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China Begins To Extend High Speed Rail Across Asia
MikeChino writes "Last year we learned that China planned to expand its high-speed rail network all the way to Europe and now the nation has launched the first step of the project with plans to extend tracks into northern Laos. The nation has also set goals of expanding the high-speed rail line into Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore."
Their existing high speed rail lines are racking up serious debt. This plan to expand it is difficult to believe.
It pains me to read where China is doing this and that, while everyone in USA talks about how great we once were. Although there are articles discussing woes of some of the Chinese high speed rail systems but systems here in USA are being torpedoed for one reason or another (i.e. Calif highspeed rail project).
This talk of high speed rail is too expensive, doesn't go everywhere, etc. Dammit you gotta start someplace and somewhere. If you don't maintain and update country's commerce then it will choke into a third world country.
mfwright@batnet.com
Post
This high-speed rail will make it easier to import all the hot foreign brides that China will need to deal with their sex ratio imbalance. :)
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Funny, you could say the same thing about America and its wars...
Hank Hill: So are you Chinese or Japanese?
Minh Souphanousinphone: No, we are Laotian.
Bill Dauterive: The ocean? What ocean?
Kahn Souphanousinphone: From Laos, stupid! It's a landlocked country in South East Asia between Vietnam and Thailand, population approximately 4.7 million!
Hank ponders this for a few seconds.
Hank Hill: So are you Chinese or Japanese?
Kahn Souphanousinphone: D'oh!
You could say the same about highways or airports.
I wish we could be like them and pay our workers shit and spew waste all over our air and in our water like we used to like China is doing today....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
well with slave labor and lack of worker safety is easy to built stuff and kick backs can get you alot as well.
Show me how your car makes a profit.
Bruce Perens.
Linux *still* sucks.
with the high speed rail in place, it would be easier to send out shock troops to help the client states put down rebellions.
am i the only one who knows that the national hero of hte Vietnamese is the general who liberated the vietnamese from the chinese like a 1,000 years ago ? Am I the only one who knows that the chinese have been trying to subjugate the koreans, japanese, etc for most of their history ?
Some things aren't economic on a small scale but only become so on a large scale. Rail is something you have to roll out on a large scale, the larger the better. The countries they plan to move into don't have the greatest road systems in the world, giving the Chinese an advantage. Plus, rail is much less polluting and requires less fossil fuel, meeting international obligations (this matters to the Chinese government only because it's PR they can use against other nations) and freeing them from oil dependencies in nations potentially hostile to them.
In the event of conflict in the region, the Chinese will have greater mobility and reduced troop movement times, which basically means that they'll be able to dominate the region in a way America is no longer capable of within the Americas.
From the Chinese perspective, it's cheaper to build rail than to build a fleet of giant troop transport planes and it has none of the PR damage involved in the latter.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This has serious long term benefits to their state. For one, all that construction and maintenance will further add to their middle class and domestic consumption, not to mention tourism and trade from Europe. Consider what such access has done for Europeans when they opened their borders to each other and it makes perfect sense for the Chines to do the same. Plus, they're control freaks and I'm sure see incredible value in recording every word on one of their trams. True that it's expensive now, and they won't have a return on it for a long time, but it's nice to see that at least one country is forward looking in terms of their infrastructure, especially compared to the austerity and oil jerks in the US.
It's too bad this is a capital project - they can't save money by outsourcing the work to offshore corporations the way American companies do...
#DeleteChrome
Their existing high speed rail lines are racking up serious debt. This plan to expand it is difficult to believe.
I was going to bring up the same point. I believe that the only profitable HSR line in the world is Paris-Lyon. So these lines are really much more expensive than they appear when sold to the taxpayers of the country.
I really hope that this idea doesn't spread to the USA in its present form. As Florida pointed out recently, even though the government was going to kick in a couple billion to get the thing built, Florida was going to be on the hook forever afterwards supporting it.
Until they can build a line that makes a profit AND gives me a reason to want to ride it in preference to other transportation alternatives, we shouldn't be building them at all. And artifically raising the price of gasoline to $10/gal is NOT a valid reason. That's just screwing us over because some Liberal Progressive politicians "feel" we should be in trains instead of cars.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Because GM has vested interest to see that it fails, again.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Not as much as the US government is losing on "Cyber crime". Hellooooo CIAAAA - I recommend you guys switch to openbsd. If you can tolerate Theo, it's probably just right for you.
Don't worry, China will just buy more of our debt to give us the cash we need to subsidize the rail line for them. See, problem solved.
I use my car to get to my place of employment. Along with the purchase price there is the cost of gas and license fees, and tolls.
The salary I get from my job is more than the all these costs.
Therefore my car makes a profit.
[racism]I wonder if they'll call it the orient express?[/racism]
Yes, but will it be made out of human feces???
Sorry, I can't get over that one....
Please try a little harder.
Sigh. Of course high speed rail is expensive. So were today's "normal speed" rail lines in the past. China's rail network is really crappy or non existent, so when they decided to improve their rail network, they invested in the latest rail technology - high speed rail. In the case of China, investing in "normal speed rail" (technology from several decades ago) is a waste of time and money. USA and other developed countries have a great "normal speed" rail system, so they don't need to waste huge amounts of money in high speed rail. This is the main reason why China has the largest high speed rail network.
There are two HSR lines that have paid off all their construction costs, Paris-Lyon and Tokyo-Osaka.
Taiwan's is the only HSR line in the world right now that is falling behind on the loan payment, but it still covers all of its operating costs through fares. Every other HSR line in the world is making positive progress toward paying off the construction costs.
So what this all boils down to is, what is your definition of "profitable"? I've given three possible definitions from which you may choose.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
That's fantastic! Hey, let's get rid of all profit-less things like fire departments and freeways too!
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
There's more than high speed rail going on. China is building an inter-provincial expressway system, too. The interior provinces aren't sharing in the prosperity of the coastal ones. Better roads and better freight rail will help. Historically, China discouraged inter-provincial trade, and each province was expected to be self-sufficient. That's still to some extent true, and there's some internal friction over eliminating internal trade restrictions. They won't survive a really good highway system.
The history of the US Interstate Highway System isn't quite applicable, though. Every state has at least one interstate highway, and most have at least two. That's a consequence of how Congress is set up. China's transportation system is thin in the western portion of the country.
Do you simply not get what's wrong with that analogy? Or are you trying to be funny?
People choose cars over railways because they see a better cost/benefit tradeoff. That's why railways lose many and car manufacturers make money. One can make the argument that personal car use doesn't properly account for all the externalities. You're welcome to make that argument.
But China's problem isn't lack of good public transportation, it's having too many people. If China had 100M people instead of 1000M, all of those people having a car wouldn't be a problem. Ditto for the US.
I never understood why they build high speed "mag-lev" rail with huge cars and long long trains. They have to fill all those cars, with tons of people all looking to go the same place at the same time.
