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European Salon de News, Discussion et Klatsch - 10 March | 107 comments (107 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

I thought Dodo had demonstrated that long journeys (>500km) by HST weren't cost effective

keep to the Fen Causeway

by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Tue Mar 9th, 2010 at 05:31:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (4.00 / 2)

For freight I think they are, and even if you have a single line that goes 5000km, that is a lot of 500km sub trips. I'm pretty sure china is more interested in fast freight.

In general the formula is something like
d = (a*c)(a - t)

where d is the maximum supported distance, and a is the speed of planes, t is the speed of trains and c is the cost of going to an airport. so if a = 600km/hr, t = 300km/h and c is 1.5 hour, we have a limit of 600*1.5(600-300) = 450km.

by njh on Tue Mar 9th, 2010 at 10:46:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 1)

I think the formula you wanted is d = a*t*c/(a-t). (Leaving SCOOP's auto format on turned the / into italics.) Putting your numbers into it one correctly gets 900 km.

This is the formula for equal city center to city center travel times. The plane and train speeds in that formula are travel speed, that is, departure to arrival average speeds (which, for both planes and trains, depend on distance if top speed is the same), and "time to the airport" is the sum of those for arrival and departure airports.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Thu Mar 11th, 2010 at 03:33:42 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 1)

Ah yep, I got distracted halfway through, and when I got back it no longer made sense :o I presume there are much fancier rules used in practice, which include distributions of source travels, preference for comfortable seats, certain psychological preferences for travel times (people treat trips under half an hour quite differently to trips over half an hour). I suspect there are similar steps for long distance trips: Once I am committed to a long trip, I would rather do it slower and in comfort than at top speed, so I choose the 10 hour train journey to my grandmas rather than the 1 hour plane flight (requiring me to leave home 3 hours before hand, at 4am). I expect reliable and cheap internet access will tilt this even more.

by njh on Thu Mar 11th, 2010 at 05:03:41 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

BTW, given other obligations, that diary I promised you may take some time... in the meantime, you can read Why Glaeser Got It Wrong: Re-Running The Numbers On High Speed Rail » INFRASTRUCTURIST, which goes beyond picking apart that old hack job which was brought up again by fairleft in the China HSR diary, by doing a detailed calculation for a Dallas-Houston line.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Mar 12th, 2010 at 03:10:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

That's great, exactly the sort of thing I would like to see more of. Incidentally, he says re CO2 and concrete in construction: "On a somewhat smaller scale, the same can be said for new terminals or runways at airports." James Strickland showed that the concrete and steel in a single runway corresponds to about 650km of high speed rail (though this was for ballasted track rather than slab construction).

by njh on Fri Mar 12th, 2010 at 04:22:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

I did ad hoc high speed line to airport comparisons in Railways, energy, CO2 - Part 2, too, with much more CO2 for HSR. In that calculation, based on the Frankfurt-Cologne line in Germany (which has slab track), most of the concrete was in tunnel linings, but long bridges (like on Asian lines) would exceed slab track similarly.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Mar 12th, 2010 at 05:11:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

That looks great. One thing to note with steel is that unlike concrete, it can be very efficiently recycled, using little extra CO2. I wonder if this means we should consider building more with steel and less with concrete (or use steel coated in cement for weather resistance - a few cms of low water/cement mortar can protect steel for hundreds of years.

by njh on Sat Mar 13th, 2010 at 06:23:40 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

There are some good counterstudies in the comments you should read, it seems that the analysis is still rather weak.

by njh on Fri Mar 12th, 2010 at 04:50:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 0)

Well, it's nowhere near a serious study (like the British HS2 study discussed in another Salon), but it can be called one, while Glaeser's is a joke.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Fri Mar 12th, 2010 at 05:02:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 1)

From a traveller standpoint, replacing 12h in a plane with 36 in a train can sound attractive : instead of spending a day in a plane, it becomes 2 nights and a day.

How many China - Europe planes are there each days ? If the market is large enough filling up the line with even a small share of this market might be possible...

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères

by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Tue Mar 9th, 2010 at 10:51:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Living off the Planet (none / 1)

Hm? No I didn't :-) Passenger HST can be cost-effective for relations up to 1000 km. But, as njh says, you can have longer relations if (1) there are stops at major cities at least every few hundred kilometres, (2) there is significant traffic demand between all pairs of neighbouring major cities. Or, think of it as linking up a succession of 2-800 km high-speed lines, and adding long-distance traffic to their medium-distance traffic.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Thu Mar 11th, 2010 at 02:51:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]

European Salon de News, Discussion et Klatsch - 10 March | 107 comments (107 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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