Writing for a fine automotive establishment like The Autopian here, I’m pretty comfortable saying that I love cars. They’re as essential to daily life as they are fun, whether it’s meeting with fellow car lovers, running laps on my simulator, or even just wrenching with a friend.

But every time I visit a city with real, meaningful public transit, your New Yorks and Chicagos, I fall in love with the ability to live independently of a guzzler that demands you constantly pump with the blood and bones of brontosauruses.

Subways are cool! Not driving is cool! Walking to and from destinations and finding a sweet corner shop along the way that you fall in love is cool! And so is the cardio you’re getting along the way that keeps you trim. It ROCKS and I yearn for it.

With that in mind, I already loved experiencing Japan’s expansive (and occasionally confusing) metro system, but what I was really excited for was some high-speed rail. I’m talking the mfing bullet train, the Shinkansen. I’m so stoked to ride the thing that Bradley Pittford made a movie about, that Logan X-Man Wolverine did a frickin’ battle on top of, and that the US just frickin’ refuses to build. This is gonna be awesome!

It Wasn’t.

To say that riding the bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka was a disappointment would be a gross understatement, only not at all for the reasons you think!

The first time I flew on a plane was to tour a college in Northern California, and I was blown away as soon as the pilot put the hammer down and the twin engines started putting out all that thrust. The acceleration paled in comparison to something like a rollercoaster, but I was definitely pushed into my seat, which excited me then and still excites me now when heading out on my travels to exotic lands like Columbus, Ohio.

I had that same excitement getting onto the Shinkansen and feeling thrown through the back of my seat like Han lurching the Millennium Falcon into lightspeed. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that wasn’t remotely the case. It was so anti-the case, I was actively disappointed the entire first chunk of my roughly 300-mile trip between Tokyo and Osaka.

Again, flying to the always alluring Columbus is exciting beyond belief, as is boarding to go to the forever dreamy Odessa, Texas, but let me contextualize this lack of punch by talking about other forms of transportation, too.

Think about all the times you’ve been in a car that hit the go/no-go pedal with a bit of extra verve and how hard you get jerked in the seat. Think of riding a bus and how, even in your chair, you felt the rig’s momentum shift while you’re still wondering why don’t have to wear a seatbelt here. Same thing with a subway.

That subway lurch is real, so real that a famous actress friend of mine once told me she got the “ick” from a guy briefly stumbling as the train came to a stop, and she ghosted him right after. If a momentary stumble gets you ghosted by A-Listers, keep me far away from it and get me on a shinkansen instead because that acceleration was the most boring, gradual thing I’ve ever felt, and boy did it let me down.

But then I looked out the window.

Understanding Its Speed

When I started this article, I didn’t think I’d be dusting off my dormant AP Physics knowledge to convert formulas and think about sig figs, but here goes nothing.

I rode on the Tokaido Shinkansen line, specifically a Nozomi N700 Shinkansen, which is as follows:

• Tokaido Shinkansen is a specific line in Japan that seems to translate to “east coast route, new main line.”
• Nozomi is Japan’s fastest train service, offering the fewest stops between cities.
• The N700 is a series of trains made by several manufacturers across Japan. Basically imagine if the A321neo (my favorite medium-range plane) was just a spec that Boeing and Embraer could also make; that it wasn’t just the intellectual property of Airbus.

While I don’t know what specific “trim” of N700 I was on, they’re known to accelerate at a rate of .72 m/s^2, which translates to a gain of 1.61 miles per hour per second. If we use that to calculate the bullet train’s zero-60 time, that means the rig will get there in a mind-blowing 37.25 seconds. Wow! For something called “bullet,” I would’ve expected it to be a lot more ferocious than that.

While finding information about a plane’s acceleration is shockingly harder than I expected, some of my research claims that an Airbus A320 (the predecessor to my beloved A321neo) generally starts taking to the skies at around 150 to 165 mph. If we use the slower of the two speeds and calculate how long it takes to hit the longest runway at LAX (10,285 feet, almost two miles), you’ll be fresh out of runway in 46.75 seconds.

I know this is comparing fundamentally different vectors, and that the plane’s equation assumes a linear speed without friction while the train is an acceleration figure that operates exponentially, but I just wanna hammer home that you’re fresh out of that two-mile runway in a little under a minute while the bullet train is still struggling to hit highway speeds in almost the same amount of time.

