Ok, well let’s take Chicago and Cleveland. Greater Chicago has about 10 million people, greater Cleveland has about 3 million. They are roughly 350 miles apart. Why aren’t the transportation options more like Tokyo-Osaka?
For one thing, average car ownership in Tokyo is about .5 cars per household. In Chicago, it is roughly double to triple that rate. If a Chicagoan wants to get to go to Cleveland, driving is a very viable option (if there is time to spare), whereas not so much for those in Tokyo, what with not owning a car, gas being about 40% more expensive, not to mention more than $100 in tolls.
So, up to four people can drive from Chicago to Cleveland and back for around $100. To take the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka and back, it is about $300 per person.
If you can’t afford the 5 hour drive, you could take a one hour flight for about $150, and the government need not invest billions of dollars in new rail lines and cars.
Without arguing whether this is the most optimal solution for transportation or not, I’m reasonably sure that this is the thinking that has stopped high speed rail from developing in the US along the same lines as in Japan.
Except they don’t mostly that car from chicago to cleveland is 1 or 2 people not 4, which changes the economics considerably. And that “one hour” flight actually takes 2-3 hours when you count checkin, waiting for baggage, airport security, congestion delays and all the other hassles that come with modern air travel.
In comparison, you turn up at a train station 5 minutes before the train for Shinkansen, there is zero queues, zero delays, zero security and zero time waiting for baggage. A 3 hour trip means 3 hours from walking into the station to walking out… no hidden extras.
The Wikipedia article linked to in the OP mentions that the Shinkansen cost billions and was unprofitable. In the US any discussion of high-speed rail is accompanied by questions about its cost and whether it will pay for itself. But meanwhile, the US did and does spend billions on its highway and airport systems. So I think it’s a matter of choice; the US chose to invest in its highways and airports, while other countries invested more in rail networks.
Think of it this way… the Tokyo metro area has 34 million and the Osaka metro area has 19 million. And there’s the Nagoya metro area in the middle with another 9 million. That’s 12 million more than the US’s NE corridor.
[QUOTE=Dewey Finn]
The NEC [North East Corridor] is immediately identified by the use of overhead wires and high speed rolling stock. Mostly operated and owned by Amtrak, the NEC offers the only true high-speed rail service in the United States, Amtrak’s Acela Express, as well as lower-speed conventional passenger trains. Freight trains also use the tracks.
[/QUOTE]
That’s news to me, I thought it was passenger-only.
However, the Boston-to-Washington track is owned by Amtrak (or so one online site claims). They’re not at the mercy of someone else’s schedule, and there might be restrictions on the freight trains to keep the tracks in good shape.
By the same argument is the US highway interstate highway system profitable? Key infrastructure is often unprofitable in private capitalist terms but it’s overall benefit to the economy is very hard to measure.
Something else I’ve always wondered about…the English-language announcements on the Shink invariably say “we will soon be making a BRIEF STOP at Location X.” The Japanese version doesn’t mention the brevity of the stop; it doesn’t have to.
Those train doors close ON TIME, although I supposed if I shoved my bum up against one to wait for my co-worker to scoot up the stairs and onto the train (guilty…), I could delay it a few seconds. But otherwise, those trains are on a super-tight schedule, and it makes the news if flooding or other circumstances force the train to stop or slow.
Could we force folk to abide by a rigorous train schedule in the US, do you think? I dunno.
That was my point. No one asks whether the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System was “profitable,” although it helps that one way that Eisenhower justified the vast expense was by saying it was critical for national security reasons.
he’s saying that you can’t compare the population density of the Tokyo Osaka route – which has 12 cities with populations over 100,000 in a route of 300 miles – with someplace like Texas, or the midwest where there is a total of absolutely nothing between moderately sized cities that are 300 miles apart.
Take the example of Chicago - Cleveland. There are only 2 cities with populations over 100,000 between Chicago and Cleveland: South Bend, IN (100,000) and Toledo, OH (300,000). Cleveland itself only has 400,000 residents. On the Tokyo-Osaka, it would be considered no more than a “town!” Chicago has less than the “only” 3 million living in Osaka.
