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You’re Too Cheap to Fly Faster

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Re: You’re Too Cheap to Fly Faster

#71

Post by seanmcdirmid »

venus wrote: post #70
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan is a very compact country. Lovely for anyone in the DC-Boston corridor, doesn't scale to most of the states however. Consider how there isn't much of anything between San Francisco and LA. Love the Shinkansen though. My preferred method of travel within Japan.

The "compact" excuse is a cop-out, IMO. LA and SF are two massive cities well within high speed train range. Of course there's nothing in between them - there's no transport! You're thinking backwards. Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years? My point is that these lines would be considered viable in Japan - more than viable; completely ob…

Its not really that though, there is nothing between LA and SF because the land is not really suitable for big cities. Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation pushing many of the cities into a narrow band (e.g. Tokyo - Osaka). You can't really fight geography, and you work with what you got.

> Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years?

At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese. I also find this to be a bad outcome; if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?

Re: You’re Too Cheap to Fly Faster

#72

Post by venus »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #71
venus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "compact" excuse is a cop-out, IMO. LA and SF are two massive cities well within high speed train range. Of course there's nothing in between them - there's no transport! You're thinking backwards. Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years? My point is that these lines would be considered viable in Japan - more than viable; completely ob…

Its not really that though, there is nothing between LA and SF because the land is not really suitable for big cities. Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation pushing many of the cities into a narrow band (e.g. Tokyo - Osaka). You can't really fight geography, and you work with what you got. > Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll sti…

> Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation pushing many of the cities into a narrow band

Lucky? How is that lucky? I believe this is the first time I have ever heard someone describing a lack of habitable land as "lucky".

It's true that in the last 50 or so years, the USA has become extremely suburbanised, totally reliant on cars for transport, which makes it hard to pick "winners" as to where gets a station, but you can't just use that as an excuse to do nothing!

> At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese.

The Japanese are far from "rich". Anyway, a commuter pass pass from, say, Utsunomiya to Tokyo only costs a few hundred, and is anyway paid by employer. The alternative is spending several times that on housing, in a situation of intense competition for limited housing stock in a viable commuting range.

> if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?

I don't understand this answer. Obviously, not everyone can live in the CBD of the city they work in. That's the problem fast transport solves in this situation. What's your better idea?

Anyway I'm not blindly recommending anything the Japanese do. I'm just saying that fast transport has the effect of greatly expanding the viable urban living of a major city.

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