Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> And even going 3 stations from Shibuya to Shinjuku will cost you 2 dollars on the Yamanote line. You could easily spend 10 dollars a day on a daily basis just getting around the city, and multiply that by the number of people who use the system, and it's a fortune.

Fun fact: Shinkansen tickets are about the same price as Acela Express tickets. Except the Japanese trains are unsubsidized while Amtrak is heavily subsidized (Congress pays capital costs). And the Japanese trains are fast and reliable, while Amtrak is the opposite of those things.

Also: minimum D.C. Metro fare in peak hours is $2.25. Metro is also a disaster, with tunnels catching fire, etc.

View on HN

I was curious, so did a quick check. It's even worse than you describe! I did a comparison between Tokyo->Kyoto (~280mi, ~US$123, 2h18m) and NY->DC (~230mi, US$198, 2h55m). That comes out to $0.44/mi @ ~122mph on the Shinkansen, and $0.86/mi @ ~79mph on the Acela. So the Shinkansen is both cheaper (by almost half!) and faster (1.5x!), even without Amtrak's usual delays and unreliability.

I was in Japan this past summer and took a Shinkansen train from Odawara to Yokohama. It was about 37 miles in 16 minutes, and only cost ~US$18. It felt magical in a way that train travel in the US just can't compete with.

Just throwing this out there, buy JR Passes if you are going to be traveling a lot via Shinkansen (especially if you did what we did, Osaka->Kagashima->Kumamoto->Beppu->Nagasaki->Hiroshima->Kyoto->Osaka), it's worth it.

JR passes are phenomenal value, and give you a lot of flexibility. We once caught the wrong train from Nara and ended up in Osaka instead of Kyoto. No big deal: the next Shinkansen was a fifteen-minute wait, made the 50km trip in about the same amount of time, and cost us zero dollars on top of what we'd already paid for our passes.

D.C. Metro is a special case as far as world metro systems go.

Fast, Cheap, Reliable - pick none, should be their slogan.

Fast, Cheap, Reliable - pick none, should be their slogan.

"WMATA: It probably won't catch on fire today"

All these comparisons are unfair, because Japan had the good fortune to be bombed into oblivion in the 1940s, enabling them to start with a more or less clean sheet and 20th century technology.

In western cities (apart from Germany, also conveniently bombed) our train systems are stuck compensating for bad decisions made in the 1880s, and then the further bad decisions made in every subsequent decade to ameliorate those bad decisions. It's the physical equivalent of maintaining 150 year old legacy code written in Linear A (if you will pardon the mixed metaphor) except that you can't just throw it out and start again because you'd have to demolish tens of thousands of houses.

"Good fortune" might be a weird phrase to use, but sure.

I think it's reasonably valid to use this excuse for, say, why the NYC subway is so far behind Tokyo's train system. Maintaining a system as old as NYC's requires so much money and time that there's little left over for upgrades.

But there's no excuse for a regional train like the Acela being so slow, expensive, and unreliable when compared to the Shinkansen. It's certainly difficult to do major upgrades in a constrained area like NYC, but upgrading tracks and signaling and the trains themselves in the mostly-open areas between (say) NYC and DC is a lot easier (even if you can't touch the last couple miles on each route due to city density, you can still make tons of improvements in between). And given that the US gov't gives Amtrak tons of money, and they still collect 2x as much as the Shinkansen does from passengers on a passenger-mile basis, it's shameful how poorly that money is managed.

There was an article posted on HN months ago that talked about per-mile transit construction costs in various countries, and how construction in the US costs so much more. I don't recall if there was a conclusion as to why, but it seemed to be a combination of gov't and union waste.

Japan has been running trains since the 1800s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_J...

> Stage 1, from 1872, the first line, from Tokyo to Yokohama

Reply on news.ycombinator.com