Why High-Speed Rail is the Better Alternative to Flights
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- Опубліковано 11 лип 2022
- Alon Levy's Article: pedestrianobservations.com/20...
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Worth mentioning is that if done correctly, rail should be significantly more punctual than air travel. Many countries have shown this to be absolutely achievable, and air travel, no matter how good, will always have more weather and equipment delays. North America has a long way to go here with rail ownership and management to avoid the hours- or even days-long delays of some trains. I think people would even be willing to pay a premium for reliable, on-time service.
Atleast trains don't get stopped by birds.
Instead bird ceases to exist.
No one should have to pay a premium for service to be on time. I should get money off my rent for paying on time if that's the case. The gov always wants us conditioned to expect less. Let's expect more.....and demand HSR atp.
@@mrgooglethegreat The EU has binding rules about how much too late needs to pay back how much money. Also, when you lose enough time on a switch-over due to late trains, you have a right to hotel rooms for the wait. I see no reason (except the unfortunate political landscape) why North America could not copy those rules, or create similar ones.
@@mrgooglethegreat thats actually called interest, and yes you do pay extra for being late on your payments. if you want HSR, you need to vote for your state party that promises it, and if none do, either you create it, or you drum up the party you like the most and get everyone you know to do the same, while educating people you dont know on the benefits so theyll vote for it once the party agrees to it.
Yep, the benefits of operating on the surface!
I'm a Aerospace Engineering turned train conductor...
Airplanes are most efficient over long distances (think New York to Singapore). Alot of newer airplanes are built for long distance fuel efficiency.
An Airplane going from Toronto to Ottawa or New York to Washington spends most of the flight getting to cruise speed and then slowing back down wasting fuel.
Well, taking the train from New York to SIngapore might prove somewhat difficult (not that it wouldn’t be awesome)
Toronto to Ottawa? Try Nanaimo to Vancouver. 13 mins flight time. It’s insane.
i would just wonder how that efficiency pans out over time: maintenance, fuel substance, and fuel/cost and fuel/person
Yup like SIN-KUL, where planes can cruise only at FL200, thought it might be a different story using turboprops instead of jets (which is also more convenient as those places fly between XSP-SZB instead, & SZB is nearer to downtown Kuala Lumpur than KUL), though only Malaysia & not Singapore would profit (as Singapore's airlines don't fly turboprops but Malaysia's ones do e.g. FireFly), so I imagine politics might come into play too
Hello Krypto Transit, not true. The optimum flying time for long-haul is around eight hours. Remember back in 2012 Air Asia X retreated from Europe. At the time then one of the airline's executives said the "sweet spot" was a flight of around eight hours. NYC-SIN is *not* economical because an airline must burn fuel simply to carry fuel (during the early stages of the flight). A former CEO of AF branded ultra long-haul aircraft like the A340-500 as "flying fuel tankers."
I find it ironic that you mention Melbourne to Sydney HSR. There has been talk of building one since before the 80s, but as usual with projects around here nothing has happened accept feasibility studies, with varying results. It really should have been built decades ago. The benefits of such a railway would be incredible, Melb to Syd being one of the worlds busiest flight corridors.
A Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney route would probably be one of the best and most important pieces if infrastructure Australia ever constructs... if only the airline lobby wasn't so powerful
Feasibility and environmental impact studies are one of the reasons nothing gets done
what's the actual distance between Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney? it looks small on the map, but some maps can be misleading, the actual distance might be a lot more than i imagine
It would be nice but it would give an option to people who have an option. That same money could build 8 Sydney metro norths. Or three Melbourne suburban rail loops. Or 50 Mandurah lines. Or build regional rail to second cities. Let’s not put a sizeable portion of the country’s GDP towards a project that makes no meaningful difference for holidaymakers and business people, meanwhile there’s millions needing an actual gain in liveability in their actual lives.
@@Freshbott2 the benefit is that it would greatly stimulate the economy. the more connected you can make your hubs, the more cohesive they can be. planes have too much wait time and theyre prone to delays and they cant move people fast enough. look at the chaos going on at our airports now. that wouldnt happen at a regular train station. youd be saving consumers money as well which theyd spend in areas that actually benefit people rather than the airlines. not to be cynical but you cant exactly put money into helping the poor and expect a large enough return fast enough to go do it again. by catering to the rich you gain the ability to invest in the lower income sect.
This is partly what California high speed rail is trying to achieve. LA to SF is the busiest short haul flight route in the US, and the drive up I-5 is about 6 hours (without traffic). We need a third option, and the world has proven it's high speed rail.
Like you said, high speed rail can connect with other transit services, which includes airports. For California HSR, it will have direct connections to SFO and Burbank Airport, in addition to current rail and bus services in the Bay Area and LA as well as in the Central Valley.
Would love it to connect to San Diego as well if at all possible. (If not, just switching to surfliner would be fine)
@@redlion45 I think that's planned for phase 2. Once its built, this will be a game changer for travel in CA
A lot of short haul flights are often used to connect to longer haul international flights. For example my city in the UK (Norwich) is only around 100miles from London and has direct trains to Stansted Airport but it's often cheaper, more convenient and a safer option for me to fly from my local airport over to Amsterdam and change there rather than catch a flight from a London airport. I think this could be addressed with a number of things but primarily we need train/plane combo tickets, like I believe are now being introduced in France, so the total ticket package is cheaper and you're covered if part of your journey is cancelled or delayed.
There are already train stations with IATA codes, but there is this one small problem, poor connection of airports to main rail network that does not exactly allow efficient operation of long distance trains.
Norwich used to have flights to London
@@MrToradragon I guess that depends where you live. I have a frequent fast direct train connection to a major international airport that I have literally never used because of price and what I said before. When booking a plane ticket I should be able to select say "Norwich to ***" and it offer me a combined rail plane ticket, that really doesn't seem that hard and would likely reduce emissions by a huge amount.
@@kwlkid85 Sure it depends where you live, but even large airports like Schwechat are connected just by commuter trains without any possibility of long distance train routing, unless they will start/end there and even then the number of trains will be limited as there is only single track that you can use for waiting. Even thou it is entirely possible to build new line that would connect to main lines to Graz and Budapest. Katowice airport is not connected to railway at all, even thou there was line in the past going just next to it and Prague airport is not connected at all as well and current proposal is such that routing of long distance trains is, again, almost impossible and if they should include high speed trains, it would mean scenic route around Prague over Prague Semmering which is single track line without electrification.
Such state of infrastructure and planning makes it hard for single ticket to be created and used even if, in case of Prague, the line would be expanded in all possible places with second track. Route of RS4 (Prague-Dresden) was deliberately, despite objections by various groups, chosen in such way that it would not go through Prague airport. And another problem is that politicians had changed their minds like 5-7 years ago about main routes of high speed lines and now it does not exactly match with the way how the lines in Prague were already build and routing of those lines outside of Prague dose not exactly makes sense either. I know french standards were adopted, but maybe they should not have copied it entirely with tracks completely avoiding current lines and with stations outside of city centres.
Good point. I live Kerry (SW Ireland) and usually fly to Dublin if I’ve a connection due to how abysmal overland connections to airport are (still no metro). It’s an expensive entire day out and especially after Long Haul, the last thing I want to do is take a bus and 2 trains. However contrast to when I lived in Denmark, where I could get from the airport to Jutland (far away from Copenhagen). Such a big difference. Also for the train and plane codeshare, Swiss Airlines + SBB have that done well with their Zuirch to Lugano route
Five years after Taiwan built its high speed rail line from Taipei to Zuoying (Kaohsiung) via Taichung in 2007, all flights between Taipei and Kaohsiung were stopped for good. There are still a few domestic flights, but Taiwan High Speed Rail has helped get rid of a lot of these shorter flights.
When you consider how long it takes to even get on the plane you could be good way to scotland by train by LNER.
And even more so with the delays at UK airports due to staff shortages atm i don't see the point with short haul flights.
Also theres the fact you can have a really nice view from being at the top of a utter engineering marval of a viaduct.
The Luma stops in Stevenage which is 2 stops down the track from me. It means it's way faster for me to get up to Edinburgh city centre than to fly. The quickest I could get to the closest airport to me(Luton) is about 30 minutes by car(which means a taxi as parking is too expensive) or over an hour by bus, then check in then the rest of it. The Luma is also cheap as chips and you just step off it in the city centre so faster, cheaper, better views and more convenient.
I’ve watched a few travel UA-camrs compare travel times via rail to travel times via flight, and when they compare the door-to-door times-meaning, not just the time on the train or airplane, but the time from your home’s front door to the train station or airport, then checking in, and waiting around, then actually traveling, and checking out on arrival, and then getting from the station or airport to your hotel’s lobby-it turns out for most destinations the train trip is frequently shorter.
In fact right now airlines and airports would rather travellers take the train rather than the plane. As you will have seen on the news channels main hub airports in Europe are telling airlines to cut flights so they can better manage congestion.
To quote Eurostar, or rather, to quote Eurostar's ostrich (when did they start using that in their marketing btw?) "On en vois plus quand on ne vol pas". In English, that's "We see more when we don't fly". Pretty damn good marketing.
@@mastertrams So true. That's proven over previous weeks when E* hiked fares to ridiculous levels as many of its trains very very full (as travellers defect from aviation owing the the latter's problems). I mean just a week or so ago E* was charging £155-£199 *one-way* for London-Paris in standard class. At some times it was even cheaper to fly with AF !