Mag-lev trains get very little benefit from being big and long. Small individually switched cars like this make much more sense to me: http://www.megarail.com/pr/library/2002/mar/20maglev/
Operator, give me the number for 911!
People choose cars over railways because they see a better cost/benefit tradeoff. That's why railways lose many and car manufacturers make money.
Automakers bought profitable bus and rail lines and shut them down to get us where we are today. People did NOT choose cars, they chose trains, and then the trains went away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Maybe they use the interest from all the money they lend to support these expensive projects, that would be good government right there. We should switch to communism.
The measurement scale is different. If you count the total social benefits, like local development, job, real estate price, tourist, factory, energy and time saving. They have a big win! It's infrastructure project. you can't simply calculate the profitability of itself.
Everything comes from nothing.
It's war infrastructure pure and simple. It's analogous to the Duomo in Siena. Those big, wide boulevards? Meant for crushing civil insurrection with cavalry. China has roads strong enough to accept tanks already, to Nepal and Laos, but rail moves things so much faster.
Well Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr (the long distance branch of the German railway system) is turning a profit. (In 2002 they introduced an innovative new pricing system, but they recovered from that 2.5 years later...)
They are running their third generation HSR now (ICE 3) and have just placed orders for 300 IC X trains.
If the Chinese think that "northern Laos" is a step towards a rail network stretching from China to Europe... ... I think they might have issues with their satnav.
Of course is single bomb can be devastating enough to make an entire train route useless, whereas airplanes can fly pretty much anywhere.
--Jim (me)
It's straining their bond market to pay for it. Apparently they think the investment is worth it.
Lucky we have all the answers here, otherwise I'd wonder what they knew that we didn't.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You're mistaken in thinking any future conflict with a nuclear armed nation would take place inside that nation's borders.
I forgot to mention in my earlier post is don't have to deal with search and inspection when getting on the train unlike airplanes.
mfwright@batnet.com
Some people choose cars because of a cost/benefit analysis, but that assumes there is a viable choice. Living in an East Coast city means I have the choice to own a car and I choose not to. If I lived in Dallas, I wouldn't have a real choice, and would need a car to survive. A better comparison is railways and the Highway Trust Fund, as both are responsible for maintenance of their respective transportation networks and both lose money: the Trust Fund doesn't earn enough in gas taxes (indirect user fees) to break even and the railways don't earn enough in ticket sales (direct user fees) to turn a profit. Car manufacturers make money because most customers live in places like Dallas, those customers don't grasp the full cost of ownership to their pocketbook, and because they're buying the product of a car rather than the service of transporation.
Anyway, high-speed rail in China is a glamor project, but it's not going to last terribly well: it's built somewhat poorly and somewhat hastily, which will mean an expensive maintenance budget. As long as their economy is roaring they'll be fine, but once it levels off they're going to feel the crunch.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
Most fire departments in the US are volunteer. And the Interstate system was built to move troops and equipment quickly. Like Germany's Autobahn.
The US rail network is designed around low speed freight. Passengers, however, usually demand to be ferried around at speeds faster than 25 mph.
Railroad car and locomotive makers make money too. Indeed, they make a larger margin than automobile manufacturers.
Tell me, again, how does your car make money for you, its owner?
Bruce Perens.
There is no inherent cost/benefit to a car over a train. If the entire population used trains instead of cars, the cost benefit ratio would easily swing the other way.
Its called selfish vs group ethics. People use cars because its convenient to themselves, rather than public transit in its various forms which are better for everyone as a whole.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
A citation for that claim would be nice.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
It gets me to work.
Ken
China's highspeed rail is great. Not as great as the Japanese bullet train, the attendants are not nearly as hot and the snack cart only has the usual spicy chicken feet and instant Nescafe. But you can get a ticket for not much more than a bus, it's much faster, there's no traffic, and even the second class seats are comfortable. The first time I saw a Chinese hexie hao pull into the station, I immediately thought, "Ah, it's a shinkansen!" Indeed, the trains in my area are license-built copies of the Kawasaki Heavy Industries E2-1000 Series Shinkansen. I always liked taking the train in China, but the main problem was that the bus was always more frequent and sometimes you get some old stinky train full of redneck farmers if you don't know what to watch for when buying your tickets. With the new highspeed rail, the choice is easy.
Who cares if it loses money? That's not the point. The Chinese are loaded with cash right now. The point is to make China, and the world, a smaller place. There's a city south of here that I like to visit. However, the bus trip was 3 1/2 hours of bumpy highways (they never connect the road to abutments correctly so you always get two lurches going over every bridge)...IF there was no traffic or wrecks on the road. I never got down there as often as I liked, and my reluctance was purely due to the unpleasant journey. Now, it's 90 minutes of comfort. The last time I returned from there, I discovered that there are express trains that only take 65 minutes for the trip. Think about it: this city to the south used to be "far". Now, it is "near". I can go there in the morning and be back in the evening. A shopping trip isn't out of the question. Business is easier to conduct. Commuting to work from smaller cities outside is now an option. How's that for change the world, eh?
The black cloud in all of this is construction quality. The head of China's highspeed rail was fired, and either him or someone else highranking said he would under no circumstances ride the train himself. Oh well, I suppose I'll play the lottery on that one, and hope it isn't my train that derails at 161mph.
Connecting the rest of Asia to China's highspeed network will be pricey, but when it's finished Chinese business and influence will spread. That's the whole idea, isn't it? Invest now, pay off later. I tell you, it's weird living under a government that actually acts in its own national interest, unlike my own government.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If I used public transportation, I would have to walk 1 mile to the nearest stop, take a bus to the nearest train (about 45 minutes), then take the train to the city (about 30 if I catch it at the right time), take the subway, then walk another couple of blocks. So I'm going to spend 2-2.5 hours each way every day as opposed to driving for 40 minutes just to make everyone else happy?
No.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Additional strategic mobility for troops too. Helmuth von Moltke would be proud.
The U.S. transcontinental railroads were built terribly poorly. That's how they were able to lay 10 miles of rail in one day. The assumption was that once there was an operating railroad, that it would be very much less expensive to lay good track. It worked, we still have an intercontinental railroad through the same route that was originally laid.
It might be true that large portions of the China route are similarly without good roads.
Bruce Perens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal
Bruce Perens.
That's an expense. If you were a company, your car would be a cost-center, not a profit center. As would be what you pay for parking, work clothes, education, child-care while you are working, etc. The IRS will allow you to write off some of these expenses. Your labor for the company would be a profit center.
Bruce Perens.
