China wants unity, even in places where it doesn’t make economic sense.
edit: 100% downvotes are coming from people that don’t know the situation. The CCP wants fast travel to major population centers even when the rail line isn’t profitable.
Isn’t that a good thing? sounds like the rail is being run as a public utility rather than a business. And its still likely profitable if you average the cost over all the lines.
This is misleadingly reductionist. California high speed rail has made consistant progess in that time. That progress has been slower than ourslowest expectations. It demonstrates the void of expertise the US has in rail megaprojects. However, that expertise is being built, slowly and painfully. Its still forward progress for a nation which tore up half its rail overthe last 50 years.
America invented rail megaprojects.
America still has the largest rail network by far. It’s well more than twice the size of China’s.
The only interesting note is that it’s almost all freight compared to other nations’ use of passenger rail.
Hehehehe
With 0.92% of electrified rail it’s a joke to say that NGL. Absolute numbers are meaningless.
You have to see it into perspective per area then you’ll get to feel how dense and therefore useful the rail network actually is. Because what good is a rail network if you can’t reach your desired location.
And then you’ll see that swiss, Germany and Luxembourg for example end up with less than 10 square km per km of rail while the usa has around 40.
Okay, but the comment implied America doesn’t have the expertise to build a passenger network when it actually doesn’t have the political willpower. It has the expertise to spare, but no one in power actually cares.
Giant infrastructure projects are a weakness of democracies. It’s tough to get everyone to agree and pay for huge projects that take long term vision and planning.
Or you could call it a strength because it’s stable and can’t be changed too fast by one guy with a short term bad idea.
You can do it through democracies. Taiwan has two sets of high speed rail systems.
Are they expensive to maintain? Absolutely. In fact they bankrupted 2+ companies until the government decided to step in and foot part of the bill. But then again, if the government isn’t willing to pay for basic infrastructure, what are taxes for?
(Also as a tangent, the Taiwan high speed rail bentos are to die for. I had it 5+ years back and I still remember it. Super cheap meal in a disposable bamboo lunch box. Usually there are 1-2 choices per day. I had chicken thighs, pickled veggies, steamed pumpkin, and half a marinated tea egg. The bottom half of the lunch box was filled with rice. 10/10 would eat at a busy train station during rush hour again)
I go to China for business fairly often and there is this one area where the government decided a new subway line should be installed, so I watched it get built over several trips. The property owners in the way were, as far as I understand it, booted off the land but compensated. And boom. A year later the subway line was done and hooked up to the rest of the existing subway infrastructure with completed stations, entries/exits, and even retail shops in the stations. It blew my mind.
The city definitely needed the subway line, but I was amazed at the efficiency. In my American home town that idea’s been debated for decades and is yet to be finished because at first it was getting voted against and then finally after the public supported and approved it, the NIMBY experience began and it took a decade of land use planning to choose the route. If it actually runs efficiently before the 2020’s are finished I’ll be impressed.
iirc. in China property is not owned but leased from the state. That makes it easier legally to get people away.
On the other hand in the alledgly property protecting and valueing democracies in Europe it is no problem to kick people off their land to build highways and expand lignite mines.
China has the advantage of not having to care about the citizens’ desires in regards to be relocated to make the rail possible.
They also provide apartments to live in permanently for those displaced in the development.
Meanwhile, the US has not built high speed rail and has tent cities.
In the case of national infrastructure, China wins hands down.
Although it’s kind of ridiculous to compare California with an entire country…
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/a-whopping-900b-debt-chinas-once-profitable-high-speed-railways/?amp
It’d be good to have high speed rail but not at any cost.
Queue tankies going crazy to defend the absurd cost…
