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Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

Thing about China's railway needs is that it has population density. That makes it a lot easier to charge a cheaper price for tickets that look affordable and worthwhile to passengers, and still turn a healthy profit for the operator.

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Local transit is probably a bigger factor. Almost all urban areas in China can be accessed without a car. So Boston, New York, DC, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, etc. make sense, but other cities might not.

If you have to rent a car on arrival, might as well fly.

The density of customers also has to be adjusted for affordability. Lots of Chinese will continue to use conventional trains, which have enormous capacity and cheap prices. Train station crowds in China can be epic.

What is the population density? How does it compare to major cities like NY, LA, or SF? If you look at the United States, you'll see that we do have areas with high population densities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...

Chinese here. Off top of my head, with about the same area of land, divided by about 5x more population, let's say about 5x time denser? Personally, I grew up in a "small town" with about 100,000 people, we call it a small town because relatively, it IS a small town. I do not have any statistics to back it up, but the density level of that third-level township feels to me to be higher than Brooklyn NYC.

The point is that we do have areas with high population densities. People seem to forget that HSR is available and has been available in much of the world. China is simply being very aggressive in building. Spain also has added a lot of track in recent years.

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