For transport you're right. I think the parent your referring to was specifically saying there's no alternative way to power a plane. That's my assumption at least.
I was saying a bit of both. megablast is correct that there are alternatives, but I'd maybe quibble with "viable". For example you can get from Stockholm to Umeå with a 1 hour flight or a 6-8 hour train journey, is the train a viable alternative? For aviation there aren't alternative fuels and on many journeys even the alternative transport options aren't in the same ballpark.
Calling it a “1 hour flight” is a bit misleading when comparing transport options. The relevant number is door-to-door travel time.
Once you include getting out of Stockholm to the airport, security, boarding, the flight itself, possible baggage collection, and the trip into Umeå, I would be surprised if the total were much below 4 hours. Comparable German domestic flights such as Hamburg–Munich usually took me around 4–4.5 hours in practice in the past when traveling for work before the pandemic.
That makes the train a 6–8 hour alternative to a roughly 4-hour flight journey. Whether that is viable depends on the traveller, but it is certainly more competitive than “1 hour versus 8 hours” suggests.
I admit that for me, living about an hour north of the Hamburg main station but only 15 minutes from the airport, the plance for a business trip in Munich can still be a viable (albeit seldom taken) option. More often than not, if time permits, I take the train, work on the train. But as said - there still are situations, that make flying such a distance viable (to me).
I just wanted to point out, that it is not as clear cut as 1 hour vs. 6 to 8 hours.
In the UK I could get from Central London to Central Glasgow in 4.5 hours on the train. The same trip on a flight, it takes an hour to get the airport (assuming it's not one of the budget airlines pretending Essex or Bedfordshire is London...), I need to be there 2 hours before (maybe less is you are brave and Security isn't messed up) the flight takes an hour and then I have to get out of the airport and find my way from Paisley back to Glasgow Central.
Of course there are a lot of variables, if instead I leave from my house the aircraft would actually be faster, mostly due to the extra time it takes to get to Central London and from Waterloo to Euston.
In reality we usually drive in about 6-8 hours because, as a family of 4 traveling, it's considerably cheaper even before you take into account having transport on the other end.
I'd say that 4-6 hours is often the cut-off point for total travel time city-to-city -- provided that the train is fast.
I and a friend once started at Stockholm Central station to Malmö Central Station at the same time. I boarded a bullet train; he took the bus to the airport ...
We arrived at the same time six hours later.
I've been looking at travel in Japan recently. Between Hiroshima and Tokyo, the bullet train (fast Shinkansen) and flight are both about four hours.
A bullet train is much more comfortable than flight within these limits because there are so fewer steps: no travel to/from airport, fewer tickets to book and often no check-in or security checkpoint.
Yeah fair, having experienced Japanese trains I fully agree about the comfort. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't build high speed rail and try to shift more travel to trains instead of aviation either to be clear. I love trains and I especially love Shinkansen style trains, but aviation still has a big edge in big parts of the world and on some journey lengths.
Even if some high speed rail existed in the US, do you think it is practical to go from California to Maine? If you are going 2,500 miles on a train that is going 150 miles an hour it would take you 16 hours assuming there are no stops. Obviously there are going to be stops so your trip is going to be an entire day.
I think a lot of people do not understand just how massive the US is.
You are correct, most people who were trying to get from California to Maine or the reverse for the purpose of getting there would probably prefer to fly. Unless a ticket were significantly cheaper than air travel almost everyone doing the full trip has at least one train enthusiast in their party who is doing it because they want to do it.
The thing is, a high speed corridor enabling that trip would, as you note, involve many stops of which each pairing represents another potential flight that the same train might replace. Many of those pairings will be short enough flights that a proper high speed rail corridor would easily compete with if not destroy the short-haul flight offerings.
To use your example, it looks like there are currently two flights between California and Maine, both run weekly by United between PWM and either LAX or SFO flying east on Saturday mornings and returning west on Sunday morning. A hypothetical high speed rail corridor connecting coast-to-coast between either of those city pairs might not replace a lot of flights across the whole country but one train running along that full route might have replaced one from Portland to Buffalo, another from Boston to Columbus, another from Cleveland to St. Louis, et cetera.
The person I was responding to was saying that Europe and Asia have alternatives so it is wrong to say that flying has no viable alternatives. I was pointing out that some routes in the US are just not viable.
Sure some routes could have viable alternatives, but others just do not.
For short trips. Most plane trips are at a distance where there isn't a viable alternative. Sure there are some nice trains that can handle the more common trips, but airplanes really shine for much longer trips.
And planes go to more places than trains do. You want to add a new destination? Go through a few years of planning and construction for a couple thousand feet of tarmac, and people can go there using existing planes. Best of all, you don't need a large passenger base to justify the expense.
For rail? You're looking at an order of magnitude more for planning and construction, all new infrastructure, all new rail stock. It will take a much larger passenger base to justify the expense and effort.
Airplanes don't just shine for longer trips. There have been some interesting developments with commuter airplanes that are either all electric or hybrid with a 200-plus-mile range. If they are as energy efficient as they promise to be, we could see a resurgence in municipal airports for transportation between regional centers where rail is either unavailable or excessively expensive.
OTOH, there's a lot of stuff that is far more feasibly moved on the Earth's surface rather than in flight. So some sort of surface-level infrastructure will be required: highways, railroads, canals, rivers, oceans.
Some of those are amenable to high-speed variants, some less so. And once you've established transport corridors, much of the hard part (rights-of-way acquisition) is accomplished, so that adding a high-speed route becomes far more tractable.
For the most part, actual construction costs are fairly modest, modulo bridges and tunnels, both of which can of course be quite expensive.
Good points. I think that running rail parallel to highways, especially if the rail can travel twice to three times as fast as road traffic, is a good plan.
I think increasing the viability of travel between smaller airports is a good thing for those times when you don't want to spend a lot of time traveling or waiting for a transit vehicle. If the equivalent of micromobility air travel comes to fruition, you'll see two- or three-person vehicles that get up and go when someone wants a ride. Another benefit could be the airport-to-airport delivery of packages with different-sized drone craft and autonomous navigation.
Flying still require an airport which means you need a fair amount of distance. Sure some make short flights today but they have made their life center around flying those short flights they can't accept houses or joins that are not close to an airport. Most wouldn't accept that compromise in their life.
if people prefer flying even if alternatives exist, like what's going on in Europe and Asia, then the alternatives aren't good enough -- price, convenience, availability, comfort, whatever reasons.
Well it means nobody can avoid their extortionate upgrade pricing anymore so I think that decision paid off well for them.
The first thing I used to do when getting a Mac Mini was ripping out the memory and sticking in the max I could get. For a fraction of Apple's price. Some of them even had more memory than Apple offered itself.
I know there are also benefits to the soldered memory like the huge bandwidth but still. That matters mainly for very specific workloads like LLM inference.
It isn't. Stock price just measures investor confidence. Sometimes firing managers leads to more investor confidence. Most of the time it's a crapshoot but it's the best objective indicator we have for comparison.
It can also be a measure of other market factors. In the case of Siemens Energy the high demand for electricity generation capacity from AI certainly plays a role.
