Comment by asdajksah2123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdajksah2123 | Hacker News Reader

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There are about 3 flights between Tokyo and Nagoya taking about 1hr10 mins. There are 33 bullet trains taking about 1hr 30 mins.

The bullet train is almost certainly faster than the flight when factoring in security, distance from the city center, etc.

And even if this ends up replacing all air travel between Tokyo and Nagoya, you're talking about 500 people each way per day. That's a fraction of 1 of the 33 bullet trains that already run between these 2 cities.

I don't disagree with this project. But it's evident that the project simply doesn't make sense in itself. It's clearly a Proof of Concept that Japan is using to be able to sell MagLev technology abroad in places which currently do not have existing high speed trains and will be choosing between paying a lot of money for bullet trains, or slightly more money for an even faster Maglev train.

Which is a significant justification IMO, but that's a very different justification from saying that this new MagLev line makes sense in of itself.

There are far more than 33 shinkansen trains between Tokyo and Nagoya. Today there are 127. There is some variance in how long it takes depending on time of day and number of intermediate stops, but most are less than 1h40m.

It basically never makes sense to fly between the two cities. I'm not sure you'd even make it from the entrance to Haneda to the exit of Centrair faster by plane than by train (it takes ~3 hours by train, including 2 transfers. About half the time is on the Shinkansen...). Maybe you can do it in less than 2:30 by plane. It could make sense to connect airplanes in some cases, I guess.

It makes sense to fly to Nagoya if you are transferring from another plane. And they could service it with puddle jumpers. It is too bad that Haneda or Narita aren't serviced by Shinkansen stations themselves, then you would just take the train.

It's a pretty quick 20 minute ride on a local train from Haneda to Shinagawa station. Narita is a bit tougher, yes.

(source, I went to Nagoya for a conference last summer...)

Who’s to say there wouldn’t be more flights per day if the airlines didn’t need to compete with 33 bullet trains per day?

If those 33 trains were operating full you'd need more than 100 flights to replace them.

It sounds like a flight is 3-6x worse than the bullet trains in terms of energy/passenger/mile, with no ability to go zero emissions. (Trains vary)

Tokyo to Nagoya (Japan's 4th largest city, and 3rd largest metro) seems really reasonable, especially since it is midpoint to Osaka, and that's where they eventually want the maglev to go. The idea is probably more to add capacity to the Shinkansen network then to replace air travel, and faster trains do allow you to make more trips a day. The Tokaido shinkansen is probably just full, or close to full, and this is one way to expand capacity (the route is different, so they still need to keep the old one around to serve communities between).

I think this is unlikely to replace all flights either- the flights that do exist are probably for people arriving in Narita to get to Nagoya more quickly than getting out of the airport, taking a 1 hour local train to central Tokyo, then take a Shinkansen to Nagoya vs just walking to another gate. For pretty much every other use case the train is probably cheaper and faster.

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