[nihonde]

Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka—the big three cities in Japan—will be within an hour of each other. It’s a big win for business activity, I think. Especially if you're comparing to air travel, which has some gnarly trips to and from the airport in all three cities.

[jandrese]

That has a major danger of being another Concorde situation, where the second best option is still acceptably fast and much much cheaper. At the end of the day the market for people who are willing to spend an extra $2000 or $4000 to shave an hour and a half off of their travel time isn't very large.

[bobthepanda]

Concorde had the issue of extremely high operating costs and low capacity. I don't think maglev has anywhere near the same problem, at least in terms of operating cost.

[jandrese]

Nobody has built a maglev system that doesn't have very high operating costs yet. To be fair all of the extant systems are short haul or prototypes but there's still the question of if they will be able to reduce the costs with scale or if they're fundamental to the technology.

[nihonde]

The current Nozomi Shinkansen is about $130 each way from Osaka to Tokyo. Not out of reach for a few meetings per month, but a big stretch for a daily salaryman commute. I haven’t seen any pricing for the Linear yet.