Much as I love trains, air travel's crisis at hand is predicated on people's widespread and perfectly understandable reluctance to spend long hours in a sealed tube in close proximity to all and sundry, so I don't think this is the cue for trains to step in and save the day.

Do we know anything about how strong the economic pressures are for airlines vs. trains, regarding cramming passengers closer together?

Obviously, for a given number of passengers, more space = more cars or larger cars. But I'm curious if giving passengers 8" of extra legroom is cheaper per passenger-mile for trains than it is for airlines. I'd assume so.

One competitive advantage of trains is that if they sell more tickets than anticipated, they can (capacity permitting) add an extra car at relatively low cost. An airline has to add another plane or bump passengers. Equally, rail companies can scale more easily to different social distancing guidelines.

Does this ever actually happen though? I'm not aware of variable length passenger trains along a single route. And the stations for boarding are only so long.

More often what happens (London) is the inverse. They’ll take two carriages off and squeeze you in tighter. Mornings always 10 carriages comfortably seated? So, Let’s take two off and let them stand for their expensive season pass.

Not your ideal train system, but happens in India. Quite often.

Many rail networks are designed for trains of a specific length. Primitive signalling systems risk trains colliding if trains are longer than the design length, or there are places a longer train would get stuck (a pair of long trains each cannot move forward because each requires the other to move first due to the design of the signalling and safety systems)

You can definitely run shorter trains though.

IIRC the NEC in America can accommodate 16-car trains but not all trains are that long.

There is no automatic process but it common to add cars for events, school trips or other organized groups.

Amtrak does this.

Planes have flight attendants, and part of safety regulations is that you need a flight attendant per 50 people, or something like that. Trains have no such thing.

IIRC in its early days JetBlue used to strip out a row of seats in its a320s to get a number divisible by 50. The rearranging of the rest of the seats allowed them to advertise having the largest domestic economy seat pitch in America, which was a happy side effect.

Planes also have higher energy consumption given that they have to move you vertically and horizontally, and electric trains have an even greater advantage since electricity is a lot less prone to swings than fuel.

As far as modes of long distance travel go, the train is probably the most comfortable given generally much better ride quality than a bus and much more legroom than a plane, to say nothing of the fact that you can actually get a full size table in a train and walk around and whatnot.

The Interstate system is not high-capacity enough for all long distance travel to be in hermetically sealed private cars.

Rail has much higher initial and fixed costs than air travel, and high-speed trains consume more energy than aircraft on long-distance routes (as airliners travel at high altitude with low air resistance).

The literal footprint of a rail system is also very large; clearing and grading rail lines across the country would have a significant environmental impact.

The advantage with the train though is that it can use renewably produced electricity, whereas the plane burns hydrocarbons.

It's pretty cheap to offset. About $5 to offset all the carbon produced during a transatlantic flight in economy seating

That's great, but the environment doesn't care about the cost to offset just that it has less CO2/etc in the air from humans.

Yeah, and the offset is directly causing that much less of the gas to be emitted into the atmosphere by someone else. CO2 is fungible. Rather than eliminating it from the hardest to eliminate use cases first (planes), it makes sense to tackle the easiest use cases first (power generation, trains, and road vehicles). Your dollar goes a lot farther there.

Cool. Air travel is not getting banned.

> high-speed trains consume more energy than aircraft

citation needed. It helps a lot that (electric) trains do not need to carry their own fuel. Also, trains can run on low-carbon energy, whereas there is no viable alternative to jet fuel at the moment, and producing that from net-zero-carbon processes (akin to biodiesel) is not economical.

Biodiesel is not economical and a dumb idea, but it's pretty cheap to make flying offset factory emissions like within the EU emissions trading scheme (works out to ~€3 per passenger-hour), or even direct air capture schemes (~$20 per passenger-hour). Zero marginal carbon flights still works out to be cheaper than most countries' high speed rail networks if you compare unsubsidised costs.

Four things I would like to mention that don't come up generally in discussions like these:

* Transportation infrastructure is a societal investment that produces benefits, it's not just about its cost. Investing in terrestrial transportation like trains, even if it is more expensive can give rise to proportionally greater societal benefits than air travel--think, a long-haul train has multiple stops, providing connection points for economic activity (smaller towns and cities connected through train stations) that planes clearly cannot. I actually think it's totally OK that trains require more investment because they may create larger network effects in the big picture.

