It’s not very much in absolute numbers, but those 2% are produced by a very small portion of humanity.
With one trip across the Atlantic and back you add to your personal carbon budget as much as the average for one person for a whole year in a majority of the world’s countries.
Adding to that the emissions from airplane engines have additional negative influences due to where they are emitted.
If the U.S. had decent high-speed trains like the rest of the developed world does, a lot of short-to-medium-distance flights would be superfluous. You’d still want to fly from NYC to L.A., but NYC to Chicago or Atlanta would be just as fast by train.
I’d love to learn about where I can travel that far, that fast. Because NYC to Chicago is 800 miles in 2.5 hours. That’s like Paris to Vienna. Rome to Prague. Tokyo to Kumamoto.
The fastest train in Europe* runs Naples–Milano, connecting Italy’s three most populous cities and five of its top eight. That takes over four hours and is the equivalent of leaving NYC and crossing into OH from PA but not making it to Columbus. I guess you can also stop in Pittsburgh or . . . Allentown? The flight to Columbus takes <2 h. Maybe if you’re the type who arrives at the airport super early and are starting/ending near the train station you could make that work out.
*According to this: Unveiling the 10 Fastest High-Speed Trains | Railway Technology
Yes, our trains suck, but let’s not make other trains out to be what they aren’t. There was a wapo article earlier this month about “flight shame” that mentioned a guy traveling from Stockholm to Austria who skipped the 2 hour flight for about 30 hours combined trains, bus, and ferry. A car would have been faster.
Now that’s longer than your “short” examples. More like NYC to Minneapolis or Des Moines.
Some relevant literature:
10.1177/0954410017721254
10.2514/6.2018-1652
10.2514/6.2014-2851
I know beans about aerodynamics, so I’ll just take everyone’s word for it that there are significant gains to be made via magical (to ignorant me) placement of light motors. See also NASA X-57.
The problem still is jet fuel has a specific energy of 12 kWh/kg wheareas Li-ion batteries are something like <0.3.
That doesn’t preclude a hybrid system with a non-driving internal combustion generator, or fuel cells, which aren’t really up to snuff yet. But people are working on this.
The range/payload tradeoff also depends on power density. Magical propellors may reduce the required peak power (during takeoff), but I couldn’t tell you how much. There are also people working on better motors.
So yes, commuter planes are a more logical platform for electric motor propulsion than larger planes, but we can’t do it with existing technology. Yet.
Ruken, what are those numbers you posted?
It should be noted that the 2.5 hours you list is flight time, it does not include the wait time at the airport, going through security, taxiing after landing, waiting to retrieve your luggage, etc. What people often forget about train travel is that there is less waiting when it comes to boarding and disembarking as well as less time to reach your final destination since train stations are in cities, as opposed to outside them like airports usually are.
Although high-speed trains are not necessarily the solution to air travel, comparing flight times to transit times on trains is not an accurate comparison. Total travel to and from a destination is needed to have an accurate comparison and discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of the two.
//i\
I leave 90 minutes before my flight, same for the train, and don’t check luggage for 95% of my trips, and rarely need to be smack in the middle of a city. YMMV
DC (since I’m more familiar with it) rather than NYC, but I can leave the house at 7a EDT and be at a meeting in Des Planes, IL at 10:30a CDT. No train is going to do that. I do take trains along the NE corridor and would love faster ones, but trains in other directions just don’t have the population density that other, train-heavy parts of the world see. NYC to Chicago sure doesn’t. NYC to DC does. But DC to Atlanta does not.
That Italian train would be like going from here to Indy. So even faster than Chicago. Their 4.5 hours is a hell of a lot better than our 18+ that you could do today on Amtrak if you really wanted. But even at 4.5 hours, that makes it damn hard to make a day trip of it like I can on a plane. And nobody would put a fast route in there anyway because it travels through a whole lot of not-a-whole-lot, as opposed to 20+% of the population. Maybe I just shouldn’t expect to make day trips to Indy. But a fast train is certainly not an equivalent substitute to what I have available now.
I would love to take more trains. Right now, it’s easier for me to fly to Philly, rent a car, and drive to a meeting near Princeton than it is for me to take Amtrak to Trenton followed by regional rail or taxi/uber. It’s easier for me to drive to a meeting in Morgantown or Pittsburgh (downtown – I fly if I’m near PIT airport.) RDU seems like it should be train-able but it’s not. And east-coast-to-Chicago would be cool but it’s just silly given the distances and populations involved.
NYC to Chicago by air in 2.5 hours? Sure, if you can just walk into the airport and get on your plane. Used to be able to do that before 9/11. Now, not so much.
I already addressed this. But that’s essentially what anyone with pre-check does.