(Being a Chinese grew up in Canada, and now working/living in the Bay)
In my opinion, most people in the valley or in North America still refuse to give up their lifestyle. They look for something like self-driving cars, all electric-powered "personal" vehicle to invest. And those still drive on the same road/interstates/highway infrastructure and don't give you the benefits compare with high-speed rails.
They don't recognize the real priorities - how to transport millions people everyday efficiently, cost-effectively, and most environmentally friendlies.
They also don't recognize local economy, local businesses thrive with these connected network. It is proven to be the case in China and Japan.
High-speed rail network is what people want - to get from point A to point B quickly. It's not something even the most efficient self-driving car with the best MPG electric-powered vehicle can scale for millions of people everyday.
Instead of investing into some new technologies, they seem like they refuse to take decades of proven technology and just use it in US (high-speed trains were first invented in Japan in the 60s)
But as I understand very well in the culture here, the politics, the corruption, and the oil/automative conglomerate will never make this happen for the actual good for the people.
I would without a doubt to say the US is in its downfall as it didn't pick the priorities to fix the root of the problem.
A lot of the political pushback in the US is two major factors:
1) Rail systems are almost never profitable. The US, at least in spirit, doesn't like government subsidies. An investment in high speed rail entails paying taxes for it for many years or perhaps forever.
2) The US is much more rural than other developed countries. The land area compared to the population is huge compared to Europe/China/Japan. You almost need a car to get around because there's so much open space. Things are too far apart in many cases to make public transport realistic. Also, since nearly everyone has a car already the need for a rapid mode of transport is mostly met. Yeah it sucks in the big cities but a lot of the people that work there live far enough away that any rail system built would never reach their homes anyways.
You do see big public transport networks in places with extremely high density like New York, which has a similar density to most countries with well developed systems.
The notable exception I can think of to the trend is Russia, which has a lot of public transport compared to population density. This can probably be explained by a history of being a communist country as well as the relative lack of personal cars due to lower income and limited access to trade with countries that manufacture automobiles
Where are you getting the $420 billion per year in oil subsidies? US oil companies pay among the highest corporate income tax rates on the planet. Their taxes far exceed subsidies they receive.
$600 billion by comparison is the size of the US military and $420 billion is larger than the sales of Exxon + Chevron + Conoco + Occidental + EOG + Anadarko combined. It's an absurd claim.
> The study found that "China was the biggest subsidizer in 2013 ($1.8 trillion), followed by the United States ($0.6 trillion), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3 trillion)."
> The study found that oil, natural gas, and coal received $369 billion, $121 billion, and $104 billion (2010 dollars), respectively, or 70% of total energy subsidies over that period.
Apologies, it seems fossil fuels get 70%. Not just oil.
>A 2011 study by the consulting firm Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI)[28] estimated the total historical federal subsidies for various energy sources over the years 1950–2010. The study found that oil, natural gas, and coal received $369 billion, $121 billion, and $104 billion (2010 dollars), respectively, or 70% of total energy subsidies over that period
The cited study from the sentence I referenced in my comment:
> Estimated subsidies are $4.9 trillion worldwide in 2013 and $5.3 trillion in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP in both years).
> In terms of countries, China had the largest absolute post-tax subsidies in 2013 ($1,844 billion or 19.5% of GDP), followed by United States ($606 billion or 3.6% of GDP), Russia ($318 billion or 15.2% of GDP), European Union ($295 billion), India ($269 billion or 14.3% of GDP), Japan ($142 billion or 2.9% of GDP), Saudi Arabia ($129 billion or 17.2% of GDP) and Iran ($118 billion or 32.2% of GDP).
I'm pretty sure you're correct and those numbers are total since 1950. However, the study does seem confusingly worded - in the footnote on page 1 it says:
"All estimates quoted are in constant 2010 dollars, unless otherwise noted, and refer to actual expenditures in the relevant fiscal year, rounded to the nearest billion"
At least to me that reads like "all estimates refer to expenditures from the relevant fiscal year only". However, they later quote the same numbers as being "total spending since 1950". Am I just missing an obvious interpretation for the footnote?
I think you are. I interpret that as the estimates for each year are quoted in 2010 dollars unless noted and that those estimates (that is, the ones for each year) refer to actuals in each of those years. Then they are summed to produce the $600b.
"from the relevant fiscal year" implies that each value relates to a corresponding fiscal year. Your addition of 'only' is redundant.
But the estimates the footnote is referring to are in the first table. Those are not per year but already summed; there's no corresponding fiscal year to refer to (I think?).
Regardless, this is a tiny point so I'll drop it. I still feel confused though :(
> Rail systems are almost never profitable. The US, at least in spirit, doesn't like government subsidies.
Excuse me? Japan privatized its rail system in the late 80s, doesn't subsidize any of the JR companies[1][2] (which are all publicly traded to boot), and has a profitable enough industry that there are now numerous private operators[3] of various sizes who successfully compete.[4]
I don't know as much about China, but having been to Japan several times, I can say that the rail networks of Japan only extend to the urban cores of a city. If you want to live in a suburban or rural area, you have to get by with a car or take the local bus everywhere, which is slow. US urban rail infrastructure is already present, it just does not have the same frequency that Japanese rail has.
24/7 is in fact a negative as the state of the DC Metro and NYC system show especially in comparison to Tokyo's multiple system.
There's not enough time to do proper repairs and improvements.
What I don't understand is why more cities don't operate like Philly and operate 24 hour bus service in place of the trains at night. With a system like that the night workers can still get to work as early as others and the bar crowd can still go out with out the craziness of last train like in Tokyo.
NYC has buses covering pretty much the same routes as subway, it just takes much longer. Personally I use express buses for commute and these are amazing, though twice as expensive.
Some metro systems have a 24/7 bus system, but Philly's is an exact replacement for the trains. They don't make all the extra stops of the buses that serve similar routes. I'm unaware of anywhere else that does this
Highways (tolls) tend to be far less profitable than rail systems (ticket sales). If the US didn't like government subsidies, we wouldn't have built all these highways.
A moderate increase in user fees (gas taxes today, mileage fees in an electric future) could readily fund all capital and maintenance costs for the US interstate system. Gas wouldn't have to be that much more expensive than it was 4-5 years ago. The system would endure and could even be profitable.
No such fee structure could plausibly fund any rail system outside the NE Corridor. Prices adequate to sustain the network, let alone build it up, would put ridership into a death spiral.
Do you have a source on this? In my state the government used the tolls roads as a cash cow, they were massively profitable. The funny thing was the toll roads still sucked because they dumped all the money into the general fund to pay for everything else
Many people do indeed want to get from Point A to point B quickly. That's why there are around 75,000 plane flights per day. There are very few city pairs in the US with the potential volume to justify high speed rail.
There already is high speed-ish rail travel in the Northeast and it's very popular. But, for example, even if you could magically offer 6-8 hour train service between New York and Chicago, relatively few people would take it given that flying would be significantly faster.
> There already is high speed-ish rail travel in the Northeast and it's very popular. But, for example, even if you could magically offer 6-8 hour train service between New York and Chicago, relatively few people would take it given that flying would be significantly faster.
Texan living in NYC here. I disagree. I would happily pay to take a 6 hour train to Chicago over a flight anyday. LGA/JFK are nightmares to book last minute flights and high-speed rail is a favorable experience to flying sometimes.
In contrast, there's no "useful" rail network in Texas — at all. If there was a rail network, like the single-high speed line proposed between Dallas and Houston, it would totally dominate and disrupt. People fly to/from cities in Texas all the time.
There are many many cities that would benefit from a rail network because the cost would be considerably lower than flying. If you build it, they will come.
>if you could magically offer 6-8 hour train service between New York and Chicago
You know, that's not terribly fast... 1200 km in 6 hrs, so 200 km/hr. France started operating 320 km/hr trains in 1990's. Do you think people would go by rail if the journey was 4 hours, city center - to - city center?
Also a Texan who lived in NYC :D and now lives in the bay area. I'm constantly amazed that we haven't placed a solid, high speed rail throughout this area.
Housing costs are skyrocketing and you have people who work for all ends of the spectrum (Google down to dishwashers) moving away because they can't afford the lifestyle they envision here. Hour long commutes are the norm and every day I see at least one wreck on my way to work.
Coming from NYC where you can get anywhere in Manhattan w/in 20 minutes by train.. it's incredibly frustrating.
