I love my wife's perspective on America.
She recently drew my attention to Kingda Ka, one of the world's fastest and probably most frightening roller coasters. It whips riders straight up, then plunges them straight down, in a shrieking, brain-compressing drop of 418 feet. Maximum speed? 128 MPH! You can see from the POV YouTube video at the end of this posting, this ride is most definitely not for the faint-of-heart.
Kingda Ka is one of the main attractions at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, NJ and has no shortage of takers. These would be the same people who like base-jumping from the Eiffel Tower and bobbing for apples in a wingsuit in the jet wash of a 747.
Back to Masumi, my brilliant Japanese wife.
Her take on this? Well, after I watched the video and read about this spectacular display of American ingenuity -- an astonishing engineering achievement by any measure -- she smiled and said:
"So . . . America can build a high-speed jet coaster [ roller coasters are called jet coasters here ] but they can't build a high-speed train?"
Now, this was not America-bashing. Masumi has no particular problem with America -- that is, other than a couple of atomic bombs in 1945 and all of the raping and murders that go on in Okinawa because of the U.S. military base there. Despite these minor caveats, she has no repressed antipathy toward America.
It was just a comment, an expression of astonishment at the incongruity of it all, as in: "You can send a man to the moon but you don't have any way of sewing buttons on a shirt?"
Maybe this comes as a shock to most Americans: But trains as a form of transportation are completely taken for granted in most of the industrialized world. China, Italy, Great Britain, Switzerland, Austria, France, even South Africa, India, Malaysia, and Thailand, and of course Japan, are just some of the countries where I have personally used trains to get around. In most places, trains are like flush toilets, running water, electricity, roads, and now WiFi. They are a standard component of everyday life, just like cars in the U.S. You want to go somewhere? You take a train.
Every day around 7:30 am, the trains here are full of kids on their way to school and businessmen on their way to work.
Beyond regular train service, high-speed trains -- high-speed is considered being able to sustain a speed of 200 MPH, though many go much faster -- are, among other places, up and running in China, Spain, here in Japan, France, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Russia, Finland, and even Uzbekistan. China leads the world with almost 12,000 miles of high-speed rail, Spain is second with over 1,900 miles, and Japan is third with over 1,650 miles.
To give you some perspective on the marvels and flexibility of travel by train just about everywhere in the civilized world: I live way out in the country, in a small, traditional, rural farming community. But if I want a mega-dose of big city life, I can leave in the morning, take a regular, then a high-speed train (called the Shinkansen) to Tokyo, go practically anywhere in the most populous city in the world by using the incredible subway system there, and be back here in my home town before sun down. Note that I live almost 400 miles from Tokyo! But using only my bicycle to get to the train station, I could have lunch in Tokyo and be back home in plenty of time for dinner. No car! No driving! I could read a book or work on my next novel on my way there and back.
Yes, this is pretty standard fare. In Europe and Asia, everything is connected. All of the airports, both domestic and international, the trains, the subways, and the buses, are all engineered in vast intertwined and layered matrices to make transportation the least of anyone's worries.
If you want to get technical about it, Masumi is not entirely correct. The U.S. does have one high-speed corridor. It is part of the Acela Express service between Washington DC and Boston. It's a 17 mile-long stretch where "theoretically" the train could reach the 200 MPH qualifying speed. But the entire run is on rickety old regular railroad tracks and the train makes so many stops, the average speed for the trip is only around 65 MPH. Good grief! The normal everyday trains here in Japan go faster than that!
As if the U.S. were not already dismally behind just about every other advanced country -- and some not so advanced -- get this: China and Russia are in the process of developing something called hyperloop technology, a system using magnetically-suspended pods to transport people and products across the expanses of their vast countries at -- are you ready for this? -- up to 750 MPH! Seat belts are recommended.
"So America can build a high-speed jet coaster but they can't build a high-speed train?"
Actually, it could. It just doesn't.
Until you can visit Six Flags Great Adventure personally, I'll just leave you with the next best thing.
[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]
Kingda Ka, oh baby!
