I mean, does the population density in the US support bullet trains? I know that both Japan & China for example have large population density within each city (whether you live in Osaka heading for Kobe or from Shanghai to Beijing, you get the picture) plus the governments of both countries invest heavily on the infrastructure including maintenance.
Distance is another factor between destinations, like from Nagoya to Kyoto it’s only 130km (80mi) and the commute by bullet train is 33 minutes while from New York to DC it’s 226mi taking you 4 hours by car but via bullet train, the commute time is less than it would be from driving alone. The cities in Japan are closer to each other by comparison.
China is a large country (not big as let’s say like Russia in terms of land size) alongside varying topography and climates (they can still install tracks in uneven terrain but adjusting how they are installed), although their population is larger than the US (they have about more than 1.4 billion people as a country while the US is about 348 million).
The taxes work differently across countries, like in both Japan & China: they have the funds gathered from taxation allowing them to maintain constant upkeep or make further improvements. Well, what does the US government spend their taxes on? That in itself also lies the question whether the taxes citizens are already paying are worth it.
Taxes exist in all countries regardless, as governments need funding to maintain and improve infrastructure, roads, schools, hospitals, etc. The real question is: how is the government using that money? For example, in Japan the reason why public transport is considered reliable is due to their government using people’s taxes for upkeep & bullet trains.
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2/3rds of all Bullet trains are in China. Why are you just asking about the US?
The US does have “high speed’ rail. We call it Acela and it is just such bullshit. The Acela trains aren’t any significantly faster than regular trains.
I routinely take the train from Washington DC to New York City and the Acela train just isn’t worth the cost and hassle. It is 20 minutes faster.
Americans are weird about public transportation. Trains and busses and my go to for any sort of travel. I love the DC metro and I hate highway driving, though I have to drive more on the highway than I want.
People are posting about the auto industry lobby and I agree with that, but we Americans are strange about public transportation.
We reserve our bullets for …other purposes.
Schoolkids
Rampant corruption redirects almost all federal resources to contractors and corporations.
This. Other countries build trains as public infrastructure. US and UK try to build bullet trains as scheme to pump public money into private construction companies. The money gets stolen and nothing is built.
the situation in the US is multi-layered.
- for one, china has bullet trains but whether they’re economical is a whole other question. china often does things just to provide jobs to people, so it doesn’t have to pay off. i’m not sure whether it actually does pay off economically but in the US these things are probably looked at more profit-oriented.
- in the US you have a very strong car lobby which in turn is backed by fossil fuel lobby. why do you have such a strong fossil fuel lobby? because historically, it was the only significant source of power (apart nuclear which was shunned for other reasons) so obviously they’re a natural monopoly. this is changing today but only slowly.
- cars provide individualism and more “GDP per person”. why? because it is more expensive to make 1 car for everyone than to make enough trains for the whole area. because if more people own private stuff, obviously they pay car companies more, which make car company shares go up more and also pays wages to the car factory workers. this is politically more popular than go for the less-expensive public-transport in cities+suburb option.
- also “individual freedom” (rugged individualism) is a american core value due to the political ideology that was brought over from the english people back in 1618 (“nobody should be able to tell you what to do, and you don’t have to adhere to state-wide policies”). the consequence is, instead of everyone using 1 subway system, everyone “chooses” to own their own car.
The auto companies successfully lobbied the government to abandon passenger trains and build highways instead, basically. (That way we’d all be forced to buy their products thanks to the transportation ecosystem.)
Lots of cities are getting commuter trains though. Mine just built two expansions to our rail line. It’s a slow process, but essential.
This, right here.
US cities used to have terrific streetcar systems. Just look at San Francisco in 1940:
https://ani.social/post/13225809
Los Angeles’ legendary streetcars’ demise was the plot of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
In fact, LA’s streetcars were bought by a conglomerate of automobile companies in order to destroy them
A similar story is in the history of US intercity passenger rail, which is in Amtrak’s wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak
Which starts with:
In 1916, 98% of all commercial intercity travelers in the United States moved by rail, and the remaining 2% moved by inland waterways.[9] Nearly 42 million passengers used railways as primary transportation
Ok, but this was the only choice because neither highways nor passenger planes did exist yet
My point is that the US used to have a lot of rail infrastructure, both inside cities and for intercity travel, but scrapped most of it, and neglected what was left, mostly in favor of building freeways for automobiles.
