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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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.
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.
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
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 mean, I guess I could fuck a plane, but helicopters are so much sexier.
Plus you’ve got all those folks sexually identifying as attack helicopters to choose from!
Cars are pretty great too. /c/fuckcars but literal!
And don’t get me started on motorcycles…
– Frost
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.
Agreed. Although “flying” is fun, traveling by plane is not by any means. Trains are a far better option where you can walk around and there isn’t so much security theater.
100%
It’s so awful.
I would rather burn an extra day of PTO and drive, if I can, than take a plane fucking anywhere. If trains were a more viable option I’d pick that every time, but that just isn’t the case here in the US.
You unfortunately aren’t going very far with only one extra day of PTO. Living in the middle of the country and having family on the coast means taking an extra 4-6 days off to drive…
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”.
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.
This is distraction.
People don’t hate on billionaires and capitalism enough.
No war but the class war.
I can hate on multiple things at the same time
the millionaires have more in common with the billionaires and support them more than they do the working-class.
I live in a town of the top 10%. They think they are ‘ordinary folks’, and it’s the top 1% who are to blame. The top 1% blame the top .1%, and so on and so on.
Nobody is rich or upper class, everyone is working-class because someone else has more money than them. If you only own 3 homes and a boat and 5 luxury cars, well that’s just normal, because rich folks are the one with 12 homes, 2 yachts, and 50 cars…
My favorite is the celebrity class who love to tell you how they are ‘normal working people’ when they have 100s of millions, and their parents were ‘only doctors and lawyers and business owners’. And you do some digging and the vast majority of them come from family money and had insider connections in the industry, but they don’t advertise that fact because that would make them look bad!
its the opposite. larry page has more in common with us than elon musk. The inequality does get nuts the higher you go. This is part of the problem. There should be hundreds of rich guys striving against each other to be richest and the top should all be neck and neck. Of course that top should be a lot lower. We should be talking about maybe seeing the first billinoaire in the future.
busses
Buses?
I believe the correct plural form is actually “Bussy.”
Made me look it up. We’re both right. You might be more right, even if I don’t agree with that spelling 🥲 https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus
If you make that community we will gladly join
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.