* In some sense, all societal spending is make-work. If we're going to have make-work programs, we might as well spend it on the best long-term strategy, which in my honest opinion, having lived in Europe for a number of years, is cities being well-connected with cheap and fast rail, subways, and trams.

* Climate change is a real thing, and it's due mostly to CO2 emissions. It's gonna cost money to fix. We need to stop deploying the "but itz mah dollarzzzes" as an excuse not to act. We need to start thinking about paying back the absolutely massive debt we racked up from cheap and easy energy.

* Carbon offsets are a shell game that we can play in the short run, but ultimate we need to get to zero carbon footprint, which cannot be accomplished with offsets alone.

In summary, we better start paying up.

High speed rail requires speeding up and slowing down too. And at 15m/mile it's significantly cheaper and better to build airports

To go from LA to SF, flu. To go from Fresno to SF... Airport, really????

What does "15m/mile" mean?

I suspect that means 15 million dollars per mile of rail. It should depend on where the rail is being installed though, because for paved asphalt roads, the price per mile can vary from 500k per mile per lane in a rural area, to north of 10m per mile per lane if you’re in a densely populated urban area

At scale it comes from crops on farmland that was previously the Amazon (palm oil), or causes competition with food consumers (soybeans). Ethanol is just as bad, it’s a handout to the ag lobby.

Works fine if it’s recycled vegetable oil, but that doesn’t scale. I love a truck that emits a French fry smell.

So, if fine from waste/recycled vegetable oil, the idea is not per de dumb. The industrial part could be tweaked sure. Corn & soybeans are global commodities, so to suggest it competes with food is not an accurate reflection of how food is priced. Also, I have yet to smell french fry exhaust from fatty acid methyl esters.

I don't believe I said it was a dumb idea, but that it wouldn't scale. Repurposing recycled or waste oils for vehicle combustion is a fine idea if you're properly managing the particulates emissions.

> Corn & soybeans are global commodities, so to suggest it competes with food is not an accurate reflection of how food is priced.

Food goes to whomever will pay the most for it, same as fuel. If there is greater demand for it as a fuel than those at the bottom affordability rungs for crops, there are no regulatory mechanisms to ensure those who need food get it instead of those who would burn it in vehicles.

Airliners travel in air that is >60% less dense than the air at sea level, and usually travel over or around energy-wasting terrain features and weather.

That's not a citation, it's a random factoid, which doesn't make for a fruitful discussion. Other random factoids include:

* trains are long

* trains travel slower than airplanes, and drag is proportional to the square of speed

* making conclusions solely based drag coefficients from the density of the air is sound reasoning

One of these statements is false. I get that hackernews is just a forum for casual discussion of various technical topics, but overly categorical statements based on a reasoning in a vacuum (no pun in intended) just force the conversation into unproductive threads like this one. I'm kinda sorry I took the bait at this point.

> I get that hackernews is just a forum for casual discussion of various technical topics

I hear this sentiment a lot, and I don't understand it. Trying to speak the truth isn't just optional outside formal contexts. There's no situation so casual that I it suddenly becomes appropriate to make up bullshit and present it as facts.

That is to say, I agree with your larger point: if nickff wants to make the claim that trains consume more energy than aircraft, he'd better come up with a reasonable source for that information.

Trains are long, but skin friction drag is real. Traveling slower is a bug, not a feature. If you want to go slower, airplanes can be more efficient as well!

Yes, but they travel 5-10x faster than ground vehicles. Drag losses go linearly with air density and quadraticly with speed. Likewise the distance traveled is going to be higher on a rail network but probably in the "2x as far" realm. You're not going to make those two orders of magnitude up with this.

I think if you want to make this analysis come out you need to include starting/stopping losses (and maybe fuel hauling, empty car overhead, etc...) to the train trip or somesuch. Naively trains are going to win and it's not even close.

That’s a bold Claim. What proof do you offer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail for the costs side.

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/drageq.html for the drag side.

There are also a huge number of fuel consumption, economic analysis, and environmental impact studies, but I am sure you can find those easily if you're interested.

CHSR is like the worst case example of cost. That project is a disaster.

Every contractor and their mother had their hand in the cookie jar. And every politician wanted a stop in their constituency town(s).

This will not be any different nationally. It might actually be quite worse.

I agree, but I see no reason to assume other states would be better. New York's subway cost spiral has been quite bad as well.

