Quick Note: High-Speed Rail and Decarbonization
I keep seeing European advocates for decarbonizing transportation downplay the importance of big infrastructure, especially high-speed rail. To that end, I’d like to proffer one argument for why high-speed rail decarbonizes transportation even when it induces new trips. Namely: induced leisure trips come at the expense of higher-carbon travel to other destinations. In the 2010s discussion on High Speed 2, for example, induced trips were counted as raising greenhouse gas emissions (while having economic benefits elsewhere), and with this understanding I think that that is wrong. This becomes especially important with the growing focus on flight shaming in Europe. A 1,000 km high-speed rail link doesn’t just compete with flying on the same corridor, but also with flying to a different destination, which may be much farther away, and thus its effect on decarbonizing transport is much larger than a model of corridor-scale competition with cars and planes predicts.
Aviation emissions
A common argument for high-speed rail in the 2000s was that it would displace on-corridor flights, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the American version, this argument awkwardly coexisted with a separate argument for high-speed rail, namely that it would decongest airports and allow more flight slots to faraway destinations. In the 2010s and in this decade, this contradictory thinking fell away – the United States hasn’t built anything, China builds for non-environmentalist reasons, Europe gave up on cross-border rail construction and its activists became more interested in trams-and-bikes urbanism. This is also reflected in research: for all of the hype about high-speed rail as a substitute for aviation, researchers like Giulio Mattioli point out that aviation emissions are dominated by long-distance flights, with <500 km flights comprising only 5% of aviation fuel burn and >4,000 km ones comprising 39%. Activist response to policies like France’s ban on flights competing with <2.5 hour TGVs has been to mock it as the gimmick that it is.
For this and other reasons, on-corridor competition with air travel is no longer considered an important issue. This is now being taken in the direction of arguing against 300 km/h lines; the thinking is that high speed is only really needed to compete with flights, whereas competing with cars requires something else. But that argument misses the importance of off-corridor competition. Passengers don’t just choose what mode to take on a fixed corridor; they also choose where to travel, and transport options matter to that choice.
The limits of ridership models
Ridership models tend to be local. SNCF uses a gravity model, in which the ridership between a pair of cities with populations 
The issue is that the model is local: if I live in Berlin and want to go to Munich, the model looks only at what’s between Berlin and Munich, and doesn’t consider that I can go to other cities instead if they’re more convenient to get to. One consequence of this is that the model probably overpredicts ridership in larger milieus than in smaller ones for this reason (the Tokyo resident can go to Osaka but also to Tohoku, etc.). But an equal consequence is that off-corridor competition is global.
The limits of leisure travel
Leisure travel is discretionary, and limited by vacation time. Building new high-speed lines does not mean that the country is offering workers more vacation days. The upshot is that every new line competes off-corridor with other lines, but also with other modes. A tightly integrated national high-speed rail system offers domestic tourism by rail, competing not just with flying on longer corridors like Berlin-Cologne, where the trains take four hours and are unreliable, but also with flying to places that the train doesn’t get to.
This has implications to a Europe-wide system as well. Right now, flights from Northern Europe to Southern Europe are on corridors where rail travel is only viable if you are an environmental martyr, really like 14-hour train trips, or ideally both. High-speed rail would by itself not compete on most of these corridors – those Spanish coastal cities are too far from Northern Europe for a mode other than flying, for one. But it would offer reasonable service to other places in Southern Europe with warm climate. Speeding up the Paris-Nice TGV means Parisians would choose to travel to Nice more and to islands less. Building high-speed rail approaches connecting to the base tunnels across the Alps means Germans, especially Southern Germans, could just go to large Italian cities instead of flying to islands or to Turkey. Even business travel may be affected, through replacement of flights to other continents.
Pedestrian Observations 
I suspect a lot of the induced less than 90 min HSR trips are work related, commuting, or similar, and indeed are induced (but also presumably makes the country better off, at least according to some criteria).
For vacation travel, I think the argument is reasonable and a good one.
I think one of the challenges with high speed rail is that right now you can’t even do England-Spain in 14 hours as a “climate martyr” and if you could that would actually be a huge improvement in service quality.
Now you can just about get to Barcelona in a day but to go further you have to stay overnight in Barcelona or Paris.
There’s also the political side that is missed. Introducing high carbon taxes or using expensive sustainable aviation fuel is probably politically viable for long haul flights (ironically probably for the right wing rather than the left) – but those wouldn’t be politically viable for intra-Europe flights.
Looking at the other end of HSR service competition; commuting. Combining Taiwan with the underpredicting Utsunomiya/Takasaki North Kanto Shinkansen numbers, commuter traffic seems to be the way to outperform inter-city gravity models?