IMO it's the railway system that actually makes the cost of production is a lot cheaper in China. Well it's true that the labor wage is insanely cheaper than the first world countries, but there is another reason why corporations want to place their manufacturing in China. In China as almost every third world countries with abundant resources and cheap wages, you need to put some money under the table, or bribing, in order to get your business protected, or to ease the bearucracy of getting permit. Other third world countries with the same wage level and government corruption cannot compete with the low cost of China's manufacturing because of this.
Of course is single bomb can be devastating enough to make an entire train route useless
... for the day or two it takes to repair. And for the effort, the terrorists get terror-inspiring headlines like "train delayed; businessmen must reschedule meeting!"
Horrors.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
If you and people like you supported having good public transportation in your community, and the auto companies allowed you to have good public transportation, you would not be taking 2.5 hours each way.
Where I live, a train is often the fastest and most reliable option.
Bruce Perens.
You weren't alive 10 years ago, were you :-)
Bruce Perens.
Except that people use the roads and airports in the US and other countries.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/02/high-speed_rail_china
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703983104576262330447308782.html
"Tickets for high-speed trains can be twice as expensive as the highest-class tickets on regular-speed trains. A high-speed rail ticket between eastern China's Wuhan and Guangzhou, for example, costs 469 yuan, or about $70. That is prohibitively expensive for many Chinese, and has resulted in at least some trains operating almost empty, industry experts say."
As the GP I agree completely. For example, Ottawa, my nation's capital, has beautiful dedicated transit lanes. The buses speed past stopped traffic on the highways on their own private roadways, bringing public transit users to and from major stations with speed and efficiency. Last I checked, NYC is also an excellent example of a city that understands the need for at least decent public transit.
Unfortunately, too many people look at transit as a private for-profit opportunity, instead of a public good.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Why does it have to make a profit? Other transportation modalities, like your personal automobile, are not required to operate at a profit. The police don't make a profit for the community. Some things are infrastructure, and are costs rather than profits.
Bruce Perens.
Their existing high speed rail lines are racking up serious debt. This plan to expand it is difficult to believe.
Believe it:
According to Zhao Jian, a researcher at Beijing Jiaotong University, “the debt had at least reached 2 trillion yuan by now, and the interests of those debts have grown too large for the government to afford.” http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/02/18/will-massive-debt-derail-chinas-high-speed-trains/?KEYWORDS=china+high+speed+train
http://10CentMail.com - the Amazon SES app.
I live somewhere where walking to work isn't an option for 6 months of the year and my job has requirements that a bicycle won't meet, so my car makes me more money than I spend on fuel, parts and depreciation.
Automakers didn't shut down profitable bus and rail lines where I live.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096438/
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
From your own link
"The lack of hard information about what occurred has led to intrigue, uncertainty, inaccuracy and conspiracy theories."
And the whole section - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal#Myths_and_mysteries - where it talks about how many of the lines were already in financial distress before the automakers showed up.
because then their house of cards economy comes down harder than anything Japan or the US ever could imagine experiencing. I read an economist story basically stating they just continue to do it because they feel they have too. They don't have the social services in place to handle large number of unemployed city dwellers. In fact there is a definite possibility of serious social strife when it hits the fan there.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
In other words, you can't really say that people chose trains. It's hard to say what would have happened in the absence of this conspiracy. But they definitely had their finger on the scale, so to speak. I believe that were it not for this conspiracy, government subsidies of automobiles and gasoline, and the construction of the interstate freeway system, there's no way cars would have been able to overcome the fiscal disadvantage they bear and overtake electric traction. But who knows, maybe most people would have thought the cars were worth it. They are very sexy.
Don't conflate rail in China with rail in the US. With the population density they have, our system (cars, cars, and more cars) is simply NOT an option. The only place in the US where most households do NOT own a car is New York City, and that is no coincidence.
But since railway technology is more suitable for them than us, I say, let them make the investment in getting the cost down. It won't hurt us to be followers rather than leaders in rail.
Next you will tell me that a hammer doesn't make any money for it's owner, or that my computer doesn't make any money for me. It's a tool. You use it. If you need a car to drive to work, you need it to make money at work. Think about it.
I wonder how successful China will be in ultra totalitarian Myanmar? I can't see that regime desiring large amounts of trade and people movement.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
High speed rail is terrible at moving modern military units. They can't carry many people at a time (the largest train in the network has passenger capacity of 1114 (CRH3C×2) or 1220 (CRH2C×2). A typical motorized infantry division for the PLA has about 16,000 persons and a lot of heavy equipment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan%E2%80%93Guangzhou_High-Speed_Railway
The North American system of freeways, highways, roads, freight rail hubs and airports is much more efficient and has built in redundancies that a rail or road and rail system don't have.
For example, Google Map directions from Fort Hood Texas to Mexico City - 1,002 miles of four and six lane highway, a straight shot for an entire US Army Corps. If the road is cut, then ships can be moved to Galveston Texas for an amphibious assault, or aircraft can be brought in international or military airports to move equipment and troops by air.
and where do they land?
How much time do you spend watching television or surfing the internet or reading a book every day? Do you think maybe you could do that on the bus/train? Maybe you will actually have more time, since you can't do that while you're driving.
I used to walk everywhere (that's no small feat in the OC) and I found that even though I was spending hours walking every day, I was able to get more done (than when I had been driving) because I would budget my time and only schedule one or two things to do every day. On top of that, I was healthier and happier walking. Of course, I eventually did have to buy a car, but when I move to the east coast later this year I am planning to dramatically scale back on my driving again.
they are going to need sentries every five miles in certain areas they are planning to send high speed rail into, or you are going to have rebels blowing up your high speed rail.myanmar? seriously? study up on the karen and the hmong and some of the oppressed tribal groups there
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_tribe_(Thailand)
these are war zones. you don't send high speed rail into war zones without expecting sabotage
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Incidentally, I was walking because I found that it was actually faster than the bus if my trip was under about 5 miles depending on the bus routs. That's a testament to just how bad public transportation is in most cities.
Sure they can fly anywhere, but they can't *land* anywhere. That bomb on your hypothetical runway can make resupply into an area very difficult, for at least as long as it takes to repair the runway.
The point is the fruit originated in China and grows in China but in Beijing they only saw it from NZ. In the Chinese growing season they don't get to see it at all because it is winter in NZ.
Most fire departments in the US are volunteer. And the Interstate system was built to move troops and equipment quickly. Like Germany's Autobahn.
Does the equipment volunteer as well?
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Takes a whole lot more then a few bombs to take out a railroad - look at WW2.
Also, railroad is a single most efficient form of military transportation known to man when dealing with regions beyond beaches.
Well, Bruce, since I'm an independent field engineer (I go around fixing things) I use my car to drive to various jobs and perform my craft. Hopefully in most cases my transportation costs ('92 plastic Saturn, so not that big of a number) are less than what I charge for my services (and I get to write off the mileage.) So my car, along with my skill-set, bag of tools, and my contacts that provide customers, enable me to make a profit. The car is essential in that it allows me to perform enough jobs in a week to keep dire straights at bay. (bit of a pun there since I travel mostly in NW Washington State, often of ferries.)
