Where's my error?

[fivemack]

I've often heard arguments like 'the cost of flying should reflect its externalities', where the clear implication was that this would make it so expensive that people would stop doing it, or so expensive that it would clearly be cheaper to take a train.

On the whole I'm strongly in favour of air travel - at least, I'm strongly in favour of at most one-level-vicarious personal experience of strange far-off places, and air travel is the only realistic way to get anyone there; going over land to Bangkok is significantly more expensive than Thai Air even if time and ludicrous inconvenience are not a constraint, the price of the return plane ticket won't get me a train beyond about Moscow.

Yes, it takes a lot of energy to remove one ton of CO2 from the air: http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/co2-removal-from-atmosphere.html says fifty kilojoules per mole which is 1.2 gigajoules per ton, http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/005592.html is optimistic and says a third of that.

A gigajoule is about 300 kilowatt-hours, so about thirty pounds worth of electricity at the price I pay for it as a domestic user on a not-terribly-good-value tariff. Say the cost-of-capital and depreciation for CO2-removal equipment is about the same as the electricity; so the total cost for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere would be sixty pounds a ton.

Even people strongly against CCS no-net-CO2 coal-fired electricity generation argue that the efficiency cost of doing the CCS would be about 30%, the currently-4GW facility at Drax would produce 2.5GW; say this doubles the price of the electricity and we're talking a hundred pounds a ton.

One of Easyjet's A319 planes burns 850 gallons of fuel an hour to transport say 120 people (capacity is around 150); jet fuel produces about a ton of CO2 per hundred gallons burned, so taking your 120 people two hours to Berlin has produced about twenty tons of CO2. Removing which would put £17 a head on the cost of the flight; Easyjet is nothing if not cheese-paring, so it probably wouldn't put £30 a head on the price of the ticket. +30%. The last time I compared the prices, Easyjet to Berlin was £100 return and rail was £400 one way.

A Eurostar train carries 750 people two hours from London to Paris and uses 12.5 megawatts of electricity to do so; 25 megawatt-hours at a kilo of CO2 per kilowatt-hour for UK electricity generation [yes, I know most of the French electricity is fission-produced] is 25 tons, so about the same amount of CO2 as the A319 to get six times as many people about half as far. I don't have the figures for slower trains.

A 747 with its 400 passengers burns about a gallon of fuel a second, say produces 36 tons of CO2 per hour, it's eleven hours to San Francisco so that's 400 tons, £24000 to remove. A hundred pounds per passenger per direction; say £250 on the price of the return ticket. +30% again, maybe a bit worse if you're flying at very off-peak times and can get a cheaper base ticket.

Flights aren't the overwhelming part of the cost of foreign holidays now; making them 30% more expensive doesn't seem likely to stop people travelling, and if doubled electricity bills and somewhat more expensive holidays are the price I have to pay to keep London (and incidentally Bangladesh, for there is only one sea level) above water, I'll pay gladly.

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

Easyjet flights to Paris at less than the cost of the train make me very cross.

Obviously if I wanted to go to Bangkok the time and faff involved in dealing with the train would probably outweigh any price considerations when choosing the method of travel (but price considerations might stop me going - especially since I have exactly no good reasons to go to Bangkok).

But travelling to Paris or Berlin or basically anywhere in the EU the train is roughly equal amounts of faff, time and energy to flying once the "sitting around in airports" part is factored in; especially if (like me) you find planes cramped and uncomfortable. And yet the train is (as you point out) rather more costly (slightly less so if you factor in "getting to the airport" at both ends).

The CO2 cost of flights is not linear in distance-flown, the largest costs are take-off and landing; a back-of-the-envelope calculation that I can't recall exactly how to do (DOH! I SUCK) shows that a full 747 flying serious long haul - the example was London-Cape Town - is not really that much worse (CO2 wise, and not accounting for it being worse if emitted at altitude) than a similarly long train ride (although of course there is no train) or ship (obv. fossil fuel powered ship). However the CO2 cost of flying to Paris is VASTLY more than the cost of taking the train (or, for that matter, of driving in an average car).

Also, whilst I'm broadly in favour of people having experience of far off places; I'm not especially in favour of people flying to France many times a year. I think that rather than attempting to price people out of flying (which would of course disproportionally restrict the poor) that a system of rationing flights might be more sensible - each person would get, say, one (return!) flight per year to the destination of their choosing and you could apply for more if you had a good reason (such as visiting family, or travelling on business).

My uncle who moved to France when he retired was recently in a production of Oliver in Essex - he was commuting on a weekly basis from his home (in France) to Essex for some months. Via Sleazy Jet. This is behaviour which I think really really really needs discouraging.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I agree that it is silly to fly to Paris or to Brussels, though the cheaper train tickets sell out much quicker than the cheaper flights, so I have flown to Paris a couple of times when I'm told of a conference at three weeks' notice.

I have been by train to pretty much the four corners of the EU: Inverness, Cadiz, Sofia, Stockholm. The outbound journeys were fun (Stockholm probably the least fun, an awful lot of northern Europe looks more like Lincolnshire than you would want to spend twenty hours heading through looking out of the window); on the other hand, I was going there for fun and the journey was part of the destination, and I tended to fly back because turning six days of a two-week holiday into a succession of city breaks is quite fun, and doing the same with twelve days, in the same cities, less so.

The frontier of trainship is not all that far beyond Paris - I make it quicker to take the train to Gatwick and fly to Marseille than to use the fast line to London, Eurostar and the TGV Sud - and certainly not as far east as Berlin. I'd draw it through Amsterdam, Cologne, Nancy, Lyon and La Rochelle.