I agree we should also be looking outside of the bay area (connecting cities across America), but also see a pressing need here with a market that would use the rail system like crazy.
I think your point is generally valid for the US. However, Chicago-NYC might be a bad example, since it actuality might be viable. The Shinkansen goes ~200mp/h and thus would be able to go back and forth in 4-5hrs. Given that trains are less weather dependent, can drop you off on there middle of the city rather than the outskirts and don't come with the same security theater you probably come out with a comparable time frame and more reliability on that connection. Things like connecting the west coast to anything but itself are completely unviable though because of the reasons you gave.
Newer trains can go 300+ mph, especially the levitating variety where noise is less of a factor. Given how long it takes to navigate through the unbelievable bullshit in most airports a train has a 2h head start the moment it leaves the station.
NYC to Chicago goes through a (smaller) continental divide though (the Appalachians) [ADDED in what's also a pretty built-up area of the country]. So HSR is problematic on that route. It's about a 20 hour trip today so cutting that by 2/3rds would be a significant achievement but probably still wouldn't be enough to make it interesting.
The somewhat controversial LA to San Francisco route through the Central Valley may make sense. We'll see in 15 or 20 years or whatever. Unfortunately LA is pretty spread out so you don't get the same downtown to downtown advantages that trains in the Northeast have.
The route that probably would have the biggest potential benefit is speeding up the Northeast Corridor to the point where Boston to DC was more practical vs. flying. Amtrak is apparently doing some upgrades but decided that the most aggressive improvements weren't cost-justified.
The Allegheny Front, where the continental divide runs between Altoona, PA and Frostburg, MD, wouldn't be a particular challenge for HSR, because they're good at hillclimbing, and the mass of the trainset is nothing like loaded coal trains or intermodal double-stack trains which currently frequent this area.
LGV Sud-Est has 3.5% grades, for example; the Pennsylvania Railroad (now Norfolk Southern) Gallitzin-Horseshoe Curve-Altoona stretch is 1.85%, B&O (CSX) Sand Patch Grade further south is 2%.
Rather, overcoming the general ruggedness of the terrain is the greatest expense. Slower railroads can meander along rivers, but a HSR needs large sweeping curves (with large radii), requiring expensive fills or cuts or viaducts. Some tunnels would be needed to cross some of the linear ridges, just like the Pennsylvania Turnpike (and the predecessor railroad that used the same right-of-way) did. In fact, it's likely that an alignment would closely parallel the turnpike, as the landscape gets significantly more rugged south of Maryland or north of I-80.
A gentler route following the Empire Corridor (roughly, NYC->Albany->Buffalo) may be cheaper to construct, but would be considered a "detour" by a casual observer -- and the expense of the NYC->Albany portion may not make it worthwhile.
Sadly, it's not very likely that such a Mid-Atlantic-to-Chicago passenger-only railway could be economical to construct and operate. US infrastructure costs routinely run much higher than the international average for comparable projects, and even the as-the-crow-flies distance (1100+ km, 700+ miles) between NYC-Chicago puts it too far out of HSR's ideal range, even in countries where people actually ride trains.
If they built that route what's the likelyhood it wouldn't also have stops in Philly, pitsburg, Cleveland which would add significant time. I can't see it being a direct route with no stops inbetween.
All trains will stop at the first safe opportunity in the event of heavy rain, winds, or snow. It's one of the reasons (no level crossings is another) there has never been a fatal accident involving HSR in Japan.
There are tons of good city pairs. People are paying to be carted like baggage by Spirit.
We subsidize highways and air travel at the expense of other ground options. It shouldn't be 70% cheaper for me to drive my family to Florida or the Carolinas for vacation from NY vs air or rail. But it is.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, do that I95 trip every year. There are dozens of corridors like that.
The "Texas triangle" is one example of some good city pairs, which are a lot more practically situated than the pie-in-the-sky NYC-LA route people always bring up as a reason HSR won't work in the U.S. due to distances (and this is not the only such set of routes, just a particularly high-volume set).
Houston-Dallas is a very high-volume city pair forming one leg of the triangle, of length around 250 miles. People do fly on this route, but most people don't, because between the airports' relatively inconvenient location (especially Houston's), security, delays, etc., it doesn't save you that much time. So most people just drive. But driving is just far enough, and stress/traffic-filled enough, that many people who drive that route regularly hate doing so (it takes 4-6 hours, depending on how good a day you're having, and much of that is with wall-to-wall traffic containing a heavy volume of trailer trucks in the mix). I've done it many times myself, and I'd love to take a train instead. For me personally, it wouldn't even have to be that fast: if the train could get me there reliably in 3 hours (i.e. average speed 85 mph, not even talking about Shinkansen speeds), I'd be very satisfied. Related things can be said about the other two legs of the triangle: San Antonio - Houston (200 miles) and the San Antonio - Austin - Dallas corridor (80+195 = 275 miles).
The topography here is also more friendly to rail than, for example, LA-SF, being mostly flat and open and with shorter distances. But unfortunately the state-level political geography is less friendly (at a local level rail is popular in all four of these cities, but the state is another matter).
But these are very spread out cities so if you fly (or take a hypothetical train) you now need to rent a car at the other end. I was in Dallas a while back and basically couldn't walk to a restaurant a mile away because there was no sidewalk.
The train from Albany to NYC is at or near capacity daily, although it's only 150 miles. Similar use case in many ways... It's enough of a pain to drive that people want to avoid it, and it's better than a car to go to Manhattan.
My uncle used to fly LGA to BOS a couple of times a week... I betcha that train trip is shorter now given the security and other nonsense associated with flying.
Depends where you are coming from and going to. I do prefer to take the train driving from the western Boston suburbs to Manhattan (so RTE to NYP) but it's not actually faster than driving directly. Probably is faster than flying though.
These smaller routes do seem like a very practical case. Another is people going to/from the twin cities -> Milwaukee -> Chicago. You can do it on the Amtrak now but it's very slow and just easier to drive.
I'm not sure I understand. Even if rail were cheaper to get from, say, Boston to Charlotte, you'd then almost certainly have to rent a car for that vacation so it's hard to see a train being an economical option for most families.
And Amtrak does offer an auto train though from Virginia to Florida.
I like the train but I don't assume it's a particularly economic option.
There are tons of city pairs but because the airline industry is heavily subsidized it's often cheaper to fly.
The Boston to Washington D.C. corridor could easily sustain itself if the trains put in place were reliable, expedient, and low-fuss.
There's no technological barriers here, as China has proven, only political ones. A lot of people see Amtrak as a problem, an anachronism, not a solution.
Airports are a spectacularly expensive undertaking and require heavy subsidies to even exist. If the airlines had to pay for those with cash they'd be bankrupt unless they charged more. Then there's the subsidies paid to the oil companies that makes jet fuel more cost effective, and airlines burn a lot of that. As a portion of net cost, fuel is likely higher for aviation than for any other form of travel.
$250B sounds like a lot of money, but that's since the 1970s. In that time how many airports have been built or rebuilt? What's the net cost of that?
The footprint of a rail station is significantly smaller, the costs are proportionately lower. There's subsidies there, too, but they're significantly smaller, and many of those were provided in the early 20th century back when rail was a vital link.
Also Forbes is utterly useless as a site. Not only do they bitch endlessly about ad blockers, which I only use because the sorts of advertising sites like that promote are offensively stupid, but it splits up that short article into three pages with interstitial ads between each page.
The corridor does sustain itself. In fact, it basically makes the money that Amtrak loses throughout the rest of the country. It doesn't really work (for most people) for Boston to DC trips but it's quite popular for NYC north and NYC south.
You're using the rail example to imply downfall, and yet the US economy has embarrassed the Japanese economy the last 25 years. In the mid 1980s, the US and Japan nearly had the same GDP per capita; very soon the US will have twice the GDP per capita of Japan.
You're implying rail is so beneficial to economic growth, and let's say I agree with that: and yet the US has been embarrassing most of Europe on economic growth for the last 20 years (Germany's economy hasn't expanded in ten years for example).
If you were right, US GDP per capita should be far lower than the EU or Eurozone, when the exact opposite is the case. Germany has a GDP per capita of the poorest US states (it's nearly on par with West Virginia currently). France nearly has the GDP per capita of Puerto Rico.
I don't believe your premise has any legs to stand on based on the facts. The real implication here is that the US would be staggeringly far ahead if it corrected some of its obvious flaws.
