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Comment by dwg | Hacker News Reader

I hope trains become more popular, and train travel is reinvigorated in the U.S!

Not making any judgements, but just for comparison, here is a Japan train explorer: https://roote.ekispert.net/rmap/fullscreen.

For context, Japan is roughly the size of California.

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I just checked how much it will cost me to travel to Boston, MA from Cleveland, OH.

Pretty straightforward route. 11 hours of travel and 172$ per seat in couch vagon. Considering that I wanted to take my whole family to this trip it just doesn't make sense to go by train. Car is going to be faster and cheaper even considering parking fees in Boston.

Yep, it often makes more sense to go by car (especially when you can fill your car up), or you want to use your car at the destination (though renting is an option here).

Sometimes going by train is just more pleasant. Kids don't need to be strapped into carseats, repeatedly asking "are we there yet?" You can go to the bathroom or stretch your legs any time. You can do other things, such as enjoy the scenery or read a book. Also, last time I checked, trains are lot safer than cars. There is no traffic. Finally, you don't have to drive!

If you like, you might consider soft factors in addition to the fare :)

The USA is too big. Trains will never compete with air travel except maybe in regional service.

China is a similar size but trains are very competitive there.

I think the part that's missing is good urban transit systems. A long distance train loses most of its advantages if you have to hire a car at the end of it.

China has about three times the US population and it’s almost entirely concentrated along their coast. Passenger rail makes sense for that kind of population density. Where the US has similar density, it has Acela, which is the profitable part of Amtrak.

China also has a massive construction bubble that the government keeps propping up in order to delay the inevitable correction. As a result they overbuild a lot of infrastructure, including passenger rail, well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

> China has about three times the US population and it’s almost entirely concentrated along their coast. Passenger rail makes sense for that kind of population density.

But they have high speed rail across the sparsely populated interior as well - not as dense as the network on the coast, but it's there and it successfully competes with flying. So the sort of network that the west half of China has should be possible in the US.

> they overbuild a lot of infrastructure, including passenger rail, well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

Maybe. Or maybe they sensibly plan ahead and build infrastructure that will be needed in the near future. Time will tell.

> Or maybe they sensibly plan ahead and build infrastructure that will be needed in the near future.

If they were making sensible plans for future population growth in Xinjiang, they wouldn’t be committing genocide there.

That's a nonsense non-sequitur and you know it.

How is it a non-sequitur? It doesn’t make sense to build infrastructure to support population growth in an area where you are deliberately reducing the population.

They're not expecting to reduce the population. The claims of "genocide" are based on a rather stretched redefinition to include forced cultural assimilation. And the US has more than its fair share of both forced cultural assimilation and deliberate efforts to reduce certain populations, so even if we accept your arguments then that's still no reason to have worse transportation.

The birthrates in Xinjiang are plummeting as a consequence of forced sterilization. Your genocide denial aside, the demographics of the region don’t favor your argument.

Compete in terms of what? Spending at least 5 extra hours before and after you travel in order to just get stuffed inside a tube and get treated like sht?

That's an exaggeration. Airlines will tell you to arrive at the airport 2 hours before your flight but if you're a bit organized, check in online, know what you can and can't pack in your carry-on, I'd say 90 minutes is fine. I usually end up sitting at the gate for about an hour waiting for boarding if I arrive 2 hours in advance.

Even so, a flight from Chicago to San Francisco is a little over 4 hours in the air. A train takes 2 days. There is no comparison.

High Speed Rail doesn't need to cover the country end to end, because most of the travel isn't end to end. There are plenty of "regional" services that can be done that will already remove millions of other worse trips (by car or plane) and will be a net benefit for everyone and everything (saving people time, generating revenue, reducing pollution and noise, etc. etc).

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