Streety McCarface
Senior Member
^There's this trifling and bothersome factor called "cost":
https://www.economist.com/the-econo...hy-japan-leads-the-world-in-high-speed-trains
It's not like building HSR in Japan is especially cheap, it's not (the Hokuriku shinkansen will cost 30 billion for 120km), and the claim that the HSR lines make only 30% of JR east's revenue makes perfect sense. JR east operates 1,125 km of shinkansen track out of 7,527 km of railway track, in other words, 30% of revenue for 15% of the track.
I know nothing about Japan or it’s high speed rail.......so your posting here intrigued me....you made a compellling argument that our proposed HSR was very similar to Jōetsu Shinkansen.....so I thought i’d look it up and the first thing I saw was this map and I have to ask, what are populations of all those dots in between the two terminal stations and how are they able to have so many dots in between when we were told that station spacing was so crucial to HSR that we need to skip the biggest municipality outside of Toronto in the corridor?View attachment 156015
Weirdly enough, lots of those stations have fairly small populations comparable to those along our proposed HSR line.
Niigata: 800K
Tsubame: 80K
Nagaoka: 275K
Urasa: 43K
Echigo-Yuzawa (Yuzawa): 8K
Jomo-Kogen: 800 daily users (Town is very small)
Stations shared with the Hokuriku shinkansen
Takasaki: 370K
Honjyo-Waseda: 75K
Kumagaya: 199K
Shared with Tohoku, Hokkaido, Hokuriku, Yamagata Mini, and Akita Mini-shinkansen lines
Omiya/Ueno/Tokyo: Greater Tokyo Area (40M +)
The main stations along the proposed HSR line have as follows:
Detroit: 670K
Windsor: 220K
Chatham-Kent: 105K
London: 390K
Stratford/Woodstock: 32K
Waterloo Region: 523K + 70K students
Guelph: 120K
Brampton: 570K
One thing to note, however, is that Japan's expressways have extremely high tolls -- probably around 100$ to travel to Niigata from Tokyo. For many, the train's high cost is justified in this manner. One also has to consider the densities of the towns when compared to each other and the time the Joetsu line has had to allow its ridership levels to mature.
Another interesting thing to note is that a lot of these smaller stations are not served by all trains. Japan runs lots of superexpress services on this line. It's also worth noting that outside of peak season (winter, due to skiing), trains only arrive every hour or so, so you don't need super high-frequency HSR to use it.
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