But it is complex: first, it works in such a way that the plane tends to be cheaper. Should you tax the flights? But then you basically say that rich people can take the plane. Banning is more fair in that sense.

Then, the perception is different: people tend to trust the plane more (even though planes have delays, too) and underestimate the commute time for the plane (I often hear people compare the time between two train stations against the time between two airports, completely forgetting all the time to the airport and back, checking in, fetching the bags, etc.

And finally, what we need to do goes way further than just making it more convenient to take the train for some journeys. The whole aviation sector is going to have a huge problem because it can't reasonably replace fossil fuels (no, there is not enough electricity and hydrogen for planes in a post-oil world), and therefore we need to heavily prepare for that. It means that we will have to go towards a society where we almost don't fly and mostly take the train, and that will be less convenient. We just don't have a choice, and we have to prepare for it.

My anecdote:

Some time ago I did a lot of business trips around Europe. All business travel was organized by a subcontractor. They sometimes wanted to route me through a crazy amount of short airplane hops to get me to the destination. Sometimes even when a direct flight was available they couldn't put me on it because they didn't have a contract with the operator or something like that.

For some reason they strongly favored air travel and fell back on other means of transport only when there was absolutely no way to get there by air.

One some occassions I was supposed to do 4 or 5 500 km short hops, which would mean a whole wasted day of basically waiting at airports and boarding airplanes. In such cases I just said no, paid out of my own pocket for a train ticket or took my own car. And then spent next 3 months doing paperwork to get travel expenses reimbursed.

While that may be true, those aren't the only criteria. (And, the efficiency is only fuel efficiency.)

> Riding on any good rail service is vastly more enjoyable to the passenger than flying.

When the journey is the goal, that's great, but I'm usually travelling because I want to get somewhere else.

More like air routes are a lot cheaper to change than rails. Nor do air routes cost millions of dollars per-mile to build.

And yes, jetliners are several times faster than trains, even bullet trains, and since rail networks are orders of magnitude more expensive than airline networks... The whole thing adds up to air travel being much much much cheaper and more convenient than rail with relatively few exceptions involving high population densities.

Economy yes. But how is it a positive for the environment? > Most trains in general are already scheduled. There is close to zero marginal cost for an additional person to take the train.

That's a good point but that's true for flights too.

well personal experience is not always representative - but anyway isn't one of the ways how trains could replace planes by increasing number of connections and speeding them up so that it does become feasible?

If you waste time while you're travelling with public transport you're doing it wrong. For example, something like an e-reader is pretty thin and weights a few hundred grams and can hold thousands of books. Noisy? I bought half decent earplugs the other day for just 12 EUR. All you gotta do is take them with you. But you'd do that in an airplane as well. Add to that, airplanes are terrible for the environment; trains are less bad.

OK cool I'll just take a train.... uhhh absolutely nowhere as I live on an island with extremely limited inter-city rail.

>The big advantage of air travel is exactly this, you don't need to spend much time in the actual plane. And the passengers are by definition under full-time supervision by other passengers, so stealing or attacks are not so easy to get away with.

There are also drawbacks to air travel that you're not mentioning. I was in a sleeping segment with 5 other people and felt more safe than in an airplane. The important thing though is: we need to cut down on carbon, and travel by train is an important way to do it.

Well, for me one reason is that I've watched countless hours of "Seconds from Disaster" and "Air Emergency" on the National Geographic Channel.

Seriously, though, I think the control thing is big for me. I'm pretty sure that if I was wealthy, I'd be a private pilot--and still would not like flying commercially.

I don't like buses all that much, or cars when I'm a passenger, so that's more evidence in support of the control theory.

I'm OK with reasonable sized boats (e.g., the ferries in Washington State).

Ambivalent about trains--I was OK with them until I took Amtrak from the Seattle area to Beaumont, Texas, and back (yeah, patent lawsuit), and saw just how poorly maintained the tracks are. Fortunately when my train derailed, we were only going about 5 miles an hour so no one was injured. It just caused a several hour delay.

Exactly. And the pros and cons for trains, as a mode of transportation, have made them a less viable option for most American journeys ever since the mid-20th century. When you say "there are people who do not drive or fly but use trains", you're not describing the typical, reasonable person who weighs the pros and cons between different modes of transportation, you're describing someone who refuses to even consider alternate modes of transportation. Maybe it's not necessarily a whimsical romanticism for trains, but it's certainly something well short of any actual necessity that's deserving of public subsidy.

Sure if you think its a good idea to blow lots of carbon in the air and a punch of emissions with led all over the continent.

Trains absolutely make sense in the waste majority cases in Europe.

And having high speed dedicated lanes also has the additional benefit of removing capacity from older lines and allowing more regional and more cargo.

Building trains, both conventional and high speed is a huge win.

P.S:

The current lead in terms of electric viable plains I would say is Heart Aerospace from Sweden.

“Trains are usually a better choice. Most people don’t need planes”

Would high speed rail be that different? Not being snarky, I really don't know. I just figure that if it's very fast and/or expensive, it's probably not going to be very roomy on the inside. That Chinese train looks like it's about the same width or less than most airliners.

Unless you go electric, you'll never get anywhere near a carbon footprint of rail.

You've just described airports, except with trains instead of planes. If I could take a train instead of fly I would.

People who know the plane is cheaper.

Didn't use to be, but the cut-throat budget airlines and the greed and privitization of train networks made it so.

People who don't like or use transit love to talk about trains to the airport. It reveals a lot about how they view transit. To wit: it's a novelty, for special situations, for when you couldn't otherwise use your car to get where you're going.

It's not real transportation, in other words. It's a shuttle for the exceptions in your life.

I was traveling this week with both, an Airbus from Lufthansa and high-speed trains from Siemens.