Of course seeing HSR as like Airplanes, a “luxury” you take for a abnormal event, rather than an everyday thing. Reinforced by pricing. We can argue about induced demand, but certainly from a business/mode share point of view, large cities should certainly think about exburban commuter stops (hint hint HS2).
It’s not quite commuter traffic, because Tokyo-Sendai is the same distance as Taipei-Kaohsiung.
There are what 6 stations just within 100km of Taipei along the THSR, including Hsinchu? Some station distances being less than 30km? Plus Taichung’s an hour away. That’s slightly less station density than the JR East’s North Kanto lines, but dense by Euro-HSR standards. And because the geography or Taiwanese urbanism is much more concentrated than Greater Tokyo’s suburb rail sprawl thanks to the mountains. With the west coast urban belt served by 1 legacy narrow guage line and 1 full HSR?
JR has north of Omiya has 2 branches of their big conventional network and Shinkansen, plus the relief lines south of Omiya (Saikyo, Keihin-Tohoku), plus the Tobu network competing into central Tochigi and Gunma.
Don’t get me wrong Inter-city is the backbone of any HSR system, but in densely populated urban corridors, that can very easily merge into commuter express line. And should especially if you aren’t capacity constrained in the way Tokaido Shinkansen is. Taiwan’s simpler network demands actually mean it should really lean into commuter service especially given the need to relieve housing demand in Taipei. They should do a new station between Banqiao and Taoyuan HSR once the new Taoyuan subway line to the airport is complete.
Yeah, but the ridership at the second cities is very high relative to modeled prediction too, it’s not really about supercommuting to Taipei.
Just checking, does the model account for cost of trip? I mean crude spot conversion of NTD and Yenn suggests comparable* journeys in Taiwan are what a 60% the cost in Japan?
*They aren’t entirely since Shin-osaka and co are further away than Taipei is to Kaoshiung.
No, which is why I am using different constants in Japan and Europe due to the different fares.
A model trained on Japanese data is hardly a neutral model to apply to Europe.
There is no neutral model to be had given the differences in geographies and societies.
Taiwan and Japan are also closed systems that are easier to comprehend than continental scale systems like Europe or China.
Its purposefully a crude model.
@Borners. That’s fine – then introduce that model in that way. Alon’s framing of it as ‘the model’ and expressing surprise at European systems outperforming it is frankly odd.
One reason why I believe we should invest more in regional and urban travel is that those people that travel by train are the subset that has a transit oriented lifestyle. Most people in Europe do not even have train on their radar.
We need to get more people out of their cars first. More people using transit for their every day life. Rail has a far higher share in Switzerland than in Spain. And those Swiss will actually take the train to Spain, even if it is difficult…
Personally having experienced your point, I have small kids and being able to go somewhere by train has been a huge plus choosing a vacation destination (small kids are a lot of logistics). Price, when you have to buy four or five tickets, is the other big factor. In this sense, it strikes my attention that, when I was a kid, we did family trips to places like Granada or Bilbao on night train, because it was the logical way to haul a full family at a reasonable price. Without eco activism, they had a business case. Now, apparently, they’re too expensive to run, or they run as a luxury product. Has the price of labor increased more than the cost of fossil fuels?
Did night trains have a business case, or were there simply no alternatives (before mass aviation) and they were a subsidised good?
I think it’s more a case that alternatives have become more attractive and more efficient. A high-speed trainset can earn 4 lots of revenue in a day for a 3-hour journey (500 seats each way for a 200m trainset) with two 8-hour shifts for crew, and an A320 does multiple trains in a day.
A night-train only earns one lot of revenue per 24-hour period with a far lower passenger density, and those passengers take up 1 whole staff shift (night shift workers probably need to be paid more too), and night trains have a far higher staff – passenger ratio.
And then let’s face it, it’s hard to argue a night train is more comfortable than a flight+hotel, and yet a night train has to be priced at a flight+hotel level to wash its face. HSR+hotel is the better competitor to flight+hotel than night trains. HSR can move 2tph all day volumes, a night train can only move 1 train per night.
The alternative to the discontinued Lusitania Madrid-Lisbon night train is a 10 hour bus trip. RENFE and CP stopped selling tickets on the 685 km relation because day trains required 3 changes, were slower than the bus, and more expensive than the airplanes. The Portuguese government told the Spanish one that the two capitals already have a fast connection, by air. At most, they would rather have a connection to Spain along a more northernly route than through the Extramadura province where Adif is slowly building high speed rail.
Along the way, the trenhotel between Barcelona and Galicia served towns where one cannot fly. I had a full size cabin and bathroom for some 120 Euros, when the recommended alternative to reach my conference was a flight to Barajas and 5 hours in a chartered bus. AVE will eventually offer an alternative but for the time being the single day train takes 9.5 hours. I don’t know what happened to the rolling stock that looked new.
