I've often wondered how much HSR construction in China is a subsidised public works programme, similar to the pyramids in ancient Egypt, to create artifical demand for labour, keep the economy...
I've often wondered how much HSR construction in China is a subsidised public works programme, similar to the pyramids in ancient Egypt, to create artifical demand for labour, keep the economy stimulated, and of course serve national pride.
It's one of the big weaknesses of command economies. China has liberalized it's markets significantly, but it still operates with far more centralized control than the US. The issue with economies...
It's one of the big weaknesses of command economies. China has liberalized it's markets significantly, but it still operates with far more centralized control than the US. The issue with economies like that has always been that politicians don't have as much insight into the demands of consumers of the people who's livelihoods depend on predicting those demands quickly.
There's obviously massive drawbacks to more market driven economies as well, but no private developer would risk trillions of dollars overbuilding infrastructure that has no chance of being used, absent of some other profit motive.
Something similar happened in the US with the telecommunications act of 1996, right before the dot com crash, which resulted in millions upon millions of miles of dark fiber being laid all throughout the country, some of which is still underutilized today.
Not directly related, but I think we should build more average speed rail. I’m told in Europe that HSR has become affluent only, and that ordinary rail has gone away. The challenge is that many...
Not directly related, but I think we should build more average speed rail. I’m told in Europe that HSR has become affluent only, and that ordinary rail has gone away. The challenge is that many smaller towns that were served by rail no longer are, and ticket prices are at business class airplane level for basic hsr service. This pushes less affluent folks onto busses and planes and cars, which diminish the environmental and urban planning advantages of trains, and of course unfairly disadvantages those that are not born to wealth.
This struck me as absurd, so I went ahead and did some quick research. A direct train from Paris to Berlin leaving today at 19:12 is $141 USD according to rail europe and the only nonstop business...
This struck me as absurd, so I went ahead and did some quick research. A direct train from Paris to Berlin leaving today at 19:12 is $141 USD according to rail europe and the only nonstop business class flight with seats currently available is $1729 USD (Air France 1534 departing at 17:40) via google flights.
Given that it looks like it's much faster to fly than to train and the 10x cost difference, I'd argue that they're serving entirely different markets.
My knowledge of european geography isn't robust enough to pick smaller city pairs this early in the morning, but the effect is so large, I don't feel bad disagreeing with your conclusion.
Business class wasn’t a great point for comparison - I think people tend to forget it’s 10x the price of economy, not 2-3x - but it is fairly common to find (economy class) flights for a...
Business class wasn’t a great point for comparison - I think people tend to forget it’s 10x the price of economy, not 2-3x - but it is fairly common to find (economy class) flights for a significant amount less than the equivalent train ticket.
In my experience it depends more on the route and the specifics of how the particular train operators in question are funded rather than on whether it’s a fancy high speed line or not, so I think the bigger question is around effective subsidies to airlines (e.g. tax free fuel) vs genuine additional costs (e.g. land for rails and associated maintenance, rather than just airports) vs pricing externalities (tax the carbon, motherfuckers!).
Either way though the extra cost to the consumer of using the environmentally friendly mode of transport is often real, and it’s a worthwhile one to keep in mind when discussing this stuff - if nothing else in order to focus on the routes where it is much cheaper to make the better choice, and emulate whatever they’re doing to make that the case.
Also, keep in mind that buying for a trip today is ~2x the price of buying a month or more in advance. I take the ICE (germanys HSR system) monthly, and Frankfurt-Berlin usually costs ~50€.
Also, keep in mind that buying for a trip today is ~2x the price of buying a month or more in advance. I take the ICE (germanys HSR system) monthly, and Frankfurt-Berlin usually costs ~50€.
For all the hype that HSR gets in America, people don't seem to understand that it's probably going to be more expensive than airplanes, even when subsidized. It is way cheaper, for example, to...