This is what I mean when I say it’s boring. Once I accepted the N700 wasn’t gonna shoot me out of this barrel at 9mm speeds, I sat back and worked instead. After about 20 minutes of sending my best jokes to The Autopian Slack and getting ignored, I lifted my head to see we’ve finally cleared the megalopolis that is Tokyo. It’d been entirely replaced by surrounding farmland that we were just zooming by. I had to consciously focus on buildings in the distance and track them so that I could actually see the villages we’re blowing by.

I distinctly remember our train passing over a small bridge, and its elevated support beams were flying by so fast that neither the structure’s shapes nor its shadows had a chance to register with me. I felt like I was stuck inside an overgrown zoetrope. I was amazed.

What I learned in that moment is that this thing is only slow off the line, but give it time to fully put the power down and you’ll soon be catapulted to a top speed of 186 mph, with some potentially topping out at 200 miles per.

Trains, Planes, and No Automobiles

Okay so 186 mph isn’t the craziest, especially compared to planes that effortlessly cruise at 500 mph. My car has a top speed of about 190 mph and I own that frickin’ thing; I could go that fast if I wanted to (I won’t, obviously. But I could). The difference, though, is that a plane is too high to appreciate your speed as the ground slowly moves below you; your car will never hit those speeds unless you’re on a track, and even then, it’s pretty safe to say that not many here have the gonads to go that fast and just carelessly stare out the window. Ok, maybe Parker.

The Shinkansen, though? Just effortlessly hitting those speeds on ground level, within city limits. And truth be told, the whole experience of being on the train was more pleasant than a plane, too!

To get between LA and Phoenix, I’m booking way in advance and frequently spending about $300 for that ticket, and it only goes up from there. Factor in a roughly $70 dollar ride share to and from the terminal, we’re now at a good $440 dollars or so, and you should be getting there plenty early to go through security and find your terminal, and you’re losing even more money if we’re believers in the old maxim of time is money. Taking the bullet train? I just walked up the same day, said “one ticket please,” gave them about $90 USD for a reserved seat, and went on my way.

According to notoriously reputable and frequently referenced website “TravelMath.com,” average gate-to-gate time between LA and PHX is 1 hour 20 minutes, plus the conservative hour in the respective terminals, plus the roughly hour in traffic to get there. From departure to arrival between Tokyo and Osaka, it’s about 2 hours and 30 minutes, no security, and maybe ten minutes in-station. I’m not including traffic to the station here because that’s highly variable depending on where you live, if you’re taking buses, other metro lines, or walking around the corner to it, but I think I’ve still made my point here.

No, You Haven’t, Griff Daddy. What Is the Point?

First off, it’s kind of crazy you’ve made yourself comfortable enough to call me Griff Daddy, but whatever, I’ll work with it.

My point is: the Shinkansen is as disappointing on the surface as it is cool and comfortable in every single way. Did I feel like I was punted into light speed the way I wanted to be on the train? No, not at all. But it made for a pretty comfortable ride, even as the train hit its extreme one-degree tilt on a bank.

And when I say comfort, I mean it. The aforementioned A321neo has a 31-inch seat pitch (distance between the same point on two chairs), while the N700 is 41 inches. Although seat pitch isn’t a perfect 1:1 translation of how much legroom you’re gonna get in any given craft, it’s a damn good indicator of the general space available to you. As a man who clocks in at 6 foot 2 inches, or 74 inches, 187.96 centimeters, and a whopping 0.00116793 miles tall, I know that I’ve felt quite comfortable on that Airbus, so getting cozy on the N700 was as easy breathing (note that this isn’t meant to be an asthma erasure blog).

And if you have to use the lavatory while on the train, get this: they even have bidets on the train. Despite my best efforts, we have no plans to create a spin-off site called “The Stooltopian” (click that link I dare you) that allows me to talk about the intricacies of a quality toilet, or to wax poetic about how I bought a bidet of my own on my final train out of Tokyo so that it would be delivered and waiting for me by the time I got home. Until the distant dream of The Stooltopian becomes real, I’ll just say this: trust me, bidets are cool.

While I was disappointed at first by the almighty bullet trains of Japan, I left it with a deeper appreciation of the engineering, the inviting chairs, the ease in booking and riding, and, most importantly, I left with a cleaner colon thanks to the feature-packed toilets.

Okay, bye

Topshot Credit: Depositphotos.com