It's the daily life and the local journeys that have the biggest impact. Which is why the obsession with aviation is so flawed
I fully agree that we need to deal with the daily life elements, however we can't just ignore other bits because they are small.
If you look at the majority of my posts I talk about cars and how we need to reduce our use of them. Primarily by walking, cycling and public transport.
HS2 has a part to play in that, in that we need to cater for the majority of trips which people will make for them to give up on the idea of personal car ownership (even just give up on the ideal of 2+ car ownership would be a huge step forwards), that means making sure that (as an example) XC services have more capacity on them by switching the longer distance passengers to HS2 (remembering that the original HS2 plan would have cut the Southampton to Newcastle fastest journey times by at least an hour and offering a more frequent service at that speed). By doing so it would allow more passengers to use XC services between adjoining stops for the very day to day travel we need to improve.
Yes XC need longer trains, however they need them as well as the extra capacity released by building HS2.
HS2 was based on rail growth of 2.5% per year, for several years from 2009 onwards growth was higher than this across the whole network. Leading to, for example, London/West Midlands rail use growing from a baseline of 100 in 2009 to 180 in 2019, when it "should" have only grown to 128 if the 2.5% growth was correct.
Even though growth rates were lower in the latter years, 2.5% growth on 128 passengers is an extra 3 passengers, to grow an extra 3 passengers when you've got 180 of them growth only needs to be 1.78%.
It's why ALL rail investment is needed, it's why the £30bn of spending by Network Rail in the 10 years to 2019 is important. It could never be like some of the European networks where it was HS rail at the expense of local rail and of our every for like that then I'd have argued strongly for it not to be like that. However it hasn't been, much as many have said that it would be. The last few years, due to COVID, have depressed the investment due to keeping services running, however there's still investment in TPU, East West Rail, Portishead, etc.
The point I was highlighting with regards to HS2 was that if it was the catalyst for a policy which was similar to that which France has brought in on internal flights, the concern which some have over embedded carbon could be dealt with swiftly - even though it's a small amount of our overall carbon emissions.
However, it should also be remembered that once you offer a viable alternative option people do use it. I have a friend who loves flying, however they very much prefer using Eurostar to get to France.
Yes HS2 could fix 40% of domestic flights, however it's about rail capacity first and foremost. Rail capacity for travel long distances, but also to free up capacity too run more local services too and to carry more freight.
It could also mean they the cost of carrying each passenger falls, as there's far more passengers, which puts the finances of the railways in a better position.
By shortening journey times you need fewer resources to run the same services. Running 3tph London/Manchester using 11 coach 390's requires 165 coaches and 15 drivers at any given time (not allowing for spares), HS2 can do it with 16 coach trains at 3tph and only need 144 coaches and 9 drivers. As such the cost per train is less, even though the trains can carry nearly double the number of passengers (1,050 seats would be 1.8 times the number of seats of an 11 coach 390).
It's why the maths for making the 390's 12 coach units never really stacked up, as you'd need 180 coaches compared to HS2's 144 and you'd still be looking at no more than 2/3 of the capacity of a HS2 train.
With that sort of uplift in capacity but still with a reduction in operating costs the financial situation of the railways would be much healthier.
As of the existing trains costs £1 million per day, even with higher costs per coach and per driver for HS2 services you could expect those costs to fall, for argument sake let's say to £0.95 million (a 5% fall even though there's 13% fewer coaches and 40% fewer drivers). Over an 15 hour day with 11 coach 390's providing 1,767 seats an hour in each direction that's a cost of £18.86 per seat. Now with HS2 with train with 1,000 seats per train that cost falls to £10.56 per seat. (The actual costs don't really matter, as they'd still show the same sort of fall, in that if the original costs were £100 per seat the HS2 costs would be £56 per seat).
That gives the TOC more scope to offer cheaper tickets and still cover their costs, by having cheaper tickets it atracts more people to use the trains, and in turn they are less likely to drive for that trip. If that trip is their main justification for owning a car, then they are less likely to own a car, and if they don't own a car they are more likely to walk/cycle local journeys.
Likewise, if there's few domestic flights, the cost of a transfer flight increases, which means it's more expensive for someone not in London to travel internationally if there isn't a direct flight from their nearby airports. That in turn could reduce long haul flights (probably not by much, but by a little), with middle distance flights (where there's enough local demand to fly to a destination - for example people may reduce their travel to South or Central America instead heading to North Africa) taking up the slack.
Now with fewer non London passengers some long haul flights could become less viable, meaning that there's more need to hop to elsewhere in Europe to get the range of designations. However if other places are also reducing domestic flights or other short distance flights, (especially with more people choosing not to fly or not to fly as much) it could lead to other hub airports also loosing some of their destinations.
As such whilst domestic flights are a small amount of all aviation emissions their existence could encourage international flights, which otherwise wouldn't happen without them. Therefore the total aviation emissions lost by cutting London/Scotland flights could actually be higher than just that created by the flights themselves and AIDS up in reducing our emissions from international flights as well. This is because those with the largest carbon emissions are often frequent flyers (1% of the UK population takes 20% of international flights).
The other thing to note, is that rarely are people traveling from airport to airport. Now given that rail allows travel from much closer to home to much closer to where they are going to it is likely that the associated travel emissions for rail are lower.
Take for example someone living in Winchester and going to Manchester, if they go by train they can join at Winchester Station and travel to the city centre in Manchester. If they are flying they would have to travel to Southampton or one of the London airports (which could even be Luton or Stansted) and then from Manchester Airport to the city centre, which could add a fair amount of carbon emissions depending on how they travel. It's not unlikely that such emissions (potentially not in this case, but generally so) could be car based, so the switch from flying to train would likely reduce car emissions as well as aviation emissions.
No, but that's because we build them so badly. We don't have to. 500m from where I'm sitting, there is a four storey block of flats with huge covered balconies the size of a decent room. It can be done
It can be done, you also have to beat in mind a lot of suburban housing has parking and garage space which isn't that much smaller than the footprint of the building.
To highlight this take a look at Minehead, the town is quite a lot larger than the Butlins (easily 5 times the size, if not more). Yet the population of Minehead is 12,000 whilst the capacity of the Butlins is 10,000. Whilst there a lot of 1 or 2 bedrooms with a shower room which increases the capacity significantly, it's also true that it saves a lot of space by not needing to cater for cars on site by just having them all parked in 2 large car parks.
