Most countries are going to be bad when compared to Japan. Japan is also the third largest economy.
Another example of high speed train, they forced flight companies to make the Valencia <=> Madrid flights more expensive because people preferred going by plane than by train (faster, easier, way cheaper). Yup, instead of making the train better or cheaper, just force the private companies to be worse so the public infra can compete. Why was it so expensive? Because of it being many times overbudget? Why? Because everyone was taking money.
Do you have any proof of that scheme you're mentioning? I say this because, believe it or not, one of the things that Spain does right is building infrastructure on a budget. There has been corruption cases and places when it has been horrid, but in general is well managed.
You'd be surprised how bad it is in many other countries deemed better by your average spaniard. In terms of cost overruns, time, and all kinds of nasty shit.
Anyways, I have to hard disagree on flying being faster and easier than going by train. Flying is a pretty horrendous experience in comparison, and if you account for the time spent in the airport and getting to it it's not faster either.
This particular flight I'm discussing it's more convenient. Getting to the high speed train station is tricky (there's no subway there!), you have to go to the closest one and then walk 10-15 min, which is just slightly faster but harder.
Let's see times:
• Train: 15 min to the station + 15 min early + 1.5h in the train + 15 min in destination = 2h15min
• Plane: 30 min to the station + 30 min early + 30 min flight + 30 min at destination = 2h
(this is domestic flying where you normally just walk in fairly straightforward)
I live in London and my closest train station is 10 minutes by foot, the closest airport is 1h by car or 2h by public transport. Also I tend to arrive 2h before departure, so flying burns at least 4h before even sitting in the plane and maybe as many hours when you land. It's a whole day affair. Domestic flights aren't any better. You save maybe 10 minutes not queueing for passport control.
Flight is terrible unless it's intercontinental. But most prefer the plane because it's vastly cheaper.
You live in London as you said. That's a totally different experience from a local domestic smaller airport in Spain. Budgeting 30min for a domestic flight (no traffic, no check in, no passport, 2-3 min walk to any gate, literally just the security check) is enough, if you want to be extra careful sure plan to arrive 1h early, but every time I've regretted it since then I had 50 min to wait.
US is too big and too sparsely populated both on a large scale and small scale for trains like Europe, Japan and China.
There's a part where no one talk about, and that's the infrastructure within the city are not conducive to trains. People get to a train station and they need to get around and unless you're talking about New York they really just need another car.
This in comparison to European and Asian cities where your friend can just post you an address and you can use public transit all the way to the last block.
US land is amazingly well suited for HSR and cities are well suited for subways. We also have the money. The only problem is political.
The US has a massive setup cost problem, any significant infrastructure project takes years of regulatory hurdles and then legal challenges as competitors and NIMBYs try everything they can to slow things down.
Thus ending up being way more expensive than countries where they still have slums to ruthlessly tear down or land to seize from small-time farmers to make room for new infrastructure (not to imply that the way it works in the US is much better).
This is exactly what I meant by political problems.
> Thus ending up being way more expensive than countries where they still have slums to ruthlessly tear down or land to seize from small-time farmers to make room for new infrastructure (not to imply that the way it works in the US is much better).
India razed slums and farms for trains, the US razed forests and farms for interstates. It's the same thing. Slums in India have a land value to them. The government doesn't get that land for free. Just pay out property owners market value+20% for infrastructure and build the thing that is so direly needed.
I’m grateful to live in a country where having a vehicle is normal and not just for the wealthy class. I’m happy to not be packed onto public transit if I want to take the family to the beach or go hiking or something.
You don't need to. It's not like those countries with extensive train networks don't have cars and interstate highways. They do and people use them. The point is that in those countries, cheap options exist for all income brackets and all use cases.
In America, it's a car or bust.
And are you saying poor people in America wouldn't want a cheaper mode of transportation as an option?
Ship has sailed, it usually works in the reverse. People aren't coming back from suburbia because there's stations where they don't need cars.
The train in NYC runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The London Tube stops at midnight.
The train in NYC is much much cheaper, it's $2.75 to go anywhere on its almost 400km of track. London's Tube has zone-based pricing.
The NYC subway cars are all air-conditioned.
The NYC subway cars are far roomier than the Tube.
NYCs subway is "cut and cover" and so the stations aren't nearly as deep and quicker to get in and out of.
Public transport in London is notoriously expensive though it is true.
One major failing of the NYC subway in my mind is the near total lack of signage. There is like one map per carriage (which is often hidden behind people standing or sitting), and the platforms have almost no signage or maps or directions. You look out the window to see where you are when you pull into a station and there are no signs. Perhaps there is a single letter initial every 30 meters or so... WTF? At least in London the station name is repeated all the way along the platform (along with route maps and network maps and colour-coded signs to other lines etc), there are like 8 maps in every carriage at above-head-height so you can see it over people etc.
The express routes in NYC subway are awesome and I wish London had those
I don't want to overstate this too much, I dislike the JR privatisation (including a part where a lot of the public-era debt ended up in the gov't's hand), and all the train companies here do a combo of offering the train service and doing loads of real estate offerings at each station (making them very successful organizations overall). But I believe that we would see much less train coverage without continued gov't financing in these projects.
Here is an article (from '97, granted) talking about how the gov't sets up things like interest-free loans for developing new lines. https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr11/pdf/f14_ono.pdf
If somebody is making money off of a transaction, that money is coming from somewhere. At the margins that is fine but when we're talking about 10s of billions of dollars it just looks like a handout from the general public to people who had enough money to invest in a transportation corporation during its privatisation.
Counterfactuals are not resolvable though, but I think we can look at how this stuff was built out and decide if there are structures to do it without having to just let go of democratic control of vital infrastructure.
[0]: yes I understand that there's a universe where the public-run version just falls apart and doesn't exist.
TIL this amusing combo, thanks! The Wikipedia entry is helpful [1]