I really wonder who takes the plane when a train does it in under 2.5 hours... It feels very, very hard to be faster than 2.5 hours with a plane to go pretty much anywhere (including going to the airport, check-in, security check, boarding, flight, and going to the city from the destination airport).
So yeah, 2.5 hours seems ridiculous. 4h made much more sense, because many people consider that a 4h journey in the train is "very long" and won't do it. Spoiler: it is actually really fine, and it would have been good to force people to realize it.
I don't know how it in Spain (but I heard their rail system is good), but in my country it's the opposite. Trains sometimes have small-ish delays of 5-60 minutes, but longer delays are rare and there are usually other trains running the same route, so you can easily switch (for free if it's the same company). I've never experienced a cancelled train.
With airplane, you often get these small delays as well, but there's also the risk of a very long delay. I had the pleasure of waiting 12 hours for a (connecting) 50 minute flight.
To clarify, I was talking specifically about domestic flights within EU countries. Here in Germany you're often paying about double for a train ticket, even if you book early.
Speaking from experience, the 10-20 euro fares are not always available on flights. But then again, cheap fares are not always available on the trains either, especially at the times most people want to travel (Friday or Sunday evenings, etc). Also flying takes longer because the airports are not as central as the train stations, and you need to go through more luggage checks, board with more time to spare etc.
I think competition has helped drive down flight prices, and since they opened the Madrid-Barcelona high speed line to competition prices have dropped a lot for the train as well. If you compare Madrid-Barcelona to Madrid-Sevilla for example, the price difference is really high and much more than the distance would imply.
While we never saw the 20 Euro airplane fares, for some reason the train fares were almost always more 20-50 Euros more expensive than the plane fares given the same lead times.
Not in Europe they're not; thanks to Open Access you have your choice of three different companies to take a train between Madrid and Barcelona, only one of which is the state carrier.
Oh please, Tell me how much public funding those other two companies receive. I dont count a company that cannot survive without government funding as a private company.
Government monopolies don't have to run super inefficiently, and many times they don't. Also look at how many private companies fail (especially startups): private companies are not a safer bet.
Keep in mind they're not leaving from or going to the same places - usually. Depending on where you live/travel relative to the aiport vs. train station the numbers can come out very differently.
E.g. I live in London - a train or plane* going from the "wrong" station/airport both adds about 1h15m in travel compared to a train or plane going from the nearest station or airport, and that difference could be substantially bigger if I lived a little bit further south. Do that both ends, and suddenly that plane starts looking more attractive to a lot of people.
I'd personally still tend to prefer the train in a lot of circumstances even when it's not the fastest option, because I do agree it's fine.
> I'd personally still tend to prefer the train in a lot of circumstances even when it's not the fastest option, because I do agree it's fine.
I now have gotten used to spend 10 hours on a train trip. I can work most of the time, so it's basically a work day. More than 10 hours starts to be a lot, though.
The US often has cities spaced too far apart to make trains effective. The one exception is the Northeast corridor, which consequently does have a passenger rail line.
Very few rail corridors in the US are so sparsely populated that they can't be as cost-effective as in Europe, with the caveat that this doesn't mean cheap - a whole lot of European routes are heavily subsidised.
E.g. even the old closed Amtrak corridor through Southern Montana would today serve more people than some perfectly viable routes in Norway, over a similar stretch (and there is work underway to try to resurrect it).
But flights are often cheaper in Europe too despite subsidies for rail. Outside of the busiest corridors trains works best in those places where it's competing with cars or buses, not planes.
If flights are considerably shorter than rail trips, then they'll outcompete passenger rail. Sure, it'd be cost effective to travel from New York to Chicago by rail. But it'd take way longer than a flight. By contrast, trains in Europe are often about as fast as planes since they avoid the overhead time cost of airport security. Transit time by be longer, but a 2 hour train ride is not much longer than a 1 hour flight when you include time spent in security lines.
For endpoints that are big enough to warrant airports that is true. But trains have the benefit of being able to serve lots of places in between better. You don't need a lot of people to take the whole journey.
E.g. to take the North Coast Hiawatha route that they're hoping to resurrect through Souther Montana - it went from Chicago to Seattle. Very few people would be taking it all the way - it took ~47 hours.
But many of the stops only have road connections without it.
