If it is anything like the Japanese HSR system these trains are in station for less than 2 minutes, usually around 90 seconds. There isn't a baggage car, no baggage offloading. You keep your bags with you at all times and when you get near your stop they announce it and you stand up and head to the doors. When the train stops you just get out (the platforms are level with the doors, so no hopping down awkwardness, its very quick. Then the train is off again. Since these are all EMU train sets that means they do not have a single engine, but powered bogies along the entire train. They can accelerate and decelerate very quickly.

I think I read 35 stops on the route, if a train stops at every stop then that is roughly 70 minutes in station at 2 minutes a stop. So out of the 8 hour trip, thats 6 hours and 50 minutes you are moving, which means that the trains are going somewhere over 300km/h (336km/h to be exact). I doubt this is the actual speed, I am guess that the 8 hour trip is for express trains, which will skip some of the stops on the way, only stopping at major stations, while other trains will stop at all or more stations (this is how it works in Japan). That'd put the speed at around 280-300km/h which is about what Japanese systems run at.

Yea but how often is that even possible these days with modern console games...? Almost all of them require internet multiplayer, except for some pretty specific party games.

Does it only work on 14 year olds with dead parents?

No need to explain, only something this stupid could come from the country of Italy... They even beat Texas on the wacky scale. Watch out cell phone manufacturers, if you travel to Italy they might charge you for manslaughter, just like they charge people for not predicting earthquakes.

Ahhh... Too funny. I think you need to sit down and really think out your political views and what you want to see in society because you obviously are pretty confused and angry to think about anything rationally.

Those 7000 where out of how many total protesters in the United States in 2011? In how many separate incidents did these arrests occur? What was the average arrest rate per event? You can throw out numbers like that and they seem shocking but in the big scheme of things it still comes out to be not really all that shocking, that is unless of course you are a total reactionary, which I have a feeling you are.

And yet there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who have never been, and never will be arrested for peaceably assembling...

Also I think your definition of reasonably might be a bit unreasonable.

So you plan to build the next mars rover? How about just the road to get to the place where the next mars rover will be built? Let us give private citizens and companies the power to do all of that and see how far they want to go spending their money. Quit thinking like a child and realize that there is a reason you are taxed, and its a good one.

That is why you have multiple train sets. In Japan the bullet trains run essentially what amount to locals, rapids, and super-rapids. The local like ones stop at every station on the route, the rapids skip the smallest but still stop at larger ones, and the super-rapids like the Nozomi on the Sanyo line stop only at the largest cities. Smaller stations are built with turn out lines for the platforms, allowing the faster trains to bypass them while they sit in the station.

Also, the length of time a bullet train in Japan is in station is very short, often around 90 seconds. The N700 series also can accelerate very quickly, often being back up to their top speed within a few minutes.

Watch this video of a tunnel entrance on the Sanyo line in Japan and make sure to watch the clock in the lower corner: http://youtu.be/YlPjo9RIQNE

Hopefully with HSR the small towns along the route will grow much larger as well. People keep looking at the negatives and at none of the positives here, they see the immediate cost and none of the long term benefits of more people (and more tax paying residents and businesses) that infrastructure like HSR and other rail projects bring. Its time that we stop looking at the car as the solution for everything and start looking to other countries and how they have done well with rail, because we could ultimately do it better.

I'd imagine only 1 monorail is a bit of a contrast to the main land islands.

Airports are far less efficient. They need to be placed outside of city centers and still require some other sort of infrastructure to get people from the airport to wherever else they are going. Trains, not only high speed, are far more capable of moving large numbers of people into the heart of cities quickly, as well as moving them out to the outlying areas and suburbs.

Flying is only good when connecting vastly separate areas together (read thousands of miles), places that have no useful population centers in-between them.

Its a damn shame most cities destroyed their interurban rail systems by the 1930s in favor of cars and now are trying like hell to get them back. Hundreds of miles of existing infrastructure destroyed due to market collusion by the likes of General Motors.

Visit Japan and tell me their trains do not work.

You do realize that improving infrastructure improves the areas surrounding those improvements as well right? Gotta spend money to make money. I suggest you take a look at a country like Japan, which could easily compare to California in a lot of ways and tell me their rail system doesn't work. Go ahead, explain to me.

I think you need to look at countries other than the US.