it's the most expensive to build/operate and much safer than typically perceived. Accidents are spectacular and rare.
*Rail travel
Air is generally cheaper than rail for the cheapest ticket, but more polluting and for journeys under around 300 miles slower, if you’re flying from city centre airports like Billy Bishop or London City, or 500 miles if you’re flying from larger out of city airports. Additionally it’s even safer than flying and you can take way more luggage and bikes.
People don’t tend to have a fear of train travel though, it’s just that NIMBYs, those who would rather pour money into a pit than make investments and corrupt politicians (those last two often being the same people) who tend to dislike it.
They don’t fear safety of rail, but they do have rail related fears. They fear that rail is too slow and expensive to build and to use. They fear it’s worse for the environment thanks to several major ecological disasters caused by bad rail stewardship (and I suppose they do fear safety there too). They fear it’s just too inconvenient for practical use.
I’m a huge rail supporter but we don’t do it any favors by not acknowledging the reality of how fucked it is in some major markets. It’s for a long time been treated by Americans as the inconvenient thing we used before airplanes and cars that only makes sense in New York, DC, and Chicago. As well as the “what if the greyhound was also unaffordable and didn’t go where you want” option for cross continental travel. Europe seems to have treated it as the option for staying in your country and getting around your city.
With neither a cross Schengen heavily subsidized and standardized system that is designed to outcompete air travel or a massive change in how amtrack is treated and going from seeing it as a corporation owned by the American people that needs to support itself to a public resource that is supposed to take a loss when it needs to akin to how the post office used to be treated then rail isn’t going to beat air. California and France can’t do this alone
I see a difference regarding the effects if something does go wrong. A plane crash is no Fukushima.
sure, a plane crash typically kills everyone aboard. The explosion and resulting leak at Fukushima killed no one.
they’re obviously not exactly the same, but similar in certain respects
Didn’t know that, but you are right, nobody actually died directly from radiation related causes at Fukushima. However, deaths from circumstances relating to the evacuation of the area are estimated to be in the thousands (source: wikipedia). I find that that somewhat illustrates the extent to which human lives have been impacted. While a plane crash is a personal tragedy for a number of people and relatives, a nuclear accident feels more like a collective catastrophe.
It’s not clear to me that these deaths from evacuation are from the explosion at the plant and resulting leak or the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan (mag 9.0) and resulting tsunami. it’s really hard to pin a definitive reason onto these fatalities.
Fair point. Nuclear plants are fairly safe and historically have a low death toll, I agree. Leaves the radioactive waste to deal with.
