Moving freight by train is also a lot more efficient than moving people by train. Freight doesn't need room to walk around, doesn't need to eat, doesn't need to sleep, doesn't need bathrooms.
Love the Shinkansen though. My preferred method of travel within Japan.
My point is that these lines would be considered viable in Japan - more than viable; completely obvious. The fact we can't seem to build them - can't even take the idea seriously - is more about the nature of our society than anything to do with geography.
> Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years?
At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese. I also find this to be a bad outcome; if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?
Lucky? How is that lucky? I believe this is the first time I have ever heard someone describing a lack of habitable land as "lucky".
It's true that in the last 50 or so years, the USA has become extremely suburbanised, totally reliant on cars for transport, which makes it hard to pick "winners" as to where gets a station, but you can't just use that as an excuse to do nothing!
> At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese.
The Japanese are far from "rich". Anyway, a commuter pass pass from, say, Utsunomiya to Tokyo only costs a few hundred, and is anyway paid by employer. The alternative is spending several times that on housing, in a situation of intense competition for limited housing stock in a viable commuting range.
> if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?
I don't understand this answer. Obviously, not everyone can live in the CBD of the city they work in. That's the problem fast transport solves in this situation. What's your better idea?
Anyway I'm not blindly recommending anything the Japanese do. I'm just saying that fast transport has the effect of greatly expanding the viable urban living of a major city.
I don't think that's a good reason to be too disruptive towards the freight industry.