When I was visiting Japan a few years ago, I had a side trip to Hiroshima planned. The original plan was to take the train there and fly back to Tokyo for the sake of time. This was my first trip to Japan and first experience with high speed rail. The experience was compelling enough that I cancelled the return flight (was still within a window to do so without penalty) and just take the train back. Ultimately it was a couple of hours more travel time, but that wasn't too big a deal in the grand scheme of things, and the comfort (more leg room, nicer seats, scenery etc) and convenience (no airport security, checked baggage, strict boarding times, ability to take a later or earlier train at will) all made it a far more pleasant option. I really wish we could get this right in North America. Unfortunately I live in a part of Canada where it'll be decades before it's viable by virtue of a relatively low population density, but I can dream...
IIRC there's some very slow progress in making Toronto-Montreal high-speed.
There isn't even a line connecting Calgary. How are they going to connect my home town.
@@_human_1946 Yeah, the Toronto-Montreal corridor has some tentative steps with federal funding for new, passenger dedicated stretches of rail, but there'll still be some places where it uses older lines which will be shared with freight. So quasi-high speed and a step in the right direction, but not there yet. If we want to get really ambitious it may support a Windsor-Quebec City extension in the long run, but outside of Ontario/Quebec, there isn't much potential for inter-Provincial high speed rail given the distances between major towns and cities without heavy subsidization.
Honestly if we could get the corridor 20% faster, more reliable, and roll out the new trains we will be pretty good in Canada!
@@RMTransit Yeah, for people in Ontario and Quebec. I'm very salty about the quality of tracks everywhere else. 50km/hr is not acceptable.
Yes to all! An inter-connected global HSR network needs to happen. This is what the UN should be doing but you know... And yes, Go Prairie Link (350 km/h Edmonton-Calgary line)!!!
100% agree. The Edmonton-Calgary flight is so infuriating. I have flown it many times, as a connection to an international flight out of Calgary. By the time you reach cruising altitude, you're already descending. I would love a rail alternative, personally.
Even at 160-200 kph would be a big improvement (and still at a very competitive timing compared to both driving and flying). It's an absolute disgrace there's no train service at all, at the moment.
I wonder why this is not happening already
Do the numbers add up? A 300km high speed rail line, double track, grade separated (high speed at grade doesn't make sense; Google Brightline crashes), at say C$100 million per km conservatively, plus stations, and more expensive building within the cities. C$30-40 billion total, not including rolling stock? Maybe 30 million passengers per year, generously? (Calgary airport is more like ten million a year, to all destinations.). Are you talking multi hundreds of dollars cost per one way ticket on average (whoever pays)? Don't get me wrong, I liked living in Calgary for a decade. But high speed rail is a thing for larger populations (tens of millions), or vanity projects.
@@bearcubdaycare not true Spain has a High Speed rail network have stations of cities and towns under 2 million that have stations even as low as 100k (though not as used as much as bigger stations) and Spain is just as dense as the American Midwest
The biggest practical advantage IMO: because of lower base costs, a
You can also add cars to a train. I've never seen a jet liner pull a glider behind it to add capacity.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 This is not really true with multiple units though, and you really want multiple units. You can do double trains though, true.
More so when the trains have 1st class.
Oh also trains can have a bar because screw it.
Absolutely which is super valuable, even when vehicles are empty
However trains are generally fixed to a couple of routes, but a plane can hop from one city to another to match local demand as required.
There is a reason why we don't see a lot of cross border trains, specifically high-speed high-capacity cross broder trains, outside of Europe. And that reason is border control. For both air and road travel, it's much easier to concentrate border controls in one place. With flights, you can place border controls before take-off and after landing, as there are no stops. With buses and cars, you just force people to stop and disembark at the border.
With trains, neither is a good option. You can't have multiple stops if you introduce flight style border controls, and that defeats the flexibility aspect of a train. This is also why the Eurostar has so few stops. On the other hand, disembarking 1000+ people at a border control stop will be wildly inefficient and chaotic. I am not saying this cannot be solved, but it's a lot more complicated when border controls are mixed with trains.
Within mainland Europe (ie excluding Britain and Ireland) the Schengen agreement means that boarder controls have largely disappeared. (Note that Switzerland and Norway are within the Schengen agreement even though they are not in the EU)
It is also protectionism of interests. In NL the national NS is wary to let Deutsche Bahn on its intercity lines. On Amsterdam Brussels here is beside the Thalys , a intercity connection. But the Belgians (who have a stake in Thalys) command that that ic operates as a stop train between Bru&Antwerp ,making it less competitive and interesting ...
@@Fan652w but often you still have border stops for crew changes unfortunately.
You just have a longer wait time at the border. Still faster than airport customs and immigration. The border patrol just comes through the train verifying docs
@@adorabell4253 Where the Schengen agreement operates (the whole of continental Western Europe including Switzerland and Norway but not Britain and Ireland) you no longer see border patrols on trains (or trams or buses). NOBODY CHECKS YOUR DOCUMENTS.
Just yesterday I started planning my trip from Prague to Stockholm, oneway trip by train would take 25 hours and cost 300 euros while by plane it would take less than 2 hours and cost 80 euros. Quite a huge difference
There is a sleeper train from Stockholm to Berlin. You might want to check that.
That's because the Baltic Sea is in the way, so the trip has to take a detour over Denmark. Unfortunately, the Rødby-Puttgarten train ferry closed down in 2019, also increasing the transit time. Before that I had taken that route, with a long stop-over in Berlin. Then the slowest leg was the train from Prague to Berlin.
BTW. In the past, there had been several sleeping car routes, that have sadly closed down. I have chosen them a couple times instead of train + hotel.
The sleeping car network was even larger back in the '80s, with a ferry across the Baltic Sea to East Germany, connecting southern Sweden to Berlin.
Prague is also unfortunately very badly connected to other countries. Our railway network is quite dense and fast enough for the size of the country but there's very few and slow ways to get out. There's really just an EC to Hamburg to the north and an expensive slow third party train to Munich connecting Czechia to Germany. I'd love a quick direct connection between Prague-Pilsen-Nuremberg-Frankfurt and perhaps beyond.
@@lauraner99 It's not that bad. From Prague there are direct trains to Austria (Vienna-Graz, Linz), Germany (Regensburg-Munich, Dresden-Berlin-Hamburg-Kiel), Hungary (Budapest), Slovakia (Bratislava), Poland (Rybnik-Warsaw, Rybnik-Przemysl), ... many of them run every 2 hours, some even hourly.
@@lauraner99 But fortunately the EuroCity train Prague-Dresden-Berlin is operated by CD, so at least you get comfortable seats and great service in the restaurant car. It so much more civilised than anything offered by DB.
I mean I've taken my private train to the majority of my summits with other leaders. To China to see Xi Jinping in Beijing, Russia to see Putin in Vladivostok, and Vietnam to see Trump. Only time I've went to one by plane was for Singapore where China let me borrow an Air China Boeing 747-4J6. Seeing a country by train is how you really take it all in.
Then build the Dandong-Pyongyang-Seoul line already, dear Leader! ;-)
Lol wtf
i see since biden came in youve gone back into air travel of the supersonic kind.
those missiles are a flying again...
Eurostar is way too expensive compared to flights, Renfe is looking into the London-Paris route, needs a lot more competition and services to elsewhere in Europe asap, Stratford "International" could be a great hub for low cost carriers
Eurostar does have about 70-80% of the London to Paris and Brussels markets - it's been making significant inroads into London to Amsterdam too.
Stratford international is not set up for international traffic. If you have been you will know that the supporting building is surprisingly small compared to the length of the platforms
@@fortissimo6210 it provision for all the facilities needed. It was intended as the London stop for services from the North, but while the journey time was now more competitive, the increased security and asylum seeker border paranoia that was becoming government policy meant it was increasingly unlikely to get used. At the time plans were drawn up budget airlines were not yet a thing either when construction began.
Interesting the same logic as Stratford applies to Old Oak Common on HS2, but all services will be stopping there.
There are 2 main bottlenacks here:
(1) the uk is not a schengen country adding expensive border checks and check in desks really making it loke taking a plane and (2) the track access charges are just insane. Eurostar really doesn't make much profit, nor does the eurotunnel which has expensive debt to pay... that is the problem if you have partial for profit infrastructure financing
@@railotaku Yes it's great if you live in London but for those further afield it can cost almost the same amount as a plane ticket just to get a train down to London.
In Spain there are 2 alternatives for the Valencia-Barcelona route apart from the highway: going by plane or by train. The thing is that it's better to use the train (in fact the train has been massively used between these cities so no-one knows why there's a flight) because the time of the journey (2h45) is the same as if you went to Valencia Airport at least 1 and a half hour before the flight, taxied and flew between both cities (45 minutes), waited for your baggage, exited the terminal and took a car or public transportation to the center of the city. The best part is that the train connects the center of Valencia to the center of Barcelona through a semi high speed line (half of the way is normal speed, then the train changes its gauge and enters the high speed network). People should be aware of the time you lose when flying. Also I can't wait for the Mediterranean corridor to be finished so the time can be reduced by a lot since it passes through both cities.
