https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen
A shame it's a largely useless and incredibly expensive prestige prospect that's not even projected to become profitable until 2070, but that's another story.
* Shinkansen is Shin/kan/sen, shin means new, so old shinkansen is a bit funny.
Another reason was Tokaido Shinkansen was extremely utilized (it goes every a few minutes) before covid. Now this era with remote work, big companies (primary customer in workday) become realizing that they don't have to pay for train to meeting but just able to use Zoom. There are doubt is before-covid level demand reviving while we're in population decreasing situation..
I wish that’s how we looked at public transit in the US. Amtrak would be taking us coast to coast in a matter of hours at this point.
If you can supply say 20,000 passengers a hour for 15 hours a day - 300,000 passengers a day - then you just need the population centres.
A 600kph maglev from New York to LA would take 7.5 hours. A flight takes 5.5 hours, so not much in it, especially if it were downtown to downtown.
For New York to Chicago it would take about 2h10, same as a plane.
Unlikely to provide 300k passengers, but if you added branches at each end and were routed Boston, NY, Washington branches meeting in western PA, then heading to Chicago (meeting a Toronto branch perhaps), Denver, Vegas then at the Western end splitting to LA, San Diego, Phoenix, San Francisco you might be able to occupy the bulk of the route tracks enough.
Crucially you don't need to stop every train at every stop, as that adds big time penalties.
Of course you're talking 6000km of maglev track minimum, and maglev means you can't just run it on traditional lines for the last 10 miles into the city.
JR will make up the difference renting space at the new rail stations. It also isn’t very useless, a lot of people go between Tokyo and Nagoya (and I assume they plan to extend to Osaka), so this will just make those trips faster, creating even more integration in the corridor.
This is something I just don't understand about transit design in the US. Why don't we take advantage of the property value increases next to transit?
The actual concern is whether it helps the people and business of the country to thrive.
Like think of the US highways... extremely not profitable to the government, but our country would fall apart without them.