[jokteur]

I'm sorry, but rail is the lowest form carbon footprint you can find, if you exclude biking and walking.

Also, boarding a train is so much more comfortable and convenient than boarding a plane (no security check, at least in Europe, wide seats, no emergency tutorial, ...). Also the train drops me right in the city center.

I would argue that up to 500 km of distance, high speed train is the best option, then it becomes debatable.

[xnx]

Trains on existing tracks are very efficient at moving weight.

When the tracks don't exist (i.e. in the US) there are billions of dollars of carbon cost (moving earth, concrete, steel) to building new track.

[jokteur]

This study [1] cites a 80 to 280 tCO2 per km of new high speed track laid (it includes bridges, tunnels, ...). Lets lay 700km of new high speed tracks (Orlando to Atlanta). So 700km of high speed track is 56'000 tCO2 to 196'000 tCO2.

Orlando to Atlanta will have sold more than airplane 310'000 seats in December 2023. At 250g per km per passenger, we get to 54'250 tCO2 emitted on this route alone in December. You can see that laying 700km of high-speed tracks that will last more than 30 years before renovation will emit as much as one to four months of flight emissions on the busiest US airplane route.

You can argue about the specifics of this back of the envelope calculation, but flying emit orders of magnitude more tCO2 than any form of transport (on short haul) that even building a whole new high-speed rail route is worth it after a few years of exploitation. Obviously you are not going to convert 100% of passengers to rail, especially in the beginning with spotty transport coverage, but focusing on busy airplane routes (< 1000km) and building high-speed rail is worth it in the medium-long term.

[1] https://uic.org/IMG/pdf/carbon_footprint_of_railway_infrastr...

[xnx]

Thanks for referencing some data. Unfortunately, on page 10 it looks like they are specifically excluding the impact of constructing rail lines ("construction infrastructure").

The high speed rail line from LA to San Francisco (~380 miles) was estimated to cost $128 billion. The Orlando to Atlanta route is longer (~440 miles), but lets pretend it could be built for the same cost.

A one-way plane ticket from Orlando to Atlanta is about $100. For $128 billion you could buy 1.28 billion plane tickets. It looks like ~3 million people current fly between Orlando and Atlanta each year.

For the cost of building a new high speed rail line, you could fly everyone for the next 426 years. It's not hard to imagine that the fuel expended during construction of the high-speed rail line would be greater than the fuel consumed by all the planes flying between those cities for decades.

[jokteur]

Sorry but you misread the report. They are saying that typical eco-calculator usually do not take into account the emissions from construction and maintenance. You can see on the document that on table 2, emissions of construction is taken into account. It is the point of the report. So my point about carbon emission stands. You can build miles of high-speed rail and offset the emissions caused by construction compared to the same route in airplane in a few months.

Also, the California is the most expensive high speed rail project in the world. The US simply does not have the expertise anymore to build effienctly big infrastructure project. In comparison, Spain is building highspeed rail for 17.7m€ per km (also Spain has a lot of mountains), while the rest of European countries build at 45.5m€ per km. This makes this 700km line more like 12.4 billions € to 31.9 billions €. So 50 to 89 years worth of plane tickets.

I agree, still expensive, but then by the same logic you should stop investing in highway expansion, because they are super expensive and always prove ineffective at reducing congestion. The US has proven in the past they are able to make big projects. Why admit defeat and try to keep the status quo?