And as you point out the total time spent is not just the journey time anyway. But beyond the raw time spent, there's a difference in how. It's faster for me to fly to Paris, because I can get flights from an airport close enough to me to outweigh the security, and that's small enough to not usually be so bad. But I still have to go through security, wait around for my gate, walk to the gate and go through another round of waiting, and then I might have to wait for luggage at the other end. I'll happily spend the small amount of extra time to be able to just sit down in the Eurostar instead.
The biggest issue with respect to choosing trains in the UK is that the cost of train tickets relative to air travel in the UK is criminal compared to much of the rest of Europe.
> But I still have to go through security, wait around for my gate, walk to the gate and go through another round of waiting, and then I might have to wait for luggage at the other end. I'll happily spend the small amount of extra time to be able to just sit down in the Eurostar instead.
But it's not a small amount of time. Planes travel 7-10 times faster than passenger rail (Amtrak runs at 50-70 mph, and can't go faster without track upgrades). If you're going to a city that's a 1 hour plane ride away that's still 7-10 hours of travel time just to skip security and baggage claim. Not exactly a good proposition.
Even St. Paul to Chicago is not viable by rail when the flight is only 90 minutes. Even with a two hour security line that's still 1/3 the total transit time.
"trains have the benefit of being able to serve lots of places in between better." Yes, but only when those places are fairly close and have enough population to fulfill travel demand. And the US doesn't have many regions with those conditions.
You're quoting a part where I gave a specific example where it is indeed a small amount of time difference, and use it to argue over an entirely different scenario.
The Eurostar takes <2h30 hours from London to Paris. The plane takes ca 1h. The plane will leave you ca. 40m travel from the city centre via the RER.
But the Eurostar terminal in London is further from me than the nearest airport, and so end-to-end travel time from me to the centre of Paris is marginally shorter with a plane.
If I lived on the other side of town, or wanted to go North of Paris CDG instead of to the city centre, the numbers might look entirely different. Hence the point of giving the specific example I did in order to make the point that WHEN they are roughly similar, I still prefer the train. The point you quoted had nothing to do about overall viability across all distances.
> Even St. Paul to Chicago is not viable by rail when the flight is only 90 minutes. Even with a two hour security line that's still 1/3 the total transit time.
That's fine, but a total strawman related to the argument you quoted.
> "trains have the benefit of being able to serve lots of places in between better." Yes, but only when those places are fairly close and have enough population to fulfill travel demand. And the US doesn't have many regions with those conditions.
As I've elaborated on at length elsewhere, even the lowest population density states in the US have only exceptionally tiny numbers of people in areas where that is true when compared to existing lines considered viable in Europe. To start with less than 5% of the US population live in states where the average population is lower than Norway, and like in Norway, and just like everywhere else, most of the population even in those states live along corridors that are dense enough - and indeed many of those corridors have existing rail and either do have or used to have passenger trains (e.g. South Montana used to be covered by the North Coast Hiawatha until the late 1970's; it's population density is higher now). Norway has a significant proportion of the population - not all, an entire low density region is without rail at all because it's considered too expensive - within reasonable distance of passenger rail.
The US could too - just providing rail cover to similar density stretches as in Norway would mean passenger rail covering the vast majority of the US population. Again, nobody is suggesting 100% coverage - just that far more coverage is entirely viable.
The US has areas not considered viable due to US political considerations. That's a choice for the US public to make, but this is not because US geography or demographics is exceptional, but because US politics is.
> The Eurostar takes <2h30 hours from London to Paris.
American railways cannot support those speeds, though. The American rail infrastructure was primarily built for cargo, and supports speeds of 50-70 miles per hour.
> That's fine, but a total strawman related to the argument you quoted.
The St. Paul to Chicago example was referencing the North Coast Hiawatha in your previous post. You mentioned that some people would only take a small segment of the line, not the entire Seattle to Chicago route. You wrote, "Very few people would be taking it all the way - it took ~47 hours." What specific destinations were you referring to here?
> As I've elaborated on at length elsewhere, even the lowest population density states in the US have only exceptionally tiny numbers of people in areas where that is true when compared to existing lines considered viable in Europe.
This is patently false. Take California, for instance. The vast majority of the state's 40 million people live in the San Francisco Bay Area and LA - San Diego metro areas. This would be 5-7 hours by rail, but only an hour long flight. Los Angeles to Seattle would be 10+ hours. These aren't places withs small populations. But the metro areas that do exist are far away from one another. Too far to make trains viable for passenger travel.