For all the hype that HSR gets in America, people don't seem to understand that it's probably going to be more expensive than airplanes, even when subsidized. It is way cheaper, for example, to take a plane from Tokyo to Osaka than to take the shinkansen, most tourists don't really notice it because they buy the train pass that includes unlimited travel on the shinkansen for free, though.
Lu Dadao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warns that oversized, underused HSR infrastructure has ignored basic economic logic, weakened public finances, and derailed regional planning.
Yeah, my first reaction was “huh, nice problem to have”, but from a quick skim of the article (it looks really interesting, but long enough that I don’t have time to read in full detail right now)...
Yeah, my first reaction was “huh, nice problem to have”, but from a quick skim of the article (it looks really interesting, but long enough that I don’t have time to read in full detail right now) it’s good to get a reminder of just how far our standards have fallen. And I’m saying that even from the UK, which is in a slightly better state than the US right now, even if we do seem to be angling to take the title back in our ongoing race to the bottom…
The core point of the article seems to be that a vast amount of money has been spent on high speed rail, and that reallocating some part of that to other public services would have been a bigger net gain than even more high speed rail - which makes sense to me.
There is some discussion of corruption as well, but that accepted base premise seems to be that public money has been earmarked broadly for the public good, and the important question at hand is proper allocation.
I very much understand that China has its own set of issues, but I guess it just served as a decent reminder to me that public spending for the benefit of the public is still a realistic baseline to demand, and that we should be arguing over allocation within that context rather than seeing it all disappear into the hands of billionaires.
Meanwhile, California allocates billions and almost 2 decades to HSR and we get basically nothing to show for it. Saddest thing is that money was probably gone no matter how we spent it. There's...
The core point of the article seems to be that a vast amount of money has been spent on high speed rail, and that reallocating some part of that to other public services would have been a bigger net gain than even more high speed rail - which makes sense to me.
Meanwhile, California allocates billions and almost 2 decades to HSR and we get basically nothing to show for it. Saddest thing is that money was probably gone no matter how we spent it. There's just so much corruption, beauracracy, and red tape here. Anything not liked is just sued and stalled for years. Something needs to be done about this.
Also, it's very much a "If you build it, they will come" situation. If you want to increase hiusing supply in cities you need to make it easier to expand those cities via fast public transit....
Also, it's very much a "If you build it, they will come" situation.
If you want to increase hiusing supply in cities you need to make it easier to expand those cities via fast public transit.
There is a reason almost every inland town in America had initially cropped up around the railroads, rivers and canals.
Noooot really ideal for high speed rail. Traditional rail can work like this because it's low maintenance and can do just about anything. Tons of people or freight is all the same. HSR requires a...
Also, it's very much a "If you build it, they will come" situation.
Noooot really ideal for high speed rail. Traditional rail can work like this because it's low maintenance and can do just about anything. Tons of people or freight is all the same.
HSR requires a LOT more upkeep, even if lightly used, takes a ton of energy, and generally isn't nearly as cost effective for things like freight.
The entire advantage of HSR is to move between two points distantly quickly, and the main thing that cares about that is humans. Ideally you build HSR between two points of importance, and then further routes splinter off as things can build up near the stops along the way.
This is not the same as traditional rail where "well fuck it, it'd be nice to have a route here" works even in the middle of nowhere because it's easy to cover the cost. Then later as that spot is less isolated you can now build up around it.
This is a VERY expensive overshoot if the article is correct.
It might be an "If you build it, they will come" situation. See examples of overcapacity infrastructure build outs in authoritarian central asian and middle eastern countries, now underutilized....
It might be an "If you build it, they will come" situation. See examples of overcapacity infrastructure build outs in authoritarian central asian and middle eastern countries, now underutilized.
Edit: And isn't housing supply in a similar situation for China?
On one hand, I agree. Obviously the US is lacking in trains, HSR or conventional. Which is ridiculous. But I do think that if we ever get a better rail network, maybe even interstate HSR (other...
