[sho_hn]

I haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains, and that's before you consider that people developing and building a train line get to eat and put their kids through schools.

I can't believe seriously arguing for oversized quadcopters as a mass transport alternative.

[fragmede]

Do the people who run the helipads not also get to eat and put their kids through school though? Where are you that makes the parents pay directly for school such that not having a job at the train station means their kids go hungry and unschooled? What horrible place is that? (Wait, don't tell me, is it the USA?)

I don't know how the economics in the electric VTOL era works out, but the thing about air travel vs train travel is that in order for the train to be useful, you have to build tracks from every train station to every other train station to have perfect routability, which is expensive. However, for a helipad, once you've built the helipad it automatically connects to all other helipads in range.

[JumpCrisscross]

> haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains

In Manhattan? I honestly would. If it were a nation, it would be the 22nd-largest economy. Any disruption to that system is massively expensive.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do the math. But we also shouldn't be reaching conclusions without attempting it.

[timcobb]

People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time. Manhattan is hardly a purely reasonable place, in fact it's far from it. All kinds of nonsense takes place in nyc all the time. If nyc was driven by cold economic reason it would be boring and lame compared to what it is today.

[JumpCrisscross]

> People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time

This isn’t in the same category as burying a new train line. I lived around just the Hudson Yard water and electric expansions when those happened. It was years of increased noise, traffic and litigation.

[djeastm]

Sure it was bothersome, but it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself, either.

[JumpCrisscross]

> it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself

Straw man. Nobody claimed these were existential threats.

OP said "I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains." I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite came out–take the costs of the disruption and time value of money into account, and building a new train line anywhere in Manhattan is a worse use of resources than (a) increasing capacity on existing lines, a veritable forest of low-hanging fruit or even (b) eVTOLs.

[timcobb]

> Nobody claimed these were existential threats.

Strawman: yes, but the point stands in its milder form that noise etc isn't substantial economic disruptive.

But yeah the reality is that no one is going to be digging in NY substantially soon/ever because if you look at precedent that's been the case for the last 100 years. And building a tunnel to JFK would be huge

[signatoremo]

NYC already have a functional mass transit system. Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus? Why it's so hard to understand there still is the need for other modes of transportation. At the very least, tourists want to view the city from above, or those who wants a quick hop from JFK to Manhattan. This is not a replacement for mass transportation.

At least try to show curiosity about what they want to solve.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus?

Hypothesis: people aren't familiar with New York's trains. It's a world-class network the likes of which we don't otherwise have in North America. (Sorry Toronto.) So when they see eVTOLs, they emotionally map it to their local trainless context.

[sho_hn]

I don't fit the hypothesis - the two cities I've lived in (Berlin, Seoul) have excellent trains. So it's perhaps overfitting in the other direction.

[bluGill]

Both of those cities are not in North America. In North America, New York City is by far our best example of a transit system. It is terrible by world standards, but is still the best example we have in North America.

[rsynnott]

... I mean, no. It's more that it is weird that there is no train to the airport (it looks like you can take ~3 trains from Manhattan). New York is likely the only really big city in the developed world where this is the case.

In Ireland, everyone thinks it's pretty ridiculous that there's no train to Dublin Airport (all going well, it will finally have one in 2036 or so, after _many_ false starts). Dublin's a city of about 1.5 million people. It's pretty incomprehensible that a city ten times the size wouldn't have one.

[minutillo]

There is (since 2023) a train that connects directly from Grand Central to JFK AirTrain.

[JumpCrisscross]

Airtrain opened in 2003 [1]. It connected to the subway system and, through Jamaica, Penn Station. The novel bit in 2023 was also linking into Grand Central.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_JFK

[rsynnott]

Huh. Google Maps was not showing me that.

EDIT: Oh, wait, misread, I thought you meant a direct train from Grand Central to the airport.

[JumpCrisscross]

> a direct train from Grand Central to the airport

It’s a single, low-bullshit transfer. Frankfurt Airport also requires a connection for terminals 2 and 3 [1].

[1] https://www.frankfurt-airport.com/en/transport-and-parking/t...

[dzhiurgis]

EVTOLS supposed to be less complex than cars and cars are already cheaper than trains.

[Jblx2]

Call me skeptical on being less complex than cars. I suppose this must be referring to parts count compared to an internal combustion engine car?

[dzhiurgis]

Suspension, steering, brakes, airbags, body...

Of course on a serious EVTOL you got variable pitch props and tilting rotors (basic 4 rotor design is inefficient just doesn't scale).

Avionics vs modern AEB, ESP, etc likely on par. Inverter redundancy way more important on EVTOL, but EVs have redundancy too.