Based on this equation, shouldn't high speed trains consume less energy since they travel so much slower than planes (3x speed = 9x drag)?

Really not sure whether the person you’re replying to is actually correct, but the air is a lot denser on the ground than at cruising altitude. That’ll have an effect on energy consumption that works in the other direction.

Of course it’s not correct. A high speed train will use about 40kwh per 1000 people per mile

A plane is about 5 tons an hour, or 10kg per 300 people per mile, so 30kg of jet fuel per 1000 people per mile, or 1.2GJ

So a cruising a330 uses about 10 times the energy per passenger mile as an ICE high speed train.

Clearly the comparison of polution caused it then affected by how green the electricity source is and the extra environmental impact of burning fuel in the high atmosphere.

Let's invest in medium speed national passenger rail that will go to cities of 100,000 population everywhere.

I agree with this - max speed around 120mph looks like the sweet spot in terms of ROI. I see HSTs as more of a vanity project these days - lots of them run under capacity and are even worse on paying back the money invested into them than standard rail. I love HSTs, and have been on Eurostar, Thales, ICE, AVE. But in many circumstances - and obviously it's down to the particular geographical situation, and many other factors - HSTs are not the optimal solution.

Oh, yes, indeed! Let us invest, using the fantastic negative-$864 billion/month budget surplus that we have been so blessed as to earn amidst this global pandemic.

Provoking people into this exact argument was, in fact, the entire point of blowing up the budget deficit in the first place.

Put military spending, corporate tax rates, and upper income tax rates back to where they were, and re-allocate that money to productive infrastructure and it'll be fine.

Sssshhh! Don't give them ideas to weaponized viruses!

I am confused; you seem to say that trillions of dollars in US taxation and spending were chosen primarily for their rhetorical effect? This seems like a pretty stunning accusation to make against policymakers.

There has been a long-term effort by the Republican party to shrink government, the core of which is often called "starve the beast"[1]. The idea is that by cutting the revenue of the government, it will have to reduce spending on things like, say, a national high-speed rail system.

So, yeah, regardless of how you feel about the goal, I don't think it's unfair to say that trillions of dollars in US taxation and spending were chosen primarily for their rhetorical effect. Being able to say "but we can't afford that!" was a top goal in recent tax policy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

How curious.

Well. I did some basic math. The figures I found online indicate that the 2017 tax cuts reduced total revenues in 2018 from forecasts, by about $275 billion.

The June 2020 deficit was, as noted, $864 billion in a single month. This suggests that the added revenue from restoring taxes to "where they were" would pay for June's deficit over the next ~4 years — well, three and a bit, and you have to account for the revenue drop in a crisis.

This is, of course, on top of the $779 billion deficit in 2018 and the $984 billion deficit in 2019. And, of course, there are multiple months in 2020.

I think the general point stands, unless you're going to raise taxes VERY high or go full "money printer go brr" perhaps?

Depends on where the earlier commenter meant when they said "where they were"; the 2017 cuts were just the latest in a long line. For instance, if we rolled all the way back past Reagan's 1981 tax cuts, we'd be up to a 70% top marginal tax rate (it's currently 37%). They also wanted to cut military spending, which has gone up by a fair bit in the same time period, and meddle with corporate taxes.

It's probably fair to say that all this would have a big impact on that deficit.

It's unlikely to cover the 2020 economic-crash monthly deficit, of course... but hard times are the right time to go full deficit-spending to try to prop up the economy. Money printer can, indeed, go brr if it'll slow a collapse. So says mainstream economic theory.

If you borrow to invest for the future by adding value, you grow. Everyone seems delighted to borrow ever more against existing housing stock, which creates nothing.

Yes, but only if you add value. It is of course possible to borrow to invest in the future, and lose value, particularly given the time value of money.

Do you think this proposed investment is being made with conservative, reliable underwriting, such that we can be confident that it will deliver value?

What if people are doing nothing with their time [0]? If that's the case it wouldn't matter what the money is spent on. Of course it would be better to optimize everything perfectly but that is a luxury that's not available to everyone.

[0] Most likely mass unemployment due to the corona virus.

Yes, I agree. You have a fence that needs painting, paint, a brush, and a guy who is about to spend the day watching daytime TV.

Yet we are told, no!, do not pay this man, we can't afford it. We cannot get that day back when the sun sets.

Economics has let us down very, very badly.