GDP Annual Growth rate from 1996-2016 in Europe was 1.7%, in the US from 1995-2015 it was 2.1%. [World Bank, Trading Economics].
The German GDP per capita grew from $36,000 to $46,000 from 2006 to 2016. [World Bank], and it ranks in the mid 30's out of 50 states. [Wikipedia].
The per capita GDP of Puerto Rico is $28,529, the per capita GDP of France is $41,329. [World Bank]
For a fair comparison between the US and Germany/France, let's examine the inequality adjusted Human Development Index, as measurements that do not account for income inequality obfuscate the reality of most citizens.
Germany ranks 6th, France ranks 18th, the US ranks 28th. [Wikipedia].
I'm not sure GDP per capita makes sense for this comparison when ownership is distributed so unequally in the US. Taking the mean is basically dividing up wealth equally and that's not what happens.
What is there about the German standard of living for typical citizens that compares unfavorably to the US? How can this be measured? No single number works, but I would suggest looking at medians ahead of means.
The US apparently has about half the median wealth of many European countries, although notably not Germany, which is comparable to the US on this metric.
But I'm not sure how meaningful this is or what factors might be affecting the numbers. (And I'm not even exactly sure what's being measured.)
That's a symptom of broken governmental policy, not so much imaginary value. People still need to buy houses for them to sell, so it's not like the property bubble isn't backed by real money. It's just that people are placing disproportionate value on property over other investments.
For example, say your house went from 400k-500k in a year. For it to be 500k you still have to find a seller. Yes, there's a degree of paper value there however it's paper value only because other properties are selling for that. If you were to somehow remove property from being bought and sold, the money would just go into other investments. There is no way that 'most' of that wealth is wealth on paper in the form of property.
The reality is that Australian wages are very high comparitively. Australia is a wealthy nation.
>Germany has a GDP per capita of the poorest US states (it's nearly on par with West Virginia currently)
Wow. I did not know or even suspect that! Funny thing. I've lived in both. I'd rather live in a closet-sized apartment in Germany than in a McMansion in West Virginia. It seems like there might be an ocean of inquiry behind that narrow channel of facts. (At least for me personally)
Talking about GDP, I am not an expert, but just compared two examples:
1. ST3 project in Seattle metro area. http://soundtransit3.org/ This project will be finish in 25 years, with $53.8 billions in estimation, to construct 62 new miles light rail majorly.
2. The high speed rail project connecting Beijing and Shanghai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_High-... And this project completed in 3.5 years (from April 2008 to Nov 2010) by constructed 819 miles high speed railroad between Beijing and Shanghai (averaging 186 MPH), and the total investment is $34.7 billion.
In summary, 819 miles HSR vs 62 miles LR, $34.7B vs. $53.8B, and 3.5 Years vs. 25 Years
So compared with other countries, how much the inflation US GDP has?
> The ultimate goal is to have 45,000km of high-speed track. Zhao Jian of Beijing Jiaotong University, who has long criticised the high-speed push, reckons that only 5,000km of this will be in areas with enough people to justify the cost.
Do you agree with this 5,000km figure? If not, what figure would you choose?
As someone who grew in China, I just want to point out that besides the engineering, it is a political wonder as well.
Before the bullet train network was built, China already has an extensive railway network. The first step is to run the bullet train on traditional railways, with a peak speed of 180km/h. People think it's great. No objections.
But to raise the speed further, a new network has to be built, almost side-by-side to traditional railways. This idea horrored almost everybody: new railways for 10s of thousands kms, new train stations (yes for most of the place it needs a separate station), just to be a bit faster? Of course it got a constant concensual blaze from both the citizens and all the official and unofficial media. This state maintains from the beginning of the project all the way a couple years into it operates (which spans many years).
The head of the project, Liu Zhijun had to be in jail of course. Then everything changes, 180 degree. People took the trains and realize it's great. What I (and probably many people too) didn't know before was with the speed increase, the perception of distance changes. The trains run like buses: between major cities, the train runs across in every several minutes. You can just get a ticket, go to the station, an hour later you are on the subway of another city. Many times when we were holding a meeting, people from other cities actually took less time to arrive than someone driving from suburbs.
Then the new railway network gets praise from both national and overseas. The official media shut up about Liu. People start to think Liu as a fanatically great
engineer.
I cannot imagine how this project can even get started, and what Liu had to do to get this to work. There must have been a great story, but we may never know.
I have ridden those trains (spent 2011-2016 in China), and they're pretty great, but they're hard to justify economically:
> The overall bill is already high. China Railway Corporation, the state-owned operator of the train system, has debts of more than 4trn yuan, equal to about 6% of GDP. Strains were evident last year when China Railway Materials, an equipment-maker, was forced to restructure part of its debts. Six lines have started to make operating profits (ie, not counting construction costs), with the Beijing-Shanghai link the world’s most profitable bullet train, pulling in 6.6bn yuan last year. But in less populated areas, they are making big losses. A state-run magazine said the line between Guangzhou and the province of Guizhou owes 3bn yuan per year in interest payments—three times more than it makes from ticket sales.
I wish it weren't so, but they look like Iridium, as mentioned by a very-downvoted comment. The builder makes enormous losses.
But they're built now, and that isn't going to be undone. I hope.
It's a very fine line to walk though: too much profit, people hate it (it's taking money from them), run at a loss, people hate it (it's a waste of tax money).
But since it is built and owned by the government, the economical benefit is also in the equation other than operation profit. A province would welcome the bullet train network even if it has to pay, if it attracts a capital influx to the province. This is usually true: given the convenience of taking the train, a city get connected means you are almost merged into a mega city, economically.
Right now the bullet train is for passenger, but cargo trains are on the timeline now. Think of goods shipped by train but arrive almost as fast as by air: this alone would make the investment a bit worthier than it looks.
Compare this overall bill to the total amount of public and private money spent on interstate highways, bridges, interchanges, rolling stock (aka automobiles) etc in the United States.
By back of the envelope math the comparison seems to favor China. It's not even close.
Obviously also has roads bridges etc. But with a functioning train network you can build far fewer of them compared to America.
> But they're built now, and that isn't going to be undone. I hope.
I work in a city where bike commuters have to dodge trolley tracks from electric trolleys that stopped running decades ago. We're converting an old train viaduct into an elevated park, although where that viaduct goes below grade, the construction of a building within the old right-of-way prevents full utilization of what had been old railroad tracks.
In municipalities across America, you can see the scars of old train tracks criss-crossing the landscape, creating curved cuts through square city blocks, turning into hiking trails along rivers, past abandoned ruins of old mills.
With any luck, China's rail system won't suffer the same fate.
I'm pretty sure I know what city you are talking about and I've definitely been caught in the tracks all over town. At least the active line on Girard has bike lines running parallel
Are these supposed to make a profit? Isn't this a state-run project, like highways?
Aren't the debts covered by the state anyways, via taxes?
Also, economic justifications are broad concepts.. how would it compare against a country like the US that has oil and people can therefore drive cars for cheap, whereas China doesn't have oil?
Is high-speed rail a more economically efficient system than cars?
> Are these supposed to make a profit? Isn't this a state-run project, like highways?
Yes, high-speed rail could be worthwhile even if it doesn't make a profit. I haven't seen any figures about high-speed rail so it may be a good investment. But in general I think China's investment boom is bad in the long term. By taking on so much debt to fund projects that have little economic return China is setting itself up for a lost decade or two like Japan.
> Aren't the debts covered by the state anyways, via taxes?
Yes, the debt is effectively passed on to taxpayers.
> Also, economic justifications are broad concepts.. how would it compare against a country like the US that has oil and people can therefore drive cars for cheap, whereas China doesn't have oil?
Sure, you need to look at the economy as a whole and the cost of energy is a factor. But that would include the cost of coal-fired power to run the trains - including costs of pollution.
> Is high-speed rail a more economically efficient system than cars?
China already had slow-speed trains and fast airplanes. So the better comparison is between (a) upgrading the capacity of the existing rail and airport systems; (b) building an entirely new rail network.
The rail doesn't have to be profitable itself (which is a benefit of being state-owned). The more important thing is the bigger picture, is how much economic advantage it generates.
undone, maybe not directly but indirectly. it is quite easy to keep on deferring maintenance until a line is not viable. this will be key to determining if this is a successful expenditure. what gets cut first
I don't get why the part where Liu Zhijun had to be in jail. Fast trains are intrinsically a great thing for China. People don't just "realize" it's great because of Liu or anybody else. Your "then" logic is misleading. Liu got into jail because embezzlement and favors from project contractors, at least that was part of the story, aside political factions.
