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Shinkansen was doing a top speed of 130 mph. At that time, the Hikari express service was making an average speed of 80 mph. Acela has a top speed of 150 mph and an average speed of 67 mph, comparable to the initial average speed of the Shinkansen Kodama (64 mph). It's definitely not great by today's standards, but Acela is essentially equivalent to the initial operating standards of Shinkansen (by average speed. Ride quality, reliability, etc. probably don't compare as favorably thanks to the aging infrastructure of the NEC). People making unfair comparisons against American train service are well intentioned in pointing out that we need to do better and to modernize, but can make train travel appear less viable than it actually is in today's conditions by doing so
The Kodama and Hikari have more frequent stops. The Nozomi is more comparable to the Acela Express in number of stops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodama_(train)
The numbers alone don't tell you the full story. The difference in punctuality, ride quality, and reliability has to be experienced. This video of a high speed in China shows what I mean, and if anything the Japanese are better at it.
Pre-edit: Rereading, I definitely misread your comment because I saw 37 years ago and my perpetual 2000 brain decided you must be talking about the first year of shinkansen operations, 1964. You're almost certainly correct in your initial assertion that 1986 Shinkansen well outperforms anything on the NEC
Nozomi did not exist in 1964 and the Hikari timetable of 1964 was more or less the same as today's Nozomi (4 stops to Nozomi's 5) across the Tokaido Shinkansen, which is all that existed at the time. At 33 miles per stop, the Acela is in the ballpark of the original Kodoma timetable (27 miles per stop with 12 stops), or today's Hikari timetable (36 miles per stop, which definitely outperforms Acela at an average speed of 128 mph). Definitely not disputing your points on the intangibles or the fact that Acela is not up to snuff when compared to the state of the art, but it does compare favorably to Shinkansen as it opened, which is just to say that we don't even have to start from scratch to realize the benefits that Japan and so many other countries have reaped from their HSR systems, we just have to actually invest in improving and expanding what we have at a competitive level. I think overall we agree, so I'm probably just being pedantic
It is worse when you realize that the NEC for a brief moment when the Metroliner was first introduced was almost competitive at least when it came to trip time and average speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroliner_(train)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Speed_Ground_Transportation_Act_of_1965