James O'Malley's avatar
Air travel is good and we should want more of it
Richard Gadsden's avatar

I wrote a long comment, copied it to fix a typo, deleted, and then discovered I hadn't actually copied it.

But the summary is:

You can divide air travel into four. One can be replaced by the new battery-electric planes there will be in the 2030s - Heart Aerospace have 200+ orders for their 19-seater, and there are others making similar progress. One can be replaced by high-speed rail. And the other two cannot be replaced as is.

The electrifiable option is short-distance low-demand routes, usua…

Richard Gadsden's avatar

Seriously: if you can get on a train at St Pancras at, say, 8pm and get off the next morning in Lisbon or Seville or Naples or Budapest or Prague or Stockholm (all possible if the high-speed system get joined together), then I think a lot of intra-European flights will disappear.

I would love to believe this is the case, but the two sleeper trains I've been on in my life were absolutely awful for actually getting any sleep (Munich->Paris, circa 2013, Cairo->Aswan in 2019), so given the choice would perhaps rather fly (even though I'm - ironically - a very nervous flyer). In both cases, I'd obviously take however many hours on a high speed train over either option.

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Dec 14, 2021
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1:30 PM