Could I work at one place and take transit? I did that for two decades and am tired of it. Besides, who's going to fix the VPN at the end site if not for blokes like me?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Shouldn't they be? If the users are unable or unwilling to completely cover the costs without external help, isn't that a sign that maybe it wasn't a wise use of money in the first place?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I believe China will trade rail for access to core resources. This is what makes the project worthwhile.
The police don't make a profit for the community.
With red light cams some are now considered a profit center.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Automakers didn't shut down profitable bus and rail lines where I live.
Are they really profitable? Just today, I read that the bus system in my town has 90% of its operating costs subsidized by the government. I've heard similar figures for other systems.
I wonder if the Chinese have similar ambitions?
Actually there is a definite advantage to owning a car over taking a train.
At least here in California, a car gives me opportunities for better jobs, access to cheaper food, plus the absolutely invaluable ability to go somewhere on my own terms. A car means I'm less likely to catch the flu, is much cheaper than public transit, is more comfortable, and takes me directly to my destination.
Public transit is definitely a useful option, but ultimately you're not going to take away the automobile without taking away personal freedom.
Why difficult to believe? WE are paying for it now, and in the future with our interest payments to them.
I just LOVE funding other countries projects... NOT!
Being able to fly anywhere doesn't help much if there's only one place that you can land at your destination - which only takes a single bomb (or, for civilians, just the threat of) to make useless.
Didn't post WW-I Germany spend a lot of money improving its infrastructure so it could deliver "products" to all its neighbors with efficiency? And didn't the world fawn over them for being awesome at the time?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Of course is single bomb can be devastating enough to make an entire train route useless, whereas airplanes can fly pretty much anywhere.
Airplanes still need runways. Those, too, are easy to bomb.
There may be externalities that make it worth the government covering part of the cost. In this case it would give China influence in the countries with the rail lines, and might encourage more countries to purchase Chinese rail equipment.
Even within a country an improved transportation system can boost the economy in some areas and provide benefits to people in addition to those who directly use the service.
Another example would be if the rail system were being constructed by workers who would otherwise be unemployed and receiving government support. In that case the reduced cost of support would need to be factored into the calculation.
It doesn't have to make a profit but it should be the public's well informed choice to make. Most of the proposals for HSR have the appearance of billion dollar boondoggles rammed through by greedy or corrupt politicians. Not all infrastructure spending is good (bridge to nowhere comes to mind), some are just pork. I'm sure that if someone in the US can put forth a well thought out proposal and can justify its existence with real numbers, support will materialize.
Seriously, ~65 mph rail is cheaper than 220 mph rail, and can move troops fast enough, and rail linking the nations (in different gauges) already exists.
Private bus services in the US are thriving. In the most train-friendly setting in the US - the Northeast Corridor - you can pay $111 for a ticket from Washington Union Station to New York Penn Station to get there in 3h 30m, or $168 to shave 45 m off that time - or you can take the Bolt Bus for $17.50 and have free WiFi all the way, at the cost of taking 4h 15m to get there.
Trains, like ships, are a very, very efficient way to transport freight over long distances when time is not at a premium (like commodities, where you don't care how long it takes to get there so long as you have the amount you need every day). They are just not efficient for moving people around, because time has value to people. If enough people are riding in it, even a large SUV becomes very efficient per passenger mile.
Having your own car means the freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want - and people are willing to pay a very large premium for that, because it is a much superior product.
What's the next intermediate stop? South Pole? Seems like typical government project to me.
The only expansion projects are more than offset by abandonment of unused spurs and lines due to lack of demand. If you think that their is some pent up demand for passenger rail service, maybe you should take a ride on an Amtrak train sometime. If you dont think that truckers pay their own way, maybe you should pay some attention to the price of diesel fuel next time you fill up your prius (or at least research to see what percentage of that price is tax).
Could you please explain everyone how this is possible, when China is capable of creating money as it is pleased to. Yes, China can make debt free money, because the People's Bank of China has the power of creating it. According to its site, the PBC is responsible for "Issuing the Renminbi and administering its circulation" and is directly acting upon the orders of the central party. So, if they can make money when they want, how they want, how is this exactly creating debt? In what way having a state debt (which I don't believe exist) is an issue when you can create more money, debt free?
It gives me freedom to go wherever I want, whenever I want. I am hostage to nothing but the supply of gasoline. It's not supposed to make money for me any more than rail, air, walking, bicycling, or anything else will make money for me. Transportation is an expense that I must bear in order to make money. The fact that it's an expense for me suggests it's a profit for someone else - and indeed, lots of people profit from me driving a car. Just like people should profit from me taking a train... except that they don't.
In 2000, I was trekking through that area. Our "bus" broke down, so 40 people had to climb in the back of a dump truck to the next town. As nobody spoke English or could understand our Thai or weak French, we didn't realize that the next town didn't get us very far. We found a place to stay, and were told that we should wait on the road for a ride on to the next town where there is a regular bus. What they didn't tell us until the second day waiting on the road for a car going the right direction was that our chances were twice as good if we hiked up the mountain to the junction in the road...
Average mechanized speed traveling around the country was about 15 miles per hour... even averaging in a flight from Vientiene to Xiang Kong!
Electricity was via uninsulated baling wire strung from house through the next house, and on, with one bulb per home. Just a little 2kW generator for the town...
Now they get a bullet train...?
That's fantastic! Hey, let's get rid of all profit-less things like fire departments and freeways too!
And while we're at it, let's get rid of those unprofitable airlines. The ones subsidized by the government (Airport support monies, FAA, etc.). It's really, really hard to figure out what the true 'cost' of transportation is. And don't even get started on externalities like pollution, carbon use, etc.
Generally, government sponsored infrastructures pays for itself over time, often measured in decades. It also has the tendency to change the structure and makeup of society (think trains, automobiles).
I suspect that's what China is trying to do with high speed rail. Not make a profit, but to push (Han) Chinese culture and economic power throughout China and the rest of Asia.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Where I live, the volunteer firemen go out asking for donations and have various fundraising activities........such as selling BBQ and catfish stew. They also have shooting contests where you have to pay to enter with a donated turkey as the prize. We seem to do ok.
But then some people need the government to take all the responsibility and do their thinking for them.
Bullshit! The price for going to Beijing from Shanghai with this fast train is from 400 to 1700 Yuan, which is expensive, but far from being twice the price. On my last trip to Beijing (from Shanghai), the cheapest air ticket I could find was 1200 Yuan.