Recently subsidies were secured and SNCF restarted night trains to small towns in the Pyrenees, Massif Central and Southern Alps. The daytime rail alternative would take between 6.5 and 7.5 hours. There are no commercial flights.
In summary, there are places without alternatives even after mass aviation. Most of the times, it is not even the case that daytime alternatives have become efficient. These night trains were canceled during the pandemic. At times, the annual loss was modest, a couple million Euros for the Lusitania, but these trains need subsidies. Unless the governments make an effort, they won’t run.
It’s difficult to argue that a sleeper train provides a worse experience than a 6am budget flight which involves leaving the house at 3am and getting up at 2am.
The cost of an airport hotel + flight is similar to that of a sleeper train.
Maybe I sleep exceptionally well on them or hate early mornings by a large amount but I would call an airport hotel plus early flight a wash with a sleeper train in terms of sleep quality.
Even so night owl + EV for next car must be enough to get a ~10% market share for a well run sleeper train.
@Matthew Hutton sounds like you do sleep exceptionally well. Also as a solo traveller the cost of a single-occupancy cabin on a sleeper train is often way more than a hotel + flight (or hotel + daytime HSR). If you are in a four-person sleeping car cabin or a six-person couchette you really are taking a comfort downgrade for what’s often a similar cost.
“It’s difficult to argue that a sleeper train provides a worse experience than a 6am budget flight”
That might be true (for some, as Weifeng notes sharing a sleeping cabin is very low for many/most people on the comfort/privacy experience) but unfortunately for your argument planes depart all day, and not just at 6am. Many times the odd hour departures/red eyes are for long haul flights where trains, even sleepers, cannot compete. What’s more, the tradeoff isn’t flight+airport hotel but flight plus the actual hotel at your destination. Finally many sleepers have odd hour departures or arrivals because not all city pairs are spaced to have optimum 10 or so hour trips for a full night’s sleep.
Especially with the European budget airlines there are lots of early and late flights because that helps them use the planes to maximum efficiency.
And sure there are flights in the middle of the day too and they are better, but often they do seem to take all day to complete the full journey.
“A night-train only earns one lot of revenue per 24-hour period” is not true. I believe you should know that in China CRH sleepers run short-turn non-sleeping services at daytimes as well.
In Europe they generally don’t, unless some of the Couchette carriages are turned into ‘daytime’ modes for 6pm departures or 10am arrivals – in which case your journey time is really uncompetitive.
You wouldn’t run a sleeper set on a daytime service out of choice and leave a ordinary daytime set in the depot, so such practices can only ever be a stop-gap or in exceptional circumstances.
They generally don’t compete with daytime flights or high-speed trains, but do have a niche market on very high volume O-D pairs. Before COVID-19, the market split between Beijing and Shanghai was roughly air : daytime high-speed trains : non-high-speed night trains = 1 : 1: 0.15 .
Caveat: Chinese night trains are generally faster than European counterparts, averaging 120 km/h or more on conventional lines. Thus, for cities ~1500 km apart, it’s either a 4-5 hour trip, door to door wise, via air or HSR, or a 12-13 hour one via night trains.
So the point is that in the context of decarbonisation, the only mode that can meaningfully compete with air on high-volume corridors is HSR. Night trains will only be a niche thing.
Beijing – Shanghai ought to have half-hourly ‘super-fast’ services on the high-speed lines and take majority mode share (at the moment the super-fasts are only every hour or every 2 hours). It’s doable with proper clock-face timetabling, and also putting stations on the correct lines (the smaller stations shouldn’t be on the HSL – they should be on the 160km/h classic Beijing – Shanghai line).
There is low/no carbon jet fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel
Sustainable aviation fuel is 2-3x more expensive than fossil fuels though.
Perhaps that’s politically viable for long haul but that is unlikely for short haul.
Prices are frozen forever and ever and ever?
I think there may be some mandatory pricing stupidity involved. As far as I know nowadays night trains have to pay full track access charges, as though they were competing with other trains for their slots, whereas at earlier times the monolithic national companies could correctly see that they were using empty track capacity.
(And yes, the labor efficiency of extracting and refining fossil fuels has increased massively.)
On the upside, some night train operators have realized that families would really like to be able to buy 4-bed sections of couchette cars as such, rather than individual beds in a section that stays “open”, and implemented this feature. (They have also been recently experimenting with various other layout options, most famously with individually encapsulating beds.)
