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Japan's MagLev Gets Go Ahead
ThinkPad760 writes "The Japanese government has finally given approval to build the long awaited MagLev train linking Tokyo and Osaka via Nagoya. But don't hold your breath. Construction will start in 2014. The Tokyo Nagoya section will be completed in 2027 with the final section to Osaka complete by 2045. I was hoping my wife could buy me a ticket as my retirement present, but looks like I have a wait a couple of years after that."
TFA mentions 67 minutes travel time. The Shinkansen takes 155 minutes for the same distance, so this would be a significant improvement. The cities are 500 km apart, even an airplane would not take significantly less than an hour.
Why would they have to raise our taxes? Invade one less third world shithole per presidency, and the budget wouldn't be balanced, we'd have a fucking surplus that could see us with goddamned maglev trains to the goddamned doorstep.
But of course, THAT'S SOCIALISM. And we don't stand for none of that there socialism here in 'murrica.
These things are ridiculously expensive and virtually never pay for themselves -- ever.
The problem with this mindset is that it only measures ticket sales. If you make travel between cities incredibly fast then you open up all kinds of new business opportunities and larger efficiencies.
There is certainly a need to balance cost/benefit but too often we only balance direct costs vs direct benefit while ignoring the larger returns that result.
Picture for a moment Broadband internet. If a couple of universities needed to move large files then it wouldn't make sense to lay fiber optic lines across the country--you could just overnight fedex them. But once you do lay fiber to everybody suddenly you can teleconference, you can have movies delivered to the home, you can create an entire entertainment sector where people play MMOs etc etc...
When I was in highschool I had to plead with my parents to get internet. And then a second phone line. And then broadband. Now thanks to what I mostly learned on the internet I have a high paying job. It was a great investment that they made--but not one necessarily that looked like it should pay itself off. I mostly wanted high-speed admittedly to play games. As a gaming connection it was a complete money loser. But it opened up my world and from that I found unintended consequences.
Conservatives tend to be the ones who always bemoan the unintended consequences of market intervention. But for some reason everyone seems to believe that there can only be negative unintended consequences.