Currently in Japan on an extended business trip and marveling at the Shinkansen…
Here’s some spectacular facts from the wiki article:
There has never been a fatality on the shinkansen since it has introduced in 1962 to this day from derailments or collisions…
in 2003, JR Central reported that the Shinkansen’s average arrival time was within six seconds of the scheduled time. This includes all natural and human accidents and errors and is calculated over roughly 160,000 Shinkansen trips completed
The time savings alone from switching from a conventional to a high-speed network have been estimated at 400 million hours, an economic impact of ¥ 500 billion per year.
Between Tokyo and Osaka, the two largest metropolises in Japan, up to ten trains per hour with sixteen cars each (1,300 seats capacity) run in each direction with a minimum headway of three minutes between trains.
as economic infrastructure it seems like such a game changer in overall productivity compared to the now obvious failures of mass air travel… Yes Japan has a high population density but it also has extremely mountainous terrain and is earthquake prone and they still make it work…
In Comparison construction across the empty midwest or texas in the US would be a piece of cake…
I don’t buy the population density argument, plenty of other places have economics that SHOULD make it work, so why / why can’t high speed rail of this standard work anywhere else… not just speed, punctuality and safety. How much of it is due to unique factors of Japanese culture?
It can. It has. There’s high speed rail in China, there’s high speed rail in France, in Spain, in Germany, in South Korea. There’s even limited high speed rail in the US, with the Acela trains from New York to Washington, which can reach speeds of 150mph, although the run’s average speed is only 80mph.
I believe that high-speed passenger rail in Japan and France runs on dedicated track, while the Acela shares its track with freight trains. Also, the curves are designed to be gentle to allow the train to maintain a fast speed. In other words, the whole system is built for speed. The Northeastern US is so developed that it would be fabulously expensive to acquire land for a new track run.
What makes you think Japan has the only high-speed trains? At the bottom of that Wikipedia page is a link to this, a list of other high-speed rail networks and experiments around the world. France, in particular, has been running TGVs for decades. I’ve done almost 300 km/h on a third-generation ICE between Brussels and Frankfurt.
I wouldn’t start laying tracks through the midwest or Texas just yet. Population density does matter; the places where there are the most potential passengers also tend to have most of the land already occupied with something else. There is the Acela corridor, though, from Boston, through New York City, and on to Washington, D.C. It’s not state-of-the-art, but it’s a step in the right direction and has been a commercial success.
You missed the point of my argument… not to the standard of Japanese Shinkansen…
I’ve used ICE and TGV… it’s nowhere near as good as Shinkansen in punctuality or safety… thats what I was getting at. Why is it that only the Japanese have really got high speed rail right?
This is an important point… in Japan the Shinkansen can and does compete with air travel because it’s so reliable… thats why there is no budget airlines in Japan, they just can’t compete with the bullet train network…
The same is not true everywhere else where rail is perceived as being a poor alternative to air… In japan the reverse is true for any domestic cities that are connected by Shinkansen
Why don’t you buy the population density argument? Its perfectly valid.
It’s the same reason that NYC and DC can and do have subways where Kansas City doesn’t. It’s a combination of factors, both that less people mean easier transit (less traffic) and fewer people to share the cost.
Similar arguments apply for long distance transit. Japan is small, the US is massive. For a rail to replace any significant amount of travel, an Entire infrastructure would have to be built. Not a rail line or two, thousands. There are currently lots of planes in the air going between different places, you’d have to provide a way for each of those planes to be replaced, or you’d just end up with another parallel transit system that took longer and wasn’t as popular (look at Amtrak).
So how many stops does this train make between NY and LA? Every city? That’ll add time in acceleration and deceleration. Skip cities? You’ll lose riders. How many trains and racks do you run? How many cities get stations, and in what order?
As far as I know, the Acela track is a dedicated passenger line. (Good thing, too. The weight of freight trains can cause tracks to shift or settle a bit, and high-speed track needs pretty tight tolerances.) It does share track with the passenger and commuter trains that feed New York City, and blending that traffic together is one of the things that limits the Acela’s speed.
They shut down the railways at night. You can have perfectly punctual trains anywhere in the world if you never have to schedule trains around track maintenance. Other countries (the UK for instance) keep the network running 24/7 and have to schedule trains around maintenance/put on replacement buses.
Although Tokyo greater area has 13 million, Osaka has only 2.6 Million. They are 550km apart. That was the first Shinkansen trunk and it’s still the busiest.
There are plenty of city combinations in the US with a greater total population and less distance apart but no high speed train connections…
Trains only work in areas of high population density. Even on a simple subway or El train, it only works in areas of high density, like NYC or Chicago. Even then a subway is only faster if you go from point to point, with no transfers.
America is too spread out. You could build the trains, but people wouldn’t use them. So you’d be paying taxes to subsidize them. Airplanes are quicker cars are more convenient.
For example in Chicago, it takes me, even in rush hour, only 20 minutes to get from my home to the John Hancock Building downtown. On a subway, hitting everything on just right (meaning when I enter the subway the train is there waiting) it takes 65 minutes. Usually it’s about 90 minutes.
Off peak times it can take about 2 hours, 'cause the trains don’t run as often. After midnight it’ll take 3 hours, 'cause the trains don’t synch up at all.
And public transit loses money.
The NE corridor train works in part because it’s so dense, which is my point. Many people take the train, because air routes are overcrowded and that’s the only option left. I worked for a hotel company headquarted in NYC and no one took that NE corridor train unless it was a last option.
We’re a long way from having a coast-to-coast network, but you don’t need passengers to ride from one end to the other to make a line a success. The Acela runs from Boston to Washington, but that’s about six hours. I don’t know if anyone takes that trip, and I don’t see Amtrak really advertising it or quoting ridership numbers. But a lot of people take Boston-New York, and New York-Washington. One track, one train, but it serves multiple city-to-city trips, even if end-to-end doesn’t make much sense.
Probably because the Japanese have got their regular trains to work right.
The no fatalities is partly due to the structure of the shinkansen tracks, which are elevated in populated areas, so there are no train crossings (with car roads).
There are several factors which have made the bullet trains successful. One is that the extensive local public transportation systems in the cities which are connected. This just allows riders to seamlessly extend their range.
They were able to build the bullet train track lines along side the existing train lines, which make the cost somewhat cheaper (although it was quite costly).
This is exactly what I mean. In Japan people fly because they can’t afford to take the Shinkansen…
Shinkansen is widely perceived as the easiest best option for travel between any two cities that they connect… That’s unique world wide… That’s what I’m asking… Not why don’t other countries have high speed rail… just why is it by far so successful here that it makes all other transport options look like a bad joke?
See my post above about a train line not just serving its end points. The map on that Wikipedia page shows about a dozen stops between Tokyo and Osaka. Some of the riders get on and off there. It’s not fair to compare that to U.S. cities of comparable size and distance, but farmland in between.
Except that there isn’t just farmland… Shinkansen stops at towns with 100,000 to 300,000 population and there’s plenty of those in the US between major cities. If there isn’t then it doesn’t stop and thats just fine.
I rode lots of trains in Germany, no one ever seemed to treat me like I was slumming.
If trains are viewed as second-class there, I can think of two reasons. They’re still building out their high-speed network (or were when I was last there), not all the busy routes and city pairs have track that can handle the highest speeds yet. And the trains have a very good highway network to compete with, although limitless cruising on the Autobahns is becoming rarer as time goes by.