Please avail yourself of an economics work and read about what the "time value of money" is and how little it is connected to unemployment. You will be able to engage in a coherent discussion. Thank you.

Really? Why not develop something you can use to stop wasting fossile fuels on trucking stuff around? A rail system using small electrical vehicles instead of diesel would make more sense with an option to move people as well.

Since I live in EU that would only make sense for this to be multinational and therefore probably never get built. Also it would require our leaders to think about the future and not just about how to get more votes.

Most high speed trains are actually powered by electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_trains

First-and-last mile delivery need the flexibility of trucks, there's no way around it. So an expanded railway system and electric trucks are the way to go I believe.

Not in Denmark where I live. Most (I think) trains are running on Diesel as our politicians decides not to electrify all parts of the country.

When travelling on our highway (e-45) I see many trucks which are not first/last mile but more likely in the 1000 km range. I think that we should consider smaller trains which cost more to establish but could use some of the power getting wasted (wind/solar) at times where it is generated but the demand is low.

The problem here is that Europe optimized for passenger rail (so the rail is fast, which is good for people, but expensive per mile, which is bad for freight) and the US optimized for freight with the reverse positives and negatives.

The only country that I’m aware of that did both great on the same network was China, but they ran into capacity issues so they spent hundreds of billions to move people onto a brand new dedicated passenger high speed rail network and now the legacy slow one has more room for freight.

That was the leadership call. In the US, current leadership might do the same. It's likely a national poll would support an electric solution though.

How would locking _more_ people together in a confined space for even _longer_ help in this situation?

Trains at least stop and open their doors occasionally letting in fresh air. Each car has less people in it than a typical commercial flight, and my train trips are significantly shorter than my plane flights as well. It’s not obvious to me what’s worse one way or the other.

Can you give an example of your train trips that are shorter than the flights. It seems like a short flight between SFO-LAX is about ~1.5 hours of sitting-inside-the-tube. I am not aware of a train between these two cities that can do this trip in any significantly less time than that.

One thing to consider is that train seats are significantly roomier and more comfortable than airline economy seats. This site[1] lists most high-speed trains having seat pitch of >900mm (or 35in), some reaching 1,000mm (39in). According to [2] most airlines have seat pitch of 31-32 in.

[1] https://misc.transport.rail.europe.narkive.com/ffTnAi0D/seat...

[2] https://www.seatguru.com/charts/longhaul_economy.php

6 feet is 72 inches though. So this is insufficient.

Wasn't sure which were the apples and oranges to even begin comparing it seems. I was thinking of train trips locally like commuter trains for about 30 - 40 miles v. short flights a state away because for a train trip to be made a route needs to exist, and those tend to be commuter trains. I wouldn't suggest a train to be an aggregately shorter time period for a long distance trip.

Another factor to consider is that total time for air travel for the covid context should include sitting on a tarmac and loading / unloading.

Building high-speed train track would provide exactly that, something like Shinkansen or CRH trains.

the parent comment is that we should build highspeed trains like the ones in other countries that demolish plane travel time and overall checkin to destination time.

A plane lets in fresh air the entire time throughout the flight.

When I read a long time ago I interpreted recirculated air to mean 100%. It seems that old planes had 100% fresh air and modern planes are 50% or so recirculated. Heck, I didn't think even HEPA filters would have been sufficient until I just did some reading, but clearly if as of 2002 a simple cold virus won't transmit appreciably with recirculation, the coronavirus won't either [1].

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/195131

The problem with recirculation is not that it makes through the filter (although that'd be part of the issue, if it did), the problem is that air is blown throughout the cabin, and those droplets travel quite a bit _before_ they reach the filter. Someone sneezes 3-4 rows away from you, and you could inhale whatever they expelled.

We’ll need to solve the last mile problem effectively - especially in low density areas. At least with airports you can rent a car and continue your journey. Train stations need to have similar infrastructure.

Having just completed the 32 hr train trip from Los Angeles to Seattle I would love a high speed alternative.

We did, then it was regulated to bankruptcy and the government took it over and now we have Amtrak.

Trains used to be high speed new technology. If the government got out of the way (I'm looking at you, California high speed train fiasco) we'd be fine and there would be great systems.

The interstate highway system had something to do with the end of long distance rail.

As someone who voted for the California initiative in 2008, I don't trust the competency of our national (or CA state) government. Perhaps it can be done in a privatized manner somehow.

Highway self driving will make virtually all of those obsolete as well.