As behind as the US is on this front, the NE Regional and Acela are fantastic for NY-DC travel. It's infinitely less headache in terms of what you can bring (liquids in baggage and not really much of a weight limit), space (leg room for days), general comfort (no cabin pressure)... I could go on about this.

I used to travel NYC to Boston fairly often for work and I absolutely loved the experience of taking the Acela. The problem is that it’s so expensive! This was fine when my employer was willing to pay, but I wouldn’t pay it myself (it’s usually far more expensive than flying in my experience)

The problem for the US in the case of trains is that the US government owns Amtrak and they own no actual train tracks. Therefore when there are 2 trains competeing for the same track, Amtrak has to yield to the commercial trains. I have seen recent court arguments that it should be the other way around, but as of last year when i brought my father down from chicago to san antonio that was the case (that is a near 40 hour train ride).

I would ride the trainmore if it were quicker and a 4-5 hour flight or 18 hour drive didnt take 40 hours on a train.

I had an enjoyable trip on the Empire line from NYC to Niagara. A beautiful way to see that part of the country, without the horrors of the TSA.

With no noxious TSA checkpoint and a streamlined boarding process, it's amazing how much more pleasant travel by train is. I often arrive an hour early, if not more, to an airport. Between unpredictable TSA wait times and the lengthy boarding process of airplanes, it's a huge waste of time. When I'm traveling by train, I often arive at the train station no more than 5 minutes before I am sitting on the train. There are no lines to enter the train station and the line to board the train moves quickly because the train has more space to move around on and because the train has multiple entrances and exits. It's totally feasible to walk into a train station then without stopping walk straight onto a train.

That's an experience I'm generally willing to pay extra for vs flying, but unfortunately in America the opportunities to take advantage of trains are lacking if you live outside the Northeast Corridor, as I now do.

I've found this to be a fantastic resource for creating travel plans in Europe (and beyond) without flying: https://www.seat61.com/

No affiliation, just been using it to help plan all sorts of travel since I stopped flying in 2011 (although I have to say the best way to travel long distance in Europe is by bicycle, if you can make the time).

I'd say 5 hours is about the limit where the train makes more sense practically than flying. An eight hour train isn't worth it IMO compared to a 1.5 hour flight.

There is no such thing as a 1.5h flight. With security, traffic to and from the airport, "allow extra time for <x>", and actual airtime, you're looking at 4h door to door for pretty much the shortest travel distance that it makes sense to fly (LA to SF or DC to NY). The train compares much more favorably when you factor everything in.

This is a popular sentiment, but didn't ring true for me as a frequent traveler. I've been taking regular 1h45m flights in the past few months, so I added up my actual travel time for those trips. It did take 4h15m when everything was included... but the part that was unique to air travel (arriving earlier at airport, security) only added up to 40 minutes.

It's true that a 1.5h flight would take me 4h, but most of that extra time is universal to all travel. An equivalent 1h30m train ride would take me 3h20m. Not that much more favorable.

Some of those things don't apply outside america. E.g. in europe or japan congestion-free public transport to the airport exists and internal flights have very low security overhead.

On the other hand those places also have high speed rail.

Depends on how long the trip to/from the airport is. Railway stations tend to be in city centers.

Edit: also, you can get stuff done on your notebook in the train, but often times not on a plane b/c of the excessive check-in, gating, boarding, security, customs ceremony

Consider a sleeper service!

Sleeper services are usually much, much more expensive than a regular seat, so it doesn't help in trying to compete with air service (where you don't need sleeper service because it's so much faster).

I used to do a hard sleeper from Beijing to shanghai or Hangzhou (overnight train), and it was definitely cheaper than flying at the time. But hard sleepers aren’t for the feint of heart, especially if you get a dreaded top berth.

Sleepers are appreciated on planes enough that they charge a lot for them (a 12+ hour long haul in business class is mostly sleep, in economy it’s watch whatever movie you can find).

Sleepers on planes certainly are expensive (you're talking about business or first class to get that space), but you don't feel the need for it as much because it's only that useful on long-haul flights. There's no such thing, usually, as a train that goes the same route as a 14-hour plane flight: such a train would have to somehow cross an ocean.

> such a train would have to somehow cross an ocean.

Beijing to Western Europe via Moscow could technically be done by train. The first leg is 8 hours which should count as a long haul.

That's why I added the word "usually" in there. Try taking a train to Australia or Japan (from outside those countries), between the Americas and Europe or Asia, etc.

Generally anything separated by water should fly, but even just going across the continent I think flying wins out; eg why train from shanghai to Urumqi for 2-3 days when you can just fly for 5 or 6 hours?

