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Comment by shiroiuma | Hacker News Reader

There is no world where bullet trains between NYC and LA would make any financial sense at all. The trains can't possibly go fast enough for passengers to be satisfied with the speed (even maglev isn't fast enough), and the cost of track construction and maintenance would never be paid for by ridership.

I live in Japan; bullet trains are great here, but the distances they cover are quite short by American standards. Extremely high ridership, with trains covering relatively short distances between extremely populated population centers (the Tokyo metro area has 38 million people for reference) means the trains operate at a profit. That could be done in America, maybe, but only between select cities that aren't too far apart, such as DC and NYC and Boston. Even here in Japan, no one is taking the shinkansen between far-apart cities in the north and south; they use inexpensive and faster domestic flights instead.

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In China it's a matter of politics rather than financial sense, of unifying the country hence why they have them in ethnic minority areas too. The trains would be like roads, sure, most people wouldn't take them from one end to the other, A to Z, but there are enough people to take them from A to D, J to N, Q to T, so to speak. If one could commute in one hour from Boston to DC for example each way, daily without flying, it opens up more economic opportunities in total. But like PG said, the competition to an airline isn't a car or a plane, it's Zoom.

Yes, I can see how some people might think the same system would work in the US too, with a HSR network going from Boston to LA, with stops along the way in NYC, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, Denver, and maybe some smaller cities too.

But China has a much larger population than the US, by far, and an authoritarian government that has no problem using the "build it and they will come" business model for large infrastructure projects that may or may not work out as planned and no worry about opposition from local politicians, NIMBYs, etc. Don't forget, most of their population is concentrated on the east coast; the inland areas are relatively unpopulated. And they don't have a population that's been conditioned from birth, ever since the 1940s, to think that automobiles are the mode of transit that society should be based around.

So even if they did build an HSR network across the US, I don't think it would work out. How much travel is there between Denver and St Louis, really? A lot of the intra-US travel is really between places on opposite coasts, or on the same coast, because that's where the population is.

Denver is too far away from any other large city to make HSR work. At the distances involved everyone will fly. Maybe you can make it work within Denver, but not to get to any other state as there is no city of any size anywhere close.

Zoom isn’t a replacement for in-person meetings all of the time but it’s pretty good for a lot of purposes. I’m on a non-profit board and we do have a couple meetings a year when we ask people to try to make it in person but the rest is planned to be virtual.

Remote work is a good replacement for commuting.

It’s a workable replacement for commuting a lot of the time. Some face to face is useful even if it’s only quarterly team meetings.

Absolutely, and I'd far rather take a 6 hour train ride once a quarter than a 30 minute commute every day

> it's Zoom

I heard something like that about the Concorde at the Air and Space Museum. What killed it was not fuel costs, but cheaper long-distance phone calls and fax machines.

But if a country takes the Chinese approach and pushed inexpensive rail as a way to open new economic opportunities, the idea of flying as your daily commute moves from ridiculous to feasible (if you replace the airplane with a train).

The thing that killed the Concorde was a fatal crash that killed everyone on board.

The thing was already losing money because it guzzled fuel and was horribly loud and uncomfortable inside, while still costing a fortune for tickets. Not many people really wanted to pay 1st-class fares for worse-than-economy comfort just to shave a couple hours off the flight. Also, the plane could only operate at supersonic speeds over the ocean, so when it flew to/from Texas, it had to operate at subsonic speeds (and guzzle even more fuel because it was inefficient at those speeds), and the average trip time wasn't that much faster than a regular jumbo jet. It had been going downhill for a while, but that fatal crash was the end; they stopped all operations after that.

Sure, better communications might have contributed to its downfall, but that would have affected all air travel; just comparing like-for-like, the Concorde really wasn't a great alternative to the subsonic jumbo jets which became more and more prevalent for transcontinental routes.

    What killed it was not fuel costs

No, it was definitely the cost to operate it and the sonic boom associated with flying at that speed. The company operating the Concorde never made a profit.

British Airways certainly made a profit from Concorde, which was operated by a separate division of the company.

I don't know if (then state-owned) Air France did.

What amazes me is frequency of shinkansen for Tokyo-Osaka. Like more frequent than some metros! Just rock up Must change how people think.

> the distances they cover are quite short by American standards

Typical distances are about the same as SanFrancisco-LA, LA-Phoenix, Phoenix-LasVegas, Dallas-Houston, Houston-New Orleans, Portland-Vancouver. The longest service is 650 miles -- around the Atlanta to New York, Chicago to Washington DC, San Francisco to Portland, Austin to Kansas City

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