The thing with air travel vs. trains is that with air travel you only need infrastructure at the origin and destination. This makes it fairly easy to add new routes. By contrast, for a train you need infrastructure all the way from origin to destination, necessarily crossing other types of infrastructure (e.g. roads and canals) which requires the construction of bridges and/or tunnels. The land also needs to be acquired and, depending on length, will likely require dealing with hundreds or thousands of existing land owners.
If there is an existing rail line, that may help, depending on spare capacity. Adding additional tracks may also be slightly less difficult than constructing an entirely new track, assuming the existing property is wide enough to accommodate the additional track(s).
A port for an airship is probably even easier to realise than a normal airport, as you don't need a long runway.
Trains accelerate slowly. Adding stops non-linearly increases travel time [1]. A few extra stops might thus make total travel time by train meaningfully more than by air.
[1] https://blog.bimajority.org/2018/10/20/interlude-physics-of-...
> There may be reasons to add or update infrastucture ...
As long as we're talking in abstract we can construct scenarios where one is faster or better. However my read the original comment was that that adding a new connection involves adding new infrastructure, which isn't always true.
The single trip I took by rail in the US we spent most of our time just waiting on other freight trains to pass us.
On short distances a railway is simply less efficient than trucks.
Also companies have optimised their storage and logistic chain to expect for example one truck each day instead of a train each week and thus are using the road as storage facility.
Part of it is that the Northeast Corridor has to pay for basically the entire rest of the country where Amtrak almost universally loses money.
The other is that Acela specifically is priced to be more or less just competitive with air on the BOS-NYC and NYC-DC legs. (Acela doesn't really work for the most part to travel the entire length of the corridor.)
I almost never take Acela if I'm paying myself because the electrification work done for Acela made the regular regional train only about an hour slower for the BOS-NYC leg. (They used to have to switch engines in New Haven.)
Passenger rail is pretty much the direct opposite, requiring fast acceleration and speed. So the two do not mix well (freight trains will slow down passenger trains.)
The only country that operates both high speed rail and freight successfully, by China, literally built a whole separate new high speed network to reserve for passenger trains and to leave freight the freed up space on legacy lines.
A bit like what the US does for roads.
https://specialty-freight.com/2021/06/us-requires-railroads-...
"This April, the US Senate introduced the Rail Passenger Fairness Act, legislation that requires infrastructure managers to prioritize passenger trains over freight trains. Infrastructure managers will be brought to court for not complying.
[...] the US is giving Amtrak, the nation’s main passenger carrier, the ability to take infrastructure managers to court for not providing preference to passenger rail operating on their rail lines."
Apparently the incentives are not there for that, and should be reexamined accordingly.
However, come to think of it, one might want to give everyone some carbon credit or travel points, and then develop a market in it. (That would still mean that the rich will fly as much as they want, but at least they'll pay the poor that don't travel for the privilege.)
One of them is a pure carbon tax on all carbon emitting sources, which is regressive: it will affect poorer people more while affluent people can just conveniently pay more to emit the CO2 they need.
The other way is by specifically increasing taxes on income and wealth and using that money to invest in decarbonisation - for the most part by making solar, wind (and in some cases nuclear) cheaper, which eventually makes carbon more expensive in relative terms.
Governments these days tend to focus on the second way, either because it's progressive and therefore perceived as fairer, or because they see the alternative as political suicide (Macron's Gillet Jaunes appeared because of a proposed carbon tax on petrol)
This already exists, but the problem is that carbon credits are nearly impossible to regulate (it's very hard to prove that some carbon-reducing initiative isn't counted toward two distinct carbon credit programs or that the carbon is even reduced as promised). It's hard to do the accounting correctly for honest participants, which pretty much guarantees fraud among less honest participants.
The lower class is more susceptible to the effects of worsening air pollution and climate change. They see the greatest benefits in those categories as each are improved by a carbon tax.
