Even more than just the distance, though, is the fact that there would be no practical way to have direct rail lines to every major city in the US.
Trains are useful, but there is no way they could replace air travel in the US.
Perhaps people/families have spread themselves all over the continent because in the past energy has been 'too cheap' (i.e., didn't price in externalities).
With carbon pricing people may make different decisions in how far they want to travel from their 'home town', and what that would mean for seeing family.
>95% of the population of the US (and CA) are people who moved across an ocean and had basically zero expectation of seeing their families once they left. The only communication would be letters, telegraphs, and later trans-oceanic telephone calls.
Given the realities of climate change, and what it's cost us with regards to damage to the planet, expectations need to adjust.
Living in a poor, rural county with poor schools and few jobs can really mess things up.
Someone I know is getting divorced.
She was a very high earner who moved to a low-cost of living, low wage area to be with her husbands family.
She had previously earned very high wages, but took a significant pay cut to live with in-laws.
As the divorce is concluding, she realizing that the terms of the divorce prohibit her from taking the kids out of state.
Which means until her kids are 18, she’s effectively trapped in a market where her MS in Engineering gets her a job at Walmart.
She had previously worked for a major firm in New York, and then worked for a the local government until she had to resign.
So she’s basically screwed.
Plenty of people have skills and credentials that can only be used with relocation. A MA in Journalism isn’t very helpful outside big cities.
"Travel" or "movement"?
I am the first generation to be born in the country I live in. When my (grand)parents left, they left under the assumption that there would be no, or maybe very little, chance of going back to the Old Country. They took a boat over the course of many weeks to traverse an ocean; an era before cheap air travel.
When people move in the future, to hopefully have a better life than where they current are, it may be that they may not be able to go back (as easily) to where they came from.
The fact that we can now travel back and forth cheaply over great distances could simply be a temporary blip in human history, and we should perhaps consider this era could be ending. You can still move, but it will be more 'permanent' going forward, and travel is will be less frequent/easy/cheap/etc.
Under the current regime of 'cheap' travel in which the externalities of climate change are probably not taken into account.
to be fair, even for short trips trains require a minimum passenger flux before it's more efficient than planes. So even strictly talking about carbon emissions, trains are a net loss for most trajectories, but a large gain for most passengers.
If trains could go 250km/h on average, that 5000km trip would take 20 hours - that's plausible for an overnight trip, leave 6pm, arrive 10am. A flight over this is distance is probably a much more stressful red eye.
Sure this is quite speculative, but perhaps less so than hyperloop dreams, or supersonic aircraft that somehow have no environmental impact.
If there was no air travel, I would just travel a lot less. If you want to argue that the environmental cost of air travel is too great to allow it to happen is one thing, but done act like it wouldn’t make the travel experience a lot worse.
internet foo
Found this. As I suspected, hockey stick graph.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1579/airlines.aspx
Half the people in the US don't fly at all. 25% fly 1-2 times a year. People that don't fly at all, and people that fly 1-2 times year. Probably wouldn't be much impacted if they had to take a high speed train instead of a plane.
> All overland passenger transport should be rail.
Then it was claimed that this is impossible. My argument is saying it’s possible to have rail replace rail, for example if air travel was severely restricted.
I can't imagine how long would it take to tunnel through the Rockies. Look at the map, they are far wider than the Alps. Getting through the Rockies is like getting from Denmark to Croatia.
Think BIGGRRRR! (Aggressively so, instead of sissying around!)
edit: also not to forget about 'Nuclear Tunnel Boring Machines/Subterrene' https://havacuppahemlock1.blogspot.com/2015/06/nuclear-power...
cf. "Trans-Planetary Subway Systems
A Burgeoning Capability
by Robert M. Salter
February 1978"
Again it’s difficult, but possible if a replacement for air travel was considered a necessity.
Arriving, baggage claim rarely takes more than 30 minutes. (Delta “guarantees” 20 minutes on domestic flights.) With no checked bags, it’s the 10 minute walk through the airport and then plus/minus ground transport differences vs the train.
I can’t imagine that most people are spotting the train a 6 hour head-start, unless the live upstairs from the train station and are extremely nervous about missing their flight.
With planes, airports are way off the city centre, I think that there are few airports (here in Europe) serving large cities that can be reached in less than 1 hour from the city centre, and that applies to both A and B, to this you add, unless you use a private means of transportation (car-taxi), a half an hour for the timetable of the bus or train you need to take to/from the airport, as it won't necessarily be synchronized with your flight departure/arrival.
[1] https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=11&lat=53.61524&lon...
visiting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_Messe_und_Congress
you'd take
[3] https://geofox.hvv.de/jsf/home.seam?execute=true&date=05.07....
I see no problem here.
(edit: WHAT?)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557848
Maybe they will start to organize a few more of these trains, the level of stress was so much lower on (overnight) trains when compared to planes when moving in Europe.
If you make it a fast train, at 350km/h, it will beat the plane on any trip up to 1700km.
Most trips are short, so no, most trips can be done by train and people still spend less time on them than by plane.