/h.
I mean, there are no speed limits on Autobahn so nobody would stop you...
1. I absolutely could not sleep on a bus that makes frequent turns on country roads.
2. On the way back to Germany, we got stuck for 2 hours in a passport check, because customs found a Bulgarian family on the bus that had previously been extradited, and there was a long argument before they left the bus.
Air travel is the king of hidden time fees. They say that it's an hour from Berlin to Munich, but you have to show up at the airport an hour before the flight, it takes 15 minutes to get off the plane and get out to the curb, even if you didn't check a bag, it takes 40 minutes to get to the airport, and another 40 minutes to get from the airport to the city center. By the time you add it all up, 4 hours is how long it takes on the plane, and most of that is annoying stressful walking from one place to another, waiting in one line after another, cooped up in a tiny seat, and for maybe 30 minutes of the whole 4 hours, you can use your laptop and do something useful.