We have /c/fuckcars but no /c/fuckplanes. Yet a lot of the same arguments apply. They cause air pollution (roughly double the amount per km traveled), noise pollution and they (airports) take up a lot of space near dense living areas. Sure, some places can practically only be visited by plane, just like some places can practically only be visited by car. But people don’t consider not having your holiday that far away or giving pushback on a busines trip that should have been an online meeting. Besides work-from-home being encouraged, work-from-home-country should be too.
Cars need to be discouraged in favor of busses, trams and trains. Planes nees to be discouraged in favor of high-speed trains, staycations and hopefully new alternatives like modern sailboats or electric planes.
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While I agree that plane travel needs to be reduced, and trains should be prioritized, most people typically take a plane less than once a year. The problem isn’t Joe Schmoe taking a vacation overseas with his family every once in a while, it’s the millionaires and billionaires taking flights every other day on their private jets.
Nah… the problem is not the vacation “overseas” but the amount of domestic flights that could have been avoided if we had a proper (fast, cheap, comfortable) rail network.
How many flights do we have between, e.g, Boston-New York, LA-San Francisco, Dallas-Houston, Chicago-any city in the midwest? Thousands of flights that are less than 3 hours in duration, but we have to take it by plane. Maaaybe some of them could be made by bus, but buses are slow and super cramped.
Now imagine if we had good train service. Even if we were not talking about bullet trains, if you count the time it takes to board/deboard + the time it takes to get to airport to the city, there is a good chance that the train travel would take less total time.
I think amtrak is super comfortable, it’s just ridiculously NOT cheap or fast.
For example, driving from Santa Barbara CA down to San Diego, is about 4.5 hours’ drive with light traffic. You can expect to pay like $100 in gas round trip.
Now, the amtrak line is $88 per person round trip last time I checked, and takes like six hours
So
You can drive a sedan and bring several people in your car and spend $100, and have a car in San Diego
Or you can take the train, spend as much as you would on gas for a commuter car for ONE person, take 25% longer to arrive and get home, and then you’re in a city with no car instead of having a vehicle…
Why TF am I choosing the train, again?
It’s hard to compare with cars because cars/fuel/highways are seriously subsidized.
Both are a problem. Private jets are much more wasteful but only a small portion of total kms traveled
If people stop commuting by plane to do a meeting I think the bulk of airplane travel would stop.
At least the morning and afternoon planes are usually full of people in suits where I live.
How have you gathered apparently representative data on morning and afternoon flights? Do you work at an airport or airline?
only a small portion of total kms traveled
Thats doesnt really prove anything, the fuel burn is at its peak during take off and landing since it requires a lot of force to actually lift up. On the contrary, sustain flight is very efficient.
Shorter distances isnt a valid excuse - in fact, it is the direct problem you’re seemingly defending.
How do planes compare to travel by boat? Then what about a car ferry if you go on as a foot passenger or only take a bike, are you really taking up any space on it?
So if you’re talking freight, ships are unparalleled in their energy efficiency, even when you look at the disgusting dirty fuel they use. They’re SLOW, which reduces friction with water, and have economies of scale.
However, planes are more efficient for passengers due to the volume (of people). People take up a lot of space, much moreso than cargo, which makes giant boats really not the most efficient choice for human transport because you end up using a giant hull with tons of overhead to move all these lightweight people across the ocean. Once planes get up to cruising altitude they hit a sweet spot where their fuel efficiency improves drastically, but it’s still not nearly as good as trains… But I have no idea how to calculate how expensive or environmentally damaging it would be to build and maintain a set of trans-continental railways. I can only imagine the insane amounts of marine destruction needed for any amount of transport bandwidth…
And none of this is taking into account time, which is another important factor. A container ship takes 10-14 days to get from New York to London; a direct flight takes about seven hours.
Suppose the route is important too. I live in Portsmouth, so the ferry to France is right here and I think it is better than flying to France. But that is also a short flight.
Plus its a car ferry, so its mainly transporting cars with people as a bit of an extra. I suspect there is much more variation with sea travel compared to flight.
I’m not saying private jets aren’t a problem. Both are a problem
I don’t think people going on holiday are the problem. Its the power users, a small percent that just fly too much like its taking the train. I have a rich family member that has three houses around the US and they split their time between them all. Often flying 3 times a month, perpetually. Its a horrific and wasteful lifestyle.
Power users make a bigger difference. But that doesn’t mean others shouldn’t be conscious of their impact.
On the flip side i worry everyday folks, who aren’t the real problem, shame themselves everyday for living just because they’re self aware, when the actuall problem makers are oblivious to their own behaviors and won’t change.