PS: If you have the chance, please use this train line. You'll be amazed by the comfort not only because you're using a train but because the train used is an Euromed with a Talgo composition (super comfortable and silent coaches where you don't even notice the track bumps or when you pass a changer).
Valencian here, i think that the Mediterranean corridor should be built. It would link Barcelona and Valencia with a properg HSR rail and also connect to Almería and Murcia along with Alicante, Castellón, Algeciras, etc. We have a really good HSR network but we could make it better.
In Japan, they say HSR can replace plane only when the trip is less than 4hr, it feels like cities in North America are just too far apart for it to work
Coast to coast yes, NA is just to big. But costal connections. And some certain routes, like LA to Vegas or connecting Austin, Dallas Houston I think it’s a good option.
@@slscamg
Heck of a lot of smaller towns in the US than just the big metropolitan centres that could be linked with HSR systems and even standard regional rail systems to form a network. It's not about being able to go from extremity to extremity that is the main market but all the places in between that having a comprehensive network allows for. Somewhere the size of the US which is only very slightly smaller than the whole of Europe means that the coast to coast market is very niche, it's pretty much for tourists. America is has the least exploited rail market in the developed World which is odd for a capitalist country.
@@darthwiizius America is 80% urbanized. Most people live in metro areas. So an Atlanta to DC train with stops in metro areas would get a lot of use. Cities are what 100 miles apart maybe 150?
@@DavidJohnson-dp4vv
Yes it's almost as urbanised in the US as the UK which is why HSR would be a logical choice over standard commuter rail but those large distances mean any towns between could be serviced too without overly disrupting and slowing the service. I suppose the only regions that could build a fully integrated network in the short term would be along the coasts and the northern and southern sides where you tend to find a lot of cities that could be chained together.
The issue with connecting HS1 & HS2 (I would love it to happen) is that any new eurostar or other international services going from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Bham etc would have to have all the passport and security facilities because our government is stingy and refuses to join the Schengen zone with most of Europe.
And more importantly:
You have enough people travelling between for example Glasgow and London to justify an hourly train service.
You have (pre pandemic) enough people travelling between London and Paris to justify an hourly train service.
You almost certainly don't have enough people travelling between Glasgow and Paris to justify an hourly train service.
Normally that wouldn't be a problem, because most of the Glaswegians would get off the train at London and be replaced with Londoners wanting to go to Paris, but you can't do that alongside passport controls.
That's not as big deal as you think, there's plenty of small airports in the UK that only get a few international flights a day but that's clearly enough to justify the expense of security/immigration facilities. Each of these "North of London" stations would probably only need to have 1 dedicated international platform, probably off to one side of the station, so it wouldn't hugely effect their domestic capacity. If they were smart the government would be adding provisions in place at the new HS2 stations to retrofit such facilities in the future.
@@katbryce You don't need enough people travelling from Glasgow alone to Paris, you can stop the same train at multiple UK cities.
@@kwlkid85 But could you actually fill a train with people wanting to go to Paris? If it doesn't run at least every two hours, people will find it quicker to change at London than wait for it, and the cities are much smaller than London. Catchment area for Glasgow Central is about 2.5m people, vs about 24m for St Pancras.
True. The passport and security issues with Eurostar to Britain and back is a serious pain up the rear end. That is the main reason that Amsterdam, Schiphol Airport and Rotterdam aren't connected to London by Eurostar. Which made the realise that it would be really convenient and relatively (véry relatively, as it is in a tunnel...) to build a platform that is accessible from behind passport control.
I had to laugh when you mentioned taking a train from Cape Town to New York - at this stage it's challenging enough to take a train from Cape Town to Cape Town - although a lot of work is being done to remedy that. Intercity rail in South Africa (apart from tourist trips) is just not reliable at all and most of the development work happening is in recovering metro lines or expanding our Gautrain network. Sadly the narrow gauge lines and 3kv DC electrification (where it works) is working against intercity rail - and the distances between our cities mean that any project to build fast intercity rail is many years away.
In theory, Cape Town-Bloemfontein-Johannesburg-Pretoria is a pretty damn good route along which to build high-speed rail. That said, while I do like South Africa a lot, I can't imagine how a government that still has to institute regular loadshedding because it can't guarantee the basic supply of electricity is ever going to build an efficient high-speed rail network. I'd love to be proven wrong though; I'd certainly much prefer if next time I go to Cape Town from Europe, I can get off the plane at OR Tambo and just sit down in a comfy train seat instead of cramming myself into another Airlink Embraer E-Jet that looks like it hasn't been maintained in fifteen years.
The EU should make a fund to expand the reach and connect HSRs to places without yet. As a way to help the countries that cannot fully afford to build it. The US federal government should do one too.
That’s a little harder since state govt’s are contingent on building them. Multiple plans to connect cities in place like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida stalled due to newly elected Republican governors in the early 2010s. So unless the governments there stay sympathetic to HSR long enough for it to become infeasible to cancel the project as construction has progressed enough to where you can’t turn back, then a fund won’t matter
The EU already finance such projects through TEN-T (Trans-European Transport Networks)
The mentioned Rail Baltic is finance by them and the base tunneles connecting Austria and Italy (55km but since it connects directly to the Austrian Innsbruck bypass tunnel it more than 64km) and the France Italy base tunnle (75km) are parcialy financed by them (50% and 40% respectively).
Rail Baltic wiil also connet to Finland, first by ferry but later by an underwater tunnel.
As for the US, they did this in the past (first with railways and than with the highways) but as things are today it's not likely.
@@AL5520 The thing with Helsinki to Tallinn is that, between the main stations of the city, it’s on a straight path, 51.1 miles, or 82.23 km long. Even the Chunnel was only about 38 km. Depending on how deep the water is where the tunnel will be built, that could take way longer to build and much more money than anyone may be willing to pony up
@@PhilliesNostalgia the plan is already in the air and if finland wants to connect via the south (the route mainlanders will take) they will probably want it. plus, the baltic states would benefit massively from a better connection to finland, and the number of people passing through to get there would also be beneficial.
@@jonathanodude6660 I don’t deny the benefits. It would be quicker than a ferry and better than any alternative. But considering how long the Channel Tunnel Rail Link took, 6 years and €12B, that may take awful amount of time and money. Will get done, but not without headaches
In the USA, at least, there is also a lot of labor issues going on with airlines right now. Rail and aviation are sectors that can work in tandem to better optimize both services. For example, if you replace a short haul flight with a rail connection, you can free up gate space and takeoff/landing slots, as well as the labor required to operate the flight.
Wishing America heard this
Absolutely, for longer higher value flights!
@@neiro353 😭
California released $US 4.2bn in Proposition 1A funds to the California High-Speed Rail Authority (project LA-San Francisco). The Los Angeles Times reported on June 30 that $US 2bn of this would be dedicated to the construction of the 275km Merced to Bakersfield northern segment of the Central Valley high-speed line.
Texas Supreme Court Upheld Eminent Domain Authority for Texas Central High-Speed Rail in June 2022.
You say that as if there isn't about to be a nationwide strike for Class 1 railroads? At least on the pilot side, the labor contracts seem to be doing okay. Both industries are prone to labor disputes though.
Great video, just to add to it.
- Unfortunately RENFE and SNCF do not compete on th France-Spain lines, they operate them together.
- HS1 is the local name of the high speed line conneting London to the Channel Tunnel not the name of the the entire line/service.
-An important step for better train/flight connectin was recently made. DB joined the airline Star Alliance enabaling integrated international plane and train journeys through one platform. This starts on August 1st.
Local connection from the stations is very important. In Spain every RENFE long distance/AVE train ticket includes a free ride on the loca commuter rail service (Cercanías, Rodalies, FEVE or tran de Alicante) on both the origin and destination up to 4h before departure and after arrival.
Longer-distance rail tickets in Japan also may let you alight at any major station in your destination city (with such stations typically identified by a character on their signs e.g. '阪' for those in Osaka, '京' for those in Tokyo), giving you more flexibility to alight somewhere nearer to your final destination. This is more likely for normal speed rather than high-speed trains as the latter are served by fewer stations more spaced out, with both using different track gauges
14:41 yeah, that was proposed for the world cup (which happened 8 years ago), alongside the 3 monorail lines in São Paulo (one of which is still not finished, and another one got cancelled like 2 years ago), the LRT in Cuiabá, and a ton of other projects (not all rail related) that didn't see the light of day. I'm not hopeful for a system like that in the near future, I think it will probably end up being more expensive* than flying, not to mention that it's definitely going to end up being used to embezzle a ton of taxpayer money (as is usual down here). English Wikipedia gives a 2025 expected completion date, but it isn't even being built yet.
*Prices for an HSR ticket were estimated at R$200 back in 2012, which is R$375 adjusted for inflation, not taking into account the fact that the BRL-USD exchange rate back then was 2 to 1, today it's 5,5 to 1, so the project would be way more expensive, thus driving the ticket costs even higher; by comparison, a flight between both cities costs around R$330.
ashford is probably a better example than stratford for London. it's eurostar service will restart soon (stopped for covid) and a lot of people use it rather than going into London.
I really do hope it will restart, but I've not seen anything concrete from E* yet.
@@joegrey9807 Eurostar says it will make a decision later this year. The earliest Eurostar would serve its two stations in Kent would be 2023.
After experiencing the Shinkansen a few years ago, I've always preferred trains over planes when available.