Maybe I should explain better. I think with a project receiving so much opposition both from the government and citizens, I imagine Liu would have to use extraordinary methods to push it forward, which will hurt the power players hard (especially those who created the opposing voice).
The embezzlement and favours are usually just an excuse. Most people with power (at least in China) get away with it even if everyone knows about it. It only become important when someone who don't like you gets more power.
Because Liu is basically a railway enthusiast but in power. In order to push projects ASAP he bribed everyone thoroughly.
Each time a new HSR line is open he is the first passenger, and once on Chinese New Year eve he traveled to distant small rail stations and fire drunk station masters on premise.
But what percentage of the population actually uses a bullet train in a given week/month/year? (Not trips/population, the percentage of people who take one or more journies in a given timeframe.) Is this just a service for the urban elite? Or do farmers also use them?
The 747 and like jets made air travel affordable and now air travel is cheaper than by boat/rail over long distances (for people, taking into account food and lodging). If you need to attend a wedding more than a few hundred km away, you are going to consider flying. But high speed rail networks in many countries (uk, france) are either extreemly expensive or massively subsidized. All i see are suited office workers heading to jobs in downtown cores.
The carbon footprint of high speed rail, while not as bad as air, also remains much higher than other ground options. Speed always comes at some price.
This is a similar question to what percentage of people use all those empty condo-cities being built in China. The answer is: a perhaps-negligible number now (except around existing metropolitan centres, where there's respectable usage), but with projected growth toward capacity as GDP rises.
Because Chinese civil-planning policy isn't a matter of election promises, it isn't constrained to showing benefits within four-year periods. A lot of the things China is doing don't "make sense" from an intuitive standpoint if you're imagining anyone expected short-term gains, but do make sense if you imagine they were planning for 10 or 20 years down the line.
Those empty condos are unmarketable. As people become wealthier, they're going to change tastes. Even the middle class is going to seek out individual single family homes, instead of the concrete jungle of repetitive jail cells that are those new condos.
They're the poor mans idea of what the middle class wants.
A lot of those cities have the apartments built and sold before they put in commercial areas and most importantly things like subways. There was an episode of Sinica where a guest was talking to a person that bought one of the ghost apartments but wasn't living in it because there wasn't a subway line. The guest went back to the area once the subway opened and most of the apartments were full and roads were being used. I think it was this episode[0] but not 100% sure. I know the section I'm talking about was towards the end of the episode.
The ticket price of the bullet train is usually cheaper than by air (and the train is much, much more convenient than flights), and affortable by average citizens. This has created a huge headache to the airlines, which leads to some healthy competition.
Air transportation is only more affordable for a very small portion of the travelers who get the highly discounted fairs. On aggregate of costs for all travelers air travel is more expensive.
As the other comment stated, please do some research before openly spreading false information. Its very dishonest and in the end leads to great damage for countries.
My reciepts say otherwise. When planning trips to europe from NA the train options between cities end up costing almost as much as the intercontinental flight. Jumping on a discount airline from a secondary airport is ussually the cheaper option.
Also, European rail operators now do what airlines have done for a long time: discounted tickets if you book a fixed train early, expensive tickets if you book last minute or with full flexibility.
I have. I bought tickets and they were very expensive. Im flying vancouver-sf round trip next month for 1/3 the price i paid for london-paris a few years back.
Doing the math again today, round trip paris-london on eurostar is 600$ in my money (320bp on eurostar site +fees +conversion to cad, leaving next monday). Vancouver-sf by air can he had for 275$ (corporate account, no visible discount).
I just checked the Eurostar prices. A ticket for London-Paris tomorrow and Paris-London on Wednesday can be had for $247. If you book a month ahead of time, it's below $50 one-way.
The airport in London and Paris aren't very convenient if you actually have to go to the city, and you need to add transportation costs to and from the city on both sides. Eurostar takes you to locations where people actually want to be.
AS for your 600 euros for a ticket, it's likely a last minute bought one at the most expensive time, it goes as low as 39 euros for a single, most people will pay under 300 for the round trip I guess...
Heathrow is pretty convenient to London with both tube and Heathrow Express service but train is generally more convenient than air if you're going to either downtown Paris or Brussels. Personally, I'd probably never fly those routes unless they were legs on a longer trip.
In general, I've found that in Europe there are pretty consistent large savings to booking rail well in advance, which is not nearly so much the case in the US. This can be the case with flying but air prices tend to be all over the map without an easily identifiable pattern.
The parent post was about French high speed rail. Your rebuttal was about a specialty link (the Eurostar) between London and Paris. That's 2 different countries and a massively expensive 35mi long undersea tunnel.
You're not wrong that French rail is relatively expensive, but I think a specialty link was not really a "normal" rail ticket to use to compare.
You can get a round-trip on the Eurostar for USD 140 in Economy, maybe USD 200 for popular departure times. That brings you right in the middle of the city, unlike a flight. There's a reason the Eurostar is popular.
If the Eurostar were typically that expensive, then its competition (both aviation and coaches/ferries) would be absolutely crushing it in the market, and they aren't, which suggests that that is unusual.
"Less than a decade ago China had yet to connect any of its cities by bullet train. Today, it has 20,000km (12,500 miles) of high-speed rail lines, more than the rest of the world combined. It is planning to lay another 15,000km by 2025"
The contrast to the UK, where we might someday build the HS2 line London-Birmingham-Manchester, is massive. I am left with a feeling of awe at China's development, and frustration at the UK's stagnancy.
> I am left with a feeling of awe at China's development, and frustration at the UK's stagnancy.
While the UK does feel particularly stagnated on several fronts, I'm not sure abandoning the rule of law, protection of private property, labour protections, at least an attempt at the appearance of corruption-free tenders, high safety standards and the principle that people who are affected should be consulted is worthy of much awe.
Some of the UK's problems are not due to the rule of law, but the perverse incentives given to politicians.
In particular, the system often rewards politicians who delay making tough (or expensive) decisions.
For example, building a new power station using the latest green technology causes more protests and opposition than keeping a decrepit, polluting power station running for an extra five years. At which point, in all probability it'll be someone else's problem.
So often, a politician presented with a chance to either approve a power station, or call for more impact assessments/consultations/reviews, will be rewarded for choosing the latter.
"For example, building a new power station using the latest green technology causes more protests and opposition than keeping a decrepit, polluting power station running for an extra five years."
I saw this happen once in my constituency. The protest was ridiculously meek and likely astroturfed but it had the backing of the local Tory MP.
Thus the department of energy and climate change refused permission to build a wind farm.
As someone who works in the planning and urban design field the real issues are private property and heritage. China doesnt care about either. The UK cares too much. The answer is of course somewhere in the middle. Lets not forget most of the UKs existing infrastructure (including railways, roads, canals) was built on private property and through heritage items too, just in a different environment where this was easier to do.
Where there is clear wider community benefit, IMO consultation should be relatively narrow ('we will build this but if small changes can provide major benefit please make sure we know about them and we should be held to account in planning for them') however compensation should be generous. Few heritage items should be sacrosanct however not many will be affected and losses in heritage should be compensated by greater heritage contributions elsewhere (eg money for conserving heritage items on the at risk register). It really shouldnt have to be so controversial if the right systems are in place. We have to plan for the future and this should not be questionable...
Rule of law, labour practices and corruption-free practices arent incompatible with these projects.
I'm always amazed when I see more detail about the UK's canals. They are individually quite small (e.g. when you go for a walk) but the national network is huge. One day when I can take a sabbatical, I'm going to try and navigate from one end of the country to the other on them.
I think this analysis fails to consider the effects of timelines of development, population and history.
The chinese revolution led to complete overhaul of the property system, land ownership and land reform from the 50s.
Being developed countries a lot of development happened in a different era in most western countries when the rules, environmental awareness and current standards just didn't exist. China is doing it now. It's a completely different ball game.
China is a huge country compared to most european countries and has more than 1.3 billion people. Its unlikely the things that apply to Europe or the US will apply here.
That's a valid point. And there is always a tendency to see the good points in other countries and the bad points in your own.
In this case (and also in e.g. building new power stations, new housing, widening roads, expanding London's airports, etc) the contrast is so stark. For sure the UK needn't abandon rule of law in order to build infrastructure in a timely manner.
