Winning government funding for projects and jobs in Massachusetts is a proper goal for any of our US Senators and members of Congress. Yet it is not enough that projects simply be located here to merit their support. Projects should create something of significant value.
That’s why it was so sad to see the headlines: Rail stimulus funds to bypass Northeast Corridor. Broken wheel caused Red Line derailment. Mass. push saves costly engine plan: Lawmakers protect jobs at GE in Lynn despite Obama call to ax program. And the kicker: China unveils world’s fastest train, goes 236 mph.
In the 50s and 60s, we had a monopoly on industrial production. We could afford both guns and butter. But we can’t today. The Lynn jobs need to be saved. But everyone would have been better served with funding to retrofit the Lynn factory to build train engines, wind turbines, or something we actually need.
If America does invest in these technologies, we will probably buy them from Europe or Asia, simply because they’ve been building them there for years while we have not been. American technology may eventually catch up, but at the moment, if we want the best systems, we will need to import them.
… is that it tends to go to support vested interest. It makes people that make a living off of old technologies happy enough to re-elect the politicians that support the old technology and the industries themselves to aid the politicians. But, there are no votes from jobs that don’t exist.
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p>Whereas much private money will take the risk and try to get to market first in order to maximize profit, government attempts to maintain a status quo. Private money tends to create new jobs.
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p>Little wonder the television, calculator, personal computer markets were started by private industry. I don’t see the government leading any new innovation. The jobs of the future are waiting overseas.
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p>We are in for a very tough time.
Look at military technology. Nuclear or otherwise, government-funded military technology is consistently cutting-edge, because that’s what the government bothers to spend money on. There’s no reason why we couldn’t shift to the cutting edge of a different industry.
Education
Health Care
etc
etc
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p>Transportation would of course be on that list as well. It’s great to see a defense of government spending for once.
… article by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker that touched on how China deals with the public role of technolgy research investment.(hat tip Ezra)
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p>Our private market myopia will constrain good R&D in this country for decades to come. With regard to energy research, the article notes the stunning growth of R&D in China and contrasts it with Regan’s effort to abolish the DoE.
things like rail systems and highways aren’t built by private industry innovating on their own. Not here or anywhere on the planet.
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p>So if we want these things we have to be able to deal with the corruption you describe. Or outsource the job to societies that can, apparently, deal with theirs and get things done.
That’s of course not really true. Much of the technology that led directly to the PC revolution came from the Apollo program — government spending all the way. Private industry surely picked up the ball and ran with it, but they had a big, public helping hand. Indeed, the list of NASA spinoff technologies is pretty impressive.
Bell Labs used to in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
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p>R&D has been slashed to pad the bonuses for CEOs and their sycophantic lower-level employees.
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p>The corporation decides things based on what boosts this quarter’s bottom line, and to spend money with the assumption that would pay off 10 years down the road is to “cheat” the shareholders of value.
Yes, we are the Merchants of Death for the world. Our weapons are prized by military people and feared by men, women and children all over the world. They are now being distributed to local police forces to keep Americans in line. (Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy.) Could we change? Sure, but the money is with the big spender government, not with the people. Now, the Pentagon spends more money than the 50 states combined. Bleeding of economy as it did in the ’60s. (Remember the false hope of the “Peace Dividend” when the Cold War ended?)
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p>We could follow the lead of the Chinese. Certainly we are getting more like them. Right now the little resistance to a planned oligarchy is with the Congress. Once that is abolished, we can look forward to seeing the necessities of planned economies with forced migration, slave and prison labor, the absence of human rights. (Somehow, I don’t see that as progress, but my views are no more valid than those of anyone else.)
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p>Well, the integrated circuit was originally developed then used in the Minuteman missile back in the early ’60s. It did lead eventually to the personal computer, but in thirty years of computer use, I can’t remember ever using a computer designed or build by the government.
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p>Many of the corporate leaders of today are not capitalists. They do not use the accumulation of capital to improve the corporate well-being. They are looters, using monies invested by institutions and governments simply to enhance their own wealth, serving not the interests of the investors or the corporation, but themselves. When the investors realize the extent of the failure they fall back on the taxpayers’ largess through the fully paid for Congress.
