Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Are High-Speed Trains a Political Scam? - VisualEconomik EN" video.

  1. There are three key ingredients for high speed train, to be successful. 1) High wages in economy, because to get the speeds necessary, maintenance of infrastucture and trains them selves is enormous. 2) High population density. You want the train to lose as little time on accelerating and decelerating, while picking up maximum amount of people along the route. 3) Restrictive geography, denying the populace the ability to disperse them selves. Here comes, what I believe kills high speed rail anywhere outside of Japan and possibly Italy. If you look at Japan, you see islands of elongated shape. Most people live along the cost in huge cities that are not that far away from each other. Italy has similar shape but not the same density. This is why there is chance for profitability in these places, but not elsewhere, that is more "round" like, like Germany or Poland, where people have more space to disperse. Planes don't need so much infrastructure and don't need to share it with others, hence, why they are the better choice for long distance travel... unless you're traveling overnight at regular speeds that is, but let's not get ahead of ourselves... If you want to see long haul trains in general, you need to look to Russia, which is underdeveloped, needs to bring in raw resources from distant places in Siberia to their demographic center in their European part of the country, where majority of them live and passanger trains are an afterthought (as far as civilian use is concerned), or India, which has very low incomes, is somewhat underdeveloped areas interlaced with highly developed centers (for reference, watch Chirs Tarrant's Extreme railways episode about Konkan Railway, somewhat dated, but shows the concept)
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