You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer, and need safely maintained local infrastructure every meter of the journey. It's tough to make that cheaper.
And then the service is less valuable since it's so damn long. I love train rides, but 14 hours costs a whole day, and 2h costs an early-rise morning.
You can get a coach (bus) direct to Heathrow from almost any town in England. Getting to Waterloo [1] (London’s international) station from outside London could easily be more time consuming and tough with luggage.
But of course UK is gonna be an outlier in European train value discussions. It’s an island on the periphery with a single rail connection. The mainland capitals are more competitive.
[1] edit: now St. Pancras, which is closer to other London rail stations so likely better on balance. Thanks user sbuk.
While UK train prices are an outlier, London and the South East are very much part of the high density economic core of Europe. A box drawn around London/Paris/Amsterdam/Cologne contains roughly a quarter of the pre-Brexit EU population (and a substantially higher proportion of economic activity.)
Rail is already very competitive between these cities - it's only 2 hours on the train from London to Paris or Brussels and since the tunnel was built Eurostar has captured the vast bulk of travel between the cities it connects. The bigger challenge would seem to be making rail competitive to more dispersed cities like Berlin/Vienna/Barcelona/Madrid.
Getting to LHR from where I was, it was always quicker to get to any of the major rail stations in central London than to either LHR or LGW, but LCY was relatively good (only really works that way if you're east of the centre though).
And those are on twinned, dedicated passenger tracks where you never have to wait on a siding for a freight train to go by in the other direction, like you do with the Toronto -> Vancouver train that takes multiple days end to end.
Anyway, they keep studying HSR for the route, so much so that a prominent Canadian comedian made a joke video about it almost a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W32klYkTxCQ
But it's definitely a chicken and egg thing; it'll never gain significant market share under current conditions, but no politician can justify the money required to properly build HSR with current ridership numbers. But of course billions [1] for a new toll highway directly through protected greenbelt farmland (Hwy 413)? Ram it all through! Will it lose money and eventually be sold off to a foreign interest for pennies on the dollar similar to how Hwy 407 was twenty years ago? Probably!
[1]: Even without accounting for a likely sell-off, the gov't of Ontario has been super cagey about the planned costs of 413: https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/10/08/the-hugely-contr...
It takes 3 days to travel the 4500 km of rail from Toronto to Vancouver because the first 1500 km are through muskeg and around lakes where building straight, flat, protected 200 km/h high-speed tracks is just not an attainable option. Even if you managed 200 km/h the entire way, it's still 2 days travelling.
Planes travel about 800 km/h and can go in a relatively straight line without fear of a moose or a washout. It's 5 hours Toronto to Vancouver and 4.5 hours the other way because of tail winds.
In any case, I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested HSR for the train out west. VIA has simply embraced that it will always be slow and impractical, and they market and price it accordingly— it's supposed to be an experience, like going on a cruise, not a practical means of getting to a destination.
In Europe passengers trains have priority over freight trains of which there are very little anyway. Freight mostly goes by road while trains are mostly used to transport passengers. It is very different from how the network is used in North America.
However, according to statistics i found, rail freight in the EU is at 17% for 2019[0], while in the US it's at 9%[1] for 2017.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://www.bts.gov/topics/freight-transportation/freight-sh...
Or the whole night with sleeper trains, which is a decent workaround for that problem.
But, while I've done it, Boston to DC doesn't really make a lot of sense unless I'm looking for an excuse to do some reading, etc. for a day.
The train is pretty much a full day. I've done it when schedule allowed but going down the day before, working on the train, and spending the night in a hotel as opposed to doing an out and back in a day doesn't work for a lot of people.
Of course, shorter segments of the Northeast Corridor work pretty well by train. I pretty much never fly Boston to NYC unless I'm under unusual constraints.
We could honestly skip these checks for no-risk travelers.
And it also assumes that you are headed downtown and not to an adjacent town.
> flying is cheaper and quicker...
In Europe, notice how it's a bunch of private businesses competing with one another vs state ran rail monopolies?
How to decide who is a "no-risk traveler" and how do you identify them?