Also noticed how clean their train noses are compared to other high-speed rolling stock
Yet, Malaysia chose to terminate the KL-Singapore High Speed Rail project in 2021. The flight route is highly used pre-pandemic.
Aren't they talking about it again?
Very unfortunate, the flight will be busy again soon
A very bad decision, I guess, given that Thailand is now busy building their HSR line from Vientiane to Bangkok and would likely to shift their focus down south by 2025.
they said they gonna renegotiate again
oh well
@@Banom7a Might be because the gov't in Malaysia changed again with the PM, with BN not being as supportive of the ruling coalition as before. Think the HSR was originally cancelled as Malaysia suggested giving its operation rights to its incumbent int'l rail operator KTM, to save on the costs of conducting an open tender for a more internationally recognised operator (e.g. MTR, TransDev, Arriva/DB) as originally agreed (as the pandemic impacted the country's finances I think). Maybe Singapore felt was too risky to renege on the contract's terms & conditions & thus disagreed. The next best idea I imagine is finishing the on-going ETS upgrade program to existing normal-speed railways (double-tracking & electrification) that hopefully can reduce rail travel times from KL-Johor Bahru/Singapore from 5+ to ~3h
Here in the Philippines, only the capital is getting rail for the past decades. But recently there are plans to revive some rail lines destroyed by WWII in Visayas. But all of these are still plans another plan is to connect the whole island of Mindanao which is in the south of the country.
I live in Rio de Janeiro and almost cried when you mentioned Rio de Janeiro - Buenos Aires by train. I could literally give an entire arm of my body in sacrifice to make that come true one day 😢
What I do love more about trains in general over flights is that you just show up to the station, and board the train when it arrives(unless youre in china). For taking an airplane you have to show up 2 hours early and have to go through extensive security checks that may seem invasive. I prefer to take the train for this reason, even if its a slow train cuz overnight trains exist and its like fast travelling to your location. You sleep and when you wake up, boom! you're at your location!
I find traveling domestic (Canada) security and everything adds 40 min top (unless Pearson).
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 that and the transit time from the airport to your final destination. Train stations can be located in the middle of downtown and be accessible by multiple forms of public transport, and are closer to your destination, usually within 10-15 minutes
@@xero4479 This definitely can be a huge advantage, although it's not always true. Particularly in North America there are Airports just as or more connected to the downtowm as the train station. Also, given our lack of transit, many people still have to drive to the airport/train station, so being downtown may add travel time in traffic for the average person (who is unfortunately in the suburbs), and the likely inclusion of parking is more costly.
Uhm, Canada is already allowing there flight agency into train stations and I wouldn’t be surprised if the US lets the TSA in the CAHSR. North America is dumb.
@@KRYMauL What do you mean? Like the unnecessarily security protocols?
Amazing video I love the concept of high speed rail between countries!! I would advocate a bullet train link in Canada is massively game changing connect Halifax, Frederickton, Quebec city, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton and Niagara falls would be a DREAMMM we gotta get ambitious like we use to!! Back in the day when they laid down the silver ribbon across this great country railways have always played a key role in progressing Canada
Levy's SNCF link svp. Or did I somehow miss it?
Around 1980, Siemens-Düwag offered to build FOR FREE a 300 kilometre per hour High Speed Rail link between downtown Calgary and Old Strathcona, just south of Edmonton's downtown, as a demo facility for North American intercity railway clients. Urban planners, politicians, engineers and more would have visited the system creating some tangible spin off benefits as well as new and valuable national and international business connections. Regular service between both downtown centres with stops at YYC and YEG, with some regular stops in Red Deer. I've postulated for years that a regular Red Deer stop would have substantially eased growth pressure on both Calgary and Edmonton resulting Red Deer probably having a population of 250,000 or so rather than the 100,000 they're just nudging now. Had the line been built, I suspect there would already be extensions north to Fort MacMurray and maybe even south to Okotoks, High River, and on to Lethbridge. In addition, I suspect we'd already have a link, albeit probably in the range of 150-200 kph, to Banff and Lake Louise. Imagine how much quicker and easier, let alone less polluting, tourists would find their trip to Banff National Park.
Alas, the Alberta government said no! THEY SAID NO! At the time, they owned Pacific Western Airlines and they ran tonnes of lucrative daily flights between YYC (Calgary) and YEG (Edmonton). The self-proclaimed free-marketers didn't want the competition! A classic case of head-in-their-ass syndrome.
Even as a car enthusiast I do think it sucks America doesn’t have a dedicated high speed train service
I’d love to take the train from Chicago to Springfield where I have relatives
Or from Chicago to Milwaukee for the day
The best part about airports is that they are close to more people. Example I live in Lexington Ky and we have a regional airport. There isn't a train station, at all. Even Cincinnati has a Union Station but the trains are only there like 3 times a week at 3:00 am. Versus I can schedule a flight from Lexington to practically anywhere in the country any day of the week.
But I do think at some point that air travel is more competitive than train travel, even high-speed rail. I recently flew to Denver to participate in a camp near Colorado Springs. We took off at Philly International at 12:49pm EST and landed in Denver at 4:30pm EST, 2:30pm local. The distance between the airports is about 1550 miles. A slightly extreme version as to when air travel is the better option than high speed rail, but an example nonetheless
By contrast, Google Maps estimates that by taking the Cardinal at Philadelphia 30th Street Station and switching to the California Zephyr at Chicago, it would take 2 days and an hour. HSR would help, but not enough to make that route competitive with air travel
@@PhilliesNostalgia there is also the factor of labor efficiency too
Yes, rail travel between remote US regions is essentially out of the question for efficiency, speed, and price. I suppose you could do it, say high speed lines from Philadelphia-Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh-Columbus, Columbus-Chicago, Chicago-Omaha, Omaha-Denver. That would make it possible, but would accommodate shorter runs as a priority. Still, it would probably take 12 hours at least and cost three times as much
Simple answer: Because it's a train, and high-speed trains look way cooler/aesthetically pleasing than an airplane. I'd take riding the Eurostar from London to Disneyland Paris anyway over a flight. Not to mention it leaves you right at the entrance to the parks and the resorts are walking distance. Disneyland Paris is the only Disney park with a high-speed rail connection. Disney World was gonna build one for Brightline but alas
"Because it's a train, and high-speed trains look way cooler/aesthetically pleasing than an airplane."
That's your personal opinion.
@@kelseyduerksen6404 Yay, you pointed out an obvious fact. Here's a cookie 🍪
@@kelseyduerksen6404 Are you seriously here to argue otherwise? Good luck with that!!!
@@stickynorth Yup. Trains are amazing! And flying sucks.
@@kelseyduerksen6404 no, it's the CORRECT opinion
This is such a well thought out and delivered video. Great job. I do like the concept of HSR until the edge of a city. Naturally, trains coming into said city would slow down to stop, so there can be an interface to the conventional lines that allows more network at a lower price.
when i travel overseas, i always make it a point to pick a plane only if the journey is a little too long.
using Japan as an example, if i'm (somehow) travelling from Hokkaido to Fukuoka, i would seriously consider taking the Plane since even by Shinkansen you're still going to spend almost 13 hours travelling onboard.
however, if i'm travelling form Tokyo then i would either use a Sleeper Train and depart at night (requires a transfer at Okayama) or just take the regular bullet train next morning.
I've recently tested out that even without sleeper trains, doing a 13-hour or the like train journey, including a few switch-overs, is perfectly doable, though these days I'm doing it first class - which has been a fairly cheap upgrade. The bus journey (a bit more than one hour) at one end, with no switch-overs, is much less comfortable.
I thought Overseas only meant other countries
@@TankEngine75 i meant it in the way that when i'm in other countries. since i'm from an island nation my choice is often ferry or just take the plane.
@@KaiHenningsen perfectly doable but i'm not sold on taking 13 hours train ride from one end of Japan to another even if i could.
@@RainStorm148 Oh, yeah when you mentioned overseas and all those Japanese cities, I was wondering "how can you get a train from Japan to somewhere like South Korea?"
I live near the city of Esbjerg (5th largest city in Denmark) and enjoy holidays in Edinburgh (Capital of Scotland). Back in the day, I would be able to take a ferry to Newcastle. If that Ferry came back, I could easily take that, and then, I could take a High Speed train to Edinburgh. Where's now, i'm basically bound to take a plane.
yeah the collapse of north sea ferry routes is sad. the goteborg one is the other obv one.
think there used to be uk to stavanger or bergan
The thing about short haul flights is that they're actually *much* more feasible to use electric planes on than long haul flights. Yeah, we're not really there yet but there are companies working on this specific problem. Eviation is probably the one that's closest to having a commercial product.
I can't see long haul flights being electrified for a *very* long time, on the other hand. The energy density of batteries is just much too low without some dramatic technological innovation.
We are still talking about an airplane here with engines, airframes and batteries to maintain and replace, sustainability is not only about emmision. Smaller planes that are heavy for their sizes fly low and experience more drag, and the numbers needed to meet demand also congest airports and airspaces.
On timing sleeper trains can be the most efficient solution. A practical example. Live and work in London, 9.00 meeting in Edinburgh. If you work a full day in London, there is not enough time to get to the airport and fly or at best without getting to a hotel very late; flying at a reasonable time means leaving the office 3pm, means missing an afternoon; flying in the morning means a very early start (4am or so). Sleeper train leaves Euston around 11.30pm, gets in 7.30 city centre Edinburgh.