Yes you do. If the rail goes across any freehold, you'll have to negotiate and compensate for the owners loses. This process takes years if not decades. The only reason China is able to build so quickly is because the government tramples on people rights (does private ownership of real estate exist in China?) like there's no tomorrow. I attended a seminar in UCL a few months ago where the panelist shared the number of protests in China in the range of 10s of thousands every year. Salivate all you want about China's rapid development, if you attempt to migrate this model to your own country, don't be surprised when the gov bring a giant bulldozer to your door one morning and wake you up.
Isn't it possible to have something in between those two extremes? The opposite of showing up one morning unannounced with a bulldozer to take land uncompensated doesn't have to be an eminent-domain and planning-approvals process that is so bureaucratic and slow that it takes decades to complete.
The U.S. has some of this problem as well, though more in its environmental legislation. Having environmental legislation is good, but it's currently extremely bureaucratic. For example, Illinois is doing a relatively minor upgrade to the Chicago - St. Louis rail line, to upgrade it from 89 mph to 110 mph top speeds. This isn't a newly built line and involves very little alignment change, mainly rebuilding of crossings and stations and signalling upgrades. One of the parts of the process that has slowed it down the most is the required reporting under the National Environmental Policy Act [1], not because they're worried everything won't ultimately be approved (it eventually was), but because the amount of required documentation and procedures to go through are just so numerous and slow, that it takes a substantial portion of the resources of the entire project just to do the paperwork.
I'd argue that the main problem with US environmental law is that it isn't handled by a beaurocracy in a straightforward way but rather by giving pretty much everybody the right to sue to stop a project on environmental grounds. If the St. Louis only had to jump through the EPA and FRA's hoops then the whole thing would be much, much simpler and easier.
>Yes you do. If the rail goes across any freehold, you'll have to negotiate and compensate for the owners loses. This process takes years if not decades. The only reason China is able to build so quickly is because the government tramples on people rights
Actually the Chinese government builds a lot of the high speed rail tracks on elevated tracks in order to avoid interfering with the owner. Which is why most of it looks likes this:
So it does seem like they're using tracks elevated by concrete pillars pretty widely, but are you sure your image shows a high-speed rail track? To my untrained eye that seems like a really aggressive curve radius for a high speed rail track. See also:
Yes, it's a high speed track. That's a Siemens ICE train (or a Chinese derivative thereof). A telephoto lens can create this visual effect of depth compression.
I'm flabbergasted by people implying that there's a good excuse for why the Western nations can't build HSR the way China does. China has entire lines like this that don't touch the ground for dozens of miles at a time. These lines are out in the country connecting major city centers, and I'm very skeptical that they disrupt any landowners in between. China has perfected the technqiue of low-cost construction of this elevated track. Meanwhile in California every property owner along the CA HSR right-of-way has the right to sue the state and claim not that they haven't been compensated (they have), but that there will be environmental damage (even though it has already been studied), delaying the construction and making it cost even more.
Many Western countries' ability to build large infrastructure is broken, because they give too much power to the landowners and unions.
Elevated track doesn't buy you anything over level track, at least in terms of landowner hostility. What makes you think that an easement for pillars is going to come any cheaper than an easement for continuous level track?
If you browse the image search results for "china high speed rail viaduct" it's obvious that it's a lot less disruptive than laying the track at surface level.
E.g. if it's through the middle of your field you can cross the track at any point, as opposed to going out of your way to get under a tunnel. Most of the land underneath the track can still be farmed, so why wouldn't it be cheaper?
Neither your or your parents photo represents "elevating the rails to avoid interference with the property below".
What's happening in these photos is that either there is a flood plain below the tracks and/or there is a maximum grade (elevation) change that they need to respect and so they are "flattening" the track with those pillars.
Those pillars are not there to be nice, they're there because of physical constraints.
"Laying track on viaducts is often preferred in China to minimize resettlement and the use of fertile land"
I rode across a lot of the country on HSR in 2013 and it was obvious that huge swathes (perhaps most) of the network is on viaducts.
Either China is about 40% "physical constraints" (which would make this high speed rail network an even more impressive and our lack of one an even greater failure) or they're actually there to be "nice" (i.e. avoid the need for resettlement/compulsory land purchase).
That's true. I've seen them all over north western China. although I know what the true purpose of them are. The pillar look pretty dense to me, so I'm not what to think about "avoid interfering". I suspect they are used to keep the rails level since the network goes thru a pretty wide range of elevation.
This is correct. Much of china is mountainous, so pillaring and tunneling are quite common to get the straightness needed for HSR. They also need to skip over urban areas sometimes, but that is more about traffic.
Here's a construction process used in China for long pillar-supported track.[1] That's an useful machine.
I wonder, though, how much time is wasted slowly backing it up to the staging area to pick up each new beam section. Maybe they sometimes use a beam carrying machine to bring more beams to the erecting machine.
Japan seems to prefer to build at ground level outside of cities.
> Yes you do. If the rail goes across any freehold, you'll have to negotiate and compensate for the owners loses. This process takes years if not decades. The only reason China is able to build so quickly is because the government tramples on people rights (does private ownership of real estate exist in China?) like there's no tomorrow.
How is this different from, say, oil pipelines in the United States? They are constantly trampling on the rights of (Usually indigenous) people living in the area - and you currently have a Congress, a Senate, and a President that have all made it very clear what side they are on in this battle.
The primary difference to me is that China seems to consider train transportation infrastructure to be critical to its economic development - whereas the United States considers that to be the case for private oil extraction.
At least high-speed train spills are far less likely to cause long-term ecosystem damage then bitumen.
The process of compensation can be made much faster without a meaningful loss of private ownership. Look at pretty much any Civil Law country, for instance.
>I'm not sure abandoning the rule of law, protection of private property, labour protections
All 100% unnecessary in order to build a lot of high speed rail.
Except possibly the protection of private property (it would require eminent domain). But, since most British homeowners have been subject to one of the largest handouts in history (in the form of house price appreciation directed by the state), I think the a little leeway on that one is affordable
Plus, like the Chinese (who don't completely ignore property rights), there's nothing stopping us from building railways on stilts.
They don't use stilts because of property ownership, but because of terrain and traffic. There are hardly any stilts between Beijing and GZ, for example, because it is easier to just tunnel under hills rather than do both.
I assume the U.K. is rather flat and you wouldn't use stilts at all.
I've seen a lot of stilts being built along the Yangtze River, but that is hardly flat at all, they have to stilt or go low enough to build a really long tunnel, which isn't viable; it definitely wasn't because they were cutting through a farmer's field! The new freeways follow the same pattern. BJ-GZ is a really long line that goes through a big chunk of china, but it is mostly rural, whereas BJ-TJ is a short jaunt between two abutting cities.
I've never seen stilts in flat terrain before, outside of SH/GZ elevated ring roads. I'm very surprised BJ-TJ is elevated when almost nothing else in urban Beijing is.
> I'm not sure abandoning the rule of law, protection of private property, labour protections, at least an attempt at the appearance of corruption-free tenders, high safety standards and the principle that people who are affected should be consulted is worthy of much awe.
Two points:
1. The income tax that pays for the UK's lavish welfare system violates private property (and privacy) rights on a massive scale. It just doesn't seem that way to you because it's been normalized in the society you've lived your entire life in. Conversely, the type of property that was not made by man, and thus, should be under greater government purview: land, is treated as nearly absolutely private, with the state having very little power to expropriate it for the public good.
2. Laws prohibiting particular labour arrangements are not "labour protections". As Peter Schiff put it, "mandatory vacations, sick days, and bonuses do not expand worker's right, they restrict them. They do not raise compensation, but rather force workers to accept compensation based on government requirements rather than personal preference." It is only demagoguery and ideological group-think that makes people believe otherwise. The same applies to mandatory "high safety standards", which violate the right of consenting adults to engage in voluntary actions and interactions, and ultimately result in top-down cookie cutter standards created by a small body of bureaucrats replacing a wide assortment of personal standards, that would be based on the localized knowledge diffused throughout the economy.
I always wonder if people who regard safety standards as a terrible imposition by "a small body of bureaucrats" have any experience of work environments that don't just consist of meetings and sitting in front of a computer?
All property and privacy rights are societal norms in the first place. Society isn't violating any natural rights by taxing you. On the contrary, modern society actively protects you from having all your stuff taken by anyone strong enough to take it.
Says my conscience. That's all a perception of human rights amounts to. I think most would agree with my perception if the euphemisms and ideological labels were pealed away.