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p>In other news…
I grew up in Lynn and am depressed by how the connectivity of the Boston metro area has decayed. In the 1960s not only were there frequent, relatively cheap trains to Boston from Lynn, but the Boston & Maine railroad reached out to Portsmouth NH on an hourly basis! The downside was that even as a young traveler, I could see the deferred maintenance as the whole system turned shabby. The B & M wrung every bit of value they could from the system, then dumped it on the state government. Commuter Rail began with a aged, poorly maintained system and it has never really caught up. We need a Marshall Plan for rail transport. Obama’s appointment of Ray LaHood as Secretary of Transportation augured well, but more and more of the energy and funds are being sucked away by 2 wars and a a very messy and expensive health reform program.
yeah, that’s a strage statement. Here’s the thing though: congressmen from the Northeast Corridor will always support Amtrak — even the occassional Republican. Why? Acela is a great way for constituents (who just so happen to be wealthy businessmen) to get from A to B.
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p>The problem is that there isn’t much support elsewhere. So, let’s spend a bunch of money and get an Acela South. Then, we’ll be more likely to have GOP support for
Amtrak from southern pols in the future. Go DC to Atlanta through VA and NC and you’ve now got 6 Senators and a bunch of House members who are more likely to throw votes. They don’t care about the current Amtrak because by and large it’s their poor black constituents who use it. But, get wealthy white people on the train and the pols will demand that it gets public support.
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p>Hopefully the stimulus money results in more high speed rail that really works for the business traveller. It’s the easiest way to get broader and deeper support for Amtrak from a majority of our congresscritters.
you know, Boston – NY in 2 hours, like they have in the developed world.
East/West, with a pick up in Palmer. Sigh…it would be so amazing. I would pack up my son and his friends and we could travel by train to Boston for the day. No car, no parking, no hassles. What a lovely dream.
You can’t run a train in excess of 100MPH and stop every ten miles at stations like Palmer. The question will be Worcester, Springfield, or both. The way I see realizing your dream is that you board a clean, fast, affordable and comfortable local train (probably electric) — that runs every 15-20 min — that gets you to the high-speed stop, where you board the high-speed for Boston (or Chicago).
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p>Still no car, still no parking to worry about, still no hassles. Just an extra hop at the beginning.
With the various grades of service: Regional Bahn (every single stop), Regional Express (skipping the minor ones), Inter City (long distance normal speed), and Inter City Express (high speed). Palmer would probably be covered by RE service, if we had something similar here, not only because it has decent population (about 12,500), but it is also the location of and important rail junction. I still can’t imagine a high speed stop there though, seeing as two Amtrak lines pass through it, but neither stop currently.
I know Palmer is not the biggest town on the books, but it is a junction for the Mass Pike, Route 32, and Route 20. The tracks are already there, as well as a renovated train station. It just makes sense.
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p>It would give Palmer and the surrounding towns a resource that would generate growth in this area. We need it. I would love to see workers in Springfield and Worcester move to this area because we have commuter rail. I would love to see Connecticut residents consider Massachusetts as a new home because we have commuter rail. It goes without question that it is a huge plus, and worth every penny of investment.
I’ll accept that as an amazingly workable solution!
My wife is Austrian and grew up in Bavaria, so I’ve had ample to time to observe the European (and especially German) model.
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p>Marcus dimed me out 🙂
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p>I agree it that it works marvelously. Let’s hope we can make something like it happen.
There is no way a defense plant could somehow overnight (or even in 10 years) become a train manufacturer. While this worked during WWII that was 70 years ago and the products were much much simpler. We can’t even get bridge built across a 20 foot creek in 4 years.
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p> While I would love more trains here, the US is not as dense as Western Europe. While trains might work in the Northeast Corridor – taking a train from Boston to Chicago would be way to time consuming (and I think frankly use more resources, including energy than a plane).
Rail is extraordinarily more fuel efficient than air, mile by mile and ton by ton. To the tune of about a factor of ten (49 passenger-miles/gallon for air versus 468 for rail). The difference in density will work to enhance, rather than decrease, rail’s advantage — most of the consumption is in starting and stopping. The notion that a medium- or long-distance plane uses less energy than a train is badly mistaken.