Imo people should strive to be better than average for where they live. Leads to continuous improvement. Never make the mistake of trying to be the end goal society needs to reach while everyone else is still far away, the mass of changes is important, so you’ll just make yourself miserable and not save the world anyway.
Yeah… I wish for people to feel proud that they are contributing and wanting to contribute more because it makes them feel good. Instead of debilitating shame for thinking they aren’t doing enough.
Just a quick DuckDuckGo AI response.
FurtherActual research can be done on your own.
So, cars are worse. But sure, planes aren’t “great” either. It’s just that the amount of cars on the roads of the world is so significantly much higher than planes, as well as number of trips per day, that plane travel fades in the shadow of cars. There’s so much driving compared to flying.
AI is not research. This may all be hallucinated.
And the only way to tell whether it’s a hallucination or not is to check it by doing the research yourself … which is what you should have done in the beginning.
I know. Fixed. But I will not be doing any research myself — I’m not the one interested in finding out information regarding this. OP should be, however, since it seems to be a major concern for them. 👍
OP should be, however, since it seems to be a major concern for them. 👍
And you think OP is incapable of asking the AI?
What do you think you’re adding to the conversation by adding AI to it?
Was the information wrong?
The information is pointless because it easily could be wrong. And now anybody who wants to know whether it’s wrong or not has to research it themselves … which they could have done from the beginning.
It just adds a layer of wasteful AI slop that, ultimately, brings absolutely no new information to the table.
I’m not trying to “add AI” to this, nor am I asking OP to use AI… I am saying that actual research should be done to find out more/actual facts.
I think you’re derailing this from where I intended it to go. I just wanted to show a quick example of what was already stated — that commercial plane travel is quite efficient, fuel-to-passenger wise. But if “you” want to know more, there’s better sources than the quick AI response, hence why I mentioned that it was an AI response in the first place so there’s no mistaking it for a real quote. I made sure I cropped the image very carefully too, to include that it was AI, so there’s no doubt of that fact.
We’re on the same side here, of AI hallucinations and all that, friend. Don’t worry. 👍 So let’s put that to rest, thanks.
We’re on the same side here
We’re really not, if you still think injecting AI slop into a conversation is a good and useful thing to do.
Now do AI search vs a normal search
I did a normal search, the AI response just showed up automatically because I put a lot of words in the query. 😅
I know about that 👍
This one makes it so you always get noai: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-no-ai-search/
So when I did my own research I came to the conclusion that… it depends… There is more going on that just the amount of CO2 being put in the air. It’s being put in a different space, from a different fuel type with different byproducts. Either way, it’s pretty bad for the environment, just like cars are. And we don’t have hybrid or electric large planes yet.
Also, nobody drives their car 5000+km
Very interesting findings! So I guess the question then is, are the total byproducts left in the air by air travel “equally” “bad” (by some measure), compared to the total left by car travel, based on the altitude, chemistry, effects on the atmosphere and ozone layer, ecosystems, individuals, etc. Very complex. 😅
There is aot of people so yes everyone taking a vacation one a year is a problem when everyone does it. Then you have the people who go two or three times a year. It all adds up.
I get where you’re coming from, and I do agree to an extent, but on the very rare occasion I want to and am able to travel to another continent I don’t want to have to spend months travelling by boat to spend a week or two at my destination. I love trains. The US has shitty train infrastructure but I still kinda want to take a train on my next vacation.
the problem is, it isnt your average commute, people rarely take many flights in one year unless you were going on vacations for months at a time, plus theres a long process in getting a passport if you havnt gotten one before, or havnt renewed in the last 10-15years. many people seem to fly to countries, states for specific conferences(tech, stem, research), or business meetings, likely make up most of the flights.
I would gladly take high speed rail if it was as available as Asian countries.
its non-existent in usa, because it so car centric, and it so ingrained in “american culture” too. and have been lobbyed against many times, so it never happens. HSR would solve alot of things, like tech, biotech jobs which are impractical in other forms of public transports, or even a car sometimes which are usually far from a metro area.
Yup and now I have to take 4x as long in a car
Asian countries are not available in Europe but high speed rail is
I think I’m on-board (heh) if its specifically /c/fuckprivateplanes, but commercial is apparently pretty good, averaging an equivalent of 100 miles per gallon (42.5 km/L) per passenger on a full flight. Yea, it’s not better than a train, but it is significantly better than driving a typical ICE car to the same destination.
I came to mention that people flying fly light which is possible because of the short trip times. even on trains they tend to have a lot more luggage and cars its usually a massive amount more.