My fastest check-in was in Phoenix. I think it took me 11 minutes from curbside drop-off to sitting in my seat at the gate, including dropping off a checked bag (Southwest Airlines). I don't think I ever stopped moving forward from the moment the machine printed my bag tag until I hit my gate. This was pre-Covid too, so the airport was somewhat busy.
I'm not aware on any European wide unified airport security structure. The closest to that would probably something EU related [0], but I couldn't find anything related to "pre check" type programs being a thing.
My personal international airtravel experience, living in Germany, has been rather limited in the last decade; I flew on vacation to Turkey for a few weeks. There was pretty much zero security theater.
The biggest time waste was the slowness of everything, waiting in lines for luggage, pass/ID clearance, traversing the long distances across the different airport wings, really long time window for boarding.
Apparently the same airport also offers an "evening before pre-check in", but the website for that seems to have become another pandemic victim. It seems to be the biggest thing that skips is luggage check in and formalities/getting boarding pass, by allowing passengers to do that the evening before.
[0] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/security-and-em...
We should stop subsidizing fossil fuels, and start taxing them by how much they pollute.
You probably hit over night travel. If you leave early enough the time goes down to ~9 hours.
> You tie up the machine and staff for 7X longer,
You also cover over a dozen stops in one trip instead of two.
> and need safely maintained local infrastructure every meter of the journey.
The German rail infrastructure is so outdated that it probably is at least partly responsible for the last big train crash (no automatic lockout).
The last big airplane crashes on the other hand were caused by much needed efficiency upgrades that forced Boeing into using engines that were way too large for the half a century old frame they needed to remain compatible with on paper.
If DB updates infrastructure, that's on their budget (and while 100% publicly held and lots of politicians involved, it's nominally private). If it breaks down so much that it needs to be repeated, that's coming from federal funds. We have some perverse incentives in infrastructure maintenance.
You have exactly 1 destination with a plane flight, right ? A to B. But with a train you have A + all stops along the way + B so if done correctly you could potentially serve a lot more passengers with a single trip than you can with a flight. It could be that monetarily doesn't work out still, but it could be because of an inefficient market.
And you should also think in terms outside of just transportation. I imagine plane flights have a centralization effect on where people choose to live while trains allow them to be more spread out.
The train is several times cheaper than a plane, seats 10x more people and some of machines used in UK were built in the 70's. How many airplanes keep flying that long?
Infrastructure? Hs2 is the first track of rail in UK in over a century! Most track is 200 years old, so it has paid for itself a hundred times over.
The UK does have plenty of track: 20,000 miles worth, along with 6,000 level crossings, 30,000 bridges and viaducts, 2,500 stations...
Track needs constant maintenance through ballast redistribution and compaction to maintain track geometry; the rail itself needs to be ground regularly to maintain its shape; points systems need to be maintained, as well as signaling systems, earthworks and embankments, even vegetation.
Network Rail spends billions of GBP every year maintaining the railways.
Many.
> Most track is 200 years old
And have been relaid about 30-40 times since then.
About the only thing that dates to 19th century are the rights-of-way.
No, it's zero. Commercial airlines last about 30 years, they have metal fatigue from pressurisation cycles.
"And have been relaid about 30-40 times since then."
Are those expenses comparable to earthworks and contraction involved in laying down new line?
Look, I just opened up flightradar24 and clicked a random plane. That was G-DHKC, a 757-256, first flight 1989. 33 years.
And that's just a random pick. There are many airframes from mid-late 1970s still flying commercial.
> Are those expenses comparable to earthworks and contraction involved in laying down new line?
What do you mean by that?
Your random choice also did hit an interesting quirk in aviation that cargo airlines tend to use old aircraft that are no longer fit for passenger operations.
There are several reasons for this, but cargo ops are able to use their aircraft in ways that maximise their life [1]. Passenger airlines try and maximise the time each aircraft is airborne (i.e. earning revenue) whereas cargo operators often schedule differently. This sometimes allows for operation of aircraft that have very few pressurisation cycles left in their lifespan.
The specific aircraft you found was retired from passenger ops in 2016 (after being in storage since 2015) from Icelandair when DHL purchased it [2]. This is when the airframe was 16 years old. It was converted to a freighter variant at this time - the 757-256.
