shinkansen

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Carrol writes:
>
>>  my experience over the last
>>  few years that in travelling by air one must add a minimum of 5 hours to
>>  the flight time, sometimes more.
>
>What, do you crawl? 
>
>I recently left my house in Berkeley, drove to SFO, got on a flight to
>Palm Springs, spent half an hour at the airport, flew back to San
>Francisco, got my car and drove home in just over five hours.  That's
>421 air miles _each way_ ... you could drive that one way in about 7+
>hours (my mapping software says 480 miles the easy way).
>
>Yes, this was post-9/11.
>
>-=-=-=-=-=
>
>Ok, as usual, LBO is way off track.  All I said about trains is that
>it's too bad they don't compete well in the US, and that they aren't
>even all that impressive under the best conditions in the rest of the
>world, and I always laugh when people talk about how great the trains
>are in Europe and Japan and how they wish we could have those fast
>trains in the US too but they don't get that the cities are just closer
>together there and trains, even fast ones, won't work very well here.
>
>Even if you got a Shinkansen to do the 400 miles from San Francisco to
>Los Angeles in 4 hours (better than the example I gave before, Tokyo ->
>Hiroshima), it'd still be WAY faster to fly.  Maybe if you could get
>one to go from Sacramento to San Francisco (and get across the Bay
>somehow, hmmm) in an hour, that'd be impressive, but you'd be competing
>with busses, not airplanes.  And who would ride it?
>
>Fast trains cannot and do not compete with airplanes, except in very
>rare circumstances, usually in the 150-250 mile range, and then only if
>you have a straight shot on a very fast train.  Very few city pairs
>count, most of them starting in Paris.
>
>/jordan

Naturally, I like trains better than planes.

1.  Trains have more comfortable seats and give you more leg room 
than planes do.
2.  Trains run on time (in Japan), but planes are frequently late.
3.  You don't have to show up a couple of hours ahead of time to get 
on a train.
4.  Train ticket prices are predictable, but plane ticket prices aren't.
5.  You get fun shopping & entertainment zones (and beyond them 
residential areas) around train stations, whereas you get only ugly 
hotels, parking areas, & rental car dealers around airports.
6.  You'd rather eat ekiben than airline pretzels.
7.  Last but not the least, there are unquestionably better movies 
about trains than planes.

The problem in Japan is that while trains are getting faster and 
faster, economy gets worse and worse.  I went home last May, and I 
was shocked to find so many homeless men in the train station in 
Chigasaki.  Japan seems unable to get off the fast track to an 
economic no-man's land.
-- 
Yoshie

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