this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Why promote flying? Why not invest heavily in really fast ground transportation? Let's build a bullet train between major hubs so people have a choice. If there's a serious competitor to flying, Boeing will have to improve or they'll lose a ton of business.
If the government takes over airlines or airplane manufacturing, we'll just end up with lots of cronyism.
I say start with LA to SF and LA to LV. The current infra there sucks, and there's a lot of worthwhile stops along the way. Then perhaps upgrade NYC to DC and related lines. It'll be incredibly expensive to roll out, but should be very cheap to run and maintain.
Yeah, here we go. Trains are so much more pleasant. If they weren't 10 times as slow I would never fly.
We have the tech for high speed rail, we just refused to build it because of lobbying (bribery), regulatory capture, and forced dependence on cars and planes.
To me at least the speed isn’t a problem. I’d much rather take a 2 day Amtrak (in sleeper) than an 8 hour plane.
The problem is the pricing, and also how much it fluctuates due to the extremely low capacity (one train a day…)
You gonna build a bullet train across the ocean?
No, planes are good for that. But there's a ton of domestic travel that could easily be replaced with a decent rail network.
Which, given the context that planes are necessary, you continue to ignore the OP:
And then your justification for not privatizing is cronyism. So the government contracts for air travel = bad, but the ones for your project are... good??
Your comment was really just a soap box to say air=bad, trains=good. I'm not going to argue trains are bad, but maybe make an honest argument for it.
I didn't claim that at all. I claimed that competition on travel is good. If people don't feel safe flying, there should be another, viable option, like trains. If enough people take trains instead of airplanes, airplanes will need to improve to get those customers back.
Trains have a lot of advantages vs airplanes, but I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that we should have viable alternatives.
Yes, it's always going to be unfeasible to cross the Atlantic or Pacific by train.
But the vast, vast majority of air journeys taken every day aren't trans-oceanic ones. Most journeys are between destinations within the Americas or within Eurasia and Africa. There are an awful lot of journeys by plane that could be moved to trains if the infrastructure was right.
Ekranoplan when?
Ekranobahn.