This isn't unique to the west coast. Take St. Louis as another example. The other big metros in its vicinity are Nashville, Kansas city, and Indianapolis. These are all 5+ hours by train but just a 1 hour flight. The cities are spaced out too far to compete with airlines. Few would opt for a 5+ hour plane ride instead of a 1 hour flight. And people who would choose the former are instead served by Greyhound buses that don't take much longer than passenger rail.
Again, the only place in America that does have a collection of large cities close together - the Northeast Corridor - has a widely used train line. The rest of America has cities spaced out further than the 100-200 miles where trains outcompete planes.
> The US has areas not considered viable due to US political considerations. That's a choice for the US public to make, but this is not because US geography or demographics is exceptional, but because US politics is.
False, it is absolutely due to geography and distance, not politics. This is one of the most clear-cut examples of geography influencing transportation choices.
> But flights are often cheaper in Europe too despite subsidies for rail
That's because intra-EU flights are also highly subsidized, especially around taxes for fuel. Decades ago the EU punted on the complex topic of charging taxes on avgas and that is a key contributor to the existence of cheap airlines like ryanair.
It’s not fast enough any more. The fossil fuel companies were successful at preventing action for decades and in the intervening half century multiple generations of people have grown accustomed to cheap air travel. Making it more expensive will gradually reduce usage but that’s a slow process and there are a number of companies which didn’t even exist back when the science denial campaign started who would be trying their hardest to slow it down.
Given that almost all trains in America are powered by diesel, fossil fuel companies would not lose if passenger rail was more widely adopted. Passenger rail is not popular in America because cities are more spread out, not because of some fossil fuel company conspiracy.
Trains use less fuel and “almost all” is leaving out that Amtrak’s most popular service area is the electrified northeast corridor. Electric trains are also a century old and it’s a straightforward engineering task to confer them.
The reason passenger travel isn’t more popular has more to do with the trillions spent subsidizing private vehicle usage. People respond to economic incentives and for the last century the message has been that taxpayers will help you drive.
Even then it'd still be preferable to fly. a 2.5 hour flight is 20+ hours by train at American passenger rail speeds. Going faster would require expensive track upgrades, which would need to be paid for by more expensive tickets.
The CityNerd youtube channel recently did a list of city pairs ideally suited for high speed rail based on Spain's own network. spoiler alert: the northeast corridor plays a pretty heavy part, but it's not the only place in the US high speed rail makes a ton of sense. Highly recommended.
This is not even remotely true. China has 4x the population in roughly the same landmass. And most of that is concentrated in the eastern part of the country (Tibet and inner Mongolia are sparsely populated, but very large).
I'd be very, very interested in where you found this claim that China's cities have the same average distance between them as US cities. Wouldn't be surprised if they used totally different criteria for a Chinese city and a US city. I would be astounded if the median distance between cities of >500k people is the same in China as in the USA.
I have no idea about how reasonable or not their claim is, but I'd note that most of the US population is, while not concentrated only in the East, concentrated heavily. Even in most the lower population density states, most of the population is within tiny part of the area of those states, often in corridors where most of the larger towns are still relatively close to at least a few other large towns. So whether or not they're right, distance largely is an excuse. Trains will not work between every pair of cities in the US, but it doesn't need to - very few US cities are so isolated that train will not work to several nearby cities.
The average distance isn't very important, as long as the cities are clustered enough to create viable lines.
Measuring average distance between cities is incredibly naive, that's my whole point. If countries A and B both have 100 cities in the sam land area, except country A has 50 cities over 1 million people and country B only has 10 cities over 1 million then one of these is still much more viable even if average distance between cities is the same. You're right that if all 10 of those larg cities in country A are really close then it may be viable. But that's not the case in America, save for the Northeast corridor which is already served by passenger rail.
The average doesn't really matter, though (and yes, I get that's a different argument than the other person made).
The threshold where you exceed what is viable does. And hardly anyone in the US live in areas that have so low density that there aren't viable routes, on the basis of comparing with the density of routes that are served in other countries.
Even, say, Wyoming, with an average population density 1/5th of Norway, has half its population in its top 10 towns, most of which, unsurprisingly, has rail going between them because a sufficient number of them are close enough to each other to form viable clusters.
Or, as I mentioned elsewhere, we have Montana, with a similar population density and a size ~50% larger than the United Kingdom, but a population 1/70th, where the lines that used to be used by the North Coast Hiawatha goes through a range of towns and surrounding area that easily covers ~40% of the state population at a density easily comparable to e.g. continental Europe and well above areas of rural Europe that are well covered by train.