You can look at fleet ages to get an impression for the age of aircraft, and generally passenger airlines (especially in developed countries) are using newer planes and cargo airlines have a much older fleet. You might have noticed this when you see old fashioned designs like tri-jets, or four engined jets like the 747 only in cargo livery at airports.
[0] https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/boeing-757-200-g-dhkc...
And agents onboard do absolutely nothing upon them. Last time after my complaint for noise, he asked them if they had a fare, they said no, and the controller didn’t even give them a fine (on a 2hrs Paris-Lyon).
I’m over with train and I’ll ride my diesel as long as they mix us with them.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, for very short flights, we still used planes once they convert to electric (which is relatively viable for short flights now).
"Vertical and Heathrow Airport partner on air taxi services" https://www.airport-technology.com/news/vertical-heathrow-ai...
Not to mention the ethical implications around sourcing oil-derived fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_war
As lover of flying I might have my feathers ruffled but there's certainly other pros to flying (the view, the feeling of takeoff).
Maybe I'm just trying to justify my love of flying, still though.
People are being killed by pollution, both directly and indirectly.
But the bullets are invisible and the financial interests are very big so most people accept it as a necessary evil...
And why don't I "mean it"? As far as I know, there are already some investigations in progress against major oil companies.
> For fuel and electric, trains still have to pay full taxes. So not suprising that planes a cheaper with better tax conditions.
Aviation is heavily taxed in Europe and Rail is heavily subsidized. One fact taken out of context shouldn't be used to paint a picture that is the opposite of this basic reality.
The problem with taxing aviation fuel is that EU directives make it hard for a country to tax fuel on cross border flights[1] (you can tax domestic flights, but almost all flights in the EU are cross border).
Therefore what European nations do instead is apply exit charges to flights as a special aviation tax. They still collect the money, but as a departure tax, not as a tax on aviation fuel. Those exit charges were just increased in 2019. It's just a lot easier to add a departure tax than go through all the bilateral tax-agreements with other EU nations to impose a tax on aviation fuel for all flights out of Germany, so this is really an issue of minimizing paperwork rather than not taxing aviation. And Aviation exit charges are higher in Germany than in any other EU nation - each passenger pays an average of 33 euros per flight leaving Germany[5], from 13 euros for short-haul to 60 euros for long-haul. (Britain has higher exit charges, and because it's not in the EU, it is able to tax aviation fuel pumped in its own borders).
And of course there are already taxes on carbon in the EU, so not sure why there should be a special singling out of one particular use, just because it gets some people riled up. Those taxes have to be paid by aviation fuel producers, so they still go into the cost.
Deutsche Ban, on the other hand, is heavily subsidized -- they are getting a special covid subsidy 6 Billion euros[3] atop regular subsidies over 11 billion[4] and an extra 50 billion euro subsidy for long term capex[2].
[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-to-inject-extra-50-billion-int...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-deutsche-bahn-bailout/ger...
[4] https://economics21.org/html/europes-flawed-addiction-to-rai...
[5] https://www.fccaviation.com/regulation/germany/aviation-tax
You can certainly argue that these beliefs are incorrect if you feel like it, and it's not as if there isn't a case to be made. But it's not just a simple matter of "we tax this, and subsidize that".
I was not making a judgement as to whether trains should be subsidized or not. That's a whole separate discussion. But since you bring it up, I'd say that in general, transportation of all kinds provides such massive positive externalities that it should probably be subsidized. Then we can debate how much more trains should be subsidized over airplanes, but both create massive net positive externalities, IMO.
Something like this applies to trains also, but much less so because their inherent geographic scope, environmental impact, sociological impact and effects on reducing travel time are much less than flying.
In most cases, that's just impossible and the taxes end up being applied for political or emotional reasons rather than objectively taking all costs and benefits into account.
But when it comes to a few areas, we know that there are massive positive externalities in anything involving transportation or communication. Anything that makes the world smaller generally has big positive effects.
Even if you never buy a foreign good, the fact that a good was brought in will lower the price and raise the quality of the domestic good you do buy. That generates employment and income. Anything that lowers the price of bringing in that good will have a huge positive effect on the economy.