Thank you so much for all the information. You are very well informed on this subject.
As a matter of fact, Deutsche Bahn (Germany's national rail operator) has joined the Star Alliance, which, up to this announcement, was purely an airline network! This was made possible given that the German airline Lufthansa is partnered with DB, allowing more effective transfers between cross-country/international flights and high speed train routes. Because of this, Star Alliance is now an intermodal network comprising of both air and rail transport!
I encourage you to look into this historic subject; who knows, it might actually turn into a video of yours!
Western-Europe has a lot of high-speed rail. But even the normal speed rail is too expensive (compared to flights). How can we make affordable trains? Subsides trains? Or tax flights even more? Or is there any other way to do it?
Exactly, I live in Europe and we very rarely use it, too expensive
Airpöane fuel is tax free in germany (probably other places too) afaik and already the largest cost factor. Taxing it like car fuel would make flying twice as expensive easily
@@the_retag making air travel only for the wealthy is not the answer
More people per train...and greater frequency.
@@the_retag yes, they should slowly raise kerosene tax up over the coming years (should have already started a couple of years ago)
Here in Austria (as well as in other European countries) we are currently in the process of banning domestic and short-haul flights, if a reasonable train connection is available for the same route.
Our national airline (Austrian) already sells flights via VIE including train tickets to major cities in the country. They run as "connecting flights" in their booking system and even have an international flight number. E.g. RJ840 (Vienna Airport -> Salzburg) also runs as OS3529 (VIE-LZS) and OS3553 (VIE-ZSB).
I have family in Austria and have noticed on at VIE that on the departure board that they often advertise Railjet services to Graz, Salzburg, Linz and Klagenfurt and that is definitely a big step, and France is making a big step by banning domestic flights in general
Although there is no need to ban short haul flights, if rail service is attractive enough. For example, high speed rail in Italia killed Alitalia airline... because suddenly, they were no longer competetive on their main market (domestic flights).
Yessss more HSR please! In Portugal the tender for the new HS line between Lisbon and Porto is expected to be lauched by the end of 2022/begining of 2023, which will connect these cities in 1 hour and 15 minutes, with a stop at the airport, and on to Braga and Vigo, in Spain, in an hour more. So, by 2030, you´ll have about 8 million people connected by a 300 km/h, 600ish km long route in 2h15m! Amazing!
Good luck to us mate, because I'm honestly very sceptical.
The EU, which many people think of as Europe, has a population of 510 million people, in an area half the size of the US, Canada is more than twice the size of the European Union. Combined with EU has a higher population than USA and Canada. With a population estimated at 124.7 million in July 1993, Japan is three times more densely populated than Europe as a whole and twelve times more densely populated than the United States.
China HSL is subsidized heavily. China is four times denser than the US as China's population density is 153 people per square km compared to 36 of the US.
African HSL are probably white elephants?
Planes need airports, but trains need fast networks of rail including electricity, beside stations. Air space is free, rails not.
Also it is possible that you need more workers for a train system than a plane based transport system per passenger kilometer.
You can temporarily switch planes easier to an alternative route than a train.
Yes, but if you run a high speed line between Quebec City and Detroit (not Canada, but just on the other side of the border), that would cover a pretty large proportion of the Canadian population, in a distance of just over 1000km. Most of the people that don't live there live in or around Vancouver.
Yes, of course. But it's not the case that everywhere planes can go, planes can be replaced by high speed train.
You can make proposals based on cost-benefit analysis for HSL for certain regions.
But a general comparison between high speed train and airplanes will lead to messy results. One way or the other.
If you have more or less electrified network with some possible alternative routes, it is possible to send train by alternative route.
@@rudivandoornegat2371 which I said right at the beginning of the video, there are an immense number of replaceable flights!
The rustbelt has the same density as Spain and France. Sweden has a density of just 25/km² , but have high speed rail..
But how about long-haul intercontinental flight? Take a high-speed train from New York to London across the ocean?
That got mentioned at 2:56; the video primarily targets short-haul flights and how they can be replaced by HSR, not travel over the ocean.
@@MarioFanGamer659 also long distance domestic routes like Vancouver to Toronto are really difficult to be served by HSR. HSR still can’t compete with long-haul flights.
No transport network is immune to faults and weather disruptions for instance. All modes of transport working together are part of a back up system in order to complement each other despite the fact for me all transport system should be made of railways of all kind and shapes.
Amazing video! Incredibly interesting & well presented :D
Pre-pandemic literally hundreds of daily flights connect china(inc hong kong) and taiwan, but everyone knows a rail link across the taiwan strait will defiantly not go down well (even if its technically possible which it may well be within this century). I think the point about international flight vs short flight is that rail infrastructure is a huge long term commitment, both monetarily and politically (which is not what politicians are known for...). Therefore I don't think international trains that you can just walk in like in Europe is not feasible in countries with less similarities nor less friendly with their neighbouring countries (which unfortunately is basically the rest of the whole world...)
Also, a valid reason that people take short connecting international flight instead of hsr is travel visa. Obviously you can only exit the airport and change for hsr to your destination if you got a passport that gives you visa free entry
My wife was in fact going to take the train to Melbourne yesterday . A train derailment has knocked out the current Sydney Melbourne line. Not all trains are reliable, especially not in Australia.
Hey Reece - if it was that easy... Long text ahead, sorry😇. If we talk about city to city, you are absolutely right. But you also mention connecting flights and here it gets tricky. Why shall I pass by the nearby airport and sit in a train for 3 more hours, only to find myself in the sprawling queues in front of the check-in area of a Mega-hub? You can hardly say, that Switzerland has a bad public transport system. Yet there is a domestic flight route between Geneva and Zurich. No one sane here would take the plane between these two cities, as the direct train service needs 2h43m and runs every 30 minutes. Yet there are (or were, pre pandemic) around 320'000 passengers every year per direction on that route, almost 650'000 in total. Yes, these are like
In the US, there are marketing issues to the public and certain private sectors when it comes to trains. The government should sell the idea that it will built high speed rail network and give incentives various private companies to provide their own trains on the network in addition to Amtrack or other publicly run trains.
Incentivize Delta airline to run several routes to service their flight hub in Atlanta (saving themselves a lot of fuel cost for short flights). Get Disney and Universal to run themed trains all the way from Boston down to their parks in Florida as part of their experience. Amazon can run high speed cargo trains for same day deliveries. Get the Hilton to run a night sleeper train with dinning and room service from New York to LA and the other way around. Incentivize car rental companies to set up shop at stations of cities with terrible public transits. A company can run car transport trains so you can take your car to your destination, like one of the Eurotunnel trains.
Short-haul flying is ridiculously time-inefficient even on a good day, where you're easily spending the flight time several times over just getting to the plane on one end and to your actual destination on the other. Given most people's cognitive bias makes time spent actually moving seem shorter than time spent sitting around waiting, plus the greater level of comfort and convenience rail offers, I suspect you can start winning people over just by getting the overall journey times close, not even necessarily equal. The best example of this is probably the northern half of the NEC, where the slog through Metro North's territory in Connecticut makes the trip from New York to Boston take significantly longer than the similar distance from New York to Washington. As a result, one can still save some time by flying to Boston, yet Amtrak has no trouble selling tickets on the route. Applying that lesson elsewhere, luring people away from airplanes starts to look more and more attainable, because it can be done even without achieving "real" high-speed rail. And then if you are able to achieve "real" high-speed rail, the competitive city pairs only become more numerous as the radius gets longer.
Honestly, NYC and Boston have terrible transit-airport connections for being on the most used rail line in North America.
Famously, flights from Amsterdam Schiphol to London Heathrow spend almost as much time taxiing to and from the runway as they do being airborne.
@@tonywalters7298 the silver line goes straight from south station to Logan every 10-15 mins...?
I want good train coverage in Vermont… they’re re-opening the Ethan Allen line to Burlington which is cute.
Re: working on trains and getting a seat at a table: my personal experience with Deutsche Bahn rolling stock is that you are actually better off working with a seat that is not at a table. I can flip open my 14-inch laptop just fine on the fold-down picnic table built into the seat in front but with a table seat, I am competing for airspace with the person sitting opposite. Both opening up our laptops to a comfy angle ain't gonna happen.
If you want to work, pack a small-ish laptop and choose a non-table seat. And bring a power strip in case your neighbour also needs power from the single outlet that your two-seat cozy zone may have.
My recent flight experience was BER → AMS → ZAN and DAR → AMS → BER. Of course there is no way to avoid the flight to/from Tanzania (if you don't want to go by ship or car for some months), but we tried to do just one flight.
But there was no way of arriving in time in Schiphol (AMS) from Berlin by train to catch the 10:00 flight, unless arriving already the evening before (which means starting at least ~ noon), and spending the night in the Netherlands. We instead picked the 6:00 flight from BER (one of ~20 flights starting at this time, we later found).
And for some reason, BER → AMS → ZAN + DAR → AMS → BER was cheaper than just BER → AMS → ZAN + DAR → AMS (even without looking on the train ticket cost), so we also took the plane back to Berlin. (Though due to security staff shortages in AMS and the fact that Europe doesn't trust the security check of DAR and we had to go through another one, we almost missed that last flight, so taking the train here might have been wiser.)
