Matt_B wrote:I'd think it fair to note that air travel is a major consumer of fossil fuels, and that - unlike fuel for most other forms of transport - there's very little tax on it. As such, it can be seen as something that is artificially cheap, which is in turn driving over-consumption to the detriment of the environment.
That's not to say that we should necessarily just attempt to fix the problem by driving the price up. While I'd think that I might consider taking the fourteen hour train journey from Sydney to Brisbane, if a flight were ten times the price rather than about the same, that's not an option for all destinations. There are communities that rely upon air transport that are neither particularly wealthy nor in the possession of alternatives. Certainly, here in Australia, only the major cities are served by rail; there are many outback towns where your choice is between flying for an hour or two or a three day trek across unsealed roads that can become impassable after rain.
Yeah, but that tyranny of distance means that Sydney-Melbourne and Sydney-Brisbane are amongst the busiest air routes in the world. A sane solution would be to build the often-proposed, but never started, high-speed rail system on the Brisbane - Melbourne corridor, as those trains could be renewably powered, and would easily compete on CBD to CBD travel time given the location of the airports concerned, unlike the archaic clusterfuck of the current intercity rail system. The corridor serves a population of well over 15 million people (around 65% of Australia's population live on the route), and as well as competing well on BNE-SYD and SYD-MEL, would serve other major city markets like the Gold Coast, Newcastle and Canberra, as well as up to a dozen other major regional cities.
Yes, many other cities outside the corridor would still be best served by air in Australia, but when we're not implementing alternatives where they
would work, we can't really claim that we fly so much because our geography dictates it. It's a mix of geography, and not being arsed to do better where we can.
Sounds from fellto's posts that Canada is similar. 7-8 hours for a Toronto-Montreal train? In Japan, that distance would be a three-hour ride, and the shinkansen system is being extended into areas without the huge population densities of the Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka corridor, such as new line extensions to the Sea of Japan coast and Hokkaido.