America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There’s a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we’ve created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
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Rural America is covered in local airports. No large commercial carriers, but the airports exist.
We need more rail. The argument starts from a bad premise.
They’re not viable as general passenger hubs.
Why not though? Honest question, I’ve been to an airport that had a terminal of around 30 square metres with decent passenger service in the EU.
I’d say it’s the flying that’s not scalable, not the airport footprints.
Most municipal airports can’t handle jet engine planes around here. They are all just small body, single engine aircraft on poorly maintained and non-level runways. They are fine for recreational flights, crop dusters, or flight instruction, but most rural airports here are little more than a few hangers and an administrative building with a runaway.
So the airport I’m talking about is Sønderborg, it also can’t service jets, the only passenger service operates 2-3 twin turboprop planes to Copenhagen and back. The airport is six hangars, the terminal literally is a single room with enough room for the passengers of a single plane.
I can see how small airports would make sense in Denmark since the landscape of islands and peninsulas makes direct paths by road or train nearly impossible. I’m in Ohio, which is comparable to Poland in geography. Rolling plains along a smooth coastline in the north with sizable hills and low mountains in the south. Flying from Toledo to Akron doesn’t make any sense since driving that is less than 2 hours, and so passenger rail would be a mich better option. You barely even see commercial flights from Cleveland to Cincinnati since the driving distance is doable for a day trip. A rail line connecting Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati would be perfect for us instead of lots of tiny airlines.
Flying is much more energy intensive, there are heightened security concerns and pilots are expensive
Yeah, I get that flying is not an ideal solution because of those reasons, but the aspect that was being talked about was airport footprints, which should be easier in the US than in the EU, with all that space.
I’ve tried to use them and they’re generally not affordable for most people, since you’re comparing to cost of driving a relatively short distance.
- The town I grew up in had a small airport where you could buy a ticket on a prop plane to get you to a bigger airport to make your flight. But it was cheaper and easier to drive an hour, and buses are even cheaper
- similar to where I went to college
- now I live just outside a major city, but it’s possible to take a small plane to a nearby tourist destination. Sure it avoids traffic but you need a car there and it’s cheaper to pick an off time for travel and drive the two hours
Edit to add: yes it’s also the airport that’s not scalable. A small airport requires minimal infrastructure, mostly provided by businesses. But for passenger service, someone needs to build a terminal, make sure there’s parking, have security staff on duty, install scanners, etc. d you have enough business to support that?
Literally no idea how a regular person would actually use those for realistic transportation. I figured those places were for private jets, people learning to fly and cargo/farm/industrial flights.
Would booking a flight on somebody’s cesna even work and be affordable/safe?
It takes a high level license to be paid to fly people.
It is fairly applicable to learn enough to fly one self (in theory from reading). There are airplane clubs where one owns a tiny part of a plane. Fuel and maintenance are not free, but not horrible for a few hours travel.
A very cleverly designed club could work somewhat for weekend trips within a tank of gas distance. Maybe.
So basically regional airports are a terrible method of mass transportation
Coming from a more rural region, even if trains were available, when people go to the city they come back with their car filled up with stuff because it’s easier to find/cheaper in the city, most won’t take the train even if it’s available if they have their car they can rely on.
But cars are still more efficient (L/km/passenger) than planes so we don’t need more planes for rural regions either.
Yeah going to the grocery store was a 40 minute round trip growing up. You go there and buy as much as you can so you don’t have to go again for two more weeks. Having a train will not be suitable for this type of trip.
A 40 minute round trip would be average in most US cities, eg Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, suburban Chicago, etc
Those cities have grocery stores every exit off the highway. I’m in NW Ohio and while every town over 15,000 people has at least onc grocery store, lota of the surrounding villages do not. 30 miles each direction to a grocery store is rough. Growing up in suburbs of major cities, i cant remember a grocery store being further than 5 miles away. It’s a vastly different experience.