Now for this Wuhan to GuangZhou, I've just check on http://english.ctrip.com/ (which gets you the lowest fairs). What you find is 280 yuan for the ticket, plus 190 of airport taxes, which makes it 470 Yuan in total, or just 1 yuan more than your above price. That is without counting the cost of traveling from city center to airport. Frankly, don't trust US journalist, I'm quite sure that they can't even read what's on http://www.huochepiao.com./ Because doing a quick check, the price is 490 Yuan, not 469!
Yes, when I had to travel 2 hours each way on the train, I did work and read on the train. But choosing 2 hours vs. 40 minutes each way away from the family just doesn't fly with me. As for TV/surfing, it varies, but doesn't take me away from the family. I can just turn those off and go be with them. I can't turn off the train and give the wife a hug.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
We're trying (I support the pro-rail group(s) )
http://felttip.com/svmetro/svm/
The problem right now is they're working on getting it started badly.
If this went through, I would have a train stop 1.5 miles away that went all the way to Philly. None of the other intermediary steps I listed above. I love trains- relaxing, can do stuff, not worrying about getting into a car accident, no parking fees, no worrying about the car getting stolen, etc.
It's just not feasible right now. Hopefully, the rail line I linked gets put through.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I remember reading something like this as well. I even mentioned it to my Chinese mate once on the phone and he replied "What? Don't be stupid, high speed train is so cheap here it costs almost nothing". He even claimed that often it was cheaper than the intercity buses (or "coaches" if you prefer). Now it's been several years since I've been to China, and my friend (like many) can have a tendency to exaggerate... but I think that the reality is not so bleak for highspeed rail in China. It's very expensive to build and run but apart from that is an absolute godsend. I live here in France, and they have only really made highspeed rail viable by making car/bus travel almost the same price. Massive taxes on fuel and obscenely high road tolls make the far quicker trains attractive. Trains are far less of a hassle in terms of security (less, not none...), generally less stressful, and for anything less than about 700kms are simply quicker than air travel. Sometimes that gets extended to more depending on how easy your airport is to get to. I live in Bordeaux, and even with less than half of the ride to Paris on high-speed rails (so max speed on those bits around 160km/h if memory serves) it only takes 3-3.5hrs (for ~550kms). They are about to start construction on upgrading the rails to high-speed rails all the way, and when that happens I can assure you air travel will drop to pretty much zero. Most people never fly to Paris from Bordeaux - when it takes only 2hrs from the centre of Bordeaux to the centre of Paris, the extra hassle of flying makes it simply non-sensical. What is my point? High-speed rail TODAY suffers many, mainly financial, hurdles in China. Who cares? It is a fabulous investment for the future - it's far, far less carbon intensive and can move large numbers of people safely and quickly. In 15-20 yrs when China's population has enough money to make expensive tickets less of a problem - when they start making road users pay the full cost to the environment and economy of road travel (some say they aren't even there yet in France...), then everything will make sense. Just like US government invested massive money in roads a few generations ago, so the Chinese government is investing now, or will be if rail companies go broke! In the long run we will look back and say "they did the right thing, it looked expensive but look at the advantages now". You'll see...
Then why do the existing train routes lose money? If you were anywhere close to being right Amtrack would be making HUGE profits, but instead they are heavily subsidized.
They did a study where I live and found out it would cost the city less money to buy each person that rides the public bus their own used car and give them gas for free then continue running the bus lines.
But don't let facts get in the way of your liberal rants, after all facts are the number 1 enemy of liberal arguments.
He did say, "pretty much anywhere."
But, he has a point. If they ever use this to transport military, it'd be very easy for their enemy to wipe out their bridge and their soldiers with a well timed bomb. It almost happened to us in Iraq, but they never triggered the bombs on the bridges when our tanks rolled over. Their soldiers had run away at that point. During WWI and WWII this kind of tactics was also regularly employed.
This has to be pretty obvious to the Chinese. I really doubt they're planning to use it for military purposes. It's really more of an economic tactic than a war tactic. As an economic one, it has a really good chance of succeeding because they can deliver goods to Europe and Asia and receive resources faster. However, someone did point out that they're already having trouble paying for their existing infrastructure, they should probably just plan for this but not really build it. That way, they can implement it at some point in the future if they've stabilized.
Interstate rail is NOT FOR PROFIT plan, often massively subsidized by the government. It is just like roads, an important public facility, it has multiple uses and purposes. We have a hypermarket here, that has been planned to be just next to our rail system so the goods are delivered cheaply from the northern ports. Also to have some travel options and backup plan for any transit withing EU is great, there are many times, like when you traveling alone to an airport and out of country when car is not very viable..
Except that China is creating debt free money, so it doesn't make sense at all. Oh, and I forgot to mention: China owns most of the US debt and a large amount of the debts in EUR as well, if you didn't know...
Except in the end they'll have something to show for it. A piece of hardware.
Kind of like we did back in the day when the CCC built all those bridges, roads, rail lines, parks, etc.
If the rail lines were that profitable, they wouldn't have been for sale. The automakers didn't buy bus lines and shut them down; they *built* buses. They bought unprofitable train lines so they could turn them into bus lines. Running rail service requires you to own rights-of-way and maintain rails, all the while only allowing you to serve areas along those lines. If you run a bus service, the government owns your rights-of-way and maintains the roads, and you can server any place that has customers. If a new shopping center is built, you can start providing service to it instantly, while providing rail service would be prohibitively expensive. And of course, if you're a motor vehicle manufacturer (like GM), the vehicles are cheap because you make them yourself.
Unfortunately, even buses (like all mass transit) suffer the same flaw: they have very limited destinations. Let's say I take fancy high-speed train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. What do I do once I get there? There's no bus that goes from the terminal to my hotel, or my hotel to the restaurant where I'm eating lunch, or the restaurant to where I'm having my business meeting. The only reasonable way to get to those places is via a car. I can rent a car or take a taxi if I've come from far away. But if I'm coming from close enough that it's reasonable to take a train or bus, it's also close enough to drive.
Because if it operates at a profit, you don't have to convince the rest of the country to help pay for your plan. It makes it a lot easier to get it through legislature.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They can send more than one train. Also, those numbers are for passengers seated in relative comfort. What if half the troops stand up? You can cram a lot more guys into those 8 carriages.
The soon-to-be-opened BeijingShanghai high-speed line will initially operate 43 trains in each direction per day in a mixed-speed configuration with peak headways of 5 minutes. In non-mixed-speed operation, the system is capable of less than 3-minute headways.
Your highways, roads, freight rail and airports all need vehicles, as does rail. Don't assume that the Chinese only have one train set, and don't think that they can't pack more than ~1000 troops into a train :)
The problem is that the actual premium people pay is even larger than they realize. I understand that there are a lot of benefits, but the cost is financially is so much larger that it's hard to believe they could have won out without government subsides and anticompetitive behavior. Also, you're talking about trains, but the conspiracy was to eliminate electric trollies, which have very different economics.
