I mean, does the population density in the US support bullet trains? I know that both Japan & China for example have large population density within each city (whether you live in Osaka heading for Kobe or from Shanghai to Beijing, you get the picture) plus the governments of both countries invest heavily on the infrastructure including maintenance.
Distance is another factor between destinations, like from Nagoya to Kyoto it’s only 130km (80mi) and the commute by bullet train is 33 minutes while from New York to DC it’s 226mi taking you 4 hours by car but via bullet train, the commute time is less than it would be from driving alone. The cities in Japan are closer to each other by comparison.
China is a large country (not big as let’s say like Russia in terms of land size) alongside varying topography and climates (they can still install tracks in uneven terrain but adjusting how they are installed), although their population is larger than the US (they have about more than 1.4 billion people as a country while the US is about 348 million).
The taxes work differently across countries, like in both Japan & China: they have the funds gathered from taxation allowing them to maintain constant upkeep or make further improvements. Well, what does the US government spend their taxes on? That in itself also lies the question whether the taxes citizens are already paying are worth it.
Taxes exist in all countries regardless, as governments need funding to maintain and improve infrastructure, roads, schools, hospitals, etc. The real question is: how is the government using that money? For example, in Japan the reason why public transport is considered reliable is due to their government using people’s taxes for upkeep & bullet trains.
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Rampant corruption redirects almost all federal resources to contractors and corporations.
Auto industry.
Around the time that the Shinkansen was being built, President Johnson included a provision for a high speed rail line to be built in the Northeast Corridor, a location that makes sense with density and distance. It went ok, in part because the line was relatively straight already and we got what later became the Acela. In the interim, the railroad that owned the tracks went bankrupt.
Part of the issue was that, while other countries were developing high speed rail, passenger rail was owned by private companies and in freefall given the subsidies going to highways. The rail companies didn’t want to build high speed rail and most governments didn’t really have any experience building rail at all.
Another part of the issue is that early highway construction trampled on the rights of a lot of people and the process of design and construction became heavily regulated. These same regulations apply to high speed rail even though high speed rail is far more environmentally friendly. Part of what was slowing down California’s high speed rail project was the permitting process.
In essence, the organizations who could build it mostly went away and the process to build it became incredibly harder. Also, there likely wouldn’t be a single system of high speed rail. Instead, there would be multiple seeds in which high speed rail grew from, with some seeds likely not connecting to create an overall network. For instance, Cascadia and CA+NV+AZ would likely be their own networks while Texas+ would likely take a while before it connected to the rest of the Eastern network.
Because it’s a 3rd world country
A lot of people have pointed out the auto industry lobby, but even if it were removed, getting high speed rail in place would still be a tough sell because of the settlement patterns that the postwar car + suburb boom created. Boston to DC is easily dense enough to support high speed rail, but huge swathes of that corridor (especially Connecticut and New Jersey) are so thoroughly suburbanized that getting to the train in the first place is a non-trivial drive, which renders the train much less attractive. New Jersey is the densest state in the country but The Acela, which serves that corridor, only has stops at either side around New York and Philadelphia because Jersey’s density is spread fairly evenly across a functionally infinite suburbia.
In a word: Republicans.
You can’t roll coal with an electric train.
People generally don’t notice that the plot of who killed Roger rabbit was actually about the dismantling of USA public transportation.
Ford and GM have been destroying it since the beginning.
In USA we have decided to avoid that “public works” middleman and just give the money directly to corporations.
Lobbying by corporate interests, the Auto industry and fossil fuel industry in particular.
It’s not like big businesses have no political influence in Japan. If anything, there’s historically more cross-over, but, they have plenty of bullet trains.
Because musk stole billions that were given to him by California instead of building it and we don’t enforce laws on the pedophile parasite class so womp womp
https://techcentral.co.za/elon-musk-hyperloop-sucked-up-billions-delivered-nothing/279294/
The auto companies successfully lobbied the government to abandon passenger trains and build highways instead, basically. (That way we’d all be forced to buy their products thanks to the transportation ecosystem.)
Lots of cities are getting commuter trains though. Mine just built two expansions to our rail line. It’s a slow process, but essential.
This, right here.
US cities used to have terrific streetcar systems. Just look at San Francisco in 1940:
https://ani.social/post/13225809
Los Angeles’ legendary streetcars’ demise was the plot of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
In fact, LA’s streetcars were bought by a conglomerate of automobile companies in order to destroy them
A similar story is in the history of US intercity passenger rail, which is in Amtrak’s wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak
Which starts with:
In 1916, 98% of all commercial intercity travelers in the United States moved by rail, and the remaining 2% moved by inland waterways.[9] Nearly 42 million passengers used railways as primary transportation
Ok, but this was the only choice because neither highways nor passenger planes did exist yet
My point is that the US used to have a lot of rail infrastructure, both inside cities and for intercity travel, but scrapped most of it, and neglected what was left, mostly in favor of building freeways for automobiles.
Therefore, as relevant to this subject, we don’t have bullet trains.
Because high speed passenger rail requires three things that don’t exist in the United States.
1.) Long-term planning 2.) Coordination among different communities 3.) A desire to invest in people’s wellbeing
We are in the ‘pieces are starting to visibly fall off this thing’ phase of societal collapse. That means that, while we’re still rolling down the road, there is a largely un-acknowledged awareness that the car isn’t making it all the way to the destination. As a result, people and institutions are all acting in their own short-term self interest.
Short-term self-interest. The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.
Short-term self-interest. The cause of
and solution toall of life’s problems.You’re absolutely correct, but they were referencing the simpsons.
NIMBY, greed, and government stupidity.
The US has a single coast-to-coast train called “The Zephyr.” It is wildly expensive, and takes multiple days to go from one coast to the other.
If we had bullet trains, our corporate-owned government would still make them unaffordable.
It runs by my back yard. It is a laughably small train, as the only people that ride it do it as a “holiday”
