this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Flying is disastrous for the climate, it should be much more expensive and regulated.
Getting rid of hidden bullshit fees is good but we really don't want more people flying, we want less.
We need to subsidise train travel. Train travel has the disadvantage that it's slower, but over medium distances not that much slower if one includes getting to and from airports and getting through security and such.
Trains have the advantage of being far more pleasant an experience, leaving from and arriving at more convenient locations, fewer restrictions on luggage, just generally less hassle.
But then trains are crazy expensive for some reason.
100% agree, we need to focus heavily on trains.
Trains require a lot more infrastructure on the ground than planes do. Also, the fuel for planes isn't taxed in Europe even though it should be.
True, but it's always like, planes are more expensive in the long run.
It's more expensive to build a solar panel than burn coal. But after the coal has been burned, the solar panel still stays up.
Trains tend to be largely privatised. I can't speak to other countries but here in the UK, each train company covers different lines so it's effectively a distributed monopoly. They have no incentive to make tickets cheaper or their trains better because there isn't any competition. Trains should be nationalised or at least have more regulations.
That’s mostly the UK. Germany has Deutsche Bahn, France SNCF, Italy SF/Trenitalia, and Spain has Renfe. All state owned. And I guess there are many other European countries with State owned Rail companies. Trains tend to be mostly state owned in Europe.
I thought as much. The National Rail is a joke.
yup. I’m in a long distance relationship. Germany to England. I’d love to take the train if it wasn’t 3x as expensive and takes like twice as long with a hundred changeovers.
"Crazy expensive" doesn't really matter when you're a government and can borrow or print to make investments that have investment returns in the form of efficiency gains that go on to improve the economy, much like what corporations do to grow (borrow, reinvest profits gained from growth). There isn't really any good macroeconomic evidence that inflation is to blame because of said funding strategies, as explained by PhD Joeri Schasfoort in multiple of his videos[1], much to the behest right wing populist politicians who lie about not being able to invest in infrastructure. In the UK, Rishi Sunak is cancelling our HS2 railway falsely citing costs and even sabotaging it by sidestepping the democratically elected House of Commons by selling off gov. owned land so that the incoming Labour government will have a hard time un-cancelling HS2 - even our old conservative Brexit-causing PM David Cameron is criticising it publicly (ex-PMs rarely criticise their own party's contemporary government).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@MoneyMacro/videos
Part of the problem is that many government’s don’t fund infrastructure investment themselves. By privatising utilities and other vital infrastructure they can appear to “cut spending”. Of course, in reality the cost is much higher (and/or the investment is much lower) because privatised entities need to make a margin and (by definition) have higher borrowing costs than the government.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/@MoneyMacro/videos
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before making flying expensive you need to provide actual alternatives first, or else you are risking of electing populists who will reverse it quite quickly. quite a few countries in the EU still don't have good train service.
We definitely need more high speed trains
While high speed trains reach speeds up to around 350kmh ordinary trains reach speeds up to around 250kmh.
So while high speed trains can go about 50% faster than ordinary trains the price tag for building and maintaining is many times more expensive compared to ordinary railway.
So let's start maintaining the railways we have and build more. Making sure that it's possible to go from point A to point B safely and in time
Then we start building high speed railways, connecting major cities.
High speed is a big thing. And actually high speed, at that. A massive number of trains are very slow and even a number of "high speed" trains are not even remotely as high speed as they could be, with proper investment. It's hard to replace planes when we're talking at least twice the travel time.
I'd love to have more train options in Canada. There is a train that spans the width of Canada, but it is so slow and deprioritized that it's not actually a viable means of transit across Canada. You can fly Toronto to Vancouver in a little over 4 hours. So maybe 6 hours with the airport overhead. By train, it's 4 days. That's something you'd only do for the experience and it'd be a significant part of the trip (one person I know who did it said that they wish they utilized more stops along the way, because by the end of the trip, they were getting pretty sick of it -- despite the fact that they recommended it glowingly). With a high speed rail, that could become less than 1 day trip, making it a lot more feasible (a lot of people already view the day they fly as a day spent only on travel).
And that's an extreme. Getting around southern Ontario is far more common and practical (it's an extremely population dense area). But the trains we have for that are very low speed and have mediocre schedules (sometimes only good for commuting). Even though a train is an option, I often find that the bus is actually the fastest way to get to my destination, cause the train is so infrequent and really not fast.
Per fuel/mile/cargo, aircraft are actually very efficient. Better than one or two people sitting in a gas powered car which is how most people drive. Of course, there aren’t transatlantic highways being driven across by armadas of single occupant cars, so the fuel usage is far higher for airplanes in such instances.
Let’s rephrase your position such that long-distance travel is bad for the environment regardless of the mode, period. There more energy efficient methods such as trains, especially local electric trains, but they are slow (unless you’re lucky enough to have a TGV or similar nearby).
Not really : https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
That chart says “per passenger mile” and doesn’t seem to include cargo.
E: and I don’t disagree that short-hop domestic flights are worse for the environment. High-speed trains should definitely be used in that instance.
Relative to passenger cars, they really sort of are.
Flying is still the quickest and cheapest way to move across distant places. In EU we're not full of flights as in the US, I am not against flying (although private flights should be regulated).
Getting rid of these fees means they will be displayed in the overall cost, which might in turn reduce the number of people flying.
30€ flights (that you end up paying more due to these hidden costs) are definitely part of the problem.
At they very least, I think short-distance flights need to be made way more expensive. Like a 70€ minimum ticket price on all flights.
There's no way in hell we're getting through the climate crisis when a German can pay 20€ for a flight to Mallorca and back, but pays 200€ for a train to the other side of the country.
This'll likely force budget airlines (who are infamous for this stuff) to raise their prices, so it'll also do that.
Well, if the hidden bullshit fees get rolled into the upfront cost then it will entice fewer people to fly. But yes, mainland Europe has the kind of density where they should be focusing on high-speed-rail to the near-elimination of continental flights.
In the climate-changed world, if you're not going over the ocean you shouldn't be flying. Which is why the foot-dragging on high-speed rail particularly in the Americas is obscene.
Yeah, look, some people just don't want to take months to go where they need to go...