A historic electric airplane flight landed at JFK with passengers, marking a milestone as Beta Technologies demonstrates the practicality and efficiency of electric air travel.
Well it did say it was a milestone flight, as well as 68 miles not necessarily meaning on a straight road you could drive 70mph on.
There are a lot of good arguments for rail or other means of transportation, but the travel volume vs the infrastructure required are vastly different in the US than in many parts of Europe/Asia. Think ‘lots of medium distance low volume routes’ that aren’t economically feasible since there are existing routes. If you went through the effort of building a train route, you would have to charge so much per person to make it pay for itself that no one could afford it and they would take other methods.
I’m Europe, there seem to be enough ‘short, high volume routes’ that are economically feasible that considering adding other legs to them make sense, or they just already work.
Not sure what you mean by constant, it is definitely a huge gradient, but the layout of the US vs the EU is so drastically different that at almost every level routes that are well suited to train in Europe are often overwhelmingly inefficient in the US.
Everything from building up routes between major cities to regional and local end up being too low volume to support themselves.
There is at least an argument to be made that some/many routes should be heavily subsidized long enough to allow industry and society in general grow around them, by which time they could become self supporting, but most people don’t realize just how big the US is in land compared to it’s population, and that often results in a lot of ground to cover just for relatively few people each to get to a lot of places.
I understand your point. I just don’t share the pessimism, I come from finland where the population density is less than half that of the US and our trains run fine. That’s why I think the US could both build infrastructure that would bring about different kinds of traffic flows, as well as just build rail infrastructure for current traffic flows that would work just fine.
Don’t know if we can reach an agreement on this topic though. There are arguments both for and against, and we can’t really get closer to the truth without trial and error.
Well it did say it was a milestone flight, as well as 68 miles not necessarily meaning on a straight road you could drive 70mph on.
There are a lot of good arguments for rail or other means of transportation, but the travel volume vs the infrastructure required are vastly different in the US than in many parts of Europe/Asia. Think ‘lots of medium distance low volume routes’ that aren’t economically feasible since there are existing routes. If you went through the effort of building a train route, you would have to charge so much per person to make it pay for itself that no one could afford it and they would take other methods.
I’m Europe, there seem to be enough ‘short, high volume routes’ that are economically feasible that considering adding other legs to them make sense, or they just already work.
You say that like its a constant
Not sure what you mean by constant, it is definitely a huge gradient, but the layout of the US vs the EU is so drastically different that at almost every level routes that are well suited to train in Europe are often overwhelmingly inefficient in the US.
Everything from building up routes between major cities to regional and local end up being too low volume to support themselves.
There is at least an argument to be made that some/many routes should be heavily subsidized long enough to allow industry and society in general grow around them, by which time they could become self supporting, but most people don’t realize just how big the US is in land compared to it’s population, and that often results in a lot of ground to cover just for relatively few people each to get to a lot of places.
I understand your point. I just don’t share the pessimism, I come from finland where the population density is less than half that of the US and our trains run fine. That’s why I think the US could both build infrastructure that would bring about different kinds of traffic flows, as well as just build rail infrastructure for current traffic flows that would work just fine.
Don’t know if we can reach an agreement on this topic though. There are arguments both for and against, and we can’t really get closer to the truth without trial and error.