My father in law can fly from Los Angeles to San Jose in an hour for $150 round trip. Not sure why we need to lay tracks all over the land when we have flying machines.
Not clear yet if this is the early stage of a global trend, and even it it is, it may take a long time to have an effect in the US, where there are fewer good alternatives.
If this is taken to its logical conclusion, everyone should drive. Trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius.
Whats the matter with the Europeans? Don't they care about the environment?
Shame that article totally fails to measure what is actually important. It's not about energy efficiency, but about CO2 emmisions per passenger mile. In Europe, most trains are electric already. Around 50% of electricity in Europe is generated using renewables or nuclear, and this fraction is rapidly increasing. In France, Norway, Sweden and Austria, almost all electricity is renewable or nuclear. So electric trains cause very little CO2 emmisions in these locations. Electric cars are a medium term solution, but it's going to take a while to move the needle on CO2 emmissions, whereas trains can do so already. Large electric plans are a much more difficult proposition. The best bet there for decarbonization is probably to continue to use hydrocarbons, but to generate them from atmospheric CO2 using "spare" electricity from renewables, but that's going to cost a lot, make plane travel several times more expensive, and not likely to happen anytime soon. So, right now, in Europe, travelling by train rather than plane is a sensible call, and with high-speed rail, will usually take much less time than driving.
> Trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius.
While the article you're quoting does indeed claim that is the case, it does have (Amtrak) in parentheses.
A Shinkansen eats 270,000 yen worth of electricity for a single trip from Tokyo to Osaka, and 1 kWh is 12-14.8 yen. A full train would seat about 1300 passengers.
So every passenger pays about 208 yen, which works out to about 16 kWh. To side-step awkward conversions, let's look at the electric cars with the best efficiency on https://pushevs.com/electric-car-range-efficiency-epa/, highway efficiency:
2019-2020 Jaguar I-Pace 29.1 kWh/100 km (5 passengers => 5.82 kWh/100 km per passenger)
2019 Tesla Model X 22.5 kWh/100 km (7 passengers => 3.21 kWh/100 km per passenger)
Tokyo-Osaka is 515 km by train, 506 km by car. So in the Tesla you'd use 16.2426 kWh per passenger, which is pretty much the same.
Here come the less reliable figures: this Yahoo Answers thread suggests Shinkansen are about 58% full on average. I don't have any data for cars, but I usually don't see many cars that are completely packed, but I have seen Shinkansen that were over-capacity.
I also have a feeling it would be pretty tough to attain this figure in the car. Occasionally you'd have to spend time in traffic jams, and it's a 5-6 hour ride anyway. Plus, if the Shinkansen were to go as slow as the car, it would probably use much less energy.
It is an option, I can't drive because of medical problems, long distance traveling in cars is also problematic when you have kids that get bad motion sickness.
You also need to consider the opportunities that cheap long distance travel gives you, A poor student like I was can travel to a far city to study and afford to come home each 4 - 8 weeks. Because the small cities are linked to bigger ones you get more students or better quality students in the big city. The nation has more educated people, the students from the small city also have to live so they will spend money in the big city, so the big city has an influx of money. The small cities don't have airports, the students are also poor enough so they don't own cars, have where to park them in the big city or afford the fuel.
