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Comment by BugBrother | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered if you couldn't finance a high speed train (Or Elon Musk's "strange loop") in areas like California by buying cheap real estate and selling it to future commuters.

Edit: It ought to be enough with 50-150 km distance to get low land prices around that part of California? Assume a train at 250 km/hour, the commute will be short and there won't be a need for "exotics" (maglev, Musk's tube, etc).

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I don't think anyone has every figured out a way to make trains profitable at a price that consumers will pay. That's why governments are pretty much the only people that build them now, since they are willing to take the losses to facilitate any economic gains generated by public transit. Whether or not those gains are real is a separate argument, but as far as I know, no American public transit system is profitable on a revenue-expenditures basis.

There are two profitable high-speed rail lines: Japan (Tokyo-Osaka) and France (Paris-Lyon).

Some will say Acela, but it is only profitable if you ignore capital expenditures.

That's what I thought. Ignoring capital expenditures could make lots of unprofitable businesses look profitable.

I've learned a lot of journalists don't look at the footnotes or supplemental tables when they write articles. It does provide a good indicator of competence though.

Yes, but I wrote:

What if you use the land price increase at the other end of a (quite) fast train to finance building the commute link?

As the comment below notes, even if you ignore capital expenditures, there are only 3 profitable trains in the world. It's operating costs that make it unprofitable. The increase in value on the land may cover your construction costs, but operating it is a recurring expense. You'd have to realize extreme gains on the land to fund that.

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