So are they really going to build a high speed rail, costing billions of dollars to serve an urban population less than 4 million, where owning at least one car per adult in the household is the norm and indeed, part of the local identity?
Me no understand sentence. The marginal cost of driving a car from Chicago to Cleveland is around $100 and five or six hours, whether there is one person in the car or four. The marginal cost of taking the train from Tokyo to Osaka is $300 per person and roughly three hours.
Add another hour or more for travel to/from the airport. So you’re probably talking $150 per person, and about four hours of travel time.
Look, I have no doubt that some people would like to pay double the price of an airline ticket to avoid an extra hour of travel. But, so far, the government hasn’t seen the value of investing in both a first-class superhighway system and a first-class train system.
So don’t build that route then… There are other city pairs where the population densities do work. I’m not just talking about the US here either… there is “high speed rail” in the UK but it’s a bad joke compared to Japan’s rail. And the population density is plenty there in the UK… and it’s flat and there’s no earthquakes… but they still can’t make it work.
Another thing is that the airports are located far from the city centers, so a 5-hour trip from Tokyo to say Hiroshima on the Shink takes only an hour or so on the plane, but when you add in the time it takes to get to/from the airport (even though airports here still allow check-in 20 min before departure–awesome!), it’s pretty much a wash.
I have heard that the next generation of Tokyo-Osaka shinks will drastically cut the current roughly 2-hour ride down significantly.
For all intents and purposes, the Tokaido Shinkansen links two major metropolitan areas, Tokyo and Osaka. The largest city in between is Nagoya (population 2.2 million), but there isn’t a whole lot else. While living in Tokyo, I personally have never used the Shinkansen for any destination closer than Osaka.
And the Shinkansen line continues to Hakata, on the island of Kyushu. I have ridden the entire 730-mile route a couple of times. At this distance it’s still fairly competitive against airlines, in both travel time and cost. The actual trip takes much longer than an airline flight, but you don’t have to go out to the airport, and you don’t have to arrive 1 hour before departure (10 minutes is plenty, 5 if you have tickets already).
Plenty of people pay double or more to be able to work on the plane and be treated like people… not like cattle… that’s called “business class” and it’s the only reason airlines survive.
Note that ordinary seats in Shinkansen have power sockets and enough room to work on a laptop and seat pitch equivalent to premium economy at least…
We’re giving you the reasons why not, and you seem to accept that there may be reasons why the powers that be have thus far decided not to invest in such a system in the US.
To recap the main points that have been implied but perhaps not outright stated, it is not as though it is extremely difficult to get between larger cities in the United States. The current means (car and airplane, mostly) might be seen to be only 80% optimal, and although a bullet train may be 90% optimal, in general, the expense of investing in a large new infrastructure hasn’t been seen as a good investment for a relatively modest improvement in our transportation efficiency.
If you would like to start a debate on SHOULD we build a high speed rail system, and we have had many debates about that before, there’s another forum for that. But I think we’ve more or less answered the question about why the US hasn’t thusfar made such investments.
I was in Paris, and running late. Took a taxi from my hotel near the Arc de Triumphe to Gare du Nord, paid the driver and didn’t wait for my change, ran to the platform, got on the train and they closed the doors before I got to my seat. I don’t want to cut it that close ever again, but you can.
Who said I care about the US? My question is not why it can’t work in the US, there is major cultural barriers in the US… The far more interesting question to me is, is there unique cultural reasons why Shinkansen is so good in Japan? Can other countries achieve there the same thing or is there something that makes it only work in Japan?
The “Northeast Corridor” line is local NJ Transit that goes from Trenton to NYC by way of Hamilton, Princeton, New Brunswick, Newark and about ten other local stops. It’s a day-to-day commuter train for those going into NYC.
The Acela line is operated by Amtrak, and goes city-to-city. I think it only hits Trenton and NYC on that particular stretch.
The problem - alluded to above - is that that stretch of NJ is very densely populated so those two lines share tracks. At some points, there are 4 to 8 parallel sets of tracks on that stretch, but most of the time you’re dealing with only 2 or 3.