On one hand, I agree. Obviously the US is lacking in trains, HSR or conventional. Which is ridiculous.
But I do think that if we ever get a better rail network, maybe even interstate HSR (other than the "higher-speed" Amtrak Acela service on the Northeast Corridor), it should still make sense. Like connecting, Idk, Omaha to Wichita probably doesn't make the most financial or logistical sense.
And that's the whole point of this article. That China has spent so much on HSRs that connect smaller cities without the passenger levels needed or HSRs are almost being used as commuter light rail trains with multiple stops, even in the same city. You don't need HSR for that. Plus these grand, gigantic, opulent stations. And that some HSRs that don't even properly connect to local public transportation infrastructure!
Now obviously, we've spent tons on road infrastructure. And I'm sure there are highways and interstates that aren't as well used. So maybe we've overbuilt on roads.
But that doesn't mean the US should overbuild on trains. If we do more rail in the US one day (A guy can dream...), I wouldn't want to do it like China has in the last decade or two.
the CA HSR was stalled for so long in order to make less financial sense. We basically have that Wichita equivalent with needing to route the transit through to Bakersfield, instead of focusing...
it should still make sense. Like connecting, Idk, Omaha to Wichita probably doesn't make the most financial or logistical sense.
the CA HSR was stalled for so long in order to make less financial sense. We basically have that Wichita equivalent with needing to route the transit through to Bakersfield, instead of focusing straight from LA to SF and adding some Central CA splitoff routes later.
But that doesn't mean the US should overbuild on trains. If we do more rail in the US one day (A guy can dream...), I wouldn't want to do it like China has in the last decade or two.
Thing is that we're so used to under delivering that maybe we should aim for the moon. That's the only way we undershot and get maybe enough railroad. There's just so much cruft to work through before actually getting to the productive part.
But are there at least CTA busses close-by? A long time ago, I used to live in the Tri-Taylor/Little Italy and then Pilsen neighborhoods. There's a Metra stop over Western, kinda close to Ogden...
But are there at least CTA busses close-by? A long time ago, I used to live in the Tri-Taylor/Little Italy and then Pilsen neighborhoods.
There's a Metra stop over Western, kinda close to Ogden and Roosevelt. It's kinda by itself (though there's a Pink Line stop not too far south on Western). But I'm pretty sure there are least busses there that can take someone to the Pink Line stop or north to the Blue Line stop on 290.
In this article, the issue is more that some of these HSR stations are like 2hrs outside of the city center. People may have to use a variety of busses or even taxis to get to/from the station.
I wouldn’t go that far. Chinese HSR has its problems, but it’s at its core it’s still a great infrastructure project in one of the few countries dense enough for it to make sense. It certainly...
I wouldn't want to do it like China has in the last decade or two.
I wouldn’t go that far. Chinese HSR has its problems, but it’s at its core it’s still a great infrastructure project in one of the few countries dense enough for it to make sense.
It certainly runs at a loss in most cases, but that’s also because the fares are obviously subsidized. Japan’s tokaido line runs from Tokyo to Kyoto, a distance of 500 km or so and takes two hours and costs $173 one way.
The Shanghai Beijing line goes a distance of 1,200km, takes two hours, and costs $30 one way.
The subsidization is as much a choice as anything else, and it is what it is.
The US should not copy China because it simply doesn’t have the density. The furthest realistic point of china’s HSR is chengdu, and is also the edge of where most the population is. If Shanghai were on the east coast of the US, this would be about where Kansas is.
Imagine if the US had 3x the population and they ALL lived between Kansas the east coast. The dreams of a NYC to LA HSR line are just dumb.
You know what, I'll bite. That would be fantastic, if you do a single other thing: Connect it to San Francisco. It's about 1050 miles from SanFran to Jeffery City, WY. If we say an average speed...
You know what, I'll bite. That would be fantastic, if you do a single other thing: Connect it to San Francisco. It's about 1050 miles from SanFran to Jeffery City, WY.
