@VirginiaSOpossum nope shipping is incredibly efficient due to the sheer scale of the operation. In fact it's so cheap to ship a container of stuff from china to Europe or the US, that the cost per item in the container is essentially zero. Once you get a container ship up to speed, keeping it there doesn't use much energy. It's incredibly efficient.
@quixoticgeek@brucknerite depends on sources. Aviation is said to be around 2-3%. Ships about 1.8-3%. Basically they are the same. And they are not direct competitors as usually they don't transport the same kind of goods. Trains under 1%.
Transport emission are about 12%? Let's say 2 from airplanes, 2 from ships and 1% from trains. Cars and trucks are still responsible of 7%. And they are really easily replaceable.
@sandglasspatrol@brucknerite 1.8% for shipping. 1.9% for aviation. ~12% Surface transport (road and rail together).
We can basically ignore shipping and aviation as a rounding error. 12% is significant. Start with that. (Hint, buses, trams, metros, trains, bikes). We have the technology for solving that one. And as an extra bonus it will make our society better.
Building emissions can be solved with heat pumps and renewable energy for electricity.
More trains is easy. Creating more capacity on networks is the big challenge. Guessing that we need to start from optimising overall flow rather than attempting to integrate thousands of scheduling decisions each made in isolation from one another.
@lionelb in the UK. We could start by building a new line. Maybe even a high speed one. That connects our 3 major cities of London, Birmingham, and Manchester...
Closing two lanes of the M1 to create a new rail link seems to me a more realistic and affordable approach. Re-use infrastructure which is already there. Sidestep planning consent.
@lionelb physics. Max gradient for a train is realistically ~2%. The tighter the curve the slower. The technology works. And compatibility with "legacy" aka standard gauge railways brings costs down.
I am looking at it purely in terms of taking advantage of existing infrastructure. The only essentials are capacity and decent velocity.
The engineering solution might be suspended track, maglev, electric bus herd or pod swarm. Or something else.
Land and permissions seem to be the primary hindrances and budget drains. What I am suggesting is that we simply delete those obstacles. I am sure we can fix the engineering.
@lionelb if land is an issue with building a railway. Use tunnels. Maglev, and all the other stuff might work in 20 years time. But we need stuff now. Finishing hs2 as originally planned is a good start. And while we're at it. Start building hs3-12.
I favour an electric bus modular system. Battery/mains hybrid. Controls which are adaptive, for independent or 'train' function. Nose to tail links forming corridors so that passengers can walk from the Redcar module to the Halifax module, during transit.
While we are at it, we should require that at least one in ten of candidates for political office are engineers.
I should have said 'bus'. When in 'train' format, some specialist modules could be added, to serve as locomotives. Others as bike stores, others as offices.
The modules would be a new, hybrid thing. But nothing that existing technology can't conjure up.
Mostly, the blocks are in our heads. Instead of trying to improve on 1860 or 1990, we should apply logic without regard to convention.
But as you have said, those dictate that we move vast quantities of rock and restrict ourselves to a very narrow choice of routes.
A modular approach has great strengths. We could link 30 modules or 130. Linked 'trains' could be driverless. We could aggregate or separate module clusters while travelling at 150kph.
@lionelb yeah. The engineering on that doesn't work out. Rubber tyres on asphalt is inherently inefficient. And building big roads is worse than building a railway.
Then we are backed into a corner and the only way is to declare HS2/3 to be critical infrastructure. Suspend planning laws and impose standardised compensation without negotiation.
Unlike Spain and France we don't have vast open spaces. There is intense friction everywhere.
Repurposing existing infrastructure at least has the advantage of respecting democracy and rights.
@lionelb yep. The question is not how can we afford to do this. It's how can we afford not to. We have to divest ourselves of private cars. And that means more rail. Some of which is gonna require bulldozing small areas.
The rail projects fell apart because campaigners used planning laws and landowners extorted profits.
Projects like this can only be achieved by using force. Not shooting people, obviously. But compulsion in various forms.
Most people want onshore wind, solar arrays, affordable housing. But not near them.
Tilting the tax system so that 'have cake and eat it' communities pay heavily and neighbours of socially useful development get that as subsidy is maybe the way forward.
@lionelb we have the mechanisms for compulsory purchase for getting the land. A lot of the problems are related to the finances. Mostly because the government set the thing up more as a financial vehicle for their friends to make money, than for it to be an actual train line. Look at hinkley point C. 55% of the cost per MWh from the construction is interest on the loans to finance it. 55%. That's utter madness.
@quixoticgeek Indeed, the biggest factor will be reducing altogether the usage the fossil fuels and all that comes from them, plastic, electronics, gasoline, natural gas.
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