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IDK, high-speed rail doesn't seem to be taking off outside of Europe and a handful of Asian countries. That leaves most of Asia outside India/China/Korea/Japan
by wtracy 6y ago
IDK, high-speed rail doesn't seem to be taking off outside of Europe and a handful of Asian countries.
That leaves most of Asia outside India/China/Korea/Japan, and pretty much all of Australia/Oceania, Africa, the Middle East, and the entire New World.
I would love to see high-speed rail take over the world, but there's a lot of sparsely-populated places out there, and it makes sense to investigate technologies to support them.
- SahAssar 6y agoSparsely-populated places are the cheapest places to build rail, both because of land prices and also the cost of labour. I think that for any volume of passengers over shorter distances that would be large enough to mandate a regular airway it would be cheaper to build high-speed rail. At least over the long term the economics of scale should take over and besides that a rail network is more useful for shipping of goods than a airport would be. In the US it'd require similar effort/cost as the Interstate Highway System did, but would probably yield equal economic benefit.
- psadri 6y agoThe problem is that train routes are fixed So it only makes sense to connect regions with high populations. Aircraft can go anywhere, including places with small populations.
- SahAssar 6y agoSure, they could, but they don't. Aircraft require airports, ATC, large land areas for landing/takeoff and so on. In general aircraft for passenger or cargo routes take a few routes and don't shift much.