So wouldn’t that be ~1.5 hours round trip? 40min one way
No, but a walkable city is. Even in a small town, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to park once then walk to the grocery, the movie theater, the home center, etc
May I point out that this effect is killing small towns and living-wage jobs? Before the car, there had to be stores and groceries and doctors’ practices, et cetera, in small towns. Those provided local jobs for people, and community. Now, people drive into the city, or to the regional Walmart, and the small towns are decaying, mired in crippling poverty, isolation, and the diseases of despair that we see today. So the car might offer “freedom” to load up on a large selection of cheap consumer goods, but at the cost of dignity, connection, and meaning.
(Walmart, by the way, can be seen as predatory, killing small business with prices they can’t match, but also, it is successful largely because it is so well-adapted to a car-based lifestyle. It’s not the cause, it’s an effect.)
Removing all the train stations in towns across the USA was a huge mistake
Plenty of places with developed rail networks are still conservative in rural places.
Yeah, but passenger rail collapsed hard. Amtrak is a shell of the former service and most states that kept their systems focused only on commuters into cities.
You also see a lot of rural towns encouraged to spread out far more than before because cars provided transportation. A small town in the early 20th century looked a lot more like a very small city instead of the hollow suburban form they have today.
I meant in other countries. Rural France is still conservative, for example. So is rural Japan.
Yeah, but that conservatism still involves as somewhat competent government helping people out. I don’t think they would push for the economics of American conservatism.
You cannot compare conservativism in the United States to conservativism in other Western democracies. Particularly a place like France. You’re using the same word for two things but they’re not the same thing. The Overton window does not even overlap between the two cases. Which is exactly the point being made.
Regional airports are generally extremely simple places. There’s nothing complicated about them. Now, big international airports, that’s unsustainable. Fact is, rural places aren’t conservative because they don’t have trains, rural places are more conservative because there’s a lower priority placed on education and more of a priority placed on working the family farm. Then you get fed whatever horseshit political opinion your dad has and that becomes your opinion.
Also because(I’m only assuming that its the same in the states) usually politicians don’t really care about investing in rural infrastructure and wehen you can see the quality from all of your infrastructure decline its easy to use populism to catch the votes from people who feel left out.
The point about trains is that it effectively reduces the separation between urban and rural.
Planes, few cripple trains, and a shitload of giant automobiles
Do Australia, Canada or India have the same problem?
All those countries are very small, poor and sparsely populated with people who’d want to travel.
USA: 9.53 Mio km² | 33.6 inhabitants per km² | $85,373 GDP (PPP) per capita | 32.5 Bn pkm (rail) | 1.98 Tn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
Canada: 9.98 Mio km² | 4.2 inhabitants per km² | $60,495 GDP (PPP) per capita | 1.44 Bn pkm (rail) (2007) | 198 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
Australia: 7.69 Mio km² | 3.6 inhabitants per km² | $66,627 GDP (PPP) per capita | 10.5 Bn pkm (rail) | 220 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
India: 3.29 Mio km² | 426.7 inhabitants per km² | $10,123 GDP (PPP) per capita | 1,157 Bn pkm (rail) | 233 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure))
This quick comparison misses international inbound tourism, infrastructure size and infrastructure cost per capita as well as an actually spatially differentiated interurban density-adjusted connectivity parameter (or whatever that’d be called), so take it with a grain of salt, but I’d argue that while having different markets, those English-language adjacent countries have similarities and relevant differences.
Yeah yeah but like, America #1. USA USA USA USA 🌎🏈🇻🇮🇺🇲🇺🇸🇦🇸🌭🍔🔫
Thank you for writing the text and a link.
I don’t know why this is so hard for people who post screenshots of websites.
A good rail network also connects to major airports to give people a range of choices so they can pick the best combination for their travel
I could provide a pseudo valid arguement for aircraft in the future to these remote locations. But i would rather waste time and comment space providing this pointless comment that doesnt contribute to anything.