Yeah, that's the point I was trying to make before with my first sentence. A 5-6 hour flight isn't that hard to do in a seat; you don't need a sleeper for that. But a 2-3 day trip on a train isn't something you want to do in a regular upright seat.

I see your point, and understand it, but on the same note, food like pasture raised egg/milk etc is more expensive than the factory farmed version.

Isn't it worth comparing not only the financial cost, but the ethical one and the environmental impact of decisions?

Is pasture-raised dairy actually more ecological? Sounds like it requires a lot of land.

Don't know about UK, but in Germany trains are obscenely expensive, especially when you compare them to low-cost airlines. There is nothing like "low-cost railway" so far, and I doubt there ever will be.

In Bavaria, they're dirt cheap, at least for the regional trains. For 25 Euros cash, you can go anywhere in Bavaria all you want, for 24 hours, in as many trips as you want. Of course, this doesn't really compete with airlines, as this is for inter-city trips within the state, and no two cities in Bavaria are that far apart.

But to say there's no "low-cost railway" is plainly false. Bavaria has probably one of the best train systems in the entire world, and it's not expensive by any means.

Yes, sorry, I had something like "getting from Berlin to Brussels at low cost" in mind. There is no way to do it with railway, only with a plane.

If I just want to travel in the same Bundesland where I am, there are plenty of cheap options, that's true.

How low cost do you want low cost to be, and how annoying are you prepared for it to be? I just picked (fairly arbitrarily) Monday 19th August, and although Expedia does offer a GBP18 Ryanair flight SXF - BRU you have to accept an 0620 departure time to get that, and of course no checked baggage and you need to include costs of getting to/from the airport. Given the need to arrive at least 1h before departure I would personally not even consider 0620 dep, and all the other flights Expedia suggests cost 90 quid or more. For the train loco2.com has one-way tickets Berlin Hbf -> Bruxelles-Midi from GBP63.50 at reasonable times.

As an American, I can only dream of having convenient train fares of about USD$80 to go between somewhat-distant cities. Berlin to Brussels for GPB63.50 (about $80 right now) sounds downright cheap to me.

Same here, I've been to Brussels quite often (for FOSDEM) and the difference is:

- flying: 120 EUR from Munich, getting up at 4-5, arriving at 9

- train: have to go the day before, have an additional night in the hotel (70 EUR) and THEN the train is more expensive than flying anyway. Maybe not so important if the company pays, but still not fun to argue (depending on the company).

Rubbish. I've travelled Berlin to Brussels (and then London) by train. It was very pleasant.

Sometimes you get a group of loud people around celebrating something, like soccer cup or getting married (especially in the connections with Regionals). Also last year there were often delays and problems in the connections between Mannheim or Frankfurt; I wouldn’t just call someone’s comment rubbish.

For every ride like that, you could get a teenaged school class flying in your plane.

While you're technically right, the MUC-BRU flight is 90% businesspeople in suits on the smallest regular plane I've ever used, I can't imaging TXL-BRU being different.

I.e. the chance of it having a school class in it is like winning the lottery ;)

25€ is not dirt cheap, unless you're planning on taking 4+ trips on a single day. In Belgium, a prepaid ticket for 10 rides, each from/to any station in the country, costs just 75€ (valid for one year).

As an American, 25 Euros is absolutely dirt cheap. We can't travel between nearby cities for anywhere near that cheap here.

The 75 Euro deal sounds really cheap too.

According to the Amtrak site, you can go from NYC to Washington DC for $53. That's more expensive, but not tremendously so.

I've looked for fares like that and never see them at convenient times. At 4AM 3 months from now, sure. That's not convenient.

I tried planning out a weekend trip from DC (where I live) to NYC on Amtrak, and I couldn't make it work. The goal was to travel to NYC without flying, and without having to take time off from work (I work normal 9-5ish, flex hours). The only way to get fares cheaper than by airline is to take the train at 5AM or so. But the train station is downtown; I can't get downtown in time to catch the train by Metro (subway), because the Metro doesn't run that early. So I'd have to take a Lyft/Uber, which is expensive. If I go at a more convenient hour, the rates shoot way up, so it's more expensive than flying.

Sure, I could take a day or two off from work, but that defeats the point. If I wanted to travel between Frankfurt and Munich on a weekend without taking time off from work, or between Tokyo and Osaka, I could do it more cheaply and easily than DC-NYC.

I guess the issue is more for intercountry rail travel.

Also pretty pointless in terms of business travel:

I've hardly ever had any customers not in Munich or in the Nuremberg (area) that weren't so far away from the station that you'd need a taxi, so you can drive anyway. Especially for conferences. Usually Munich or Nuremberg.