With planes, the fact that they make transportation easy and affordable generates massive revenue for tourism, trade, employment. European Airports alone generate about 675 Billion in GDP -- 4% of the EU's GDP when both passenger and freight is taken into account[1]. And that's just airports.
An older FAA study concludes that civil aviation generates 5.4% of US GDP[2] and that's a fairly conservative study not even trying to measure too many spillovers.
Then there is a third effect, which is the superiority of point to point designs. Miami Beach was developed in the 30s and 40s because some developers saw its potential as a great beach destination. But it was only with plane flight that the rest of the nation had a chance to enjoy it. Or Las Vegas, another center that sprang out of nowhere.
The fact that I can fly from pretty much anywhere in the country to Miami for $100 massively increases the tourism trade to Miami Beach. To do that with rail, you'd have to overcome n^2 problem. That alone would require laying down ~50,000 miles of track, requiring God knows how many tons of steel, trainyards, and workers. And it would take days to travel there with connections, stopovers, etc. Those are all frictions.
And once you laid it all down, suppose you didn't want to go to Miami, but to Corpus Christi. Thus air travel allows places to spring up in response to market demand, whereas in the old days, cities along the track became the important centers -- e.g. development was infrastructure constrained rather than allowing the infrastructure to meet the needs of development flexibly and quickly. That increased flexibility and convenience, together with the reduced frictions of point to point travel provides trillions of dollars in positive externalities.
[1] https://medium.com/geophy-hq/airports-as-a-positive-external...
[2] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/media/2014-econ...
I don't think that these are particularly good examples for you to cite. Neither Vegas nor MB developed under the wing (so to speak) of air travel, but rather the interstate system. Air travel made them more accessible and accelerated their growth, but it was not responsible for their development, and the many folks who visited either of them in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s without flying would likely not say that they could not enjoy them without planes.
In addition, although it's clear that Miami Beach and Vegas have benefitted from cheap flights, that doesn't mean that the net result for the country (let alone world) as a whole is positive.
> Even if you never buy a foreign good, the fact that a good was brought in will lower the price and raise the quality of the domestic good you do buy.
This sounds like an incredibly hand-wavy claim, and also easily refuted as a general rule. The easy (flight-based) import of foreign goods has, in many cases, led the complete decimation of various US manufacturing sectors. If you hadn't noticed there are essentially no mass-market US electronics companies any more, very few clothes manufacturing companies, and in many manufacturing sectors that do still nominally exist as US companies, their factories are no longer US based. It's false to lay this all at the feet of relatively cheap air freight, but it certainly plays a role, and refutes your overly broad claim that "Anything that lowers the price of bringing in that good will have a huge positive effect on the economy."
> Anything that makes the world smaller generally has big positive effects.
Yes, the positive effects are well known and oft-discussed. The negative effects are less well known, less researched and rarely discussed. This means that it's hard to have a well-informed discussion about the balance between the two.
Yes, I am not saying that air travel created Miami Beach, but that Miami Beach benefits from it. This is the definition of an economic externality. We are counting the financial benefit or spillover of some technology, meaning the extra value-add created beyond the purchase of the plane ticket itself. For flight, it's huge.
Then there is a switch to a different argument:
> that doesn't mean that the net result for the country (let alone world) as a whole is positive.
This is not an economic argument. Perhaps a moral argument - it's not clear, as no details were provided. But speculating as to whether some value-add spillovers should or should not be present is not how we count externalities in a pigovian tax. It seems what you want is a sin tax for flight, which is not a pigovian tax.
In fact most people, when they use words like "externalities", actually want sin taxes. They are not trying to come up with some objective measure of economic value-add spillover effects. And that's fine -- we have lots of sin taxes in the world, but then advocacy for them should be honestly labelled as such.
> This sounds like an incredibly hand-wavy claim, and also easily refuted as a general rule. The easy (flight-based) import of foreign goods has, in many cases, led the complete decimation of various US manufacturing sectors.
Now is not the time to get into a debate about trade theory, but suffice it to say that I disagree. Trade is great. Deficits are not great. You can have lots of trade without trade deficits, and trade is welfare improving. If you want to stop trade deficits, then add a tax to net foreign capital flows, not cross border flows of goods and services. But on this point we just have to agree to disagree.