Count four hours from leaving your house to getting to the source airport, then anywhere in nearby-Europe in two hours and anywhere in the EU in three, then maybe an hour and a half from the destination runway to the destination city centre. Seven hours to Amsterdam is tedious; nine hours to Kiev is pretty much an order of magnitude faster than the train and I am fairly confident that nothing is improved by twenty hours on a Ukrainian train.

I am strongly unconvinced by rationing arguments, on the boringly pragmatic basis that there's pretty much nothing else that we ration in that way in the UK (health care is rationed but in an entirely different way), and that rationing even goods which were demonstrably in U-boot-assisted short supply bred spivs mightily. You may think your uncle is spending his time and money unwisely, but I don't think that sort of unwiseness is as damaging as any legal sanctions that would prevent it.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Amsterdam is a pleasant overnight ferry away; which, yeah, probably takes longer than flying but also you get to sleep in comfort and don't have to deal with any airports. It probably costs more than Ryan Air, but then food I want to eat costs more than McDonalds too...

I think life experience and awareness of conditions that People Poorer Than Me live in may well be improved by twenty hours on a Ukranian train. Might actually *learn something* about other places, which you were suggesting as a Good Reason for taking foreign holidays at great cost to the environment...

Actual rationing would be hard and unpopular, yes. We could try the carbon credit thingy (where you can sell your allowance if you want to); that might work.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Rationing would be hard is an understatement. I wonder what would happen when people realised it couldn't apply to foreign nationals, dual nationals and immigrants who retained their passports? Taxing aviation fuel at the same level of petrol would require about the same amount of treaty-wrangling to better effect.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Yes, anything done to attempt to reduce air travel requires international co-operation. We could, possibly, have EU-wide regulations about things like aviation fuel tax that would cut down EU-only flights, but I'm not sure anyone would stand up for it.

[(Anonymous)]

Sleep in comfort? On a ferry?

S.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I don't see why not. Unless of course one gets dreadfully seasick, in which case it's probably a bad plan. It's a rather nice ferry with proper cabins.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a long spectrum from 'dreadfully seasick' to 'comfortable', and I personally prefer my bed, however nice the cabin it's in, not to move.

(Cruises don't really appeal to me either).

S.

[(Anonymous)]

But travelling to Paris or Berlin or basically anywhere in the EU the train is roughly equal amounts of faff, time and energy to flying once the "sitting around in airports" part is factored in

This old saw has been trotted out time and time again, but it is simply no longer true in the era of online-check-in, turn-up-walk-through-security-get-on-'plane.

If I go to Glasgow, I fly, because I can leave work at one o'clock and step off the bus in Glasgow city centre before five. Try doing that on a train.

(And any time I have to cross a sea I'll use an aeroplane, except for the one special case of the English Channel, where the tunnel makes a viable alternative as long as you are not travelling on from Paris, in which case the TGV tickets for any reasonable times make the price uncompetitive).

S.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Last time I flew to Glasgow it was a thorough nightmare in terms of sitting around in airports and delayed flights. The previous time they lost my luggage into the bargain. And neither airport is actually where one wants to be in Glasgow of course - more waiting, and also more expense to be factored into the comparison.

Also the cheap flights seem to be only at ludicrous times of day, although I suspect that is more due to my last-minute-booking nature. I suspect that flying with more expensive airlines would get me a nicer experience involving rather less hassle and annoyance; but that also raises the price rather.

I have never actually taken the train to Glasgow; I took the sleeper up to Aberdeen recently and that was very pleasant (although also very expensive compared to cheap flights), taking very little time out of my day since I slept for almost the entire journey.

I guess the relative desirability of modes of transport depends a lot on how enjoyable you find using them.

[(Anonymous)]

Glasgow International (yeah right) has a shuttle bus that takes twenty minutes to get into the centres, which is about as close to where one wants to be as a lot of train stations (though not Buchanan Street, of course).

With regards to expense, I never claimed the aeroplane was cheaper -- but it would have to be a heck of a lot more expensive than the train to outweigh the speed advantage.

I guess the relative desirability of modes of transport depends a lot on how enjoyable you find using them.

This is quite important. If I want to arrive somewhere tired and irritated (more than usual) and snappish, I'll take a sleeper train. Otherwise, I'll step onto an aeroplane and step off an hour or two later having read a few chapters of a novel, ready and raring to go.

S.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Whereas I find air travel cramped and annoying; but on arrival in Aberdeen I was as awake and refreshed as I ever am first thing in the morning.

[(Anonymous)]

The obvious solution, then, seems to be to run both trains and airlines; and you can avail yourself of one, I the other.

S.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

To be fair, a *lot* of the EU is more faff by train. Obviously Paris, Holland and parts of Germany are easy enough and I really find it hard to imagine why anybody would fly from the southeast of the UK to those places.

But as soon as you want to go to Austria, Italy, Spain or (of particular interest to me as my sister lives there) Hungary, you are looking at a night train and the journey pretty much takes two days each way especially if you don't sleep very well on night trains and have to make up the sleep at your destination. International train stations can be more work to negotiate than international airports too.

There are very good reasons you might choose to go by train anyway (and one of the reasons that I feel qualified to discuss this is the amount of train as opposed to plane travel that I've done!), but unless you get very unlucky with delays at airports then I think it's difficult to argue that train is quicker or less faff.