Therefore, as relevant to this subject, we don’t have bullet trains.
Auto industry.
Lobbying by corporate interests, the Auto industry and fossil fuel industry in particular.
It’s not like big businesses have no political influence in Japan. If anything, there’s historically more cross-over, but, they have plenty of bullet trains.
Train lobbies exist in both Japan and America. Americas car lobby was particularly successful, in large part because of how much everyone hated the train companies. Train companies in Japan simply didnt get as much hate as in America.
There are other factors, the Car was first made in America, and had a huge amount of popularity post WWII, given the economic boom post WWII in America, and the rapid rise of conspicuous consumption, not having to share a train car with other people was seen as a huge status symbol (and was made affordable by assembly line tech).
Around the time that the Shinkansen was being built, President Johnson included a provision for a high speed rail line to be built in the Northeast Corridor, a location that makes sense with density and distance. It went ok, in part because the line was relatively straight already and we got what later became the Acela. In the interim, the railroad that owned the tracks went bankrupt.
Part of the issue was that, while other countries were developing high speed rail, passenger rail was owned by private companies and in freefall given the subsidies going to highways. The rail companies didn’t want to build high speed rail and most governments didn’t really have any experience building rail at all.
Another part of the issue is that early highway construction trampled on the rights of a lot of people and the process of design and construction became heavily regulated. These same regulations apply to high speed rail even though high speed rail is far more environmentally friendly. Part of what was slowing down California’s high speed rail project was the permitting process.
In essence, the organizations who could build it mostly went away and the process to build it became incredibly harder. Also, there likely wouldn’t be a single system of high speed rail. Instead, there would be multiple seeds in which high speed rail grew from, with some seeds likely not connecting to create an overall network. For instance, Cascadia and CA+NV+AZ would likely be their own networks while Texas+ would likely take a while before it connected to the rest of the Eastern network.
Because high speed passenger rail requires three things that don’t exist in the United States.
1.) Long-term planning 2.) Coordination among different communities 3.) A desire to invest in people’s wellbeing
We are in the ‘pieces are starting to visibly fall off this thing’ phase of societal collapse. That means that, while we’re still rolling down the road, there is a largely un-acknowledged awareness that the car isn’t making it all the way to the destination. As a result, people and institutions are all acting in their own short-term self interest.
what you’re not appreciating here is how extremely dynamic the situation in the US is. in china, you have cities which have existed for 2000 years with rather stable population, so you can map out a city and know where the streets are, and build public transport there. in the US, cities can rise and fall within 20 years (check out the rust belt cities). so it doesn’t make sense to build infrastructure “for the ages”, because you can’t plan ahead that far. so we end up with short-term planning, which is why the housing is cardboard and the mode of transport is cars.
Short-term self-interest. The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.
Short-term self-interest. The cause of
and solution toall of life’s problems.You’re absolutely correct, but they were referencing the simpsons.
People generally don’t notice that the plot of who killed Roger rabbit was actually about the dismantling of USA public transportation.
Ford and GM have been destroying it since the beginning.
Man, that is a loaded question, and it’s already been answered extremely well in the comments. I’ll just add this to the discussion.
Years ago, there were plans to build the world’s largest particle accelerator in Texas. Construction had already begun, and the project had secured its funding. Then local politicians learned about it and immediately started working against it, citing reasons like, “We can’t make any money off of this,” or claiming it was costing too much money for no practical benefit.
It’s a very unfortunate aspect of our culture that projects like this can be derailed for those kinds of reasons. I often find myself apologizing for my fellow Americans when we behave this way.
In USA we have decided to avoid that “public works” middleman and just give the money directly to corporations.
In a word: Republicans.
Because it’s a 3rd world country
Because musk stole billions that were given to him by California instead of building it and we don’t enforce laws on the pedophile parasite class so womp womp. China would have executed him.
https://techcentral.co.za/elon-musk-hyperloop-sucked-up-billions-delivered-nothing/279294/
