Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Sparsely-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.

The 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.

Sure, 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com