If we say an average speed of 200 mph, that
puts you only 5ish hours from SF. If you built only slightly less crazy, say with connections From SF to Salt Lake UT then to Denver, CO, that really opens up possibilities.
4 hours to Salt Lake. 2.5 to Denver from there.
Would there be a mass exodus from SF immediately as a result? Probably not. Would there be a percentage that remotely considers it that wouldn't have before?
What about across New York State? That could take a trip from Buffalo NY to NYC down to less than two hours, especially given how flat it is. That expands the reasonable commuting distance exponentially, especially for say hybrid work.
If you look it through the lens of trying to build out a far reaching suburb from cities that are more than double the size of NYC, it makes sense.
Implementation details are, of course, make or break for this kind of thing. China obviously flubbed a good bit of it. But I'm willing to bet China is a lot less tolerant of 2 hour commutes as well.
But there's a whole mountain range in the way. Yes, we know how to build tracks thu mountains ... but it still ain't easy. MT to WY, that'd be easy (and useless, even with the shiny, gold-plated,...
But there's a whole mountain range in the way. Yes, we know how to build tracks thu mountains ... but it still ain't easy.
MT to WY, that'd be easy (and useless, even with the shiny, gold-plated, Trump-monogrammed rails).
Connect it to a "sanctuary city"? Trump will just accuse California of smuggling immigrants deeper into the country and cancel the whole thing (i.e. find an excuse to take the funding for himself).
That would be fantastic, if you do a single other thing: Connect it to San Francisco.
Connect it to a "sanctuary city"? Trump will just accuse California of smuggling immigrants deeper into the country and cancel the whole thing (i.e. find an excuse to take the funding for himself).
I've often wondered how much HSR construction in China is a subsidised public works programme, similar to the pyramids in ancient Egypt, to create artifical demand for labour, keep the economy stimulated, and of course serve national pride.
It's one of the big weaknesses of command economies. China has liberalized it's markets significantly, but it still operates with far more centralized control than the US. The issue with economies like that has always been that politicians don't have as much insight into the demands of consumers of the people who's livelihoods depend on predicting those demands quickly.
There's obviously massive drawbacks to more market driven economies as well, but no private developer would risk trillions of dollars overbuilding infrastructure that has no chance of being used, absent of some other profit motive.
Something similar happened in the US with the telecommunications act of 1996, right before the dot com crash, which resulted in millions upon millions of miles of dark fiber being laid all throughout the country, some of which is still underutilized today.
Sounds like me when playing Victoria III. "What's that? A few states need more power? Let's build power generation in every single state right now!"
Not directly related, but I think we should build more average speed rail. I’m told in Europe that HSR has become affluent only, and that ordinary rail has gone away. The challenge is that many smaller towns that were served by rail no longer are, and ticket prices are at business class airplane level for basic hsr service. This pushes less affluent folks onto busses and planes and cars, which diminish the environmental and urban planning advantages of trains, and of course unfairly disadvantages those that are not born to wealth.
This struck me as absurd, so I went ahead and did some quick research. A direct train from Paris to Berlin leaving today at 19:12 is $141 USD according to rail europe and the only nonstop business class flight with seats currently available is $1729 USD (Air France 1534 departing at 17:40) via google flights.
Given that it looks like it's much faster to fly than to train and the 10x cost difference, I'd argue that they're serving entirely different markets.
My knowledge of european geography isn't robust enough to pick smaller city pairs this early in the morning, but the effect is so large, I don't feel bad disagreeing with your conclusion.
Business class wasn’t a great point for comparison - I think people tend to forget it’s 10x the price of economy, not 2-3x - but it is fairly common to find (economy class) flights for a significant amount less than the equivalent train ticket.
