Solarpunk Travel

You like to live dangerously...

I assume you're not in the EU...

That sounds like a low end of reasonable price for a train ticket. I assume it’s a plane ticket though, at which point what in the actual hell that’s a subsidization level on par with driving in America

I think coaches refers to longer distance bus-travel... like greyhounds in the US.

The reason regular bus travel is so bad in that graphic is that it is counted per passenger and these inner-city buses drive a lot of the time with few passengers. But if you want to keep servicing out-laying districts and non-rush hours there is little to do about that (although often these buses are over-sized).

I admit not having read the full study that lead to that graph, but I think I do understand the graph itself:

Buses are local public transport (intracity), commonly run by the government/municipality/etc. They run no matter what. Maybe at some point they will abandon the line, but it is a public service, so they won’t be doing that easily.

Coaches are long distance (intercity) travel, usually run by a private company, and if it’s not profitable they’ll just cull it. You have that in the US, it’s the Greyhound, which is now run by Flixbus.

If you look at the graph, buses do not generally lose out to cars, only to cars with 4 people on it.

Now a bus that runs 24/7 has a lower average utilization, because e.g. at night you might be the only passenger. If you compare that to a fully loaded car, sure, the car is better.

And the long distance bus (coach) doesn’t have to stop every 500m, so you’ll have way less fuel spent on braking and accelerating compared to a bus.

It’s actually impressive that despite the many times a public transport bus runs at low utilization it still is better than a car with just one person on it.

A coach, on the other hand, will have a better average utilization, since they will just immediately shut it down if there’s only one person using it.

I think no one is arguing for completely banning air travel (or maybe only very few people are). But in the long run we need to make train travel more affordable and airtravel less so. The problem right now is that the environmental impact is treated as an externality that the person buying the ticket doesn't have to pay for, but we all have to.

Your point was that air travel uses less infrastructure.

And of course I can point to a high throughput airport and to a high throughput train station and conclude that the airport is using way more infrastructure in comparison.

Also nobody asked for „global travel“ by train.

And what about the SE Asian train network? Do you mean China, lol? Why must „many places“ be accessible by ~~train~~ edit: plane? This is not an argument.

true point: planes should be used only for intercontinental travel: for exemple dedicate 2-3 airport hubs in all europe, and the rest of it should only be accessed by train. look up european sky on flightradar: it is always rush hour up there, and probably not so many intercontinental flights. Air travel should also be limited cross country only in Asia's case: and the number of flight hubs should be reduced to a minimum and leave the rest of the country to be accessed through train