Right now, the United States (including governments at all levels) spends a total of between 50 and 60 billion dollars per year on mass transit infrastructure and operations. Funding for Amtrak has averaged around $2 billion per year the last decade or so.
If a quarter of spending on automobiles were diverted into public transit infrastructure and operations, it would quadruple the mass transit subsidy. (Note that that would still leave the United States ahead of European countries - many by a significant margin - in terms of fraction of household expenditures on car ownership.) Your bus stop probably wouldn't be a mile away any more. Your bus wouldn't take 45 minutes to get to the train station; it would run in a dedicated lane or on its own right-of-way, if it weren't replaced outright with light rail. It wouldn't have to stop for traffic lights, because signals would automatically clear the road ahead. The train station would probably be closer, anyway--and you'd probably be connected to an express or even high-speed line. There would be a unified fare system, so you could ride the entire system with one smart card. You can rent a car by the hour for those trips to IKEA.
Your forty-minute commute by car might, under ideal circumstances, be the same length, or even shorter. Or it might stretch out to forty-five or fifty minutes, during which time you can have a nap, read a book, catch up on the news, or connect to the onboard wifi. And the four or five grand per year you're saving turns into an annual two-week vacation in Switzerland, where you can see just how good public transit can get if it's funded properly.
The problem, of course, is that there's always a delay between when you start putting money into infrastructure and when it starts making a difference to a large number of people on the ground. And that interval between the investment and the return frightens the living daylights out of politicians. Even projects that will save their constituents money in the long term are a tough sell, because they're up against candidates who will promise to cut taxes now.
~Idarubicin
Do you simply not get what's wrong with that analogy? Or are you trying to be funny?
People choose cars over railways because they see a better cost/benefit tradeoff.
Depends on where you live. I've lived in Singapore and Hong Kong and in both places rail wins for the same reason.
Sure rail isn't a universal solution for everyone, but there are a lot of places where it is not only cost effectively but can actually turn a profit (as in Hong Kong)
Chicago has a very good public transportation system. That's not just accidental. There are cities attempting to copy Chicago and NYC, but most of the time it's been a mix of lack of knowhow combined with very large capital costs. Public support often isn't the issue. If you read around, cities are perplexed as to how to best implement a mass transit system that's actually worthwhile, and it's only worthwhile if it's highly tuned. In fact, I'd love to see a videogame sim devoted to it, but then I have geek love for mass transit.
See, this makes me wonder if it would be worthwhile to use HSR for long-distance travel, in conjunction with cars for local travel.
If you wanted to travel across the country, you could load your car onto a special train (with lots of other peoples cars), and you can travel with it (or maybe even in it) to your destination. Of course, that would only work if the train stopped every 100 or 200 miles and you were able to get off and back on at any stop you wanted - with your car. You'd have all the convenience of driving across the country, with none of the tedium of actually driving.
Given our rail system is already optimized for freight, it doesn't seem like it would be too hard.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Because politicians need to make money from it.
But that's not profit. That's total cost of ownership which would include maintenance costs. Unless I really on my car for making money, meaning my car is used in my business for more than transporting me to work, then where's the opportunity for profitability? It seems that, at best, you can hope for really good savings by investing in a good combination of the right car and the right automobile insurance.
Do you sell your services as a carpenter, or do you rent the customer your hammer and come along as the operator of the hammer? The hammer is an expense which a carpenter must bear as a cost of doing business.
Bruce Perens.
Good point. And whereas a train can deliver maintenance crews and materials to the damaged area of track, an aircraft that cannot land cannot deliver either.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If the Chinese are smart, they're planning to fight any wars that might come up on enemy territory, not their own. In that case, their rail network would work perfectly well (just as how the North's rail network worked perfectly well during the Civil War).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Such as in a motorail system?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorail
Your automobile is an expense that you bear as part of the cost of having employment. If you were able to eliminate the cost of your car while remaining able to work and without suffering some other inconvenience, you would make more money, not less. Therefore, your car does the opposite of making a profit. The part that makes a profit for you is the services which you offer your employer.
Once people work this out, they can start to make sense about the value of transportation. Until you work this out, you will be manipulated by people who use your lack of understanding of economics against you. You'll vote the way they want, even when it is to your disadvantage.
Bruce Perens.
...the cheapest air ticket I could find was 1200 Yuan.
Fascinating, but completely irrelevant. The quote from the article was comparing high speed rail to low speed rail, not air travel:
"Tickets for high-speed trains can be twice as expensive as the highest-class tickets on regular-speed trains."
Because doing a quick check, the price is 490 Yuan, not 469!
Um, it is possible that the price has changed since the article was written....
Regularly employed, yes, but the Germans were very successful at getting past such obstacles during the first few years of the war. In part because they moved very very fast and resistance folk couldn't transport large bombs easily. Later, especially once the RAF had the Mosquito, it was a different story. Being able to do pinpoint bombing runs with 1000lb of ordinance tends to do a bit more damage to a bridge than a handful of torpex or more likely TNT could do.
Moving troops by truck is less safe - convoys can also be taken out by blowing up bridges or by using IEDs, and convoys are much, much slower (and therefore much more vulnerable) targets. Fixed-wing aircraft are no better, and arguably worse, since a train can release passengers anywhere along the track but an aircraft HAS to land at an airport. Of course, you could try using Ospreys or helicopters. Someone noted that you need the capacity to move 40,000 men. How many Ospreys would that take?
Yes, it's obvious that the primary benefit will be economic, but don't imagine for a moment that the Chinese - of all people - aren't viewing the tactical and strategic implications of high-speed rail on holding together and expanding their empire at a time when countries with inferior transport are incapable of staying intact.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It has been estimated that nationwide, the ultimate reach of the alleged conspirators extended to only about 10 percent of all transit systems - sixty-odd out of some six hundred - and yet virtually all the other 90 percent also got rid of trolleys (as happened with many of the tramcar systems in the British Isles and France)."
From your own link. You shouldn't state something as a fact if there is a lot of uncertainty about it.
"People choose cars over railways because they see a better cost/benefit tradeoff. That's why railways lose many and car manufacturers make money. One can make the argument that personal car use doesn't properly account for all the externalities. You're welcome to make that argument."
Yes, cars appear to be cheaper because the car/road transportation system is heavily funded, while the rail system receives very little money in comparison.
"But China's problem isn't lack of good public transportation, it's having too many people. If China had 100M people instead of 1000M, all of those people having a car wouldn't be a problem. Ditto for the US."
Yes, cars are only a problem in an overpopulated world. Do you expect the world population to decrease.
Third would country, super power, flush with cash and need to maintain a 9% annual growth? I have a solution for you! Just look at the WPA during the great depression of the 1930's!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
The WPA pretty much built out all of our existing hydro-electric power, roads, national parks, trails, firehouses etc. It was fucking expensive, but it kept the country from falling into ruin and put food on the plates for something like 25% of the nation for a decade.
