The price of a plane/train is astronomical compared to what you have to pay for a pilot. I mean, you could literally buy a pilot for a millenia for the price of a jetliner (100M$ for jetliner / 100k$/year for pilot). There just isn't a very large economical incentive to automate that job out.
Planes, even small ones, require a significant amount of maintenance and the fuel is not cheap either. Also, qualifying and paying someone to operate a vehicle that is essentially constrained to one dimension of movement is far cheaper than doing the same for a vehicle that can move in all 3 dimensions or even 2 (like a bus.) That's one of the reasons why fully-automated trains have been practical and in operation for many decades already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation#Recor...
>Also, planes (and rockets) are _kind of_ simple when compared with trains or cars.
In which context? I very much doubt that maintanence costs are similar or even cheaper for planes - for one, the plane maintanence has to be more thorough.
Also, I would say that electric engines for trains are relatively simple compared to jet engines.
Even cost supports this thesis: Poland bought 400-seat Pendolino for 400 millions for 20 trains.
Comparable 777 costs 400 million... for one plane. 737s start from 100 million.
The infrastructure alone for trains is insane. We don’t need rails in the sky.
Not only that - but we’re talking about staff for half a day instead of a couple hours.
What we could use are electric planes, for short distances. Plane usage isn’t going to stop. Only the select few with the luxury of time to kill are going to pick a 12hr train over a 2-3hr flight for the same distance, even at half the price.
Business travel alone makes the idea of increasing flights costs a serious no-go.
That doesn't really answer the question. What about planes is cheaper? For simple economics to apply, they have to do something cheaper than trains, and it's not obvious what that is. As far as I know, for example, trains are significantly more fuel efficient per passenger-mile.
Maybe I'm communicating poorly here but the tech is not the problem. We don't need to invent anything new, we know how to do it. It does need to get cheaper but the construction and maintenance costs are gigantic and that hasn't changed for any big project over the last century.
Jetliners are complex machines but it's the entire infrastructure of airports and traffic control that actually make it possible, which is only viable because people choose to pay for it. Massive infrastructure does not build or take care of itself, and if it did, that would be a far bigger revolution than just building a train.
Transportation economics are dominated by the passengers per pilot ratio. Small vehicles aren't economic unless they are piloted by a passenger or an AI.
AI piloting should be easier with aircraft than cars.
A plane doesn't have to build and maintain km of tracks, it just uses airport facilities (subsidised usually) and untaxed kerosene.
A high speed train can only go to a few destination, the tracks can hardly be repaid
That (plane operating costs > rail operating costs) may not be the case when you take into account the cost of maintaining the physical infrastructure (hundreds of miles of railroad) compared to that of airports (a few hundred metres of tarmac).
Planes are going to become very expensive in the next 30-40 years, unless we come up with a cheap alternative to the energy density of petroleum. One advantage of trains is that they don't have to carry their fuel.
The two aren't independent, though. When you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for humans to operate an airplane, you might as well get the most out of the fixed cost of the airplane to begin with. If you don't have to do that, you can build cheaper smaller airplanes to fly cargo on routes that wouldn't be economical at human operation scale.
I don't see anything wrong with Flying cars, conceptually. I would love to be able to cut my commute time by 1/3, imagine all the new job possibilities, and how many more candidates companies will have.
The problem is, maybe it can never be done cost effectively enough to make viable for everyone. I mean, we can't even make simple trains cheap: here in CA, it costs almost 250$ a month to BART back and forth
Is it? People seem to think that planes are fancy and new and trains are old technology, therefore it's absurd that flying is cheaper. If you think about all the infrastructure that needs to be built and maintained for high speed rail that doesn't for flying, it makes a lot more sense. Also consider that high speed rail is in may ways just as technologically sophisticated and new as airplanes.
I wonder how much really going by train is sustainable compared to flying when you count in all the costs of maintenance of the rails, making tunnels, burden on surrounding environment etc whereas with flying this is virtually non-existent.
Surely flying is still worst but it seems more scalable; once we get electric planes then all of a sudden planes will be more sustainable maybe?
Because it's still too expensive when compared to flying. Just look at the cost of the high speed rail plan in California. Until the price of jet fuel is much higher, economically, it makes more sense to fly.
I say let the high speed rails come naturally (because they will eventually): don't try to force it.
Planes most likely benefit from the economies of scale, simply for the huge number of riders they service in comparison with trains for longer stretches.
The complicated area of railroad tracks probably doesn't help either. Someone is paying for them and the maintenance is frequent judging by the business my friends working on the railroads get.
This is ridiculous, air travel is expensive because planes are giant expensive machines, consume a significant amount of rare fossil fuel to fly, and can only be safely flown by highly trained experts. No kind of app is going to solve any of those problems.
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