Planes are similar to income inequality in that a (relatively) small percentage overwhelmingly use services wastefully
Almost 90% of the world’s population doesn’t fly at all in any given year. In the USA 12% of the population takes almost 70% of flights. In France 2% take 50%.
American Airlines report 87% of its customers fly 1 time per year which accounts for 50% of its income. The other 50% is accounted by the remaining 13%. There is a small contingency of the population that basically flies almost every single day
To put it more simply roughly 1% of people taking frequent flights account for about 50% of aviation emissions
Normal people should continue to be allowed to have their once every decade trip to change the endlessly drudgery of their working class lives for a week (even if much of that is not an actual vacation as much as stuff like visiting a home they’ve had to move far away from for employment). Once again blame the greedy selfish people that hedonistically overindulge at the expense of everyone around them.
If you want to get angry at an entire industry that is extremely destructive and genuinely has no point other than excess look at cruises. Just go to a fucking hotel/casino on land, 99% of the experience and like 5% (if that) of the emissions
Question is, would the airlines still be around if we suddenly cut that 50% of income from frequent fliers? 😅
Sure. They would just be smaller and perhaps fewer in number.
Would we be able to go to as many places? 😬
Probably not quite as many. And probably fewer flight options available.
If 50% of air passengers aren’t flying anymore, airlines would need to reduce all flights by about 50% to remain anywhere near profitable. And you’d want that. Because the environmental and efficiency gains would all evaporate if the airlines just keep flying half-empty planes at the same rate they do today.
Airlines are already barely profitable. Most of their income is not actually related to tickets sold.
Yes, half of the current market is still quite a market. It will be different, though.
Once again blame the greedy selfish people that hedonistically overindulge at the expense of everyone around them.
While some of those 13% are hedonistic overindulgers, I’m guessing that a significant portion of them are people who have to travel frequently for work.
Of those who have to travel for work, some of them could probably reduce that air travel significantly if they used remote work instead, or conducted meetings by phone instead of in person, etc.
But there will be some remaining portion of people who travel for work who actually need to travel for work. Usually people who are highly specialized in something. Inspectors, investigators, researchers, technicians, scientists, musicians on tour, sports teams traveling to away games, aid workers traveling to impoverished countries, etc, etc, etc. People whose work needs to be done in person, at specific locations across a wide area, and can’t be easily replaced by local labor.
No idea at all what the actual percentage breakdown would be between those, but my point is not all of those 13% are doing it for selfish, wasteful reasons.
You don’t know enough about boat building if you think a modern sailboat is a good idea ecologically. Boat building uses nasty chemicals, very harsh solvents and produce ginormous waste. A modern sailboat has a gigantic environmental footprint. I have a 50 year old sailboat (with a modern outboard) but I never try to fool myself into thinking I’m making a recreational choice that’s good for the environment. I’m just out enjoying the day and trying not to think about the bottom paint poisoning the lake, the microplastics sloughing off the oxidized gelcoat, and the impact of the fire retardant the textile industry dumps into all the fabric I’m relaxing on, to name a few. Nice way to spend the day though!
Fair. I’m not a maritime expert. I just get excited about new energy harvesting and propulsion tech.
Sails are quite good at energy harvesting and propulsion but you won’t find any certified organic growers of fibres for sail cloth.
Well the materials matter a bit. But for example wind mill vanes are also made out of horrible, hard to recycle materials. Yet over their lifespan the amount of oil and gas that doesn’t have to get burned makes up for it.
Isn’t the same true for cars, planes, trains and even bicycles?
No.
Hate to break it to you: It is. For bicycles of course the effect is very small, negligible even. But for example, tires are pretty bad. The ballast and sleepers of train tracks are contaminated and classified as special waste in my country.
First, please don’t use the word ‘hate’. Like, at all. We have enough of that in the world, it never made anything better, approachable or appealing. It’s at best clickbaiting.
Secondly, it’s easy to say “things need to be done”. But nobody wants to pay more taxes to build alternatives. Nobody wants to waste half of their vacation traveling by slower means. Nobody wants to wait decades for alternative infrastructure to be built. Nobody wants the alternative infrastructure built near them.
It’s funny that people who want high speed rail instead of plains usually railly up to block building it nearby - “yes, we want it, but not here”.
When Covid hit, I was astonished to see so many people complain, how they could not fly to have holidays anymore. I had not realized, it has become common fun, to be able to fly for fun at least once a year. It is incredibly wasteful, and I cannot understand people defending that shit. There is no other reason to fly somewhere faraway just for a holiday, than being selfish - it is a luxury expense, not something you cannot live without - and pretending it is okay “just once a year” is creating A LOT of environmental impact, when hundreds of thousands think the same.