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p>The question of time is more subtle. On coast-to-coast, and to some extent even with shorter journeys, the productive time lost to jet-lag offsets the apparent clock-time gain. It takes most people three days to get over coast-to-coast jet lag, especially east-bound. The same trip currently takes three days by rail, and involves no extra timezone adjustment burden. There are, in my experience, intangible gains to be had by lengthening the trip time. A surprising number of “required” trips turn out to be not so crucial when they take longer.
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p>Finally, the fundamental question I think we need to face is whether the overall cost of reducing travel time is something our society can afford, when we factor in all the costs.
Thanks for the link, I looked carefully at the figures.
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p>Rail intercity (Amtrak) 2,650 BTU/passenger mile
Air 3,261 BTU/passenger mile (unless you are taking a personal jet)
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p>So rail only uses 18% less energy. Heavy rail infrastructure, is expensive and uses huge amounts of energy, I bet it could almost even out.
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p>Bulk freight is a different story – Air Freight 9,600 BTU/short mile vs Class 1 Railroad 341 BTU/short mile – so railroads are 28 times more efficient for freight.
and in fact Amtrak is but one instance of passenger rail service. BTom’s BTU numbers are correct, except that it uses average capacity for air travel and optimum (perfectly full) capacity for rail. Furthermore, his numbers use average for the whole fleet for air, but a very efficient layout for rail passenger travel (unused in the USA), thereby comparing apples to oranges a bit.
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p>It is the case that, given some good investment in infrastructure, Amtrak could drive down their rail intercity from 2650 BTU/passenger mile to something well below 2000 — a better than 50% efficiency differential.
You could throw a trillion dollars at Amtrak and they won’t be any more efficient, the organization has blown through 10’s of billions of dollars and all we have is marginal slow unreliable expensive trains. It takes as long by train to get to NYC from Boston as it did 75 years ago.
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p>The required changes to implement fast rail in the Northeast USA, let along the entire US are impossible. We can’t even get windmills off the coast of the cape because it bothers the power elite in Massachusetts.
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p>I also think the Air btu per passenger mile will go down with time as airlines retire inefficient aircraft. So while trains will improve so will airplanes.
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p>However, my recent UK train experience was very positive, they have a private public partnership that seems to work efficient, but it’s very expensive.
It’s true you “could” throw money and it won’t be any more efficient, but it’s also true that you “could” throw money and it would be more efficient. Just depends on how you spend it.
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p>As for train from NYC to Boston 75 years ago, go ahead and prove to me you could go from Boston to NYC with stops in Providence and CT and do it in 3.5 hours. I’m calling BS. There may have been a non stop option then, and we “could” do that now if we allowed Amtrak to lose as much money as we allow the US Interstate Highway system to lose. Instead, we cripple Amtrak with weak funding that varies widely from year to year, a huge set of complex and overlapping regulations between state and regional agencies, and make sure we go ahead and subsidize auto travel at far greater levels, and we’re shocked, shocked! that Amtrak isn’t a great national rail system.
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p>Wrong, irrelevant, and the rest. High speed rail is defined to be 125 mph by the EU, 90 mph in the USA. The Acela has a top speed of 150 mph, which means that by the definition of the organizations which know what the hell they’re talking about (read: not you), we do have high speed rail already. Not enough? I agree. Let’s do more. Let’s spend the money upgrading the catenary wires, acquiring slightly wider right of ways, improving the bridges. Let’s change policy so that passenger rail gets priority over coal cargo, so that drawbridges are defaulted to the closed position, so that it’s easier to acquire the right of way necessary.
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p>Rail is already more efficient, and it’s upside is much higher because airplane efficiency is going to have tough gains. The Boeing Dreamliner is more efficient, but the laws of gravity and the density of the atmosphere put real limits on how much more efficient air travel can get. Simply waving your hands and suggesting that they’ll both get better so we shouldn’t worry about it is remarkably non-analytical.
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p>Well I’m glad your anecdote, full of talking points but not much information, leaves some optimism.
Sorry but BTU’s are facts – and I was actually surprised at the figures. I thought trains were much more efficient, obviously not for passengers. Air resistance is pretty unforgiving to any fast moving object be it a fast train or a fast plane.
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p>My understanding is there was an express train from Boston to NYC at about 3 1/2 hours in the 1950s’ express not a regional, still we haven’t come very far in 50 years.
