I will give you a hint. The ellipsis has a place, and that place is not in every paragraph.
Second, you can link to things but you cannot understand them. And you fail to do even that usefully. The fact that you know nothing about the geopgraphy or urban layout of Japan, yet use that as the basis for your entire argument (an argument which I repeat shoudl not even be in this section of the fotrum), deafens with its silence. You know jack squat about economics. Try to learn something, and you will suddenyl find that HSR is (amazingly) not in the least bit an easy choice. At BEST, it is a monumentally expensive choice applicable only to certain locations. Treating it like the automatic go-to choice is based on emotion, not any form of reason.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Once again, no actual logic or argument from you at all. Where’s your reasoning? Read my very first post with the statistics on Shinkansen safety and punctuality then every other point I’ve made.
Are you seriously trying to say that the current US system of regional hub air traffic with it’s chronic delays, runway shortages, ridiculous security that treats you like a criminal for having too much hair gel and 2 hour + additional add on time for every single journey (thats when things are going well) actually works? Are you happy with it?
I run my own small company (successfully thanks very much), and have travelled for business in the US, UK, mainland europe, Australia and Japan. The US is by far the worst to travel in for business, Japan by far the best, and then EU, UK and Australia in that order.
Have you ever actually left the US and seen how bad normal US domestic travel is compared to the way things are done elsewhere? (Going to Mexico, Canada or any other country that you don’t need a proper passport for doesn’t count.)
If Car and Plane users paid the real user cost for all the infrastructure they use and the cost of the environmental degradation caused by individual road and plane travel then the economics of HSR would be totally different.
Well yes, this was exactly my point. The Japanese Shinkansen are popular because they are punctual. They are punctual because they run on dedicated tracks that get shut down every night between midnight and 5am for maintenance. The UK doesn’t have dedicated tracks for fast passenger services. Even heavily used routes in the UK like the West and East coast mainlines are shared between passenger and freight services and never shut down. Hence it isn’t a mystery why British trains are less punctual than the Shinkansen.
So what’s stopping dedicated lines being built in the UK? Yes, yes the exorbitant costs I know. But hey The UK government paid 37 billion pounds to bail out it’s own banks, I’m sure you agree that was a good use of money? How much of a dedicated high speed rail network would that have bought?
Strictly speaking, you need a proper passport to go to any of those countries.
Geography is the determining factor. Cologne to Duesseldorf? Trains would be acceptable, but they’re so close that a car is more convenient. Cologne to Tours? Too many transfers and too much wasted time. Better to fly (or as I did, drive). Geography has a lot to do with it, especially in a rat-hive-like environment like Japan.
How would you propose I get from Detroit to Las Vegas? Detroit to Chicago, Chicago to Boise, Boise to Dallas, Dallas to Phoenix, then Phoenix to Las Vegas? What a crock! I can either fly directly, or go through a single hub.
In Mexico, passenger train service (not metros) has been so unprofitable, there’re only two lines left, period. One of those barely counts, and the other one is mainly used by tourists. Mind you, the rail infrastructure in Mexico is superb; goods move all over the country. That’s what rail is good for as an infrastructure in non rat-like environments. It turns out that I have suppliers all within a six hour drive, so no passenger rail is needed. Anything further, and planes are better than trains anyway.
High speed rail only tends to serve passengers. Every other means of physical communication serve as true infrastructure in that they transport goods. That’s where we invest our resources.
If you assume costs are linear in the length of the track put down, then about 300 miles worth, given they just spent over £5 billion building a 60 mile high speed link between London and Folkestone. But assuming costs are linear in the length of track is absurd, if for instance we consider the WCML between Manchester and London. Try converting that to a high speed line and:
More land has to be acquired either side, as its one of the two busiest lines in the UK. Simply removing a track and replacing it with a high speed line isn’t going to cut it, as so much existing freight and passenger traffic uses it.
You somehow have to find this land for a new track in the three most populated connurbations in the UK: Greater London, Greater Birmingham and Greater Manchester.
You have another fiasco with “in cab signalling” technology and trying to convert the length of the WCML’s signals.
I don’t understand this thread. Are we arguing about the merits of rail in the United States? Or are we arguing about whether high speed rail works anywhere else besides Japan? Because those are two different questions, and the OP seemed to ask the second, but now it seems the thread is arguing the first.
I mean, it’s easy to find places in the world outside Japan where HSR works. It’s even easier if you look for particular routes, such as Paris to Brussels, as I mentioned above. It’s also easy to find places in the world where HSR wouldn’t work.
