Roads are obviously worse but I’m not sure about airplanes.
They’re measuring energy per passenger/km but I think ignoring the cost of building the infrastructure (the “get data” link is down). For roads and railways infrastructure investments are huge, both initial construction and then maintenance. Not only in dollars, in CO2 as well.
Arguably, two planes crashed and we put hundreds of planes out of service worldwide just in case until we could fix it.
Also, as someone who's been in an Amtrak derailment: The severity of the derailment matters a lot. Many are small, and trains can go right around them on the adjacent track. Also note that derailments are much less common in countries with more modern, higher quality rail infrastructure.
Trains aren't hurricane proof either so we can take those right off the table. Of the rest, it takes very exceptional storms to blockade an airport for more than a few minutes. Delays that occur because of snow and fog are not because the commercial airliners can't fly in those conditions, but because the ground infrastructure can't clear the snow quickly enough, or because the reduction in visibility means increasing separation requirements on approach to landing and therefore reduces overall throughput. In places where it snows a lot there exists sufficient infrastructure to handle it (Chicago, Denver, Moscow). Even thunderstorms are not typically a big problem for commercial airliners and their airports; the controllers declare holds while the storm passes directly overhead and they're back in business in under an hour. And hubs that systematically are hammered by storms aren't hubs for much longer, a luxury that any railroad executive would kill for.
This is particularly impressive if you compare average airliner delays to average Amtrak delays.
Modern airliners are remarkably good at handling typical bad weather.
Exceptional storms still happen a lot more often than train derailments. It doesn't take a hurricane.
I was in one of the last flights to land at EWR on February 25 before all the area airports were closed for 12 hours. From the ground it was a moderately windy day. In the air, it was scary as hell, and the first time I vomited on a plane, with about a quarter of the other passengers.
There were no derailments or train delays that day.
> because the ground infrastructure can't clear the snow quickly enough, or because the reduction in visibility means increasing separation requirements
Only true for airports in the middle of big flat nothing. If there're mountains around, bad weather or visibility makes landing too unsafe, unacceptably so for commercial airlines.
Even volcanic eruptions crop up with surprising frequency and result in vast disruptions to air traffic. Those disruptions can last for weeks and can shut down a single hub or potentially multiple hubs across a region depending on which way the ash cloud blows.
As an example, every few years the volcano on Bali comes to life and hundreds, if not thousands, of flights get delayed or canceled.
They’re measuring energy per passenger/km but I think ignoring the cost of building the infrastructure (the “get data” link is down). For roads and railways infrastructure investments are huge, both initial construction and then maintenance. Not only in dollars, in CO2 as well.