In my experience it depends more on the route and the specifics of how the particular train operators in question are funded rather than on whether it’s a fancy high speed line or not, so I think the bigger question is around effective subsidies to airlines (e.g. tax free fuel) vs genuine additional costs (e.g. land for rails and associated maintenance, rather than just airports) vs pricing externalities (tax the carbon, motherfuckers!).
Either way though the extra cost to the consumer of using the environmentally friendly mode of transport is often real, and it’s a worthwhile one to keep in mind when discussing this stuff - if nothing else in order to focus on the routes where it is much cheaper to make the better choice, and emulate whatever they’re doing to make that the case.
This is the source of my information, make of it what you will.
I will say I got the fare information wrong.
Also, keep in mind that buying for a trip today is ~2x the price of buying a month or more in advance. I take the ICE (germanys HSR system) monthly, and Frankfurt-Berlin usually costs ~50€.
For all the hype that HSR gets in America, people don't seem to understand that it's probably going to be more expensive than airplanes, even when subsidized. It is way cheaper, for example, to take a plane from Tokyo to Osaka than to take the shinkansen, most tourists don't really notice it because they buy the train pass that includes unlimited travel on the shinkansen for free, though.
Oh what a wonderful problem to have, public transportation infrastructure, used or not, is better than none at all.
Yeah, my first reaction was “huh, nice problem to have”, but from a quick skim of the article (it looks really interesting, but long enough that I don’t have time to read in full detail right now) it’s good to get a reminder of just how far our standards have fallen. And I’m saying that even from the UK, which is in a slightly better state than the US right now, even if we do seem to be angling to take the title back in our ongoing race to the bottom…
The core point of the article seems to be that a vast amount of money has been spent on high speed rail, and that reallocating some part of that to other public services would have been a bigger net gain than even more high speed rail - which makes sense to me.
There is some discussion of corruption as well, but that accepted base premise seems to be that public money has been earmarked broadly for the public good, and the important question at hand is proper allocation.
I very much understand that China has its own set of issues, but I guess it just served as a decent reminder to me that public spending for the benefit of the public is still a realistic baseline to demand, and that we should be arguing over allocation within that context rather than seeing it all disappear into the hands of billionaires.
[Edit] Clarity
Meanwhile, California allocates billions and almost 2 decades to HSR and we get basically nothing to show for it. Saddest thing is that money was probably gone no matter how we spent it. There's just so much corruption, beauracracy, and red tape here. Anything not liked is just sued and stalled for years. Something needs to be done about this.
Also, it's very much a "If you build it, they will come" situation.
If you want to increase hiusing supply in cities you need to make it easier to expand those cities via fast public transit.
There is a reason almost every inland town in America had initially cropped up around the railroads, rivers and canals.
Noooot really ideal for high speed rail. Traditional rail can work like this because it's low maintenance and can do just about anything. Tons of people or freight is all the same.
HSR requires a LOT more upkeep, even if lightly used, takes a ton of energy, and generally isn't nearly as cost effective for things like freight.
The entire advantage of HSR is to move between two points distantly quickly, and the main thing that cares about that is humans. Ideally you build HSR between two points of importance, and then further routes splinter off as things can build up near the stops along the way.
This is not the same as traditional rail where "well fuck it, it'd be nice to have a route here" works even in the middle of nowhere because it's easy to cover the cost. Then later as that spot is less isolated you can now build up around it.
This is a VERY expensive overshoot if the article is correct.
It might be an "If you build it, they will come" situation. See examples of overcapacity infrastructure build outs in authoritarian central asian and middle eastern countries, now underutilized.
Edit: And isn't housing supply in a similar situation for China?
On one hand, I agree. Obviously the US is lacking in trains, HSR or conventional. Which is ridiculous.
But I do think that if we ever get a better rail network, maybe even interstate HSR (other than the "higher-speed" Amtrak Acela service on the Northeast Corridor), it should still make sense. Like connecting, Idk, Omaha to Wichita probably doesn't make the most financial or logistical sense.