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p>Acela’s average speed between Boston and New York is 62 miles per hour and 82 miles an hour between New York and Washington, D.C. I’ve taken the train many times, it follows the traffic on route 95 at highway speeds and then for a very short time it goes real fast south of providence. I find it sort of silly, the train is slow – the average speed is what counts not the top speed. Acela might meet the “definition” for high speed rail but practically it’s not.
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p>The problem is not coal freight cars (most of the coal to NE is sent by ship), but the commuter rail into NYC and the lines in some location. The Boston to NYC is fully electrified I’ve never seen a freight train on the line, I’m not even sure they can run on it.
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You are absolutely correct that the best way to improve the “timetable speed” of the Boston/NYC run is to eliminate the slow-order segments where each train is limited to 5-10MPH.
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p>It does take a modest investment in infrastructure and perhaps right-of-way. It does not take anything close to a trillion dollars.
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p>The Pennsylvania Railroad ran high-speed electric service between NYC and Washington DC for decades using GG1 power (introduced in 1934) that readily handled 90+MPH passenger service.
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p>The geography that demands modern high-speed rail technology is the west and southwest where long straight flat segments (across desert, for example) are the rule rather than the exception.
The backup data is not available on-line but I’m wondering if the BTU/passenger mile includes infrastructure. I would think yes and that’s why you see the higher BTU consumption for passenger rail. I see the freight trains in my town lumber by on 1950’s track at 5-7 mph which while the Acela requires huge investments in overhead lines track beds and right of ways.
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p>While you can add a car to the end of a train, you can also send a smaller plane or a larger one. The airlines have gotten very nibble and dealing with capacity utilization, of course they rarely make a profit.
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p>I realize it doesn’t take a 1 trillion dollars to fix Acela, I just question if the organization is capable of fixing the tracks at all. We still have a 1960’s air traffic control system which the government has thrown huge amounts of money at and from what I can see with no results. Given how Amtrak managed and promoted Acela, I’m afraid the same will happen .
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p>Interesting about the NYC to Philadelphia run, I needed to get from New York to Philadelphia many years ago, and no one said fly everyone just said take the train it’s quick and easy.
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p>No results? Ten years ago, business travelers never went by train from BOS to NYC, or from NYC to DC. Never. In 2008 Acela carried 3.399 million passengers between New York and Boston. That’s a solid result so far as I can tell. That’s 3.4M people who would have driven or flown — the poor still use regional service (which, incidentally, is also now faster because it uses the same tracks as Acela). All while charging more for tickets than it costs them to operate the trains.
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p>No results? The ridership goes up (just about) every year, and the QOS has improved — lower variance and faster mean trip time thanks to work on the catenaries, the track, the stations, etc. Keep putting in money, and watch as the trip time is shaved a minute here, three minutes there, etc.
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p>The public subsidies in air travel and road travel has absolutely dwarfed investment in rail travel per passenger mile. Start building and maintaining straight wide track like we do highways, and rail terminals like we build airplane terminals, and watch as it becomes more and more successful.
A BTU is a unit. Trains are much more efficient in general — however, when comparing two modes of transit, you’ve got to make a fair comparison. Trains in America — already more efficient in BTUs per passenger mile — have much higher upside because currently they’ve got to apply the brake often between stops — something airplanes simply don’t ever do. As those kinks get removed (and they are, slowly but surely, with capital investment), the BTU required per passenger mile goes down while trip time also decreases. There’s simply no opportunity for this in air travel.
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p>The issue isn’t air resistance — it’s braking. As rail in America is improved, trains will have to brake less often, and that’s where the gains are.
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p>So one that didn’t stop at Back Bay, Route 128, Providence, New London, New Haven, and Stamford between South Station and Penn Station. Also, during a time before the Mass Pike opened (1957) where auto travel was on the order of 50 mph at best, instead of the 70 mph we do now. So, you’re comparing apples to oranges. If we slow the highways down (and crank up airfare to the real dollar price of the 1950s) we’ll have way more demand for the rail, and we’ll have enough passengers to shoot Boston to NYC directly in well under 3 hours. But, that’s not the reality, and so you continue to insist on comparing apples to oranges.