The regular Deutsche Bahn prices are very expensive but the special prices are often rather cheap. A further 25% less for BahnCard 25 owners. I take a lot of cheap train rides that way.

https://ps.bahn.de/preissuche/preissuche/psc_angebotssuche.r...

Low cost rail might exist one day in relation to the cost of flying where the carbon cost is added to the plane ticket.

My problem with economic solutions like carbon tax is that as it alleviates the carbon footprint, it reinforces economic inequality. Mobility will become something reserved to the rich people again.

I hope we will find a better one, e.g. online conferences or putting a tax specifically on business travel on behalf of medium to large sized companies.

Technically mobility is limited to the rich right now - all of us are "environmentally rich," blissfully jetting about in environment-destroying airplanes while enjoying a relatively clean Earth.

Our offspring will be Earth-poor, suffering the consequences of our frivolous "spending."

In my mind a carbon tax is a wealth transfer from the present to the future. I think it's a good solution because we aren't exacting fair price for our activities. I read a great book once in which future generations sued the shoes off their elders for not paying fair price for their climate-changing activities.

Wealth inequality should be addressed. We shouldn't hamstring other solutions just because it also is a problem - we can work on them in parallel. I appreciate you bringing it up though, it is a good thing to be aware of.

To offset the CO2 on a US-to-Europe round trip flight would add around $500 per ticket. As the efficiency of airplanes and CO2 concentrators improve, that should drop.

That seems reasonable to me and while it will make flying to Europe too expensive for some, it wouldn't make traveling to Europe something only the rich can afford.

For a typical family flying from middle America to Orlando, it would probably mean one less day at Disney.

Does this exist: a simple carbon impact calculator paired with a place to buy offsets? maybe one that just pulls all your receipts from your email?

The Tyndall Travel Tracker has a fairly simple carbon calculator (https://travel.tyndall.ac.uk/); with respect to offsetting there is an ongoing debate currently about how best to achieve this. It is thought that offsetting carbon alone is quite a grey area at present (e.g., trees planted today will offset over 25 years but the damage is done in the now, also many offsetting schemes are...scammy) - we are currently discussing strategies to offset with more than carbon, including development activities as well as biodiversity protection; the problems can be quite linked.

My personal hope is to liaise with some of the best researchers in the world regarding offsetting and have an approved offsetting scheme, which can be applied anywhere, that updates based on the current best understanding; we would then bring this capability into a newly built travel tracker (it's closer to a prototype atm).

Please let me know if this is something you'd find interesting.

> there is an ongoing debate currently about how best to achieve this

My comment was based on the cost to directly pull CO2 out of the air at industrial quantities, not indirect methods like planting trees.

We do have experts regarding things like BECCS also; the goal is to have a multi-pronged approach maximising for efficacy.

There are many calculators that offer a way to donate trees:

https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new

https://www.clevel.co.uk/flight-carbon-calculator/

https://trees.org/carboncalculator/

Those are fake feel good offset, it price a Paris-NYC round trip with 2.2 tCO2eq at 52€, but the only serious future project of durable carbon capture that I know price it at 600$ the tCO2eq, this would be a 1320$ offset.

The last time I read about this, CO2 sequestration was $100-$200 per metric ton:

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2018/06/team-provides-firs...

Their future target price, not the current one.

It's not business travel that's the problem, it's burning fuel that's the problem. If the 1% are the only people who can fly, that's a lot less fuel being burned. Heavily taxing 10% of fliers (who can easily afford it) is a no-op when it comes to reducing the buring of fuel. Now you have exactly the same amount of fuel being burned, and a tax yielding revenue that if anything motivates the recipients of that tax to encourage more flying.

If you massively raise prices for everyone to fly, less fuel gets burned, and the people burning the fuel are paying into a pool that ideally would be used to alleviate inequality on any other front.

If you want to tax the rich, just tax the rich based on them being rich; don't greenwash it.

> If the 1% are the only people who can fly, that's a lot less fuel being burned.

I agree. The question is who are these 1% of people. Carbon tax means that they are the richest 1%. I hope our society has enough imagination to consider other options.

I haven't heard of any carbon offset program that results in only the richest 1% being able to fly.

Targeting airlines might be the wrong place. Perhaps the fuel vendors are the ones that should bear the cost of removing all of the CO2 that's going to end up in the air from every bit of fuel they sell.

Climate change reinforces economic inequality as well. Developing nations are going to be the hardest hit by it.

What if these taxes were weighed disproportionately? If you are broke you don’t get taxed at all, but if you net 1k a day then you just got a $50 carbon tax added to your fare.