So yeah, this route (only 580 km air distance) doesn't have a direct high-speed rail connection (the usual Intercity takes ~ 8 hours to Amsterdam, where one changes to get to the Airport - you can get slightly faster with switching between two high-speed trains in Western Germany, but the first daily connection arrives at 9:58), and also doesn't have night trains anymore. (I now see we could have used a night bus, though, taking 9 hours.)
Madrid - Barcelona and Madrid - Seville has true hughspeed service well beyond 300 kph, connecting Seville - Barcelona at 200 miles per hour.
It was just today morning itself that this question was over my mind that why we couldn't have or still years away from a greener way of civil aviation. And as rightly pointed out by you, the energy density of the batteries is just not enough to generate thrust to move the airplane of immense weight in the air as oppose to what the contemporary fossil fuel is capable of. Its fascinating to see how technology is progressing and what are the challenges that we face which still needs to be solved. Thanks for putting such an informative video.
Greetings from India!
The closest thing that can replace aviation fuel in the future might be green hydrogen perhaps
I did an 18 hour train trip from the alps to Sicily and it was fantastic
Funny how you compare the A380 to a train, when the plane is normally used for ultra long haul flights such as London to Los Angeles or Singapore. But I do agree that short routes would normally be better served by trains
True, along that it’s days being numbered when the a380s days being numbered directly comes from airlines finding that flying smaller and extremely efficient planes like the 787 or a350 on those routes is much better because they are more flexible when smaller
yeah, i m gonna take a train system from Europe to columbia... wish me luck
The foot print of air travel is much smaller than a ground transport. All the travel is done where humans and other animals don't exist. With your minimal HST how can that be anything but negative for the environment it travels through?
My corner of the world is the East coast of Australia.
Love Ur channel mate
VIA is high(ish) speed! It was so fast that my camera got blurry when I tried to photograph them today. Thanks for the suggestion from the live chat about that new rail park it was super cool. If only parking was easier to find near it!
Oooh sleeping services on a high speed train would be amazing! It could be cool to run a sleeper train from Portugal to England! Wake up on a sunny beach after leaving dreary UK weather.
that would require a high speed train. a train leaving st pancras at lets say 2000 could reasonably arrive in lisbon at midday if it just cruised along
would be an excellent idea to run night trains through the channel even without them being high-speed. after all all the swanky hs trains go to bed at night.
At least in Spain, the high speed lines were behind a security line, requiring arriving earlier. I hope this isn't widespread (and doesn't become so), but it is a risk to some of the user experience advantage the train has.
Yes and this detracts from rail's simplicity. It's even worse with Eurostar which now requires standard class pax to check in one hour or more before departures. (Only Business Premier customers can do it in less time). One reason, besides the border controls, is the cramped departure areas especially at London StPancras and Paris Nord. Victorian-era termini cannot handle 900-passenger trains when there's a delay.
Mainland China's railway stations are designed like that too, & your ID will be checked too upon entry, plus their platforms close 3min before departure, but rail travel is still pretty popular there (though in the past when overnight trains were being replace by high-speed ones, people were worried that passengers would become priced out), probably as planes are more prone to delays
@@lzh4950 Yeah I always found that experience to be a little annoying- perfectly fine if you're making long-distance trips, but def a hassle if you, say, live in Suzhou and commute into Shanghai to work.
It would be very interesting with an explainer on the largest tram network in the nordics: the Gothenburg, Sweden tramway! It is very extensive and covers pretty much all of the city centre and numerous suburbs. Some of the outer tracks built in mid 1900s where adopted for a futute subway that never happend. It's my hometown so my interest in this is biased, but it would be fun to hear your opinions on it :)
Fantastic topic and presentation
Worth noting is that the European Union is discussing plans to ban short-flights inside the EU, with at least 1/3 of all flights inside Europe being banned and promoting and building better railways
Airports use a lot of space? Only if you compare them to a train station, without taking into account ALL the land the train uses to go from point A to point B. Remember, once an airplane gets off the ground, it uses air to get to its destination: a train uses land, continuously. Can you imagine how many thousands of square meters or kilometers an HSR line uses? Just multiply it’s width by its length. Not to mention all the areas the rail line physically cuts in half. So as far as land usage goes, the trains are a disaster compared to planes.
It’s easiest in my opinion to get from London - Amsterdam by Eurostar (high speed rail)
Of course. Same with Brussels.
There are two cases where flying makes more sense... flying by default is easily more adaptable and scalable on a faster scale, because you don't have to have a direct rail line (and therefore land that couldn't be used for other things) between points A and B. In the US with the Essential Air Service program, for example, air travel is able to connect smaller cities that don't support larger aircraft or train service to larger cities, connecting places that otherwise would be completely isolated by anything other than automobile. An airline can fly a 50 seat jet twice a day between Denver and Liberal, KS (for example), allowing those that need to connect beyond Denver to travel without additional hassle. Additionally, the longer the journey, the more economical and time saving air travel becomes. As the video points out, you're not going to have high speed trains between Cape Town and Frankfurt, because it just doesn't make sense when air travel is still significantly faster than high speed train travel.
I might say that in the Netherlands there are no national flights because the country is so small there is literally no reason to have such connections.
I do not know pricing in the united states, but because of Low Cost Flight companies, you can easily travel across Europe for 20 dollars.
If you book in advance, you can cover London - Paris at a much lower price than trains.
The fact is that the tunnel is a very expensive piece of infrastructure and I have no idea how you could reduce costs in a competitive way against flights.
Next month I'll be taking the ICE from Berlin to Munich. Only part of the route is high-speed, but it still takes about the same time as flying... especially if you have to check a bag, which these days takes like 2 hours at the airport before you even get to security.
Knowing DB probably will be quite delayed too
I'm actually thinking of taking that exact route later this year. Unfortunately the lack of high speed sections makes it a really slow trip (average ~125 km/h) but the comfort and convenience would be totally worth it over flying.
@@LQC2556 yep I look at it like this: if I go by air, I need to get to the airport outside the city (1 hour), then be 2 hours early for the flight. Then it's 90 minutes in the air. Deplaning and getting from the destination airport to downtown is another hour or more. Total is at least 4 hours.
The ICE trip is 4 hours flat, from downtown to downtown. No security line, spacious seats with power outlets, wifi... much more comfortable. And about the same price.
With Lufthansa cancelling many 1,000s of flights this summer (and more cancellations were announced today) the airline would prefer that you take the train.
Most high-speed rail systems sadly don't use the advantages of trains, mainly easy connections to regional trains and other long distance/high-speed trains, the fact you can board until departure, border checks in the train (very common before Schengen) and flexible tickets because you don't have to have a seat in a train, it is possible to stand.
Renfe and SNCF (maybe we should rather say Spain and France) are some of the worst offenders in Europe with their platform closures up to 5 min pre departure, luggage scans and compulsory reservation. The only worse high-speed service is Eurostar because of GB paranoia.
Regarding high-speed rail we should be following Germany, even though their lines are not suitable for 300 km/h. The way they do connections and ticketing is far superior to anything France and Spain have to offer and because every train is run by the same operator, the German system is better for dealing with service interruptions than the Italian one.
So it seems really weird you didn't even mention DB while talking about inherent advantages to rail that SNCF just doesn't take advantage of.
In the Netherlands the train has internet. Though sometimes a bit crappy, most of the times I can do some light work with like sending mails and invites. As a result, I don't count that as travel time, but as working time. This makes my day a bit shorter in the office
Prior to COVID I travelled a lot around China for work, and I always took the HSR if there was a connection available for precisely the reasons you mention. Air travel in China in particular is constantly delayed, whereas the HSR network is incredibly punctual (I've only ever had one train delayed in all the journeys I've taken, and that was due to heavy snowfall), and the comfort combined with the fact that a second class train ticket between two cities is generally similar in price to an economy class plane ticket on the same route made taking the train a no brainer - even on journeys where the train trip might take up to 12 hours compared to only 3 by plane.
China is actually in a very unique situation with their high speed rail because Chinese airspace is in fact 80% controlled by the Chinese military forcing flights to go through very tight corridors with international flights obviously getting greater priority. This causes massive delays and cancellations on domestic flights making domestic air travel too unreliable which is why China built so much rail in the first place, to insure a complete transportation crisis wouldn't occur
Now try to implement that into Australia, where it makes sense to use planes due to the size and terrain of the land.
Except it’s not really different from North America in this sense, you aren’t going to build a cross country corridor, but a huge percent of the population lives between Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra!
I live near Örebro Sweden, and if i take the bus to the smaller station, i can easily connect via electric regional trains to the West Mainline to get to Stockholm, Malmö or Gothenburg with High-speed or intercity rail. Some intercity trains even run directly from here to Gothenburg, or other cities. I love the rail network in this country as you can indeed go most places [in the southern half] within like 2 - 8 hours.
We need to remember downtown to downtown aren't the only trips. People that live near airports will need more enticing.
