[bierjunge]

Karlsruhe - Hamburg (~600km) -> 5 hours with ICE (the Basel - Hamburg connection) or 6 hours with an IC.

Karlsruhe - Paris (~550km) -> 2.5 hours with TGV (and it's mostly cheaper than traveling with DB).

[4ggr0]

Out of curiosity I checked it a bit deeper - The ICE has 6 stops, while the TGV only stops once.

Spiegel also has an article about these exact two trains[0]. To summarize, in Germany the trains have a couple dozen kilometers where they're allowed to go faster than 160kp/h, in France the TGV travels at around 320kp/h for quite some time.

Considering all this it's not that surprising that the TGV is that much faster.

Apparently the problem is that the fast trains in Germany have to share the tracks with the slower trains, in France and Japan as an example they apparently have their own tracks.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/reise/deutschland/ice-versus-tgv-waru...

[iggldiggl]

France operates on a "periphery-to-Paris-and-back" model, so the goal is quite clear – you build a radial line towards Paris and voilà, you've sped up that relation. "periphery-to-periphery" traffic is mostly ignored, so you get the somewhat curious situation where the geographically direct connection between two cities might be slower (or only marginally faster) than going all the way into Paris and back out again.

Germany on the other hand doesn't have a single city that's as extremely dominant as Paris, so to capture a similar amount of traffic on your high speed network you need something more like a mesh, where any single route might only capture a smaller fraction of the total traffic, rather than the simply radial star you can get by in France.

Of course that's not the only reason for the differing evolution of high speed rail between France and Germany, but it definitively is one of the reasons behind that difference.

[kmlx]

tokyo - osaka 500km -> nozomi shinkansen 2.5hrs, hikari shinkansen 3hrs, ~EUR 100-150 one-way