A historic electric airplane flight landed at JFK with passengers, marking a milestone as Beta Technologies demonstrates the practicality and efficiency of electric air travel.
110km = 68 miles (or about one hour of car travel on many US interstate highways)
Something something Americans will do anything but travel by train for short distances.
Edit: apparently y’all are unfamiliar with the meme, and as such taking my comment at 100% sincerity instead of the intended 38%. Also I’m an American myself, so the only intended disrespect was of the self-depreciating variety.
I haven’t read this article yet, but I did recently read about electric planes. There are a shockingly large percentage of flights in the US (and probably the world) that are that short. Not a percentage of passengers, but percentage of flights. Lots of islands that don’t have a routine ferry service, or small rural communities in places like Alaska that may be separated from the road system by a mountain range.
Those small communities couldn’t support constant rail (or ferry) service, so small planes are actually the most economical way to serve them. Even places like Hawaii could use electric planes to good effect.
Well it did say it was a milestone flight, as well as 68 miles not necessarily meaning on a straight road you could drive 70mph on.
There are a lot of good arguments for rail or other means of transportation, but the travel volume vs the infrastructure required are vastly different in the US than in many parts of Europe/Asia. Think ‘lots of medium distance low volume routes’ that aren’t economically feasible since there are existing routes. If you went through the effort of building a train route, you would have to charge so much per person to make it pay for itself that no one could afford it and they would take other methods.
I’m Europe, there seem to be enough ‘short, high volume routes’ that are economically feasible that considering adding other legs to them make sense, or they just already work.
Not sure what you mean by constant, it is definitely a huge gradient, but the layout of the US vs the EU is so drastically different that at almost every level routes that are well suited to train in Europe are often overwhelmingly inefficient in the US.
Everything from building up routes between major cities to regional and local end up being too low volume to support themselves.
There is at least an argument to be made that some/many routes should be heavily subsidized long enough to allow industry and society in general grow around them, by which time they could become self supporting, but most people don’t realize just how big the US is in land compared to it’s population, and that often results in a lot of ground to cover just for relatively few people each to get to a lot of places.
I understand your point. I just don’t share the pessimism, I come from finland where the population density is less than half that of the US and our trains run fine. That’s why I think the US could both build infrastructure that would bring about different kinds of traffic flows, as well as just build rail infrastructure for current traffic flows that would work just fine.
Don’t know if we can reach an agreement on this topic though. There are arguments both for and against, and we can’t really get closer to the truth without trial and error.
110km = 68 miles (or about one hour of car travel on many US interstate highways)
Something something Americans will do anything but travel by train for short distances.
Edit: apparently y’all are unfamiliar with the meme, and as such taking my comment at 100% sincerity instead of the intended 38%. Also I’m an American myself, so the only intended disrespect was of the self-depreciating variety.
You ever tried to travel by train here? Long or short distance. The rail infrastructure isn’t there
By design, not by requirement. It used to be there.
I haven’t read this article yet, but I did recently read about electric planes. There are a shockingly large percentage of flights in the US (and probably the world) that are that short. Not a percentage of passengers, but percentage of flights. Lots of islands that don’t have a routine ferry service, or small rural communities in places like Alaska that may be separated from the road system by a mountain range.
Those small communities couldn’t support constant rail (or ferry) service, so small planes are actually the most economical way to serve them. Even places like Hawaii could use electric planes to good effect.
The first I read about them was for flights to Nantucket Island, which absolutely gets ferry service, but it’s also where a lot of rich people have homes, and they are going to fly. https://nantucketcurrent.com/news/cape-air-to-buy-electric-planes
There’s plenty of places where an electric shorter range plane makes sense. Alaska and Australia come to mind immediately.
Well it did say it was a milestone flight, as well as 68 miles not necessarily meaning on a straight road you could drive 70mph on.
There are a lot of good arguments for rail or other means of transportation, but the travel volume vs the infrastructure required are vastly different in the US than in many parts of Europe/Asia. Think ‘lots of medium distance low volume routes’ that aren’t economically feasible since there are existing routes. If you went through the effort of building a train route, you would have to charge so much per person to make it pay for itself that no one could afford it and they would take other methods.
I’m Europe, there seem to be enough ‘short, high volume routes’ that are economically feasible that considering adding other legs to them make sense, or they just already work.
You say that like its a constant
Not sure what you mean by constant, it is definitely a huge gradient, but the layout of the US vs the EU is so drastically different that at almost every level routes that are well suited to train in Europe are often overwhelmingly inefficient in the US.
Everything from building up routes between major cities to regional and local end up being too low volume to support themselves.
There is at least an argument to be made that some/many routes should be heavily subsidized long enough to allow industry and society in general grow around them, by which time they could become self supporting, but most people don’t realize just how big the US is in land compared to it’s population, and that often results in a lot of ground to cover just for relatively few people each to get to a lot of places.
I understand your point. I just don’t share the pessimism, I come from finland where the population density is less than half that of the US and our trains run fine. That’s why I think the US could both build infrastructure that would bring about different kinds of traffic flows, as well as just build rail infrastructure for current traffic flows that would work just fine.
Don’t know if we can reach an agreement on this topic though. There are arguments both for and against, and we can’t really get closer to the truth without trial and error.
have you seen the state of their rail system? Americans might be dumb but they’re not fucking stupid.
If this was 1903 they’d bitch that the Wright Brothers could have just walked to the other end of Kitty Hawk.
Me when converting Mile to KM :)
Me when converting KM to Mile >:(