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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

But what percentage of the population actually uses a bullet train in a given week/month/year? (Not trips/population, the percentage of people who take one or more journies in a given timeframe.) Is this just a service for the urban elite? Or do farmers also use them?

The 747 and like jets made air travel affordable and now air travel is cheaper than by boat/rail over long distances (for people, taking into account food and lodging). If you need to attend a wedding more than a few hundred km away, you are going to consider flying. But high speed rail networks in many countries (uk, france) are either extreemly expensive or massively subsidized. All i see are suited office workers heading to jobs in downtown cores.

The carbon footprint of high speed rail, while not as bad as air, also remains much higher than other ground options. Speed always comes at some price.

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This is a similar question to what percentage of people use all those empty condo-cities being built in China. The answer is: a perhaps-negligible number now (except around existing metropolitan centres, where there's respectable usage), but with projected growth toward capacity as GDP rises.

Because Chinese civil-planning policy isn't a matter of election promises, it isn't constrained to showing benefits within four-year periods. A lot of the things China is doing don't "make sense" from an intuitive standpoint if you're imagining anyone expected short-term gains, but do make sense if you imagine they were planning for 10 or 20 years down the line.

Those empty condos are unmarketable. As people become wealthier, they're going to change tastes. Even the middle class is going to seek out individual single family homes, instead of the concrete jungle of repetitive jail cells that are those new condos.

They're the poor mans idea of what the middle class wants.

A lot of those cities have the apartments built and sold before they put in commercial areas and most importantly things like subways. There was an episode of Sinica where a guest was talking to a person that bought one of the ghost apartments but wasn't living in it because there wasn't a subway line. The guest went back to the area once the subway opened and most of the apartments were full and roads were being used. I think it was this episode[0] but not 100% sure. I know the section I'm talking about was towards the end of the episode.

0 - http://supchina.com/sinica/beautiful-country-middle-kingdom-...

There can be little doubt that, in terms of environmental impact per passenger kilometre:

bus and train better than car better than air plane.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4003718

The ticket price of the bullet train is usually cheaper than by air (and the train is much, much more convenient than flights), and affortable by average citizens. This has created a huge headache to the airlines, which leads to some healthy competition.

Air transportation is only more affordable for a very small portion of the travelers who get the highly discounted fairs. On aggregate of costs for all travelers air travel is more expensive.

As the other comment stated, please do some research before openly spreading false information. Its very dishonest and in the end leads to great damage for countries.

My reciepts say otherwise. When planning trips to europe from NA the train options between cities end up costing almost as much as the intercontinental flight. Jumping on a discount airline from a secondary airport is ussually the cheaper option.

Can't compare prices in Europe with China.

Also, European rail operators now do what airlines have done for a long time: discounted tickets if you book a fixed train early, expensive tickets if you book last minute or with full flexibility.

This is wrong. High speed rail networks in France are profitable. Please do some research

I have. I bought tickets and they were very expensive. Im flying vancouver-sf round trip next month for 1/3 the price i paid for london-paris a few years back.

Doing the math again today, round trip paris-london on eurostar is 600$ in my money (320bp on eurostar site +fees +conversion to cad, leaving next monday). Vancouver-sf by air can he had for 275$ (corporate account, no visible discount).

Every time I made the trip, the train London-Paris was cheaper than the corresponding air travel (and significantly more pleasant).

You can get a round-trip on the Eurostar for USD 140 in Economy, maybe USD 200 for popular departure times. That brings you right in the middle of the city, unlike a flight. There's a reason the Eurostar is popular.

I just checked the Eurostar prices. A ticket for London-Paris tomorrow and Paris-London on Wednesday can be had for $247. If you book a month ahead of time, it's below $50 one-way.

If the Eurostar were typically that expensive, then its competition (both aviation and coaches/ferries) would be absolutely crushing it in the market, and they aren't, which suggests that that is unusual.

The airport in London and Paris aren't very convenient if you actually have to go to the city, and you need to add transportation costs to and from the city on both sides. Eurostar takes you to locations where people actually want to be.

AS for your 600 euros for a ticket, it's likely a last minute bought one at the most expensive time, it goes as low as 39 euros for a single, most people will pay under 300 for the round trip I guess...

Heathrow is pretty convenient to London with both tube and Heathrow Express service but train is generally more convenient than air if you're going to either downtown Paris or Brussels. Personally, I'd probably never fly those routes unless they were legs on a longer trip.

In general, I've found that in Europe there are pretty consistent large savings to booking rail well in advance, which is not nearly so much the case in the US. This can be the case with flying but air prices tend to be all over the map without an easily identifiable pattern.

The parent post was about French high speed rail. Your rebuttal was about a specialty link (the Eurostar) between London and Paris. That's 2 different countries and a massively expensive 35mi long undersea tunnel.

You're not wrong that French rail is relatively expensive, but I think a specialty link was not really a "normal" rail ticket to use to compare.

The HSR drove down airfares over night when it opened so you ought to praise it.

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