Are the rich people making most of the flights more guilty? Well obviously! We should ban that shit too! Someone else doing something even worse, does not justify making bad choices. It is hypocritical to complain about the planet dying, while actively contributing to the problem, just because you want to conveniently visit the other side of the world.
Hearing so many people in the UK say they want to go somewhere hot like Spain for summer. Its too fucking hot here! Why do you want to go somewhere worse! I would want to go to Finland.
Finland is pretty nice during summer, but it’s not likely to be much colder than UK in the summer. They have continental climate which is more stable - hot in the summer and cold in the winter.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0ql98x1nvo
The lakes and shady forests do make it more tolerable though.
Fair point, the heat here is more tolerable by a lake or the sea too.
I live by the sea but can’t spend all day there.
Yeah, I do not understand either?! And in Europe you can travel relatively easily around by train, bus, or ship. You do not even have to fly! It is just for convenience!
UK train prices are terrible, it’s cheaper to fly to Germany, drink as much as you can, throw up all over your hotel room and then fly to Scotland the next day than it is to take a train from southern England to Scotland.
And that is asinine as well! Here in Finland it is often way cheaper to drive across the country by car, than taking the train. It should not be like that! Mass transit should be heavily supported so people can make more environmentally friendly choices. And flying should be heavily taxed, the filthy rich especially can fucking pay for their convenience.
My wife and I were on holiday last year in Europe. We spent a few days in Vienna and then a few more in Paris. To get between the two, we chose a night train (nightjet I think?).
It would have been a little cheaper to fly, but we thought the train would be fun to experience.
Looking back…IDK whether I’d take the night train again. It was more comfortable than a flight…but the flight is only 2 hours. Even with time to check bags, that’s quite the time sink.
Hey! Me dumping toxic waste in the river is NOT the real problem! The real problem is Neighbour Ted who dumps twice as much toxic waste!
You’re wrong. Have my upvote.
The issue with cars is people abusing them instead of relying on public transport, where it would be cheaper and more convenient, but some people pay more for the extra comfort, which is seen as wasteful.
This snowballs into urban planning centered on cars, which creates a pretty bad incentives loop.
On the other hand, planes are a necessity for some business travel, and a nice way of visiting the world once per year. Yes, some people abuse flight, but it’s a non issue overall.
I live near a small airport and I would gladly join /c/fuckplanes
I cannot fucking stand it. These little private planes the rich folks fly, just for fun, are so loud and distruptive.
The propeller planes also burn leaded fuel.
I read that the other day. Fucked.
I’m just sick of listening to rich people whine that they can’t afford first class plane travel and lecture me about how I’m a planet destroying asshole for driving an ICE on the weekends and I need to buy a 60K EV.
And also it’s ‘not travel’ unless you’re going to another continent.
Outside of maybe the internet I have never seen specific you are destroying the planet with your ice vehicle. Even on the internet its not super common and more ice vehicles are bad and electric is the way to go rather than hey hubertmanne or tubulartittyfrog your ice vehicle is destroying the planet. I like you have one. over ten years old with somewhere around 30k miles.
a lot of the same arguments apply
You’re living in a basement somewhere dreaming about arguments in your head.
people don’t consider
YOU aren’t considering that people aren’t only doing the shitty things you’re fantasizing about.
Planes offer transportation that is unmatched by other means. Also most humans don’t travel by plane and the one who do are not regular flyers as in every day or every week like rape transportation. There are very few people in the pamner wh ok travel by plane all the time. Maybe those people should reconsider their choices as commercial airlines have democratized to a degree the ability for the masses to travel instead of just being a luxury just for the rich and ultra rich. The Elons of the world should definitely travel less by plane or plain out disappear from society but long distance travel by plane I think is a marvelous thing of the modern era and their impact on pollution is minor in comparison to cars. Maybe r restricting plane travel to big planes moving lots of people over hundred or thousands of small plains with few people aboard that coud have taken a regular transportation plane
Yes, France already banned short flights on routes that have similar train service. More counties should do that and over time increase the restrictions
And, also, they should be building more high speed rail service – both to increase capacity to match that increase in demand, and to add more routes where the train can replace flying.
“Rape transportation”?
Well it was a typo but I’d believe that with the knowledge we have of Epstein perhaps most wasteful plane travel is indeed rape transportation…
I mean, I guess I could fuck a plane, but helicopters are so much sexier.
Cars are pretty great too. /c/fuckcars but literal!
And don’t get me started on motorcycles…
– Frost
Plus you’ve got all those folks sexually identifying as attack helicopters to choose from!