Might also be progressive on the flight frequency as well. Like first flight in year is cheap, second one is more expensive etc., and also progressive on the income. So that everyone gets approximately the same amount of flights they can afford in a year.

I made that a lot in Germany and it is worth if you value also the quality of the travel.

There are regular offers between capitals and big cities across countries, travels I did from Stuttgart: Stuttgart-Paris 40€, Copenhagen-Stuttgart 80€ (the train got in a Ferry and then the travel continued until Hamburg!), Stuttgart Amsterdam 80€. Sometimes traveling to far places like Spain must go over Paris, and each country has their own train network with more or less adaptation.

The quality of the public train got worse in Germany during the last 10 years and it is not an infrastructure thought to be run as a business with profits, but it is still one of the best transportation services for long distance.

The only problems with the train is visiting remote areas where it is necessary doing to or three train changes, which increases the chance of delays.

What? Of course there is low cost train travel. It is garbage, but it exists.

https://www.flixtrain.com/

However, if you want to go Hamburg-Munich on an ICE (better than flying imo IF (!) everything works) and you do not have purchased a "BahnCard" and you do not book far in advance then it is very expensive.

2nd class ICE ride on that track in 2 weeks is 153€, flex, one way. For that money you get a return flight.

If you can be 100% sure to make it to one exact train you can go for ca. 50€. [1] Risk of failing to catch that train is pretty high though.

[1] https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/dn?revia=yes&exi...

You are comparing a flexible train ticket against an inflexible plane ticket.

The flexible plane ticket is probably 3-10x the price, depending on the airline.

So you have a moral question: Is it more important that you save a few euros, or that future generations and people in poor countries (who, let's be honest, will bear the brunt of climate change) will suffer?

No, that's not the moral question I have. I personally have a choice between a few (about a hundred normally) euros and a little emissions. The society as a whole has a choice between a lot of euros and a lot of emissions. And also reducing people's mobility, where rich people are affected the least.

I'm sad that trains don't get more attention than they do, it's amazingly fuel efficient due to the low friction and the enormous load-capacity.

If this if is the UK train service your experience can vary drastically though, depending on if you can get a seat or not...

If it's the UK, then you can book a seat on most services... if you're travelling distance during peak time, and you know in advance, then I'd recommend it - and being prepared to politely but assertively ask people to move if they are sat in your seat.

One thing that comprehensively confuses people using UK railway train reservations: The 'A' suffix on your seat number doesn't matter. When you have a reservation for 44A that doesn't actually mean there is a seat 44A distinct from seat 44, it's because somebody thought it's important to bake in metadata about how seats are arranged in trains, the A apparently stands for "airline" style for some reason.

If you hate reservations or are too disorganised to book one for a busy train, but also dislike being disturbed by someone who does have a reservation and wants you to move, most train operators have some rule about which parts of their trains aren't reserved, you can find that out and then travel in the unreservable part of the train. Finding a seat there won't be any easier, but you won't be asked to move later.

It is interesting how trains are offering better services even as planes suck more over time. Ten years ago knowing where to find power sockets in the Standard class 444 series (next to the cab at the far end from First class) made the difference between charging devices and going without, now almost every train has power sockets and/or USB, free WiFi (not _good_ WiFi, you won't be streaming video - but it'll let you check email and read Hacker News) and air conditioning.

> Finding a seat there won't be any easier, but you won't be asked to move later.

It used to be really easy. Reserved seats had a paper ticket stuck in the back. Virgin trains switched to a small LED display on the edge of the luggage rack. Rather than have a single word like "Vacant" it has a scrolling message. As do reserved seats. So you have to peer at every single display as the text slowly scrolls past to figure out where you can sit. I don't know if this is gross incompetence or part of their ongoing efforts to discourage unbooked travel.

The longer scrolling message is telling you, as you'd know if you read it, that this seat can be reserved even though it currently isn't. As I indicated, some seats can't be reserved, and in this case the message is far shorter and doesn't scroll. "Unreserved" is usually the word used.

Paper tickets can't be updated and so in some cases they reflect no longer accurate information. This is especially misleading for long distance services where many reservations may happen after the service departs from its origin.

The unreserved message definitely used to scroll without any mention of future reservations. Perhaps they've updated them or perhaps it varies by region.

The A usually refers to "aisle" in my experience with UK trains. As distinct from a window seat. I think it's like a checksum :-)

Nope. Both aisle and window seats will be suffixed A. I almost invariably book window seats, they have an A suffix anyway.

There are other suffixes, but they relate to the layout of seating in a carriage and apparently almost all trains have "airline" style according to the nomenclature of whoever decides these things.