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Busy lines are busy and profitable, while many lines are essential but not enough passengers yet. I used to travel between Shanghai and Hangzhou regularly on H

Busy lines are busy and profitable, while many lines are essential but not enough passengers yet. I used to travel between Shanghai and Hangzhou regularly on HSR and it is basically fully packed all the time. Same thing for Shanghai to Beijing and Beijing to Tianjin. Actually they are building a second line from SH to BJ. Similar to Japan's Shinkansen, the only profitable line is Tokyo to Osaka. You may see some under-capacity HSR lines, but they mean a lot to economy development. My hometown is a small city off trunk railways. 10 years ago the travel time to Beijing is 14 hours, now, with HSR, it's 5 hours. No one thinks Beijing is far away any more and people tend to travel farther and more frequently. After years in US, I think US government is not good at "generating" or "boosting" social needs. Moonshot in infra is really worth investing and sometimes you have to take the risk. US has been away from major infra (like interstate hwys) for years and I cannot believe economy growth without more infra.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Tokaido is the most profitable Shinkansen, but most of the other Shinkansen's are in the black. The only unprofitable one is the new one toward Hokaido.
kelnos 9y ago
> Moonshot in infra is really worth investing and sometimes you have to take the risk. US has been away from major infra (like interstate hwys) for years and I cannot believe economy growth without more infra. I agree in principle, but my belief is that we (the US) need to focus a lot more on infra that serves local and regional needs before worrying so much about interstate infra (CA HSR is not technically interstate, but given the size of CA it's an interstate-scale project). We have a ton of aging and insufficient local/regional infra that badly needs upgrades and expansion.
- wahern 9y ago
  > We have a ton of aging and insufficient local/regional > infra that badly needs upgrades and expansion. That was _precisely_ the point of HSR--to slow growth in automobile traffic so there'd be less need to upgrade and expand the highway infrastructure. Airports and highways are immensely expensive. There were extensively analyzed projections that showed investing in HSR was more sensible than doubling-down on the automobile. We can quibble over the calculus all day long, but that sort of quibbling is why we can never get sh*t done. I live in the Richmond District of SF. We have one of the busiest bus lines in the country, and that's just one line out of 4+ parallel lines 2 blocks apart. Everybody here wants a subway, but the city is building BRT because of cost and as a compromise with local business owners (who don't want _anything_). Nobody wants BRT, but it's a done deal, and it irks me the amount of energy people put into killing BRT ostensibly in pursuit of a subway. It's idiotic. All it does is make BRT more costly without making a subway any more likely. If you want government to be more efficient, we need to come together as a community and learn how to compromise and _support_ infrastructure development. This stuff is costly because the opposition is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    > That was _precisely_ the point of HSR--to slow growth in automobile traffic so there'd be less need to upgrade and expand the highway infrastructure. That sounds weird to me. HSR serves a different set of people and solves different problems than local/regional transit does. As a simple example, I wouldn't see HSR reducing traffic on 101 or 280 between SJ and SF all that much. There are certainly some people who commute between SF (or very close by) and SJ (or very close by), but there are still plenty of people for whom driving to/from SF or SJ to catch the HSR to go to the other destination wouldn't make sense. The major benefits of HSR are people traveling between NorCal, Central Valley, and SoCal. The most common type of commute pain is only minimally helped by HSR. > [a bunch of stuff about BRT in SF] That would seem to support my point: that we need better local transit options, including a subway, and we need to find a way to get what we actually want and need, not what interest groups like local business owners want. I see this as completely unrelated to whether or not we need HSR, though.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Tokaido is the most profitable Shinkansen, but most of the other Shinkansen's are in the black. The only unprofitable one is the new one toward Hokaido.

kelnos 9y ago

> Moonshot in infra is really worth investing and sometimes you have to take the risk. US has been away from major infra (like interstate hwys) for years and I cannot believe economy growth without more infra. I agree in principle, but my belief is that we (the US) need to focus a lot more on infra that serves local and regional needs before worrying so much about interstate infra (CA HSR is not technically interstate, but given the size of CA it's an interstate-scale project). We have a ton of aging and insufficient local/regional infra that badly needs upgrades and expansion.

wahern 9y ago
> We have a ton of aging and insufficient local/regional > infra that badly needs upgrades and expansion. That was _precisely_ the point of HSR--to slow growth in automobile traffic so there'd be less need to upgrade and expand the highway infrastructure. Airports and highways are immensely expensive. There were extensively analyzed projections that showed investing in HSR was more sensible than doubling-down on the automobile. We can quibble over the calculus all day long, but that sort of quibbling is why we can never get sh*t done. I live in the Richmond District of SF. We have one of the busiest bus lines in the country, and that's just one line out of 4+ parallel lines 2 blocks apart. Everybody here wants a subway, but the city is building BRT because of cost and as a compromise with local business owners (who don't want _anything_). Nobody wants BRT, but it's a done deal, and it irks me the amount of energy people put into killing BRT ostensibly in pursuit of a subway. It's idiotic. All it does is make BRT more costly without making a subway any more likely. If you want government to be more efficient, we need to come together as a community and learn how to compromise and _support_ infrastructure development. This stuff is costly because the opposition is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- kelnos 9y ago
  > That was _precisely_ the point of HSR--to slow growth in automobile traffic so there'd be less need to upgrade and expand the highway infrastructure. That sounds weird to me. HSR serves a different set of people and solves different problems than local/regional transit does. As a simple example, I wouldn't see HSR reducing traffic on 101 or 280 between SJ and SF all that much. There are certainly some people who commute between SF (or very close by) and SJ (or very close by), but there are still plenty of people for whom driving to/from SF or SJ to catch the HSR to go to the other destination wouldn't make sense. The major benefits of HSR are people traveling between NorCal, Central Valley, and SoCal. The most common type of commute pain is only minimally helped by HSR. > [a bunch of stuff about BRT in SF] That would seem to support my point: that we need better local transit options, including a subway, and we need to find a way to get what we actually want and need, not what interest groups like local business owners want. I see this as completely unrelated to whether or not we need HSR, though.