Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

There is no excuse for the US’s failure. Many countries have large areas to cover. China is a similar size and has massive HSR coverage. The US could too if they didn’t waste all the money on corruption.

View on HN

China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned. The reason the rail systems never got upgraded and Amtrak couldn't deploy high speed rail everywhere (despite it being a national priority in the 70s, 80s, and 90s) is that outside of the northeast corridor, Amtrak doesn't own the lines and couldn't get the owners to allow Amtrak to upgrade them for passenger high speed rail.

> China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned.

The article we're discussing explains that Japan has the best passenger rail system in the world, and which happens to be privatized, along with privately owned track. So which one is it? Go figure.

I believe the Japanese private rail companies also own the lines where their traffic is. This would explain a lot. There are other countries (including my native one) where the trains are run by one company and the lines are owned by another. This does.not.work. For what seems like obvious reasons. There's no economic gain for the owner of the infrastructure to spend money, quite the opposite in fact.

In every EU country the infrastructure company (companies) is separate from companies that operate trains, with some usually small exceptions.

Well, to be honest, the results in Japan and China, where that isn’t the case, have turned out to be much better.

The interesting thing is how the EU railway policy just keeps plowing ahead trying to impose the "vertical separation" approach in the EU, despite the disastrous results from the UK experience (and some EU countries to a somewhat lesser extent, so far the UK seems to be the only example of going all-in on that approach).

Most EU countries have adopted the approach of putting the infrastructure company and the public train company under the same holding company, which is sort-of the minimum that EU regulations demand. In practice, in many countries the previous national rail company (under whatever conglomerate structure it may be operating under today) is fiercely protective of its own turf and tries to prevent new entrants, and digging their heels in implementing EU railway competition regulations. So complying with the letter of the law, but does everything in its powers to not comply with the spirit.

Then again, given the UK experience of going all-in on the "vertical separation" and privatization path, perhaps one shouldn't blame them.

Many of these lines were built by the public, then privatized.

But maintained and extended today by e.g. JR Eeast.

A lot of the lines are still being built, maintained and extended by the state and then leased out to the regional JRs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railway_Construction,_Tr...

While I agree with you, their system did not start privatised, and the Shinkansens predate privatisation by some time. I don't have the evidence to justify this, but I suspect that you need national buy-in - both financially and politically - to start a HSR build-out, which could then potentially be privatised at a later stage.

Calling Japan Rail privatized is a "ehhh, kinda, in some places, if you squint" kinda thing.

Technically, yes, the JR's are private companies.

But track construction is generally done by a government construction company financed with Japanese sovereign debt. The completed tracks are then long-term leased to the JR's at favorable rates.

Is it really a private company if the key capital outlay is done by the government and given to you with a sweetheart deal? ehhhhhh.... you can call the operator company private, but you're being dishonest if you call the system privatized.

Russia is far larger and far less populated, it's an economic backwater and a cultural dead end. Yet despite that they have rail connecting their country together.

So did France. There is a common factor at play with Russia. Has little to do with the country's shape.

It's like saying certain rats solve the maze because the path is simpler. Except that the failing rats happen to have a different incentive.

> So did France. There is a common factor at play with Russia. Has little to do with the country's shape.

You'll have to make yourself clearer, I have no idea what you're implying

I implied that when a nation decides that transport infrastructure is a strategic investment, a decades long initiative, funded by the Public sector, it yields better results.

The private sector unfortunately is too short sighted, and will optimize for profit. Doesn't seem to work well for nationwide infrastructure..that being railroads, but also the internet.

Once you get past the Urals, most of Russia's development is along an east west axis until you reach Baikal and the the far east. Also as a Marxist dictatorship for some years, there was little emphasis on independent travel (cars etc)

To call Russia a "cultural dead end" is a bit much, considering all the great artists of various kinds that country has produced. In fact, you'll find that famous Russian novels like Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago feature trains as motifs.

Great point about trains being featured in Russian novels. I imagine trains are well-represented in Japanese literature too, as well as film and maybe poetry. That's an angle I'd enjoy investigating further for other cultures. Surely the U.S. is more of a "car culture", but even offhand I can think of, for example, the novel On the Road with train-hopping having a significant role.

Japan and Russia have slightly different relationships to the train I think. Other than arterial rivers (that often flow in odd directions), the railway was the only serious way to get across Siberia for a long time. Whereas in Japan, while the railways are a source of pride, there were viable alternatives such as roads and boats.

I think US trains did have their window though. At one time they would have been the main way to get into the interior or across the continent.

Oh Russia has created some amazing culture (Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy) but that was before they fell to the barbarians in the 1920s. After that only Lem comes to mind.. and he was either Ukrainian or Polish. Basically anyone talented and who could fled (Asimov comes to mind) because under the Soviet system, and later under Putinism the arts were a kind of wasteland. Basically the only things they did well involved little girls, drugs or board games.

It's funny as I'm quite fan of quite a few Russians, yet they're all people who either died before the Russian system was created or are those lucky enough to escape.

"The US could too if they didn’t waste all the money on corruption."

China is also corrupt, but it is a dictatorship with massive central planning. Central planning leads to wastage and human costs in many areas but it is good at producing new infrastructure.

What is this corruption you are talking about? What specifically are you talking about? Things you don’t like aren’t necessarily the result of corruption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com