There are many pairs of cities in the US between which rail travel is not viable. But there are very few cities that are not within a viable distance of a set of other cities with higher density corridors (than their state averages) in between that combined makes travel viable between them. "Nobody" will travel the full North Coast Hiawatha route between Chicago and Seattle, as it'll take ~48 hours. Plenty of people will travel parts of it (and do travel parts of it, as many parts of that route are still covered by trains). Including through some of the lowest density parts of the route if it is reopened.
To again bring up Norway, because I know the rail network there having grown up there, consider the line from Hamar to Åndalsnes - a line where the two most significant towns on that stretch have populations of around 3k (Åndalsnes) and <30k (Hamar). Compare to e.g. Butte, MT (~34k) to Billings, MT (184k). Both again are within similar distances to several more cities that form similar viable pairs and that that similarly enhances the overall viability of the connecting segments. And that's part of why Hamar to Åndalsnes is viable too - it connects to a couple of other lines at Hamar and at Dombås.
Just like Butte is a viable distance from Spokane via Missoula, and Billings is a viable distance from Gilette, WY, or Buffalo, WY (still larger than Åndalsnes, and has rail) and onwards to Cheyenne, WY.
I'd actually love a map that visualizes which parts of the US are sufficient "islands" that there are towns of any reasonable size that are not within those kinds of travel distances along a reasonable rail corridor to make up a total population size along the route that is large enough to be considered viable plenty of other places.
I can't think of any.
The US as a whole is huge and dispersed and low-density, but almost nobody lives in the low-density places, almost by definition - even as large as they are, they're not large enough for the low-density population that lives in those places to add up to significant numbers. And the upside of a train over planes is that it's not the end-to-end distance that matters, but the population near enough to the stations along any given subset of the route.
> And hardly anyone in the US live in areas that have so low density that there aren't viable routes, on the basis of comparing with the density of routes that are served in other countries.
This is just factually incorrect. The vast majority of people in the US live in places with large distances between population centers.
Of the remaining 20%, it seems unlikely that they’re evenly distributed in areas which are not suitable for rail travel because American history since the early 1800s followed rail lines (and prior to that, canals) because people followed transportation corridors - it was only with mid-20th century subsidies for car travel that people got so casual about ignoring the energy cost of travel.
> This small decline was largely the result of changes to the criteria for defining urban areas implemented by the Census Bureau, including raising the minimum population threshold for qualification from 2,500 to 5,000.
So even a small town of 5,000 people is considered "urban". Again, population density is far more important than "urban" population because a big city of 5 million people produces way more demand for travel than a town of 5,000 even if they're both categorized as "urban". Fast passenger rail has high overhead costs in terms of building high speed rial track, and is mostly viable between large population centers. But even the fastest high speed rail is usually 3-5 times slower than air travel. And in America, rail is powered by fossil fuels anyway so it's not like there's a huge climate win in terms of using passenger rail over Greyhound buses or planes.
First, even many small towns had rail service before the focus switched to rail. Second, it’s rare that your 5k town is hundreds of miles from the next one. If you look at the map circa WWII, there were tons of interurban rail connections between towns like that.
What changed was the massive subsidies directed towards private vehicle usage. Those rail connections disappeared because they couldn’t compete with the heavily subsidized highway system on all but the busiest routes. This also means that things can change if we start taxing carbon or require vehicle users to pay for their infrastructure.
In WWII there was no interstate highway nor widespread air travel. And yes, most 5K towns are not too far from other 5k towns. But a town of 5k residents doesn't have enough people to justify investing in passenger rail. Hence why countries with lower population density (like the US, Canada, Australia, etc.) don't have much passenger rail demand. If it were due to politics, why is train travel ubiquitous in densely population countries, but not sparsely populated ones? We should expect to see a relatively random smattering of train-dominant and car and plane dominant transportation irrespective of geography. Instead, we see that sparsely populated countries don't have widespread passenger rail regardless of politics. I guess it's a coincidence that the fossil fuel conspiracy [1], just happened to take hold in sparsely populated countries like America, Canada, Australia, etc. and not densely populated ones.
And much faster. It takes almost a full day to take amtrak from the west coast to denver. Not much has changed since the transcontinental railroad opened I guess.
