Earlier quoted context omitted.
200 or 300 km/h I wouldn't call that slow. Not as fast as a plane but it's not slow at all.
It is slow when it's directly competing with planes.
Planes being faster doesn't mean trains are slow.
More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
101–110 of 207 posts
Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#102Trains can't replace flights. You can't get from Munich to London in 2 hours with a train. Trains are often much more expensive than flights too.
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Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#103As a European I love this. Not only because it's better for the environment but I really like trains. They are confy, fast and cheap. There's no need to pay extra for your baggage, you just hop in with your stuff, take a seat, read, watch a movie, listen to a podcast or sleep for a while and you're already at your destination.
They are not that comfortable. Sure you've got slightly more leg space than Ryanair, but difference is minimal. The only train I've really ever liked was Amtrak, but unsure whether I was somehow upgraded to their premium seats. Taking Canadian train after that was a torture. Also they are much more expensive. Which makes sense as tech itself is legacy. The cost of maintaining, lack of competition (especially with bus…
> Honestly I don't see how we can't replace trains with electric buses...
I suspect you've never taken a train, or a bus.
Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive They’re more expensive because they’re better.
No, they're more expensive because they have higher infrastructure costs. Building and maintaining hundreds of kilometers of track costs a lot.
Prices are set by what the market supports due to the value the product provides, not what the product costs to deliver.
Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#105This is an easy promise to make but remains empty without mentioning the difficulties of such undertaking. Europe has the most splintered incompatible mess of a railway system in the world. They barely managed to run high speed trains between fairly local and established big cities (Paris to Amsterdam). Then there's the problem of routing and adding stops. With a plane you can almost always get a direct flight or a s…
It's also the only place with such amount of trains. It is quite involved of making the infrastructure, and still it's managed.
From april onwards you can travel from Amsterdam to London for 40 euro in 3 hours. There's a lot to align.
Doesn't take away from the things that could be improved. Trains from Amsterdam to Germany stopping in small towns doesn't help.
Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
200 or 300 km/h I wouldn't call that slow. Not as fast as a plane but it's not slow at all.
It is slow when it's directly competing with planes.
Not so much when the train leaves direct from the city centre and you can arrive 10 mins before your departure.
Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#107We should mandate that aviation fuel is 10% carbon neutral. And then steadily up that fraction yearly. How they satisfy that is up to them - synthetic fuels generated using solar/wind, biofuels, or whatever. The point is that we're not going to be able to replace liquid fuels for long-haul aviation, so we both need to factor in the increased cost of carbon-neutral fuels and at the same time provide a market that stim…
We should mandate taxes are paid on fuel, they dump fuel before landing. Which has a worse impact on the greenhouse effect.
They don't dump fuel, except when they need to land in an emergency and don't want to risk landing overweight. This is a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect caused by aviation, so taxing it wouldn't make any real difference.
Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#108I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against so…
Jet fuel is tax free, energy and diesel for trains is not. https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/
Wrong explanation. Jets still use more energy dollars per person flying and you're not taking account of subsidies for trains, though there are others for planes as well.
Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#109I think an issue for trains is a lack of an international unified system for routing, timetabling, booking, ticketing, labelling and so on. Planes are the same everywhere. Flight number, gate number, time, and destination, everything available in English. Easy. I can catch a plane in Japan no problem. When I fly into a foreign city and try to take the train into the city it’s always a whole big mess. Inconsistent sys…
Trainline, despite the annoying booking fee does, does this quite well for a good chunk of Europe.
If you need timetables then Bahn.de also covers almost all of central Europe and the app is usable. You can even do eg London to Beijing.
There's also the European Timetable book https://www.seat61.com/Thomas-Cook-European-Timetable.htm
Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they're more expensive because they have higher infrastructure costs. Building and maintaining hundreds of kilometers of track costs a lot.
Prices are set by what the market supports due to the value the product provides, not what the product costs to deliver.
Yes and no. The market has to at a minimum cover the cost of operation otherwise businesses will stop operating.