Your conscience being immune to and independent of the strong prevailing cultural norms of course.
And yet somehow a handful of generations ago a large number of consciences were pretty definite about the rights of black Africans. Seems impossible to today's conscience.
Consciences change over time. Every generation thinks theirs is the One True Correct belief system. Bah.
Whether my conscience is affected by prevailing cultural norms won't stop me from opposing slavery, or the imprisonment of those who refuse to hand over a share of all currency they receive in private trade.
We must ultimately live by a set of values that make the most sense to us. I see no reason why I should not.
That's exactly the reason; people own land, buildings are protected, etc. China has less of this problem (benefits of an oppressive or at least assertive regime that puts economic progress first).
I'd compare what China is doing with the high speed trains now with what the US did with the regular train tracks. Look at what it did to the US in terms of economy, and the cost for the native people and nature.
I don't think British society in Victorian times had the same level of education and basic income/living standards as they do today (my perspective is mostly from Dickens' writing though; I haven't done much research into this area personally).
"Progress" is generally considered to be the first derivative of societal wealth, not the zeroth, and generally measured logarithmically rather than linearly. So, basically, "percentage annual increase in GDP" (or other similar measure, ignoring the questionability of any one of them for now). I don't have proof as to which of modern China and Victorian England is progressing more quickly, but the claim at least passes the smell test. (Personally I wouldn't trust either number I could get, as I think China is probably lying about their growth percentages and Victorian growth percentages would be a historical estimate only, so comparing two numbers I consider unreliable would not produce much information.)
I'm having a hard time understanding this comment. Are you saying that GDP growth of Victorian Britain == GDP growth of present China? If so, that is not the point I'm making at all. Income inequality is what I'm more concerned with: you can have spectacular economic growth and the gains can still be restricted to a small percentage of the population.
The consultations took a long time, and inevitably involved demolishing minor historic buildings. The UK devotes a lot of effort to preservation where China devotes almost none. The price of cities popping up like desert flowers is the sweeping away of entire villages of traditional buildings.
I've been to a lot of National Trust and English Heritage houses. The country is lousy with them. I feel sure one or two can be parted with. This isn't America where anything over 100 years is automatically some kind of national monument. We sold them London Bridge, can't we offload a Little Pifflington Stately Home or two?
China is lifting almost a billion people out of poverty with all these projects. Think back to the West in the early to mid 1900s for the right comparison context.
I only hope China's rise into modernity is not accompanied by mega wars of the type that happened with the Western nations rise.
Forget high speed rail. It would be great if the trains weren't 30+ years old.
On the lines I most often use the carriages don't have automatic doors. I'm constantly embarrassed when I have to show visitors how to open the window, stick their hand out and use the handle on the outside to open the door (which is how it's done).
At least they've still got windows. Around here you have to put up with aircon that doesn't work in summer and a heater that's turned up way to high in winter. I find the older ones with windows provided much better temperature control.
On the plus side this is actually an example in the usability classic "The Design of Everyday Things". Iirc Norman concludes that he doesn't have a clue as to why they were designed that way and offers some hypotheses which he dismisses right away (book is at home so I can't check) :D
A little off topic, but anyone interested in picking up "The Design of Everyday Things" be aware it was previously published as "The Psychology of Everyday Things". There was an expanded and updated edition in 2013 so you should probably look for that one.
Guess: when originally built those carriages didn't have door locking. It was felt it would be unsafe to have a handle on the inside that could be accidentally opened while the train was moving at high speed. So the handle is on the outside so that it takes a very deliberate effort to open the door (and hopefully people know better than to reach out of a window at high speed).
"they firstly removed the interior door handles as a dirt-cheap “safety” measure to discourage people from getting out of the train before it stopped, then realised that they hadn’t actually discouraged everyone and had instead made jumping early even more dangerous, so they added a central locking system to keep the doors locked until the train stopped. Of course, in a quintessential piece of British train-related incompetence, they didn’t bother to put the handles back on once they had central locking."
They're quite a bit older than this, assuming you're thinking of the British examples. The last Mark 3 coach was made in 1988, and the Mark 4s have sliding plug power doors.
It was still an odd design decision, though. There had been electric doors on BR multiple units since the 70s.
Yes it looks like I was thinking of those trains, they don't look this old. They run on the Reading-Paddington line.
Anyway, there's no excuse whatsoever for this design, however old they are!
After 3 years, I am still not quite confident opening those doors. I try to let another passenger do it for me.
Yes; derivative Mark 3A/B loco hauled stock was later also built for the West Coast Main Line (plus a bunch of sleepers).
I don't know whether the crash standards for 125mph running were higher at the time. The Mark 3s are generally very strong, and have held up to high-speed crashes better than their predecessors, so something was definitely done right.
They weren't fitted with central door locking until the early 90s, though, and even now it's not interlocked with either the train power or an 'actually closed' sensor - so it relies on the guard to make sure the train doesn't set off with a door open.
This. These trains were originally not fitted with central locking, and being able to (accidentally?) open the door at 125mph is obviously unsafe.
There have been a few converted to more conventional power doors, but the original design is not such that this is easy; it's a pretty major rebuild and it's not clear they're going to be in service long enough to make it worthwhile.
China is huge, though, and the UK is not. HS2 is dragging in the UK because it's a massive amount of money to spend in order to shave 45m off a trip to Scotland. The cost/benefit ratio is totally different - and with the Hitachi training they're bringing in, the saving goes further down. HS2 is a large waste of money.
Rail is typically never profitable unless the increase in land value around stations is captured. In the UK they typically leave those spoils to private land owners.
Japanese rail companies manage this: they run the trains at cost - or even a loss - and make profits back from (for example), building malls around the stations and leasing space to retailers.
The UK could really use high speed rail around the London commuter belt. If land value increases are captured it would probably pay for itself, in fact.
Road-building is also not profitable unless you capture the increase in land value around roads. Curiously, most people are okay with tax-funded roads and streets but strongly oppose spending public funds on trains.
Of course, ideally both would be run exactly at cost via user fees (i.e. train tickets, tolls etc.), but this is not an often-shared opinion.
>Curiously, most people are okay with tax-funded roads and streets but strongly oppose spending public funds on trains.
Actually the public is strongly in favor of spending public funds on trains, but the British oligarchy (reflected by the media's default opinion - which some people confuse for the public's), is vehemently against it:
Note the Telegraph accusing the general public of being communists:
"the majority of the electorate who have no love for bankers and are positively Trotskyist when it comes to trains and utilities"
"A recent YouGov poll showed that the majority of people support the renationalisation of railways, including those who identified themselves as Conservative or UKIP voters."
>Of course, ideally both would be run exactly at cost via user fees
Why are you against capturing the increased land value like Japan does?
It's quite rare to see people advocating high-speed rail for such short journeys as typical London commuter belt. Could you elaborate how you see this working? Remember you're accelerating 1000 tonnes of steel to 200mph at each station you need to stop at.
Actually I have a coworker who commutes on HSR1 from Ashford meaning he lives closer to France than he does to the office and he still has a less painful commute than half of my coworkers.
Building high speed rail in London would alleviate a lot of commuter stress and pain and it could be used to regenerate a lot of the more run down areas on the outskirts of London if they suddenly had a ~12-15 minute commute to the center.
Huge, and authoritarian. They move whole cities worth of people when it comes time to build a hydroelectric dam, by force if need be.
The west in comparison gets bogged down in NIMBYism and haggling over land value pr CM of track/road. Never mind multiple rounds in court if one of the would be contractors can find any reason to claim the government was biased...
HS2 is not so much about speed as capacity. It does not replace the existing lines, it adds to them. That's why it's been so controversial - it puts railway where there was none. It turns Coventry and Birmingham into London commuter suburbs.
Capacity is only needed for short periods at peak times, which could be achieved by e.g running more standard-class carriages instead of first class. [0]
Since you mentioned Coventry, it's intercity capacity to London will actually be reduced if HS2 comes to be due to extra trains to Birmingham occupying the track. Same for many other towns and cities in the Midlands. [1]
> I am left with a feeling of awe at China's development, and frustration at the UK's stagnancy.
To be fair, the UK was overspending on railway long before it was cool :-)
From Edward Chancellor's "Devil Take the Hindmost" [1]:
> In January 1845, sixteen new railway schemes were projected. By April, with rail receipts continuing to grow rapidly, over fifty new companies had been registered...