Spain has massively expanded a high-speed rail network in recent years, and now has the largest high-speed rail network in Europe, and second longest in the world after China. A lot of that has been built separately to the pre-existing rail network, and so has added a lot of additional capacity.
Many airports in Europe already have high-speed connections and reasonably short walking times to the gate, but the real issue is liability for missed connections:
In Germany, Lufthansa and German railways have had a cooperation called "Rail & Fly" for many years now, and they even assign IATA "flight" numbers to some trains and (I believe) allow checking baggage through in some instances. But last time I used it, the ticketing conditions said that it was my responsibility to take an early-enough train and allow for three hours of buffer, or I'd risk having to pay for a lost connection out of pocket.
That's compared to connections of as little as 45 minutes when changing planes in the same terminal. Airlines are incentivized to make that connection if at all possible, since they have to pay a compensation for any delays of more than three hours in the EU, including delays for missed connections.
I mostly fly from Vienna, Prague and Budapest and none of them have fast rail connection.
I think this is a hard problem, since the rail lines naturally converge in the city, at the airport you'll get one rail line at best and quite likely need to change in the city again.
Vienna airport is definitely serviced by Railjet trains (Austrian railways' high-speed product) stopping directly at the airport railway station. The same is true for Frankfurt am Main (one of the largest airports in Europe, serviced by ICE trains from all over Germany).
The point here is to replace a shuttle flight from a hub to a satellite airport of an airline/alliance, and for that to make sense, there needs to be both high-speed rail infrastructure from a given city to such a hub airport, and a train station at the hub airport.
> Vienna airport is definitely serviced by Railjet trains (Austrian railways' high-speed product) stopping directly at the airport railway station.
Which provide connection to only a handful of Austrian towns / cities. For everything else (esp. international trains), you need to change at the Hauptbahnhof.
I don’t think that in Germany or Italy that’s even possible. Either travel times are longer, or you just don’t have any airport option. Spain is big though, and has a lot of smaller airports. Wonder how many flights this would affect, and what the actual potential impact in CO2 reduction is.
A bus is a reasonable alternative to a 2.5-hour train ride, but would be too long to really compete with a 4-hour train ride. If the law were extended to 4 hours, then trains would have a monopoly on these journeys and consumers would suffer.
Private jet users routinely shuttle their planes a few dozen miles to more personally convenient airports in the area. The celebrity plane tracker accounts have put a lot of focus on this sort of usage.
Boy wouldn’t it be nice to take a train literally anywhere in my Province?
We’re so far behind on infrastructure investment. The budget was announced the other week and no funding for any sort of inter city transportation to be found.
Most of the energy cost is pushing the air out of the way. This is just as true for a train as a plane. I suppose the plane also has to spend some energy as lift, but my impression is that this sort of comes along as part of the cost of pushing the air out of the way.
My very basic understanding of the physics of air resistance is that it increases at the square of speed, so a plane that's going at 500 miles/hour must use massively more energy than a trane traveling at 100 miles/hour.
The air is thinner at cruising altitude, though of course thicker at takeoff altitude. I'm sure longer flights are much more efficient than shorter, but whether they ever overtake trains I'm not sure.
Fun fact once flights go above a certain length they get less efficient because all that fuel they are carrying actually requires more fuel to move, which in turn needs to be carried. I don't think it's the energy efficiency that's the issue here. Even if trains are less energy efficient, they can much more easily be powered off renewable sources.
I mean sticking with the assumption it takes the same amount of energy you still need to show that a jet engine is as or more efficient as a train engine.
I'm honestly surprised how relatively close these values are. This says personal trucks use about 2x as much energy as mass transit. I would've thought the ratio would be much higher.
The passenger numbers seem low to me - but I can only assume they come from research - so the passenger figures will skew that. A full bus (60 people?) would be far more efficient.
Why? comes to mind. Why limit the options of consumers. This comes off as some sort of protectionism that will lead to a worse service for the end user and a worse product due to lack of competition.
You can solve this problem without resorting to archaic overreach. Make the customer experience better for those taking 2.5 hour train rides. This should be the ideal case to take a train and if people still prefer to fly something is seriously wrong with your product.
It does seem like a tacit admission that they cannot create a superior system and they fall back to the ban to enforce it instead. Some people might still prefer the plane but they will probably be the minority. With shrinking usage prices will go up to compensate and eventually airlines will reduce the amount of flights naturally.
> It does seem like a tacit admission that they cannot create a superior system and they fall back to the ban to enforce it instead.
