[nihonde]

Currently, a person living in Nagoya, Japan would have a one-way commute to central Tokyo of about 100 minutes. That’s almost too long to live in one city and work in the other. But after the Linear is completed, that commute time drops to 40 minutes each way—much more reasonable. Tokyo-Osaka drops to 67 minutes.

Daily commuting may still be cost-prohibitive, but the distance between business people who want to hold a meeting is basically negligible at that point.

Linking three major cities that are 250 miles apart as the crow flies, with about one hour of commute, and on time. If they can do it in Japan, why can’t we?

[jonathankoren]

Because the US has a uniquely mismanaged procurement process, construction unions that insist on 4x the number of workers, and myopic regulations. The whole system has become warped to slow down and prevent construction, while at the same time maximize costs. It’s absurd.

Let’s take California HSR for example. Multiple environmental impact studies and appeals, and even afterwards, every city on the peninsula demanded a different system to install the tracks. One wants elevated tracks, another wants a trench, another insists the train be at grade, yet another wants it moved miles away, finally someone wants a commuter rail stop.

We can’t build anything in this country. It’s disgusting.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...

https://theweek.com/articles/449646/why-expensive-build-brid...

[jackcosgrove]

Don't forget that Japanese politicians are addicted to public works spending and have been for generations. Great infrastructure is nice, but is it worth having a public debt that is 260% of GDP? Japan's population is also shrinking so a lot of the infrastructure will be fallow in the future. Both the USA and Japan have political problems with infrastructure procurement, just in completely different ways.

[jonathankoren]

The amount of relative debt is irrelevant here. What is important, is that the US consistently pays more, and gets less.

Regardless of its merits, Spain spent 40 billion euros and got a functioning nationwide high speed train network.[0] California was looking to spend twice that and get a single line, and probably would have ended up spending even more if it was completed.

[0] https://elpais.com/elpais/2015/03/26/inenglish/1427383199_99...

[rakkhi]

But the USA has $22T govt debt although "only" 105% Govt debt to GDP as of Jan 2019 (excluding unfunded liabilities like social security) and projects like this where infrastructure is not built. Neither situation is great but I think as a tax payer I would rather have the fast trains in Japan

[njarboe]

Well, with negative interest rates, the more you are in debt the more you earn. Have interest rate go back up to 5% and things get very bad quickly.

[mars4rp]

I really don't know anything about Japan, but the way government contractors work in this country is they are milking the cow to the max that they can.

I know of a 150 page front end app that was charged at least $40M.

accomplishing anything serious with this attitude is not possible.

[winrid]

Well, that could be a very complex application... Maybe number of pages isn't the best metric.

[mars4rp]

You might think, but it is not that complex.

I could have wrote that app in less than a year.

The contractors just made it complex to justify the tag price.

A simple change of address logic was 5000 line of java code !!

[kristianp]

It's still going to cost 9 trillion Yen (about 81 billion USD) though for the maglev.

https://www.japan-rail-pass.com.au/japan-by-rail/travel-tips...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen

[traek]

> Currently, a person living in Nagoya, Japan would have a one-way commute to central Tokyo of about 100 minutes. That’s almost too long to live in one city and work in the other.

I don’t know, I have friends with one-way commutes longer than that from SF to the peninsula.