If there's been one proven long term investment that will last hundreds of years, it's rail lines. They're the roman roads of our time.
moox. for a new generation.
Yeah, around here, bicycling often seems time-competitive compared to taking the bus.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
It's called Simultrans. Look it up.
The Chinese are going to make to Alpha Centauri before we do, apparently...
High speed rail across Europe? That is pretty cool...
Hope we can survive the nuclear age..
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
If you were able to eliminate the cost of your car while remaining able to work and without suffering some other inconvenience, you would make more money, not less.
That's a big 'if' there. How do you propose he get to work?
Therefore, your car does the opposite of making a profit.
No, if his car allows him to get to work to make the money, it helps him make a profit. Example (all numbers pulled out of my arse):
Scenario 1: Own a car and drive to work
50k salary - 10k in annual auto expense = 40k profit
Scenario 2: Don't own a car and sit around at home wondering how to get to work
0k salary - 0k in annual auto expense = 0k profit
you will be manipulated by people who use your lack of understanding of economics against you.
Wow, you don't understand how expenses work as part of the profit equation, and you are calling out someone else as illiterate in the ways of economics?
I think you are the one who fundamentally missed the analogy. The GP's point is that despite the fact that the owner of a transportation system (you of your car and China of its rail system) loses money on the act of ownership, that act has positive externalities. I am not saying that the net effect for China is a gain, but his analogy does work to demonstrate the point.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Well, automakers were heavily subsidized (through taxpayer-funded road system). And any government-subsidized industry has a leg up to mess with the competition. This would be similar to government buying tracks for railroads and not charging the railroad companies anything to use those tracks.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Car manufacturers make money because US taxpayers pay for the roads.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Rail is something you have to roll out on a large scale, the larger the better.
This is really, really, really, really not true. The best way to grow a railroad system always was and always will be to lay tracks between most congested (and therefore most profitable) routes.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I wouldn't trust a US-based journalist to understand the concept of taking a train and all that it implies.
or do you rent the customer your hammer and come along as the operator of the hammer?
That may be the strangest, and worst, attempt at some sort of analogy that I have ever seen on /. What the hell kind of question is that?
The hammer is an expense which a carpenter must bear as a cost of doing business.
...and my car is a cost I must bear as a cost of making a salary.
People profit from your taking a train as from your driving your car. For example, locomotive manufacturers like GE and Caterpillar (which owns Electro-Motive), car manufacturers like Siemens and Bombardier are paid as you pay for your automobile, and in turn pay employees and suppliers. The trains use energy, either in the form of diesel fuel or electricity, which of course is paid for as you pay for gasoline. And the railroads have a staff, who are paid as well.
All of these folks make money, even though your car doesn't make a profit and is heavily subsidized, as are many railroads.
If you were to spend time in a place where there were good railroads, you would experience another sort of freedom. The freedom to go much faster, and to not be tied to the wheel, and to not be a slave to traffic jams, and to not have to worry about parking and taking care of your automobile, and to not be forced to return to the same place where you left your automobile before you can travel anyplace else.
You only think a car means freedom because you have been deprived of a good transportation system.
Bruce Perens.
My city has for-profit fire departments. They work really well. Basically, the fire trucks compete with each other to get to the fire scene. City only pays the company whose truck arrives 1st to the scene. I don't know of any case when fire trucks arrived to the scene too late. Nor do I know of any incident of anyone dying in a house fire in this city.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Those are high speed rails, so quality (supposedly) is not an option.
During WW2 they used carpet-bombing tactics because the targeting systems sucked. Targeting systems don't suck anymore; railroads can now be taken out with a single precision strike.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There are places you can live where that reasoning really applies. But not nice places. The U.S. will get there eventually if people keep thinking that way.
Bruce Perens.
All for it. I like riding the train.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
It's pimptastic!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
My Grandmother. Fact.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Really? Very often we do pay for such things with our taxes, like roads for automobiles, or stadiums for sports teams. It's just that someone else collects the profit.
Bruce Perens.
Funny, since the subject is China.
I went on interrail in Germany one summer, they have a fantastic rail network.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Good news for hiking boot and mountain bike manufacturers, then, because that's about all that would be left without some kind of subsidy.
That's how every central bank works. The ones creating private sector debt do so by choice.
You have obviously never been to Europe.
Their favourite means of transportation is train. You can go through high-speed rail to almost anywhere in western Europe. I've been to the central bus station in Berlin. It's so desert it's scary.
The rail system in the US is archaic. It's slow and expensive. Of course no one wants to use it. I grant you that, bus is cheaper than train in Europe as well, but the difference in comfort and speed is worth it.
entropy happens
If you're delivering things or people into a conflict zone, you don't need to land there, you just drop them out and land back at home where it's safe.
> If China had 100M people instead of 1000M, all of those people having a car wouldn't be a problem.
Thus the train line to Europe? There, the population would actually shrink if it wasn't for immigration.
I don't think you should underestimate the indirect effects. There was of course no conspiracy to ditch trams in Norway, yet two of the three large tram cities got rid of them.
If you read the contemporary newspapers, you see why: it was top-down decisions, and the argument was always _trams are becoming old-fashioned. Buses are the future._ Now where did they get that idea? (which was, by the way, entirely wrong, despite its self-fulfilling character). By looking at other cities, abroad. Some of got rid of their trams for corrupt reasons.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The point being that if you did not have to pay the cost of your car, you would make (on average) $7000 more per year. My "analogy" was not strange or bad. It's just that you need to work on your understanding of microeconomics.
Bruce Perens.
Yup. It happens, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Look at the trouble Santa Clara has been having in building a new stadium for the 49ers. They were finally able to get a ballot initiative passed by promising no new taxes.
In fact, money is the major barrier to high-speed rail here in California. Railroads are popular here (even if it's because we want other people to ride them and get off the road), and if it were possible to make it profitable, construction would have already started (who doesn't like profits?)
Railroads are so popular in fact, that California already passed a $10 billion bond measure to fund them. If it could be built with $10billion, it would have been built already. If it were profitable, private bonds could be easily issued to cover the costs.
Being unprofitable just means it's harder, you have to convince people it's worth it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> You can rent a car by the hour for those trips to IKEA.
Funny you should mention that. Don't IKEA have their own buses where you live? They do here. Free transport to and from the warehouse every hour. I wonder why large warehouses outside cities don't do that more often.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The wikipedia article says that on most lines, the expected payback period on the high speed lines is anywhere from 6-16 years. That's incredible. That means the child of the man who went to work on the railroad to support his child in the first place will see the rail paid off by the time he is old enough to work. Here in Dallas, Texas my grandchildren's children will still be paying tolls on the highways they have built here in the last 15 years (99 year exclusive tollway lease to a private company).
moox. for a new generation.
