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Hi, everyone. And welcome back to America Under the Microscope. 欢迎回来【闲话美国】.
Hi, James.
Hi, LuLu. Hi, everyone.
Actually I would like to propose a topic.
Cool.
Now around the holiday I wanna travel back to Wuhan, I was trying to get a train tickets. When I'm now traveling from Beijing to Wuhan, I almost always get the train because it's so fast. If you consider the flight takes about 2 hours and then there's a long commute to the actual airport. But the train station is also usually located center of town and the train only takes 4 hours, sometimes even a bit under 4 hours.
I know I love Chinese high speed trains, so nice.
So I thought let’s talk about the transport in America. I know you guys don't really have a lot of trains or like your trains are not really great.
We have trains. We have a whole two high speed trains in the whole country.
You have high speed train? That's news to me. How fast are they?
Well, the one in the northeast that goes between Washington DC and I think up to Boston, I think it can get up to 190.
Kilometers per hour.
But for very limited stretches because it has many stops. There's a brand new one in Florida between Miami and Orlando and it can go 378 kilometers in 3.5 hours.
OK, that is like 120, 130 per hour. Yeah. That doesn't sound very impressive. Sorry to say that.
It’s not.
So really, trains that I wouldn't say that you have kept up with the world in terms of development of trains.
We have not. America is well behind. If you look at many European countries like France, the UK, Germany, Italy, they all have forms of high speed rail. And then if you take Japan, it's like their high speed rails are outstanding. Chinese, high speed rail is really outstanding. Yeah, there's America. It’s sad.
But why is that? Because it's such a vast country why?
Money. But even building airports also cost money, right?
Yes, it does, but there's a few things. So it's just really expensive to build rail because it's not just about the train station. You also have to lay down the track and all that other stuff which you don't have to do for an airport.
Oh, I see. So is it fair to say that when it comes to traveling cross country, most Americans won't even think of rail travel.
It's not even on the radar now.
Who's taking the trains then?
It depends on which part of the country you’re in. If you're in the northeast. So New York city region, there are quite a bit more trains where you can usually go from like New York to Boston, New York to Washington DC, New York to Philadelphia.
In that part of the country, there are quite a few trains that you can take. But if you're from where I am, there is no train station in my hometown. The closest train station is an hour drive away and the train comes once a day.
And you might as well just take the plane.
Yeah, it would honestly be cheaper.
But air travel, I mean I've also watched a lot of videos of people complaining about air travel and it's almost like a meme. When you watch a TV shows from America, people also complain about air travel.
其实很多美剧或者美国电影里面都有很多人去吐槽美国的飞机，就航空业各种各样的，说服务也好，什么也好，基建也好，so what do you think about the air travel?
Right. So air travel is the easiest way to get across the country because a lot of people always seem to forget that America is really big. It takes 5 hours to fly across the country.
It's a big place, but because it's high demand and there's high competition, a lot of the airline companies have done... done things to try to remain competitive.
And consumers have voted with their feet and they decided that they want cheaper tickets than having all the bells and whistles of airlines.