True. This is especially the case in many North American cities where airports are both generally closer than in Europe often in or right next to the city, and where generally, people live further from the city center meaning that travel to a train station can commonly be the same or even worse than going to an airport, especially if traffic into the city is poor
For travel between big cities withing a few hundred kilometers, trains are definitely the better means of transport. Many shorthaul flights however, even some that have only 30 minutes flight times, are 100% feeders for international/longhaul flights. With the current systems, those are still absolutely necessary. I've a perfect, real life experienced example: Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Munich. I live near Nuremberg (could be an interesting city for you, as we had the world's first automated subway, that was using parts of the same tracks, that were served with manually operated trains at the same time), and in the past I was traveling a lot around the world for work. I often boarded flights from Nuremberg to Frankfurt (189km) or Munich (138km) to transfer there for long haul flights. I needed those feeders, as taking the train from Nuremberg to either Frankfurt or Munich was just too much of a hassle:
First, Nuremberg has really efficient security controls at the airport. If all passengers, that boarded in airports like Nuremberg, Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden, Stuttgart, Hannover, Hamburg, Dusseldorf etc. would need to travel by surface to Frankfurt, they all would need to go through security checks in Frankfurt (or Munich respectively). Neither Frankfurt, nor Munich do have ANY capacity left to handle those additional passengers, the queues at those airports can be EXTREMELY long. The same actually applies for airports like Amsterdam or London Heathrow, that even limit the number of daily passengers to handle all the current masses. When passengers use feeder flights, those passengers are already cleared for the airside at their small departure airport and don't need additional security checks at the huge hub airports.
Next point, train connections: Frankfurt has a railway station for long distance highspeed trains right at the airport. However, Munich does not. There is NO efficient way to get to Munich by train. You'd need a high speed train to the city center, and from there you need to use slow and cramped commuter trains to get to the airport. This sucks, I talk from experience. Especially when you travel with a lot of luggage that you have to carry by yourself, which brings me to the next issue.
Luggage: You just can't travel by train with a lot of luggage. I was often traveling abroad to stay for months, some of my colleagues even stayed for years. We travel with two, three, maybe even four or five 20-30kg suitcases if we need to carry equipment with us or stay very long. When taking a feeder flight, I take a taxi to the airport, get a luggage cart at the entrance and check in all the luggage, so I don't have to worry about it, until I arrive at my final destination, even if I have connecting flights. Would I need to bring all this luggage on a train, I wouldn't know how to handle it. I can't just carry more than two suitcases by myself and I cannot check it in anywhere at the train station, as in Germany, there is nothing like dedicated luggage cars on a train or a luggage delivery service. I would need to carry all luggage by myself in and out of the train and of course I would need to find space for it inside the train. And if I had to transfer trains anywhere, I'd need to deboard and carry them all around another train station, which is just impossible again. Or worse, carry all luggage into a commuter train, maybe even during rush hour when people are standing with not space inbetween them.
Another issue: In Germany, the so called Rail2Fly-tickets do not account for train delays. That means, if your train runs late to the airport and you miss your flight, it is your own fault. You won't get rebooked on another flight for free, you won't get any compensation, you are just left there, as it is your own problem. That is not the case for feeder flights, where you have to be rebooked for free if the flight is delayed or cancelled and in some cases you are even eligible for compensation (250, 400 or 600€, depending on the distance of the full routing). If the next flight is only hours or even half a day later you are also eligible for food vouchers or even a hotel. So it is safer for you to take a feeder flight and not the train, as with a delayed train you are just screwed.
You see, if using feeder trains to flights would give you the same benefits, including the risk mitigation you get from a connecting flight ticket, and the possibility to check in and transfer luggage this could get a viable option. However, at the moment we are FAR from it. I don't see this being a realistic option, neither in Germany, nor in France, Spain or UK as the infrastructure is not made for this. Besides that, currently most major airports can't handle any more passengers, that check in at those airports. Those airports desperately rely on transfering passengers, that have no need for security checks.
Don't get me wrong, I fully support efficient high speed train connections, that could reduce the number of flights in Europe (I work for Siemens Mobility, we built trains and commuter networks all around the world). Sadly, Europe is way too far from achieving feeder trains for longhaul flights. Maybe in 30 to 40 years...
Damn, writing this comment took longer than I'd like to admit...
Now that DB is poised to join Star Alliance I believe there will be arrangements made for airline passengers who miss their flights because of late-running rail services.
Some airports might still need you to go thru security checkpoints again even if you're transferring @ there from 1 flight to another (& have already been thru security @ your originating airport)
@@lzh4950 Indeed. Security is paramount and some airports have been (security) arrangements than others.
@@lzh4950 In Europe, generally you have to go through security again, if you are transferring from a Non-Schengen origin to a Schengen destination (with some exceptions). However, this is not relevant here, as I was talking explicitly about feeders to Munich or Frankfurt, which do NOT require any additional security checks, if you arrive from a German or another Schengen airport. And this is one of the important issues in regards to feeder flights or feeder trains.
Luggage wouldn't be a concern if train operators had their act together. Shockingly, Amtrak in the US *DOES* - lots of their long haul trains have baggage cars and you can check suitcases all the way through to your destination.
You should do a video on private passenger rail vs public passenger rail and the pros and cons of each. (Brightline vs Amtrak for example) Also, which one holds more promise to enhance and expand passenger rail in North America?
The key is code-sharing with airlines. Several airlines do this with Landline, a bus service. Any flight less than an hour can certainly be achieved by HSR. More than that, most people would rather fly.
The problem with trying to replace flights with rail is the intermodal connections you mention. So many transit people and rail fans view these as "nice to haves" when the reality is that these are critical for getting the public to adopt rail transit as part of a longer journey.
Unfortunately, we haven't done this well at all in the US. While intermodal connections exist, few intercity rail stations are of the type that take you directly to the terminal building, severely limiting their usefulness. After all, if you have to get on a train, get off a train, get on a bus/people mover, get off a bus/people mover, etc. you're playing hokey-pokey with your journey and people generally don't like that. It adds more time spent waiting (ie, not moving) and introduces more possibilities for things to go wrong en route via delays and missed connections.
For example...If I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to take a train from Trenton, NJ to Newark, do a bunch of walking, take a people mover, then do a bunch more walking just to get to the point where I check in and drop off my bag for my flight - honestly, I'd rather pay a few dollars more and just fly direct from Trenton - just to save the hassle and risk of problems arising through taking a complicated journey.
Using intercity rail as the first leg of a longer flight journey is only going to work if at the end of that rail trip, you're put right where you need to be - that is, in the terminal building. In many American airports, this is fundamentally going to be a challenge due to lack of rail corridors both at the airport and leading up to the airport or terrain surrounding the airport. All of this is going to make creating intermodal connections at airports extremely expensive and hard to sell to the taxpaying public.
An example from my own backyard is the struggle to build Metro to Dulles Airport, a saga that started over 40 years ago and is only finally opening this fall after a decade of controversy and delays. Even then, owing to cost concerns, they failed to bring the line directly to the terminal and instead built the station far away from the terminal building, requiring a long journey from station to check-in counter. Will it be better than we had before? Sure - but the utility of the station when it opens will be questionable. After all, if I have to take a long subway ride to the airport only to find that I still have to go another 1,000 feet with multiple level changes just to get where I need to go, why wouldn't I just save the effort and just call an Uber instead?
Using rail to replace some flights is a laudable goal and we can certainly do better to help improve the utility of intercity rail in giving people more travel options. On the other hand, for the reasons mentioned above, I think it will be very unlikely that rail will completely or even significantly replace short haul flights before technology advances help make aircraft more energy efficient and friendly to the environnment.
I like HSR, but... It's capacity isn't that great. Spanish HSR carries maybe 400 passengers. Your average plane carries maybe 200 passengers. But a plane travels more than twice as fast (~500mph > 200mph). Therefore true capacity as a function of speed/distance is sometimes greater for the bigger faster airplanes. The other concern is opportunity cost. Spain has a great HSR network, yet way way more passengers use its urban rapid transit network. Yet its HSR costs much more to construct and maintain. California's HSR will cost at least 100 billion and likely will end up much more. Can you imagine the type of rapid transit that could have been built in San Fran and/or LA for that type of money? It also would have served far more people. The transit community needs to have a serious discussion about HSR vs urban rapid transit when it comes to scarce transit financing.
A big thing about trains is you can add cars. You can't add seats to a plane without totally building a new one. But the thing about distance is somewhat true although there is an area where distance/time is in favor of trains. It's those shorter routes (200-300 miles) where HSR beats planes every single time. And the point about CAHSR is connecting cities, not commuting.
HSR seems to have some kind of prestige for some people that urban rapid transit doesn't have. Maybe it hurts their pride that they don't have HSR in their country. Yet, at least some of these same people may never use urban rail let alone a bus.
@@pauly5418 I agree and it is unfortunate. Urban rapid transit transports more people for less costs and removes more autos from the road. HSR can be insanely expensive because you need long stretches of straight, flat, grade-separated-track over a lot of land that is expensive and legally tricky to acquire. My vote would be to focus on rapid transit first (first course) and then HSR later when that is properly in place (dessert).
@@SuperJolla84 Many HSR trains only have a set number of cars.
Sure but you can feasibly have trains that carry 1000+ passengers, not true for planes, you can also operate higher frequencies
sure the journey might take a few hours longer by highspeed train adding up the airport's waiting and traveltime, but one 12 car highspeed train can take up to 3 times the amount of passengers as an A320.
Hi sorry because you probably get asked this a lot, but where did you buy the Underground roundel in your background from?
You should’ve made this video earlier when I was doing an assessment at school for persuasive advertising and I had to try persuade people to use train travel instead of air travel!