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p>With investment, 30 minutes could be shaved off of the BOS-NYC connection, most of which is in CT. But, it takes real money, and it takes political willpower to override NIMBY and the non-systematic state-by-state way that the Feds and Amtrak fund improvements.
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p>Acela runs from DC. The coal issue is from MD to PA, the “lower half” of the line. It’s also a tremendous issue for commuter rail in a number of places, even in New England. The problem is that the Acela track is congested with local commuter rail, which is forced off of other track by coal. This happens in MA with commuter rail too — which is why the state signed a deal with CSX to buy some track from them so that commuter rail wouldn’t get delayed by CSX shipments. And yes, a freight train could run on the Acela tracks, and do in some segments IIUC.
Not sure how accurate this figure is, but I found specifications on the Dreamliner of 2.4K BTU per mile. Not bad a all.
When you see a two order of magnitude difference between passenger and freight (18% versus 2,800%), and you know the physics are the same, then it should be a tip-off that something else is going on.
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p>”Heavy rail infrastructure” is the same for passenger and freight, just as both passenger and air freight share the same infrastructure.
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p>One factor you’re missing is scaling. Suppose you wanted to double passenger capacity. With air, you fly twice as many planes and use twice as much fuel. With rail, you double the train length — it doesn’t take nearly twice as much fuel to move the resulting train. Want another factor of two? Run the train more slowly. That’s not going to work in an airplane.
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p>Aerodynamic forces against the forward-facing surfaces of both an aircraft and train impede the forward motion, while aerodynamic forces behind the rearward-facing surfaces of both provide additional drag. When you fly two airplanes, you double those forces. When you double the length of the train, you add essentially zero.
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p>The basic physics of using steel wheels rolling on steel rails is about as close to ideal for moving the maximum mass (whether you call it “freight” or “passenger”) at the maximum speed as is possible without maglev and similar technologies.
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p>I welcome a conversation about an engineering analysis of fuel efficiencies of various transportation alternatives.
It’s slightly more than 500 miles, and the trip can be done by train in 4:15. Given equivalent train service, you should be able to make it from Boston to Washington in about 4 hours, Boston to Montreal in 2:30, and Boston to Chicago in under 8 hours.
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p>Maybe you wouldn’t take the train from Boston to Chicago (I probably would), but Boston to Cleveland would work, and there would be very little incentive to fly from Cleveland to Chicago or from Buffalo to Boston. Moving people from airplanes to trains would also be a considerable savings in CO2 emissions.
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p>We were traveling around Japan in November with a JR pass, and the Shinkansen (bullet trains) were all built on new track parallel to existing routes. If you know Japan, this wasn’t exactly easy, as the country is densely populated and mountainous. The local trains connect to the Shinkansen at all stops, and the local service is excellent. Passenger trains are all fast electric trains with very regular service. The main line between Osaka and Kyoto has service every 12 minutes on the local line, even more frequent if you are at an express stop.
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p>My solution? Sell the entire US rail system to JR for $1.
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Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
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p>My understanding, for what it’s worth, is that licensure and cost of ownership for driving, both cars and motorcycles, in Japan is a great deal more paperwork and training intensive than most other places in the world. I suppose it could be considered ‘ironic’ for the homeland of some of the largest car makers in the world… but if you think about it, the quality of the cars is probably an outgrowth of this care taken in driving and costs. Part of it is surely geographic: if you took slightly less than half the US population and shoved them all into an area the size of California… well, I daresay driving habits would change.
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p> This has led in part, I believe, to the greater demands and expectations placed upon public transportation in Japan. Comparable demand has not been seen in the USA. In Japan, getting around is considered an entitlement of which a car presents a possible choice of subset to the general entitlement. In the USA getting a car is itself an entitlement and you’re on your own in getting around.
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p>Furthermore, right now, the ‘debate’ around HSR, such as it is, seems to revolve around two points: first, that a high speed rail would be ‘nice to have’; and secondly, the notion that we ought to have the same nice things that other nations have. I’m of the mind that the debate ought to be about reducing the number of cars on the road, and reducing the hassles of travel in general, and would therefore support tighter restrictions on licensure and plane travel, in the hopes that this would provide the ‘tipping-point’ in which we are pushed into the need for high-speed rail.