> This is not an economic argument. Perhaps a moral argument - it's not clear, as no details were provided. But speculating as to whether some value-add spillovers should or should not be present is not how we count externalities in a pigovian tax. It seems what you want is a sin tax for flight, which is not a pigovian tax.
It's not necessarily a moral or an economic argument alone, though it could be. For example, perhaps the massive shift in summer vacation travel from all points of the US towards FL was (while very good economically good for FL) both bad economically for the rest of the country and created substantial externalities within FL itself (environmental, social etc.)
Comparing these costs and benefits can't be done in a value-free way, which means that establishing the overall cost/benefit is not likely to be a task that will lead to a consensus outcome.
When I said an "increase" in value add, I meant an economy-wide increase in value-add, so the argument of taking business away from other tourist destinations doesn't apply.
If you want to claim there is some economic loss as a result of "social losses", then you need to again demonstrate that loss in terms of economic value-add and it will roll up to the economy-wide value add figure above, otherwise we have once again left pigovian territory and are back in "sin tax" land.
Transportation just has huge positive externalities, and I don't see any of them being entered into the equations when claiming that more taxes are warranted because of externalities.
If we really subsidize trains, we will induce enough demand to make investments look better in nominal terms and shift the culture/politics by normalizing way more rail travel. Easy victory.
A problem is the Europeans are prudish about printing money with their bad ordoliberal EU Constitution.
I don't think people realize how much more travel we all could do with good cheap comfortable HSR everywhere. Stuff like go to Miami from North Carolina every weekend.
The infrastructure alone for trains is insane. We don’t need rails in the sky.
Not only that - but we’re talking about staff for half a day instead of a couple hours.
What we could use are electric planes, for short distances. Plane usage isn’t going to stop. Only the select few with the luxury of time to kill are going to pick a 12hr train over a 2-3hr flight for the same distance, even at half the price.
Business travel alone makes the idea of increasing flights costs a serious no-go.
Airports past a single runway and hangar also cost a lot of money. Not to mention all the related infrastructure ( road, public transit connections), ATC, etc. Airplanes are expensive and need maintenance, luggage handling, etc. and fuel. Tons of it, to be stored, transported, refueled, etc.
This one is unlike the others because at 3 hours it's faster and more convenient than the plane city centre to city centre. Building that high speed line helped put Italy's national carrier out of business:
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/italy-high-speed-trai...
If that happens to discourage people from flying, well, that's just a side effect of having a properly functioning marketplace, where there are no externalities and the participants all have full information.
The grandparent comment of the one I replied to specifically mentioned taxing planes to get people to take trains instead.
Except it is now foreign governments that bought our rail on the market and are now creaming it.
https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/70-of-uk-rail-routes-now-owned-b....
I'm not so sure about that. British Rail was dire before it was all privatised.
So a 1 hour flight is comparable to a 2.5 hour train ride. However a quick check shows that, on average, it takes over 2 hours (133 minutes) to get on the plane after you've arrived at the airport. Then of course you've got to get off the plane, but we'll be generous and not count that time.
In summary, taking the train is about 30 minutes faster than flying. As for cost, well, the emissions from flying make the cost somewhat irrelevant. Any reasonable government would tax flying so it's more expensive than rail travel.
The benefit of trains (for what would be a 1 hour flight) is that you don't need to get to a distant airport and go through the usual airport nonsense. You just arrive 5 minutes early and board the train. You get off the same way, at the central terminal of a large city.
It certainly reduces the weight of the plane if it doesn't need to carry its initial propulsion system for the entire flight.
Still, there might be some weight gains that come from reducing the motor's peek power requirements, and those multiply across the entire flight.
I was wondering if it could worth implementing a two-stage system. The booster stage contains a lot of batteries, extra motors and a beefed up landing gear. The booster batteries contain enough power to get the aircraft up to it's cruising altitude before detaching and more or less gliding back to the departure airport. All the second stage would have to do is maintain cruising altitude for the rest of the flight then land.
The batteries are plenty powerful. We’re limited in energy to about 500-1000 miles unless we use better aerodynamics, etc.
I would love to start contributing less to emissions and take trains even though they take more time but they gotta start taxing planes and making trains cheaper to make people start doing it.