Unfortunately, high speed rail traffic is a problem on it's own
Eurostar and HS1 is an effective way to commute but the only problem with them is the cost, it’s way too expensive. You could go from London to several destinations in Europe for as low as 10£ with Ryanair
Which are loss leaders - given UK departure tax on international short haul flights is £12 per passenger - Ryanair make a loss on the airfare then try and claw back later with extras like baggage, food etc and yes I know some will get around their extras, but a lot will pay them which usually brings the fare up considerably.
@@railotaku Ah yes, this makes sense. A few years ago I was flying into Frankfurt Hahn from London and the overall flight was cheap, it’s was just the baggage the food and etc that made it expensive. so I see what you are saying
Well HS1 is probably in part expensive because the infra is frankly overbuilt
😂your Right
Need a low cost operator on hs1
The one time in my life I managed to ride REAL high-speed rail was the Renfe AVE between Madrid and Valencia, and, man, I was impressed. That was roughly the length of the Boston-to-New-York run, which I've done many times by car, bus, rail and air, and it beat the hell out of all of them.
I would gladly ride several times that distance on a similar train. Beyond about 1000 km I could see flying still start to seem more attractive, though it'd depend on price.
There's already two competing High-speed train operators between Madrid and Barcelona, from October/November onwards a third one - so prices are low, much lower than by air!
I think between Madrid and Valencia there'll be the same situation by 2023. The European Union put some pressure on Spain to open up its train infrastructure ("open access") - sucessfully!
I think it's generally reckoned that when a train journey is less than 3 hours the flight market will be practically dead, once the journey is about about 5 hours then most people will fly, however, those figures are increasing. When the mainline between London and Manchester was upgraded 15 years or so ago, a combination of a relatively modest journey time reduction, an increase in frequency, and slick marketing from Virgin (the train operator at the time) effectively wiped out the flights, other than a few used mainly for interlining. HS2 in the UK will knock out most of the remaining flight routes within mainland Britain.
Reece, I love your optimism. I agree with a lot of your points, however I'm surprised you didn't mention the popular time/distance graph often talked about on the CityNerd channel, where it shows that HSR only really makes sense (from a travel time point of view) when travelling distances of between 75 and 600 miles, with the sweet spot being around 150-450 miles. This means that any flight longer than about 2hrs is still going to be the better option for most people. We really ought to be focusing on eliminating those really short flights of between 1-2hrs, where people will choose the plane if there's no HSR option or if it's cheaper to fly. A big problem in the UK is that flights from London to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam are quite cheap compared to the train, and so many people will choose the plane. As you rightly said, we ought to be taxing short flights and subsidising HSR to get lines built and trains filled. The other thing we need to be doing is making trains more comfortable (I don't actually agree that trains are super comfortable. I give you the Hitachi AT300 (Class 80X) as a case in point. Ironing board seats!) and making sure they are truly zero emission. It's no good having electric trains if you generate the electricity from fossil fuels. Also, your argument about airports being huge is a fair point, but if you think of the footprint of all the track, bridges, tunnels and stations on a HSR line, that probably does a similar amount of environmental damage with all that concrete and disturbed wildlife habitat. I don't think rail has a strong case there. All in all, I agree HSR is good....with caveats.
Personally, I would much prefer to spend 5 or 6 hours on a train than go to an airport, go through check-in & security, get on the plane, fly, and finally go from the destination airport to wherever I’m going. It might take an hour or so longer than flying, but taking the train is a much less stressful and more comfortable experience. I think flying needs to cost a lot more and taking the train needs to cost less, and then you’ll see an increase in people’s willingness to take trains for longer distances.
Thermoelectric power plants are always more efficient to produce electricity than a diesel engine in real use condition. Is better burn fossil fuel in power plants and run electric trains (with regenerative braking) than run diesel trains. If there's any kind of low carbon energy source (e.g. renewables, nuclear) into the energy mix, the difference have an huge increase in favor of electric trains.
I think the class 80x being uncomfortable is not just the manufacturers fault when it comes to the seats.
What I tend to notice with newer trains is they have smaller wheels, and that can affect the ride quality a lot, especially when going over switches.
@@ethandanielburg6356 I definitely agree, although if you live outside a big city you often have to get into a city centre with your luggage first, usually on crowded commuter trains, metro or buses, just to reach a high speed station. In that situation, going to the airport might actually be easier/nicer depending on where you live. Also, my point was more about smoothness of ride. I've ridden on the East and West Coast Mainlines and they do shake about quite a bit compared to planes in a cruise phase. I just don't agree that trains are smoother than planes unless you're talking about purpose built, modern lines like those in France, Japan, Spain or China.
A single seat on an airliner can be and are used more than once on flights which have intermediate destinations. They just tend to be much further apart of course.
Of course the issue with new high speed lines is the capital cost, which can range from extremely high where the land is readily available to eye-watering, where it has to travel through densely occupied parts of countries. HS2 in the UK is a case in point, where phase 1 is round £45 bn, and all previous experience is that it will go way over budget. That's for just 109 miles (or 176 km). Of course, much of this is because of the work required to tunnel underneath quite a lot of central London and passing through the densely populated outskirts of the city, but if high speed lines are to be brought into the city centre, then it's always going to be very expensive.
Also, when factoring in the space requirements of airports, you also have to factor in the space requirements of the rail corridor. High speed rail is also not carbon-neutral, even if the electricity used by trains is. That's because all that vast amount of infrastructure most certainly is not, and high-speed lines require very high quality installations with a lot of concrete and so on. Tunnels have to be bigger to allow for the high speeds, cuttings have to be deeper and viaducts longer to minimise the gradients.
This is not to say that High Speed rail is necessarily a bad idea, but it works best for very highly travelled routes between population centres. It would be extremely wasteful if used to service much less trafficked routes where the fixed infrastructure emissions could exceed what is used by a few flights.
Gradients on high-speed rails can actually be steeper than on "classic" main lines, because most high-speed rolling stock has more driven axles in relation to weight. It's heavy locomotive-hauled trains that need extremely shallow grades.
Your point about the environmental impact of the rail infrastructure is true. However, this is greatly mitigated by usage - the environmental impact of every additional train running is minimal compared to every additional flight. If you have resonably-full trains running multiple times per hour, then you break even relatively quickly, and from then on, it's environmentally positive.
Thank you for sharing interesting content.
Great video, thanks
Thanks for watching!
Great video raising lots of issues.
Sydney-Melbourne: The population distance ratio (even if it replaces most flights) probably couldn't provide the frequency you would need for HSR. Better to concentrate on slightly lower speeds (e.g. 200km/h) at much lower costs. Even at HSR speeds it would still be more than 3 hours, but at 200km/h it could be done in 5 hours and would grab a lot of market share. This sort of speed currently works in the UK, Netherlands, Switzerland, Scandinavia.
Asian HSR: Surprised you didn't mention Singapore-Kuala Lumpur-Bangkok as a potential corridor.
Night trains: One option is for dual speed lines. 200-300 km/h during the day for business travel, 100-150 km/h (using much less energy per km) at night for freight and sleeper trains.
I always fly first class when traveling so I wouldn’t get the same luxury on a train journey.
As you touched on, flights are really best in a few specific areas: 1) over oceans, 2) reaching remote areas such as islands, deep in mountains, into the tundra, etc and 3) crossing long distances quickly, though high speed rail seems to be catching up on that one.
For everything else, rail is much better (and I say this as an aero engineer with years of airline experience). Operating many short flights is not only an environmental problem and more irritating that trains for the passengers, it wears out the aircraft and their components faster doing many cycles in a short time.
Technology for carbon neutral flights has been invented, but no one wants to invest in bringing new tech to production if it doesn't promise short-term profits.
Last time I flew domestic in China, it was from Chongqing to Shanghai. HSR would've taken 10hrs versus 3 hrs by plane. It would've worked perfect as a sleeper train overnight, but unfortunately most high speed trains don't run overnight due to maintenance.
Agree with this video for the most part - a lot of today's flights strictly speaking are unnecessary and stressful to take. The biggest reason why domestic flights exist in the UK (and short hop international ones to France, Germany, Spain etc) exist is due to the sheer cost of train travel within and linking to the UK. The fares are so high people are willing to take a more stressful option, and when the flights advertise a "1 hour" journey time (which doesn't include the waiting, security and check-in etc) it pushes people even further towards them. Add to that coaches are also really cheap if lengthy options, and high speed rail just isn't all that compelling for most people here.
Don’t take your achievements for granted. A lot of HSR is better than none. At least you have the option lol.
What would the overlap of high speed rail and airplanes be? Obviously NYC to LA would be better for planes and NYC to Boston can definitely be better as high speed rail, but at what point would the time cost of which be considered essentially the same? I would really like an answer to this. Thanks!
Texas HSR favors rail instead of planes even on a lucky day with check-in, security and alike, idk if that helps you
Probably around 500 miles is the sweet spot for the max distance you can go. But that wouldn't mean that Philadelphia to Chicago is too far because of all the cities in between.
@@DavidJohnson-dp4vv Yeah I understand the idea of LA to Vegas to SLC alllll the way to NYC because although most people won't take the maximum distance, they will definitely take the in between cities.
citynerd uses a neat method in his "high speed rail vs. x" videos
That depends. Usually 600 - 800 km is the longest range daytime HSR is favourable. If you have 250+ km/h sleeper train that extends to well over 2000km.