The hub system works fairly well if you live in or near a major market. It can be frustrating as hell if you live in (or are trying to get to) a smaller market.
In the U.S. Midwest, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Cincinnati are all hubs for one or more airlines. But…those are exactly the sorts of cities which are being proposed to be connected via HSR. Most of the smaller markets (such as, say, Grand Rapids, Green Bay, or Cedar Rapids) would be just as underserved by HSR as they have been by the airlines.
“2 hour + additional add on time for every single journey” is hyperbole. Yes, the post-9/11 security checks took a long time at first. I travel a fair amount, and, in the past few years, I’d say that, for 90% of my flights, getting through the security checkpoint took no more than 10 minutes.
The link says this:
For example, in the United States, few people realize that direct taxes on automobiles and gasoline barely cover two thirds of the cost of road building, maintenance, administration and safety.
This actually agrees entirely with my statement that motorists pay for highways entirely and for half the cost of local streets. Because of the much higher traffic volumes on highways, and the history of how they were financed, I think it’s entirely proper to allocate a larger portion of user fees to them, and consider them self-financing. The raw figures here.
Aviations Economic Downside: http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/reports/2004/AED3.htm
Article on the hidden subsidies for aviation.
[/QUOTE]
This report, you will note, piles on various externalities to arrive at its conclusion. It includes all sorts of external costs, but no external benefits. My claim is only that the direct costs of commercial aviation in the US are paid by users.
BTW, 9 million+ people rode the Boston-NYC-Washington Amtrak route in 2009 (both regional and Acela service), making it three times more active than even the [url=http://www.transtats.bts.gov/]busiest air route in America[/ur]. Which, at 3.35 million, is Chicago-NYC. This confirms my feeling, which is that taking the train to DC is by far the preferred mode of transport compared to flying.
Rail service already IS very sucessful in the Northeast Corridor. Only 3 other corridors had ridership over 1 million. (Pacific Surfliner Service (San Diego-Los Angeles-San Luis Obispo, 2,592,996), Capitol Corridor Service (San Jose-Oakland-Sacramento-Auburn, 1,599,625) and the Keystone Corridor Service (Harrisburg-Philadelphia-New York City, 1,215,785).
These are absurd understatements. Osaka may have a population of 2.6 million within the designated city limits, but the city limits are imaginary lines and have absolutely no relation to the urban agglomeration or actual population. Osaka as an unbroken urban area is closer to 17 million people - it is as large as New York City. Characterizing its transportation demand as being of a city of 2.6 million is like saying that JFK airport only serves Brooklyn’s 2.8 million people.
Similarly, Tokyo is a metropolitan center of at least 30 million people, maybe closer to 40, depending how you define it; it’s the largest city in the world.
So to imagine the economies at play here, imagine New York City was twice the size it actually is, and then pretend Los Angeles was only 500 kilometres away. That’s the equivalent of Tokyo and Osaka. It would be a gold mine for high speed rail.
There are no two cities anywhere in the United States with a greater population than Tokyo and Osaka, at any distance. The Tokyo metro area is as large, and arguably larger, than New York and Los Angeles combined. Throw in Osaka and you have more people than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined. And they’re a heck of a lot more than 550 km apart.
Meh. The Acela Express only averages 72 mph between DC and Boston. While admittedly about 2 hours or so faster than traditional service, most of this is simply because the Northeast Regional trains make more stops. And, at a cost of ~$200, flying is often in the same ballpark and is faster (notwithstanding standing in line at a TSA checkpoint). [sources are the Wiki article “Acela Express,” amtrak.com’s schedule, and personal experience.]
Also, according to the FRA’s specs, a train is only “high speed” when it is traveling in excess of 125mph.
Yes, but I live in Boston, and I don’t see Amtrak advertising the Acela for trips to Washington. How are the Boston-New York City and NYC-Washington routes in terms of cost and time?
constanze and Schnitte, according to a family member who is now living in your country, air travel is not nearly so time consuming and tedious, in terms of airport security, as it is in the USA. If so, this would appear to be a serious problem for the railroad.
I hope you’re not going to end up like us, with your passenger rail systems decimated.
I can’t really compare since I haven’t been to the U.S. since 9/11, but I imagine there might be some truth to it. I fly quite a lot domestically these days, and if I don’t check in luggage and go straight to the security check, it’s usually sufficient to arrive at the airport about 20 minutes before boarding time (i.e., 50 minutes before departure). That usually gives me enough time to clear security and get to the gate (that is Frankfurt airport, with relatively long walking distances within the airport), although YMMV, of course, depending on length of queues and the delay of the flight.
/rimshot