This is misleading. World wide meat animals emit more greenhouse gases than all transportation. Buildings emit more than animals and transportation. We need to cut in all areas. It is an old evasion: "why talk abou X when Y is worse?" Because doing something about X and Y are not mutually exclusive, and the subject of X came up .
Bitch:
>also notes that trains will become like buses and flying buses under
capitalism too. so I wouldn't count on that being advantage if rail ever
got off the ground.
Economics are different. When you are not living your passengers into the stratosphere the inch or two they save making airline seats uncomfortable won't be as worthwhile. Similarly carry baggage will never be as expensive. In short for the same money, rail will always be able to afford more room. As to the comparison with buses, long distance rail comparable to air will be at least as expensive as air - in short you are unlikely to ever get to quite the discomfort buses get.
Something like this can apply to security too. The great fear with airplanes is that you can not only kill the passengers or people waiting in a station, but people in the building you fly the plane into. With train the last does not apply.
Lastly Jordan argued that trains can never substitute for plane because a train can only go where the tracks go. But large planes, though they can take many routes still have to start in an airport, and end in an airport. A high speed rail network that covered every major U.S. airport would end up with about the miles of track as our current freight network. Expensive but doable. Mountains can be tunneled , lakes can be bridged. If you get the general cost per mile of track for high speed rail down to something comparable to heavy rail for freight the rest is doable if we have the will. And if we ever start taking globale warming seriously there will really be only two choices: substitute high speed rail for air whenever possible (which would ultimately be everyplace over land) or simply travel a lot less.
And to people who pointed out that rail a lot slower than 300 mph can substitute for short plane trips - absolutely. 150 mph light rail can be built fairly inexpensively; it could be substitute for trips of 400 or 500 miles that commuter planes make at 300 mph.. Again, it is not necessarily quite as fast as a commuter plane, but short enough that the difference is tolerable. (Of course commuter planes don't average 600 mph - more like 400 ).
So comparisons ---------- Plane------------------- ---------------Train----------------
Actual trip Extra Time Total Actual Trip Extra Time Total 300 mile trip 45 minutes 90 2:15 2
30 min 2:30 400 mile trip 1 hour 90 2:30 2:40
30 3:10 500 mile trip 1:15 90 2:45 3:20
30 3:50
Again I think these are fair comparsions. Rail designed from the ground up to compete with rail would put all stops on sidings - not on the main track. So there would be no equivalent of "waiting for a gate". Rail will always have more room for luggage than airplanes. Even greyhound, awful as it is has larger luggage allowances than airplanes do - the awfulness of greyhound lies in other areas.