The downsides for the lower class can be further ameliorated by making the tax redistributive, e.g. increased welfare benefits, lowering other taxes, UBI, etc.
That’s significant, but a ticket already generally costs $387 to $400/pp in moderate travel months if you take a bag.
Of course, we wouldn't allow that to happen, so we would subsidize the airlines, which in turn defeats the purpose of the carbon taxes.
Now, you might say, "carbon taxes will drive the industry to find economical, carbon-neutral solutions", and surely it will provide this motivation, but motivation alone doesn't guarantee that such a solution exists or that we will find it in time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Air_Nostrum_destinatio...
Even within Spain the Balearic islands and Canary islands are very popular destinations and probably not going to be on any high speed rail network any time soon. :-)
They also have good comparisons here: https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/news-and-media/overview/in...
That's not even talking about the fact that the lines don't even all connect to each other at Paris. They often terminate in different stations necessitating cumbersome travel from one station to the other.
If you check the population centers in Spain, it clearly should have the form of a bike wheel (full circle and radials), but it is an asterisk.
Sometimes it cheaper to fly from London to Minorca airport than from Madrid or Barcelona. I have traveled MAD-LGW-MAH (and stayed in london 1-2 days) because flight+hoter was cheaper than MAD-MAH.
TBH, we need to tax the hell out of short-haul airfare to stop nonsense like this. If you want people to make eco-friendly choices, the prices need to reflect externalities and real costs.
A small landing spot on each end vs. tearing up the entire countryside, building tunnels and bridges, displacing thousands of people for an extra rail track?
Yeah, no.
Train connections in Spain are nice though.
I took a high speed train between Valencia and Madrid two weeks ago. Pretty nice experience. They have two generations of high speed trains in Spain. On the way to Madrid, the train was doing around 245 km/h between the two stops more or less consistently. It took a bit under two hours. On the way back, I had a different train that did 300 km/h over the same track. That train arrived a few minutes ahead of schedule even in about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Total distance is 360 km (give or take). Both trains did their top speed most of the time and stopped twice. The average speed over that distance is well over 200 km/h for the newer train. That's way faster than the top speed of most normal trains and about the same as a small airplane would do (like a Cessna cruising at 110 knots/hour).
And that's factoring in that getting in and out of the big cities takes some time before it can accelerate. You lose 5-10 minutes on both sides going relatively slowly. The in between stops take a few minutes as well but it gets back up to speed quickly.
That kind of speed is not possible everywhere. You need special tracks and not too many detours/stops along the way. Spain is perfect for this because it's mostly country side outside of the big cities. High speed trains in Germany are a very different game. There are only a handful of proper high speed connections where the train can actually hit its maximum speed. Mostly it never gets over 160 km/h. Still, it's alright when you have the option.
Every time there is free real estate, “let’s use it for terraforming.”
No. Let’s admit we are overpopulated and return more land to nature, before nature and wars do it naturally. It’s not because Spain is a half desert of sand that it’s not important for the Earth.
I live in France and I’m appalled that our ideology is both to be a welcome land for immigrants and “The young generation doesn’t have housing, let’s densify habitat and make fields constructible! It’s a human right!”
It’s a human right in direct contradiction with our kids’ human rights.
And it lasts hundreds of years and is super energy efficient. This isn't Ikea furniture.
Infrastructure cost should be calculated over years of service life.
Like poor people can’t buy bulk, real countries with limited budgets can’t spend freely for a 100-year project. It will be well worth it in the end, but you have to pay it all now.
In terms of infrastructure wouldn't building railways, rail stations, and trains use a lot more resources and time?
We aren't going to survive the next century if every time someone wants to go from A to B, someone suggests that what we actually need is to spend years, billions of dollars and tonnes of carbon building infrastructure suitable for regular journeys between those points
Decarbonizing short haul flights is great, but wouldn't trains be better suited for this purpose? Especially if you consider the extra infrastructure that needs to be built at airports which will be served by these airships - concrete production also generates a lot of CO2...