81–90 of 503 posts
I was looking at my HSR options from Shanghai to Xi'an (1,500km distance) yesterday, the fastest train takes almost 6 hours and there is only one everyday. That 6 hours ride costs me almost $100 USD while $120 USD can covers my flight to Xi'an in 2.5 hours and I can choose the time of my flight. $20 extra to save 3.5 hours - the maths here is not hard.
I have used the high speed line between Wuhan and GZ (and through to HK) several times. It’s currently a 4.5 hour direct journey (once per day) or a 5 hour journey if you change at GZ or Shenzhen. The HSR is 300ish km/h at the moment and that route stops about 4-5 times along the way, off memory.
Aside, I also don’t know how much benefit 1000 km/h travel would bring. That’s an enormous energy requirement to accelerate up to such a speed only to stop 4-5 times along the way. 600 km/h would likely be much more realistic, because if you shorten the duration too much you run into the wall of needing to accel/decel constantly to make the stops.
Lastly, the HSR there is already capable of 350 km/h at least, but they limited it to 300 km/h after a massive derailment that caused a heap of fatalities years ago and never increased it back up again. It may be reading into it too much, but it may also be telling that they didn’t see the benefit of upping the top speed again even when considering the loss of face.
And San Francisco is struggling to add 1 mile of underground track. The project is postponed (again) to open in 2022.
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Just a heads-up: This person has posted at least 12 pro-China comments in the past year by my count. Extremely suspicious.
I strongly disagreed with them on this particular thread, but I don't get why having pro-China views should be automatically considered "extremely suspicious"?
So, as someone that lived in New York for 6 years and California for 6 years, stories like this are incredibly depressing. The US is the world's largest economy and should be the shining example of amazing infrastructure, high-tech, green cities, and forward thinking policies. California is an especially egregious example in terms of infrastructure investment: If California was a country it would be the world's fifth…
I’m under the impression that the US public want cars not trains and even the current tech celebrity’s vision is to have self driving cars that work together as if they are train carriages and go in a tunnel as if they are metro train carriages. In the rest of the world, people are fine with ride sharing.
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Other, and actually main, reason is that good public transport decreases cost of land, it is basically designed to do so: it makes more places liveable/jobs reachable, so there is effectively more land for the same amount of people. So everyone will vote against or they lose their pensions. Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps…
Just a heads-up: This person has posted at least 12 pro-China comments in the past year by my count. Extremely suspicious.
1,000km/h is within what is conventionally considered transonic (965-1235km/h). I wonder how practical these speeds are without a containing tunnel, particularly on the ground where there is potential for damage to buildings, structures, wildlife, etc. from sonic booms. Additionally, as I understand it, reflecting objects and terrain at ground level increase the potential for generation of sonic booms at transonic sp…
At these speeds, the train would need to drive in a low pressure tunnel.
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Sure, but pro-China shills should not be allowed to post on HN, period. It's in violation of the policies. Dang, can you look into this?
Which one in particular? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I found one that applies to you. >> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
> If technology proves to be viable, a 2,200-km trip from Wuhan to Guangzhou could be reduced to around two hours Driving, this is only 984km. Shouldn't it be one hour?