China and Japan race to dominate the future of high-speed rail – The Japan Times | Hacker News Reader

China and Japan race to dominate the future of high-speed rail – The Japan Times

japantimes.co.jp

27 pointsmardiyah24 comments

High speed rail has a small niche for routes a few hundred km between two large cities. Any shorter and the car becomes more convenient, any longer and the plane becomes cheaper and faster.

Lots of cities where people dont own cars, so the car is actually less convenient (most of the world where high speed rail is even a consideration).

Planes are only cheaper and faster when you don't care about land usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and maximum ridership. Additionally, the maglev trains that this article is about have a top speed even more comparable with flight - Tokyo to Osaka will be 67 minutes, same as a flight - but without needing to arrive early, go through security, or commute an hour at each end to get to/from the airport.

Agreed, I have friends who were traveling to and from Osaka and Tokyo frequently, and even though the current journey is around 3 hours vs 1 hr for the planes, they still preferred the train since you don't have to deal with security, nor go to a far-flung airport, nor have to be in cramped seats, nor ride a car at all, plus the environmental impact is far less [1].

[1] https://global.jr-central.co.jp/en/company/about_shinkansen/

Tokyo-Osaka is definitely a prime example where it makes a lot of sense. In an close-to-ideal system (like Japan) you could reach major cities 1200km apart (by rail) in 4h, 300kph average. For longer distances than that, the plane becomes indeed more reasonable. That means in US terms, you could do NYC - Chicago in roughly half a day by train, arriving relaxed and being able to work all the way through. If you've never taken a Shinkansen - please try it when you go to Japan. I've never experienced a smoother, more relaxing and more comfortable train than this.

The Chinese ones also feel similar, like they carbon copied the experience, and are (probably artificially) super cheap, so if you visit China sometime I’d recommend their high speed rail too! (The Shanghai airport maglev is impressive as well, though it doesn’t go to a particularly convenient location unfortunately as of when I last was there lol) I’ve taken pretty long high speed rides there, like Shenzhen to Shanghai and Xi’an to Beijing. Smooth experience and makes you wonder why the US is still not doing it...

because the us doesnt have a whole bunch of 5m+ pop cities within 2hours of each other...

there are a bunch within 4 hours however, counting by metro population. Boston - NYC - Philadelpha - DC is the most obvious candidate for a dedicated 300-350kph HSR, that investment should be a no-brainer. Further candidates: Chicago - Cleveland - Pittsburgh - Philadelphia, SF - San Jose - Bakersfield (for connectivity) - LA - San Diego, Dallas - Houston.

And if you look internationally, the Detroit-Windsor-Toronto-Montreal-Quebec City corridor is in a line with a number of intermediate cities

Because nearly every hsr route in the world loses money (eg CRC is 770 billion in debt) and the U.S. lacks enough high density city pairs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_...)

Point of public transit isn’t to make money by fares, it’s to generate value at the destinations. I find it silly how people complain that American rail in general loses money, without addressing the fact that American rail systems make horrible use of the real estate of their stations - in most of Asia there’s huge mixed apartment, office, retail complexes on every station owned by the rail companies - and guess what it’s good for business when you build a human funnel into real estate you control, see how profitable JR/HK MTR are.

Even the Shinkansen lines had a lot of their debt forgiven when they transitioned from public to private assets

Lots of highways and airports and bus lines lose money/exist only because of government support. Being profitable as a sole concern doesn't account for any of the benefits from transportation options existing.

Actually EDIT: the experience on the trains is similar, though the experience at the stations aren’t as good - they made them more like airports in China so there’s security checks, and boarding time at gates, so it’s somewhat less convenient; also the stations in Japan are part of the actual city while the stations in China are their own huge plazas disconnected from the actual city so the seamless transition from being in the city to getting on the train in Shinkansen is lost on Chinese rail. Nonetheless, an enjoyable system

> Planes are only cheaper and faster when you don't care about land usage

The land that airports use is negligible compared to hsr tracks

Rail tracks spend land in small amounts along their length. The terminals are pretty compact and can be largely put underground, so you can arrive to, or depart from, the very busy central areas of e.g. NYC, or London, or Paris, or Tokyo.

Planes do not require land under the flight path, but require colossal lumps of land for airports. These may be harder to allocate near a city, and you have to spend 40-60 minutes to get from an airport to the busy central areas of NYC or London.

This is a tradeoff, like most things in life.

HSR can be put underground. And since urban land is expensive, the rails are put underground. 90% of the Chuo Shinkansen will be underground[0]. The first section of the proposed Northeast Maglev in the US will be 75% underground[1]. The Hokkaido Shinkansen extension will be 76% tunnels (and only 7% at grade - the other 17% is bridges and viaducts) [2][3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Maglev [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaido_Shinkansen [3] pdf warning https://www.mlit.go.jp/common/000215188.pdf

Trains free up your time for driving. Also the train boarding and deboarding overhead is much lower.

that's a hell of a niche given that it probably describes the distances between countless of population centres on the globe. As the article points out, it's a 2 trillion dollar industry.

Exactly: large cities a few hundred km away. This is the typical landscape of much of Japan, much of China, especially coastal, much of Europe.

It's not much of North America, though, except a few coastal agglomerations. North America is quite sparsely populated — maybe not as sparsely as Siberia or Sahara, but not near European levels, to say nothing of Japan or south of China, so high-speed rail makes relatively little sense here.

Is there actual evidence that it wouldn't work, or we're making an assumption? That is what makes it work in those places but to say it could never work in North America because of that I think is crazy. I think it would connect more sparsely populated areas to the rest of the continent better than the interstate system. If it's convenient, people will use it, and if it's anything like the Shinkansen, then people will definitely use it.

The biggest problem in the USA specifically is not where the population centers are but simply politics. It's not necessarily that it can't work, it's that there's a lot of money invested into making sure it never happens.

It does work im North America where the density is high enough; when I need to do from NYC to Philadelphia, I take a train.

But a lot of other areas in the US (to say nothing of Canada) are way less dense. I can arrive on a train into the center of Philadelphia, but is there a center of Silicon Valley? A center of LA or Houston? A center of anything in Nebraska?

> At stake is a share of the estimated more than $2 trillion global market for rail infrastructure projects.

I could be wrong, this spending is mostly in domestic China, right? Japan is that foolish to believe they have a chance there?

Seems like there's a lot of proposed high speed rail projects around the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_high-speed_rail_by_co...

Meanwhile, around last christmas this happened:

[1] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-12/23/c_139613705.htm

[2] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-12/24/c_139615873.htm

[3] https://www.railfreight.com/railfreight/2021/01/05/new-claim...

I have no clue how production ready that really is, when they will be in service, and to be honest the shown operation in the video from the second link looks not that smooth, but it is thinking out of the box for delivery of boxes :-)

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