I believe it is slightly different. You assume that "superior" means "when given the choice, more people will choose it". But what if you say "superior" means that it uses less fossil energy? Then surely the train is superior, but people tend to choose the inferior solution because they find it more convenient. We need the ban to make sure that the superior solution is the one that gets used.
And you could say "it's not fair if individuals are forced to do something they wouldn't do otherwise". But again it is relative. I find it unfair that I have to pay more and spend more time in the train because I care about the energy/climate crisis while my neighbours don't give a shit. Many people take the plane right now because everybody does, but are favourable to regulations: "I am find not taking the plane if I know that everyone else has the same constraint, but if everybody takes the plane, I don't see why I should not".
I realize I should have specified that in this specific scenario if the train works reliably it will be quicker and more convenient than the plane for short distances. For the train:
* I do not need to come at least 1 hour early to check-in
* I do not have a limitation on the weight I can carry
* I do not have any limitations on the things I can put in my bags
* I have internet access the whole time
If I give someone the choice between the plane and the train, same ticket price, same travel time, people will pick the train most of the time.
Of course in some cases you have to ban stuff when convenient solution causes more damage. I would prefer though if they kept bans to when they have no other option. In this case they could just make a superior service and they would achieve a better result.
> If I give someone the choice between the plane and the train, same ticket price, same travel time, people will pick the train most of the time.
But it is complex: first, it works in such a way that the plane tends to be cheaper. Should you tax the flights? But then you basically say that rich people can take the plane. Banning is more fair in that sense.
Then, the perception is different: people tend to trust the plane more (even though planes have delays, too) and underestimate the commute time for the plane (I often hear people compare the time between two train stations against the time between two airports, completely forgetting all the time to the airport and back, checking in, fetching the bags, etc.
And finally, what we need to do goes way further than just making it more convenient to take the train for some journeys. The whole aviation sector is going to have a huge problem because it can't reasonably replace fossil fuels (no, there is not enough electricity and hydrogen for planes in a post-oil world), and therefore we need to heavily prepare for that. It means that we will have to go towards a society where we almost don't fly and mostly take the train, and that will be less convenient. We just don't have a choice, and we have to prepare for it.
> Should you tax the flights? But then you basically say that rich people can take the plane.
Rich people will pay premium for a superior experience. If the train is faster than the plane they would like to use it I think. Could railway companies add a very expensive business class to help fund cheaper tickets? They could try a pilot project where they deploy this kind business class between two major cities.
Trains do not have that great of an internet connection as well. Why not provide a yearly internet subscription for a fee? Businesses might pay for this for their employees when they travel between cities and they can keep working.
> But it is complex: first, it works in such a way that the plane tends to be cheaper.
Currently yes that is the case a lot of the times. With renewables getting cheaper and the ever increasing electrification of trains why could trains not become cheaper in the future? Maybe it is not possible but I feel like by banning it we are giving up before really trying.
Airlines have international competition which forces prices down. On the other hand railway companies often face little competition because the states maintain a public monopoly. Public monopolies have little incentive to keep prices low as they are the only game in town.
I would like to see them try more things to increase efficiency, convenience and push prices down to become closer to planes. Maybe they could try to sell more services to fund the rest of the system.
Maybe as you say it is impossible to match current planes prices no matter what improvements we make. I just have not seen evidence that it is impossible to make a system where you can sell train tickets at similar rates to planes. But before doing it I need to see at least an honest attempt at bringing in more revenue.
> the perception is different: people tend to trust the plane more (even though planes have delays, too) and underestimate the commute time for the plane (I often hear people compare the time between two train stations against the time between two airports, completely forgetting all the time to the airport and back, checking in, fetching the bags, etc.
Ok then maybe try to change the perception. If you tell people how much time they waste, you could convince at least some people to change. Do they already have some advertisements that try to change this perception? I have not seen any but maybe they already have.
I would even say it is necessary. And we need to do much more than that. With the end of fossil fuels, aviation will look completely different. We need to start (re)building train infrastructure yesterday.
Given the number of people with private jets who want to ban my 24-year-old pickup truck, I support banning all civilian air travel until they can prove that their aircraft meet every safety and environmental standard my 24-year-old pickup has had to meet in its existence.
So yeah, 2.5 hours seems ridiculous. 4h made much more sense, because many people consider that a 4h journey in the train is "very long" and won't do it. Spoiler: it is actually really fine, and it would have been good to force people to realize it.