I don’t have a problem with accurate charging. Access charges cover the incremental wear and tear and (depending on regime) may include a capacity element or some other mark-up. From a capacity standpoint night trains interfere with overnight possessions – the way Nightjets get diverted all over the place ad are always late show night train track access is far from a free commodity. The old way where night trains didn’t have track access charges accounted for in their costs were theoretically dodgy at best. If something needs to be subsidised make the subsidy transparent – don’t hide it.
Even with europeans not having the extreme american driving endurance, there’s also a lot of car trips to decarbonize on corridor, we always underestimate those because higher classes don’t really do that but many corridors have a lot more car travel than flight.
And oof course there’s also the matter of decarbonizing trucking by providing more capacity to rail freight.
Again, booting long-distance trains off to dedicated high-speed tracks increases capacity for local and regional passenger rail and freight.
Just like we build airports and roads we can build local transit whatever it is and long distance rail. And hospitals and upgrade sewer systems and dredge harbors and… It is possible for people to do more than one thing.
I believe Italy has given the thumbs up to building a bridge to Sicily. This will make for a nice rail link to the mainland of Europe, hopefully high speed rail.
Night trains did not disappear in Japan due to airline competition. The shinkansen did them in.
Re carbon: I suspect that, if fast trains are available to holiday destinations at family-reasonable costs, a significant number of people are less likely to drive automobiles to those destinations and are less likely to have large, petroleum-fueled autos.
Holiday destinations should be top priority for longer distance service IMO. At the moment you have to actively enjoy planning a trip by train for it to be viable.
Europe will hate that though – right now they assume everyone drives for holidays and so they can shut down their local transport systems for a month every summer for maintenance. However if people are not driving but instead taking the train they need a way to get around and now all the local transport systems are needed again. People can rent a car when they get there – but if you have to rent a car is quickly becomes much cheaper to just drive your car there. (I don’t live in Europe so I don’t know how the system works out for them, but I’ve long been of the opinion that their close for a month when everyone is on vacation is a system that is holding back transit adoption but they don’t realize it because they have always done things that way)
If “everybody” is on vacation who is doing the maintenance? Martians? Who is going to rent you a car?
I don’t think this is true at all?
Please, just stop typing. Please just stop typing. You don’t have to type. Nobody’s forcing you to type sequences of words and click “Reply”.
Subway ridership really does dip in August due to the summer vacation; in Paris it’s coordinated so that July is when people from elsewhere visit the city, and August is when Parisians leave town. But then intercity rail ridership has a vacation peak. The good practice is to reduce rush hour frequencies during the summer, as is done in Paris and Stockholm, but keep running peak intercity service. The bad practice (e.g. DB) is to also do some intercity rail shutdowns for maintenance.
@Henry: Where in Europe do you see regular shut-downs for summer maintenance? Europeans might be surprised to learn about them.
In most of Japan those are effectively inseparable in time. Expanding aerospace and HSR came at the same time at least nationally. The only regular night train the Sunrise Izumo-Seto pointedly has to stop at the major cities on the way and no cities in Europe are as large as Kansai or Greater Tokyo, only 5 are larger than Aichi. And airlines basically killed the only other viable service i.e. to Sapporo (although you could argue a lot of that is because of bad infra choices between Hakodate and Sapporo).
The real problem with night trains is they much more expensive to operate, you need special rolling stock that can only be used once a day reliably (esp in congested Japan). They have lower passenger density per m of train because you need toilets, showers, food as well bedspace, which also push you towards locomotives. And you have cross across different operators and their timetables.
Great points. High speed rail from New York to Florida could certainly compete with a lot of current flights not just to Florida but to the Caribbean.
By the way, I see you have a Facebook and X share links at the bottom of the article, did you know you can now also add a bluesky one? https://socialmediaforlearning.com/2024/11/24/wordpress-tips-adding-a-bluesky-sharing-button/
Thanks! I added Bluesky and Fedi sharing.
Nice! I came to this article from seeing you discuss it on bluesky so I figured you’d be interested haha.
If we could save 5% of aviation emissions by replacing short-haul flights with HSR that would be huge! Even more so as those emissions are more damaging in the sky than on the ground. Short-haul flights have the highest emissions per km. And it’s not just burning fuel—contrails also affect the climate significantly. Is there a good reason not to ban those flights? It may not be the strongest argument for HSR but why would anyone dismiss such an easy win?
As for long-distance travel, the vast majority of Northern Europeans vacationing in Southern Europe drive. Their martyrdom may not be environmentally motivated, but martyrs they are. It shouldn’t be difficult to lure them onto trains with convenient and affordable offers. Most important would be reducing train changes and integrating booking processes so that travelers can get a single end-to-end ticket. On speed the trains don’t even have to compete with planes, only with cars. Affordability, however, is the hard part as the cost of a train ticket rises much faster with distance than for planes.