alt Hacker NewsThere is no world where bullet trains between NYC and LA would make any financial sense at all. The trains can't possibly go fast enough for passengers to be satisfied with the speed (even maglev isn't fast enough), and the cost of track construction and maintenance would never be paid for by ridership.
I live in Japan; bullet trains are great here, but the distances they cover are quite short by American standards. Extremely high ridership, with trains covering relatively short distances between extremely populated population centers (the Tokyo metro area has 38 million people for reference) means the trains operate at a profit. That could be done in America, maybe, but only between select cities that aren't too far apart, such as DC and NYC and Boston. Even here in Japan, no one is taking the shinkansen between far-apart cities in the north and south; they use inexpensive and faster domestic flights instead.
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What amazes me is frequency of shinkansen for Tokyo-Osaka. Like more frequent than some metros! Just rock up Must change how people think.
> the distances they cover are quite short by American standards
Typical distances are about the same as SanFrancisco-LA, LA-Phoenix, Phoenix-LasVegas, Dallas-Houston, Houston-New Orleans, Portland-Vancouver. The longest service is 650 miles -- around the Atlanta to New York, Chicago to Washington DC, San Francisco to Portland, Austin to Kansas City
In China it's a matter of politics rather than financial sense, of unifying the country hence why they have them in ethnic minority areas too. The trains would be like roads, sure, most people wouldn't take them from one end to the other, A to Z, but there are enough people to take them from A to D, J to N, Q to T, so to speak. If one could commute in one hour from Boston to DC for example each way, daily without flying, it opens up more economic opportunities in total. But like PG said, the competition to an airline isn't a car or a plane, it's Zoom.