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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

> that's not even projected to become profitable until 2070

JR will make up the difference renting space at the new rail stations. It also isn’t very useless, a lot of people go between Tokyo and Nagoya (and I assume they plan to extend to Osaka), so this will just make those trips faster, creating even more integration in the corridor.

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> JR will make up the difference renting space at the new rail stations

This is something I just don't understand about transit design in the US. Why don't we take advantage of the property value increases next to transit?

Not enough critical mass. Airports are money makers, but most train stations (outside of those in NYC) are lucky to get a gift shop. They simply aren't central enough and don't have enough daily trips.

The termini are Tokyo-Shinagawa and Nagoya, which are both existing stations and are already connected via the Tokaido Shinkansen bullet train, taking 97 minutes today. Shaving that down to 40 (if all goes as planned) is nice, but not earth-shattering.

Cutting the time by nearly 60% is definitely more than nice. You could actually have people commute daily on the 40 minute ride, the 97 minute ride not so much.

Large scale commuting adoption seems unlikely. Usually JR sells commuter passes at approximately 50% of price of daily roundtrips between destinations, for Nagoya-Tokyo on current shinkansen this will come to ~$2.5k/mo. No way this is going to be approved by companies even for middle management positions.

Thanks for that info. Would make sense to go home though at that point instead of staying the night in a hotel if there's a series of business meetings.

More people, more traffic through the stations. That sort of speed has to increase daily capacity/throughput. If that capacity is used, they will do OK.

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