> By June 1845, plans for over eight thousand miles of new railway -- four times the size of the existing railway system and nearly twenty times the length of England -- were under consideration by the Board of Trade. In the following month, new schemes appeared at the rate of over a dozen a week.
> At the end of October [...] over twelve hundred railways were being projected at an estimated cost of over £560 million. The total amount of outstanding railway liabilities was nearly £600 million. This figure exceeded the national income, estimated at around £550 million, of which perhaps £20 million a year could be spent safely on the railways without starving the rest of the economy of capital.
> In Britain, [...] the spirit of laissez-faire dictated that the development of the railways should be left entirely to private enterprise. The uncontrolled expansion of the railway system, in the hands of semi-criminal entrepreneurs, produced a haphazard network. For instance, by the 1850s there were three independent routes from Liverpool to Leeds and three alternative routes from London to Peterborough.
> The results of the mania, however, were not entirely negative. With over 8,000 miles of track in operation by 1855, Britain possessed the highest density of railways in the world, seven times greater than that of France or Germany.
I've only briefly been in the UK, but I really liked the rail system. It's far better than that of other countries I've lived in. I've gone London-Manchester and back and found it a delightful experience.
There's also, I guess, a diminishing return for infrastructure investments in a highly-developed country like the UK, especially when it's much smaller than China.
That said though, it's a shame Heathrow still can't get the extra runway it desperately needs...
It's a shame Heathrow's terminal buildings have been rebuilt in the last 15 years, rather than shut down with an airport in a sensible place constructed to replace it.
The noise of flights landing over London for 17 hours a day, pretty much every 90-120 seconds, is miserable.
Wow. I can hardly believe what I'm looking at. We're so used to seeing one "bullet train" at a time, and even that is held as a lofty aspiration. Some day, maybe, my country might have one too.
That Chinese train yard picture is so serious. Once upon a time, the Dow Jones industrial average was a composite metric designed to roughly characterize the rail industry, including steel production, machining and manufacture, real estate, and use. The health of that industry was found to be predictive of the health of the entire country, and although the DJIA shifted from rail, it is still predictive of nationwide economic health.
China, in my eyes, just proved how far ahead they are - and my jaw is on the floor. Those trains represent so much. It's not merely that they exist - and all of the economic activity inherent in making them exist - but now that they exist, they are an engine of productivity. All the people who can move now...
I've heard of Wuhan before, mostly because of the Chinese tennis player Li Na [1], who was born there. She did quite well at the Australian Open for several years (including winning it once) and became quite popular with the local crowd.
The United States would rather let an oil company build a pipeline on your land, then a rail company build a high speed train track on it.
Oil is prioritized over rail because it immediately creates jobs, tax dollars, and the government doesn't have to pay up front for it. If you're a politician, which one would you want to support?
There are actually companies that want to build oil pipelines. How many privately funded companies are there that want to (and have the means to) build a high-speed rail line?
How many privately funded companies would even consider doing so in the current regulatory climate? There's a bit of survivourship bias at play, here!
Likewise, if the oil were extracted by the state, rather then a private firm, it would also not have any problems with piping it over private property.
Perhaps, but it's not as though the popularity of oil pipelines is especially high. They still get built! If anything, much of the bureaucracy and public would far prefer to build high speed rail in place of a pipeline. Certainly neither face a particularly positive regulatory environment.
I'm not sure what your second point is getting at. Rail lines face pretty huge eminent domain burdens along with everything else.
My point was mostly that the hurdles of building rail and pipelines are both quite high. The economic benefit of oil pipelines are enough to make them worth the trouble to a private firm. Rail, not so much.
The U.S. has about the same amount of land area as China and less than a third of the population. The rail network in the graphic provided in the article mostly avoids the Tibetan plateau, and so basically covers only very populated areas with relatively friendly terrain (notable exception of Urumqi).
Making network for the entire U.S. with those parameters seems almost impossible. You're either plowing through the Rockies or a desert to reach and go through areas an order of magnitude less populous than, say, Kunming or Chengdu.
That's not to say that the USA shouldn't build a comparable network, that it wouldn't necessarily be profitable, or it wouldn't bring a worthwhile benefit. However, there are real obstacles that don't necessarily point the finger at political differences.
Because we don't need one? When did a bullet train become a priority for anyone?
Seriously I have to fly 2000 miles soon and I can buy a plane ticket for $200 and be there in 4 hours. Have you checked the cost of a train ticket lately? It's something like 4x the price and 4x slower.
Gentrified western economies have economic growth of around 2% on average. Developing countries moving from mostly rural or controlled economies to market industrialized economies can, and do, have growth of around 10% or more. That's a fairly big difference in available funds for capital projects.
The same way the US was building trains in NYC, Chicago, etc 100 years ago, China and others are doing so today, but with the advantage of globalization, automation, and mostly solved technical issues for even advanced systems.
Essentially, the point at which your society hits this growth really is going to determine the what kind of infrastructure you're stuck with. The big exception here is being bombed to the point where you have to re-do your infrastructure, which is the case with Europe and why they tend to have newer mass transit infrastructure than the US which saw no bombing on its homeland, and of course has the added problem of a huge homeland which makes more sense to fly around in, than ride around in.
A good example of this in tech is how the US pioneered DSL (Joseph Lechleider at Bellcore) and how quickly the US telcos ran with it. By the time the Europeans and others caught up, DSL had advanced to ADSL2 and ADSL2+ which gave 2x to 5x the bandwidth. Meanwhile, US subscribers were stuck with vanilla DSL for decades because the cost of upgrading was so prohibitive.
There's a problem with innovative countries where they run with revision 1 of some new tech, but then are stuck with rev1 because big infrastructure changes take a long time, and you can expect decades of use before replacement. Or in the case of trains, centuries - the CTA in Chicago is built on tracks originally laid in the 1860's. From a tech perspective its weird to think Chicago was running light rail before homes even had electricity. Waiting until later revisions to build out your infrastructure, either intentionally or not, comes with fairly big dividends. Now is very good time to lay down infrastructure due to all the computing power we have, automation options, lowered costs via globalization, and focus on renewable energy.
That said, infrastructure improvements happens as needed in older economies. The US has an impressive air system, for example, with at least 75,000 flights per day and at relatively low price points. We've probably hit the efficiency and feature maximum with jets as-is, so not much room for innovation here, but its clear for the US, air became the focus instead of trains. You can fly from Chicago to LA in 4 hours. Even a 'fast' bullet train with zero stops would take 10 hours, most likely closer to 15 with stops. Also, air is privatized, so there's no worrying about raising taxes or cutting social programs to pay for a subsidized train expansion, which would take quite a bit political will from taxpayers, most of whom are happy with car ownership for daily commuting and airlines for longer trips.
What a pathetic Debbie Downer article -- quintessential modern America. Most of the article just keeps beating the cost drum -- trains don't generate enough ticket revenue to cover their cost. Meanwhile the U.S. taxpayer givers $41.0 billion a year to the Federal Highway Administration, and most roads don't generate a single dime of revenue.
Roads, originally an Eisenhower idea [1] as car culture was 'railroaded' in so to speak to win over trains, generate tons of indirect revenue.
People and businesses on either side and up and down every road generate revenue because of it. Same with the internet, trains etc.
You don't have to generate revenue directly from the thing for it to be a great idea. Bean counting away from indirect benefits seems to be overly-existent in our short-term planning modern US culture (not focusing on true investments enough like infrastructure, i.e. broadband etc).
Our interstate systems have been huge benefits even though trains would be nice as well, Amtrak is not competitive.
The interstate system is probably the best thing Ike ever did, good infrastructure projects leave a great legacy and are overlooked. It fueled economic growth across the nation as well as served as helping with defense.
The Economist is headquartered in London and as the publication's name implies it commonly focusses on the economical impact of any story it reports. They also don't hide the fact that their editorial positions are rooted in classical liberal economics.
Actually, that existing track is part of the problem, not the solution. A new high-speed train is much easier to justify economically when you're looking at (total benefit of high-speed rail) - (cost of high speed rail) than when you're looking at ((total benefit of high-speed rail) - (total benefit of current rail)) - ((cost of high-speed rail) + (cost of removing current rail if necessary)).
There's a name for this effect, but I can't remember it. Another example in the real world is the effectiveness of putting up cell towers in developing countries rather than running wires for landlines.