And that's the whole point of this article. That China has spent so much on HSRs that connect smaller cities without the passenger levels needed or HSRs are almost being used as commuter light rail trains with multiple stops, even in the same city. You don't need HSR for that. Plus these grand, gigantic, opulent stations. And that some HSRs that don't even properly connect to local public transportation infrastructure!
Now obviously, we've spent tons on road infrastructure. And I'm sure there are highways and interstates that aren't as well used. So maybe we've overbuilt on roads.
But that doesn't mean the US should overbuild on trains. If we do more rail in the US one day (A guy can dream...), I wouldn't want to do it like China has in the last decade or two.
the CA HSR was stalled for so long in order to make less financial sense. We basically have that Wichita equivalent with needing to route the transit through to Bakersfield, instead of focusing straight from LA to SF and adding some Central CA splitoff routes later.
Thing is that we're so used to under delivering that maybe we should aim for the moon. That's the only way we undershot and get maybe enough railroad. There's just so much cruft to work through before actually getting to the productive part.
We have this problem too, at least in Chicago, where you have to walk a block on the surface to get from Amtrak to rapid transit.
But are there at least CTA busses close-by? A long time ago, I used to live in the Tri-Taylor/Little Italy and then Pilsen neighborhoods.
There's a Metra stop over Western, kinda close to Ogden and Roosevelt. It's kinda by itself (though there's a Pink Line stop not too far south on Western). But I'm pretty sure there are least busses there that can take someone to the Pink Line stop or north to the Blue Line stop on 290.
In this article, the issue is more that some of these HSR stations are like 2hrs outside of the city center. People may have to use a variety of busses or even taxis to get to/from the station.
I wouldn’t go that far. Chinese HSR has its problems, but it’s at its core it’s still a great infrastructure project in one of the few countries dense enough for it to make sense.
It certainly runs at a loss in most cases, but that’s also because the fares are obviously subsidized. Japan’s tokaido line runs from Tokyo to Kyoto, a distance of 500 km or so and takes two hours and costs $173 one way.
The Shanghai Beijing line goes a distance of 1,200km, takes two hours, and costs $30 one way.
The subsidization is as much a choice as anything else, and it is what it is.
The US should not copy China because it simply doesn’t have the density. The furthest realistic point of china’s HSR is chengdu, and is also the edge of where most the population is. If Shanghai were on the east coast of the US, this would be about where Kansas is.
Imagine if the US had 3x the population and they ALL lived between Kansas the east coast. The dreams of a NYC to LA HSR line are just dumb.
Trump proposes high-speed rail service from central Montana to central Wyoming.
You know what, I'll bite. That would be fantastic, if you do a single other thing: Connect it to San Francisco. It's about 1050 miles from SanFran to Jeffery City, WY.
If we say an average speed of 200 mph, that
puts you only 5ish hours from SF. If you built only slightly less crazy, say with connections From SF to Salt Lake UT then to Denver, CO, that really opens up possibilities.
4 hours to Salt Lake. 2.5 to Denver from there.
Would there be a mass exodus from SF immediately as a result? Probably not. Would there be a percentage that remotely considers it that wouldn't have before?
What about across New York State? That could take a trip from Buffalo NY to NYC down to less than two hours, especially given how flat it is. That expands the reasonable commuting distance exponentially, especially for say hybrid work.
If you look it through the lens of trying to build out a far reaching suburb from cities that are more than double the size of NYC, it makes sense.
Implementation details are, of course, make or break for this kind of thing. China obviously flubbed a good bit of it. But I'm willing to bet China is a lot less tolerant of 2 hour commutes as well.
But there's a whole mountain range in the way. Yes, we know how to build tracks thu mountains ... but it still ain't easy.
MT to WY, that'd be easy (and useless, even with the shiny, gold-plated, Trump-monogrammed rails).
Connect it to a "sanctuary city"? Trump will just accuse California of smuggling immigrants deeper into the country and cancel the whole thing (i.e. find an excuse to take the funding for himself).