I’m pretty sure most flights are regional, not long distance, unless that’s only the us where we don’t believe in trains. There was an article a year or so back, where France started to actually ban regional flights for a few routes with good rail service. That’s where we need to be going.

Between high speed rail, and Zoom, we ought to be able to cut the number of flights in half while making travel better, and we can cut the least efficient flights since they spend proportionally more time climbing to altitude vs cruising

Even in the US, we have Acela and it’s arguably the best way to travel a few routes like BOS—>NYC, for the last two decades. Aside from connections, why do we still have hourly shuttles flying that route? Looking at the entire Acela service area, you probably have hundreds of daily regional flights. Most of those need to go

Edit: and this is part of my argument that California High Speed Rail is worth much higher funding to complete at pretty much any cost

[–] jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

the bering strait is no where near the oberpopulated east coast

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Here’s a short version:

I’m pretty sure most flights are regional, not long distance ….ban regional flights ….we ought to be able to cut the number of flights in half

Imagine if there were half the number of flights, so the remaining ones weren’t as hard on our environment. Instead of going to fantasies like railroad over the Bering strait, let’s just only use flying for long distance routes.

[–] jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

how is anyone on the baring strait thats not in a major city supposed to get fresh food without regional flights? and I thought most flights were on 737 and bigger aircraft anyways?

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Regional flights are not the same as like bush pilots, and obviously there will always be edge cases. Leave the Bering Strait alone: there’s not enough population or cities for modern trains to help, it’s mostly boats. There is the Siberian railroad, but it will never be fast or modern. Is there even regularly scheduled flights? Even if you look at Alaska, most of the population is along the coast but even a simple highway is tough. Sometimes there are disadvantages to living in more challenging parts of the world

Let’s focus on the 75% of the worlds population living in more hospitable regions

The rule of thumb used to be 500 miles. Any time you have two cities within 500 miles of each other, high speed rail is potentially the most convenient, efficient, useful way to travel. If we built it. Farther than that, flying has a strong advantage. That’s what’s generally meant by regional travel.