Perhaps you're referring to the term "leapfrogging", the topic of which Kevin Kelly offers a differing viewpoint from the mainstream acceptance despite explaining this in 2006[1].
Even for US high speed rail, I don't think any of those trains will be designed by an American company.
From Wikipedia: In February 2015 nine companies formally expressed interest in producing trainsets for the system: Alstom, AnsaldoBreda (now known as Hitachi Rail Italy), Bombardier Transportation, CSR [China South Rail], Hyundai Rotem, Kawasaki Rail Car, Siemens, Sun Group U.S.A. partnered with CNR Tangshan, and Talgo.[24]
Even though they might be foreign companies, they do tend to be built in the US. IIRC Alstom in California made all the cars for the new Florida high speed line that starts running this year.
It takes a while before you can start building rolling stock domestically. Melbourne just started making their class E trams a few years back, which they tout as being "made entirely in Victoria" and yet they've had the largest tram network in the work for decades.
Is the article a bit strange? They say Liu Zhijun was "removed for corruption", which, of course, in China, does not mean anything. They mention the crash in 2011 but not that the government wrapped up rescue efforts the next day and buried the trains.
Having been there I think it's hugely inflated. Chongqing isn't really a giant city but a large city with a huge rural area around it that has been declared to be part of the city now. Not sure why that even happened. Maybe so that it can become a special trade zone without much political work?
Oh wow, according to wiki you are right and it's larger than Shanghai which I would have never thought. I guess the city feels smaller because of the central peninsula.
Wait, so you have full security screenings for the high speed rail? (Most of Europe's high speed rail goes through the same train stations and standard commuter rail, so there's no additional screening .. although if you're crossing from Belgium to Germany they do often search trains for marijuana) at border stations.
yes, there is first check to get even inside train station, you must have ticket, then right after that is security check, then in some stations there is another check to enter boarding room, then to leave boarding room to platform there is another check and then in the train they check your ticket again, also when leaving station in destination they will again check your ticket to let you go
it's HSR with communist characteristics
no thanks, i will rather use show train in Europe where i can walk straight from my room to train with ticket in my mobile instead of Chinese harassment with thousands of people pushing you all around, it's just one disgusting experience, even Chinese airports are faster and more pleasant
This looks great but I honestly wonder - if China is under heavy communism oppression and noone can make enough fuzz about their lifestyle before eventually disappearing... why would Chinese government care about spending money and time building such vast (and beautiful!) network? Serious question...
> This looks great but I honestly wonder - if China is under heavy communism oppression and noone can make enough fuzz about their lifestyle before eventually disappearing... why would Chinese government care about spending money and time building such vast (and beautiful!) network? Serious question...
China isn't under heavy communist oppression, not the kind that you're thinking. Their style of oppression is different. The Social Contract that the Party offers the People is this - you will not get political choice, you will always be ruled by us; in return you will not have to worry about money because this economy will grow at 7.5%pa. That rising tide will lift all boats, including yours. When all your material needs are taken care of, do you really care who is in charge?
Projects such as high speed rail help the Party deliver on its promise. The Economist points out the ways in which this boosts economic growth, as well as other bonus effects, like allowing people to buy affordable housing in smaller cities that are short commutes away from Beijing/Shaghai and other major cities. If the Party doesn't hold its end of the Contract up, it risks mass unrest, similar to the Tiananmen Square protests. That ought to answer your question.
The interesting question is whether their Social Contract will survive. So far, the people are generally satisfied with the Party's performance but in the years to come growth will inevitably slow, if only because their economy is so massive that compounded growth is difficult. I think the strategy is that by then the Party will have a much more efficient way of enforcing control over individuals than they did in 1989 when the Tiananmen protests took place Rather than crude measures like locking people up or beating them, the Party will use the social score [1] to subtly control the People. If you know that your house payments will rise, or your medical care will be deprioritized, or your friends will ostracize you, or you'll face harassment from strangers or you won't be able to apply to good schools for your children, or all of the above... will you still have the courage to show up to protest, much less stand in front of a column of tanks? [2]
> The Social Contract that the Party offers the People is this - you will not get political choice
then
> Projects such as high speed rail help the Party deliver on its promise.
Ain't that contradiction? Why do they need to deliver on that promise? In other words -- if they don't, what will happen, if as you say "you will not get political choice, you will always be ruled by us".
Further you describe China like some sort of wonderland. In such case, why is it so that the reality is far different?
Or is it just american propaganda I'm being fed, and I should immediately abandon my always "bills gotta get paid" worries and migrate to PRC?
> if they don't [deliver on their promise], what will happen
Revolution, Tiananmen Square style.
> you describe China like some sort of wonderland
Do I? China is rich, will continue to grow richer but it is hardly a wonderland. In fact, my last paragraph about subtle and overt social control should have made it clear that it is far from a wonderland.
The interesting question is whether their Social Contract will survive. So far, the people are generally satisfied with the Party's performance but in the years to come growth will inevitably slow, if only because their economy is so massive that compounded growth is difficult. I think the strategy is that by then the Party will have a much more efficient way of enforcing control over individuals than they did in 1989...
This is the question that keeps me up at night. Their rate of growth should naturally slow as their economy reaches capital saturation. And there are a lot of worrying structural features of the Chinese economy. For instance, they hit their 2030 metropolitan housing target a few years ago due to their stimulus packages driving a massive residential construction boom. So technically they should cease all residential housing construction for the next 15 years or so... They're also going to have a harder and harder time maintaining their capital controls (e.g. pegged exchange rates) as their foreign currency reserves run down. All hell could break loose if they can't defend their peg against speculative attacks.
If it's a slow melt scenario, maybe there will be enough time for the CCP to re-negotiate the social contract. But if any of a number of possible economic shocks hits China, and they're suddenly staring down the barrel of recession or a Japanese-style lost decade or two, I can't help but think the only way to avoid being dragged out in to the streets by angry protesters would be to declare war on another country (...Japan).
Maybe start taking a more aggressive stance on the Senkaku Islands, for instance. And the vague sense I have (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that the Trump administration intends to pursue a more 'isolationist' geo-strategic policy.
I'd love it if we could do something like this on the east coast of Australia. I doubt it will ever happen. I fly between Sydney and Melbourne fairly regularly and it can be a real pain. Sydney -> Melbourne route is one of the busiest air corridors in the world so demand would probably be there.
For even half full inter-city trains I don't think there's any doubt about which is more energy efficient. Trains will tend to win by about an order of magnitude. Planes aren't any worse than cars containing a single person, though.
Not sure all countries have to follow this, china must have done this to compensate the growth hence the infra projects with in countries help. I think other countries rather than spending money on this can develop meaning full telecom infrastructure to villages (connecting all of them) and ensure population is spread out and people continue to there where they are than flocking to cities.
These days when I travel on a train I can work efficiently, play computer games, Skype my family or watch a movie - the personal cost of a slow train compared to a fast train isn't as high as it used to be. So maybe technology has reduced the economic benefit of a bullet-train network.
The article merely touches the economic benefits. There is also another elephant in the room which wasn't mentioned - fast way to transport army. All the bullet-train rail are capable of transporting tanks. This will allow overnight transfer of army to any city in China.
chabuduo is the tradition of cutting corners long formed as the basis for china's fast economic growth. you can build the largest and the biggest infrastructures in the world as fast as possible but it won't be the longest lasting structure which NOT what current day china is about.
While I applaud the effort. It's almost obsolete now. When they have a Hyperloop Network then I will be impressed, but given how things look, they will have it before the US..
In my opinion, most people in the valley or in North America still refuse to give up their lifestyle. They look for something like self-driving cars, all electric-powered "personal" vehicle to invest. And those still drive on the same road/interstates/highway infrastructure and don't give you the benefits compare with high-speed rails.
They don't recognize the real priorities - how to transport millions people everyday efficiently, cost-effectively, and most environmentally friendlies.
They also don't recognize local economy, local businesses thrive with these connected network. It is proven to be the case in China and Japan.
High-speed rail network is what people want - to get from point A to point B quickly. It's not something even the most efficient self-driving car with the best MPG electric-powered vehicle can scale for millions of people everyday.
Instead of investing into some new technologies, they seem like they refuse to take decades of proven technology and just use it in US (high-speed trains were first invented in Japan in the 60s)
But as I understand very well in the culture here, the politics, the corruption, and the oil/automative conglomerate will never make this happen for the actual good for the people.
I would without a doubt to say the US is in its downfall as it didn't pick the priorities to fix the root of the problem.