16
Does this explain why there are no bullet trains in the USA?
(piefed.social)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
16 points (80.8% liked)
Asklemmy
53933 readers
410 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
The geographical distances also favor air traffic over anything on the ground. If the jet engine hadn't come around, North America would have a great high speed rail network today.
Ignoring recent events in the middle east and their effect on pricing, even in Japan a flight from Tokyo to Osaka will beat the bullet train fare if you book it a month or more ahead of time. And that's not on a budget airline. Japan gets a lot of praise for its bullet train network. But it's really just one cash cow line (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto) and the rest is more often than not half empty. They run it because there is pork barrel politicking and because they can sell the flexibility and immediacy of hopping on a train in a downtown location in this network, on a whim (outside the holiday congestion). Japan is also a centrally organized country where the administrative sub sections (prefectures, cities, etc.) have less say in things.
And no local in their right mind would take the shinkansen to go from Kyoto to Osaka. That's a 40min ride or so on the normal trains. The cost to time saving ratio is not good enough.
This doesn't answer anything about what's stopping America from having both.
You are taking about half empty trains in a country that's suffering from population decline. Japan's airlines are struggling to fill sets and make profits dispite benefiting from government subsidies that the main companies that run Shinkansen don't get.
Have another go at reading the post. The question wasn't what's stopping the US from building both, the question was whether OP's explanation does justice to the status quo. My first sentence includes the word "also," indicating that this is additional information that I found wasn't sufficiently weighed in the single paragraph.
This is a thread and I read other people pointing out other things. So I didn't.
How odd (and maybe disheartening) to consider that it can be cheaper to fly and expend all the energy need to lift a big metal tube up into the air and back down, than it is to travel along the rails.
I feel like people forget how much infrastructure is required to keep high speed rail running. Not only do you need the stations, but the tracks (bridges, tunnels, etc.) all need to be maintained. Additionally, when doing maintenance you can't run the line, so you either need extra capacity so you don't disrupt service or you end up with times you have to shut lines down.
In comparison, planes just need a strip of flat land at takeoff and landing (you technically don't even need an airport). You're primary bottleneck is how fast you can get planes on/off the tarmac.
One of the other big issues in rail vs plane is that high speed rail only works at certain grade levels and turn radiuses. So for example, I believe you couldn't convert the existing northeast corridor in the US to 300mph rail from end to end simply due to the geography. You'd need to create a new route. Looking it up there are speed limits around 30-40mph for Amtrak around Baltimore and Wilmington.
That tends to be the case though. Even in Europe that's true in many cases. I think so far only France has legislation on the books that makes it illegal for airfare to beat trainfare under a certain distance.
Wow a non train circlejerk answer.
I wonder why trains are so expensive over longer distances.