The countries they plan to move into don't have the greatest road systems in the world, giving the Chinese an advantage.
I can't speak for the other countries that China plans to come to but I can for Singapore since I've essentially lived here all my life. Singapore has an amazing public transport system. It has an extensive bus and train network that will allow you to travel to about 95% of the country. For the remaining 5%, which usually just include some fringe areas that the average person doesn't have to go to on a daily basis, you could take a cab. This transport network requires a good road system, which SIngapore has. (Note that the statistics are pulled out of my ass but the actual statistics should be close enough).
I can't speak for other countries since I haven't been there, so I'll refrain from making any comparisons. In any case, if China does extend their rail here, it would be good because it'll just provide us an alternative way to travel to surrounding countries instead of having to drive/take a ferry/take a flight. If they try to compete with the local transport system, they would just be wasting their money.
[quote]That's a big 'if' there. How do you propose he get to work?[/quote]
Train, subway, bike or a combination of them. If you live in a country that doesn't have either of them, then you're forced to spend the $10k a year "crappy public transport tax"
Let me tell you how economical rail is. I worked the numbers for the cost of HSR based on the highest est. cost of England's HSR per km, and compared it to the total cost of the automotive system here in Florida. Floridians spend billions to maintain thier roads each year, they spend billions to maintain their cars, they spend billions to purchase new cars, they spend billions to insure those cars, they spend billions to put gas in those cars and they spend billions to police and pay for all the injuries and deaths caused by those cars. (Not to mention subsidies to oil companies, and wars in oil rich lands). In the end Floridan's are paying many 10s of billions each year to have cars.
You had pick me up off the floor when I crunched the numbers for HSR and saw that Florida could replace every inch of it's 43,000 miles of state roads with HSR at an annual operational cost of approx 10 billion (less than twice what Floridans pay for road maintenance *alone*). Floridians could easily cover that out of regular tax revenue if they wanted to do so, and no on would ever have to pay for a train ticket to use it!
:T:R:A:N:S:
If you need the car do do your job, and you don't have the car, you will not make more at the job, as you will no longer have it. If you are a construction contractor with no hammer, and you need a hammer to pound in the nails, you aren't going to be making money. Considering tools as a liability is the reason so many managers make such poor decisions when trying to save money. You need to change the way you think.
The flu? Really? Maybe if you have no family, spend your whole life in a cubicle, and don't ever go shopping. It would probably help your life if you got vaccinated and joined society :-)
Are you sure that you aren't actually enslaved to your car because you have no transportation choice? How much time do you spend operating it? Do you have that much quality time with your family?
Bruce Perens.
Why not to put up an international effort to build such a speed railway network? Why leave it to China alone? Where are the leaders?
It is more inspiring than, say, fight indigenous people. By the way, building bridges, tunnels, lines, etc. would give them work, keep busy, and lead away from terror.
I have to fly regularly from a Western Europe city to a Eastern Europe city. I am to arrive to the airport two hours before departure, spent two hours in a crowded transit hall, and three hours in planes. I would rather ride 6 hours in a comfortable train with a table and a fast Internet access and arrive at the train station in the city center, right near my apartment.
Besides I am afraid of flying (not unreasonably).
Right. But the fact that you write off miles means that the car is a cost of doing business. Your customer cares that you can get to the location, and leaves the method up to you.
I have a car too. I charge my customers USD $0.739/mile, per AAA's Your Driving Costs 2011 Edition, when mass transit isn't a good option. I use AAA's numbers with the IRS rather than IRS's standard 51 cents per mile.
I have to be very mobile too, although that usually means flying.
Bruce Perens.
It would be a very bad manager that only considered a tool to be a liability. I pursued an MBA for a while some years ago. The first course I got was accounting. Very early in that course we had to work out cost-benefit analyses. I doubt you could get out of a legitimate management school without understanding that. Today, the result of such an analysis would be to buy a nail-gun rather than a hammer, because the reduction in labor cost is greater than the tool cost. The profit is for delivering some finished work of construction, and these days the most profitable means of doing that is often not to use a hammer at all.
Bruce Perens.
That's because most of Amtrak's existing routes are outdated, slow and suboptimal. The one decent route they do have, Acela, is profitable, even though it still falls far below European or Japanese quality in terms of speed and puncuality.
If they can build a next-gen Acela with TGV- or Shinkansen-like speed (not trivial, since right-of-way is expensive up there), they have the potential to kill the La Guardia-Boston shuttle flights dead. It's already happened in Europe, Japan, and Taiwan. There is reason to assume the US eastern seaboard is that special.
Your forty-minute commute by car might, under ideal circumstances, be the same length, or even shorter. Or it might stretch out to forty-five or fifty minutes, during which time you can have a nap, read a book, catch up on the news, or connect to the onboard wifi. And the four or five grand per year you're saving turns into an annual two-week vacation in Switzerland, where you can see just how good public transit can get if it's funded properly.
Or it could stretch to 2 hours. This is the case for me, though that's the return trip times. If I drive, I'm at work in in 17-20 minutes depending on traffic, but if I use public transport, it's one hour if everything is perfectly on time. The marginal costs of riding the bus is almost the same as driving too.
And you know what's the funny part? This isn't Bumfuck, Texas or anything, that's the middle of Europe, I pay 60% tax on gas + road use "fee", and public transport is heavily subsidized. Sure I could sell my car and save a bit of money, but I'd rather get home sooner and jerk off or do something fun instead of being stuck in a hot smelly bus.
Thank! Looks a bit like SimCity to me. I'd have been happy even with just a subway sim. I'll check it out.
Umm, what? The US military has huge air capacity, and routinely uses it to great effect. If an obvious and severe need arose, I fully expect the US could move hundreds of thousands of military personnel, and a substantial amount of heavy equipment, into any given major metropolitan area in well under 24 hours.
And hundreds of jets are much harder to sabotage than a couple train lines.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sorry for replying to myself, but I forgot the other funny part. The even better one is that the public transport people are now on strike and anyone who's relying on them is fucked, since if you don't get to work you don't get paid. Thankfully I have my car plus I can work from home, but most people aren't so lucky.
You conflate short travel with long travel. HSR is designed to compete with long auto trips (say, two hours each way on freeway) or short to medium leg plane flights (think 1-2 hours). The car usages you mention compete with regional rail, which is a completely different animal.
HSR will be great for business trips between the Bay Area and LA--much faster than a car, less boarding hassles than a plane, and you don't have to navigate the LA freeway system to reach downtown.
It is possibly a good way to commute from SJ to SF. The time saving is probably not that significant if you include time spent on buses before and/or after the train ride, but you do get to skip the traffic jam, have a predictable commute time, and be able to read Slashdot on the way.
You probably won't use it to commute from SJ to Palo Alto unless you and/or your workplace happens to be close to the station. That's commuter train's work, which CalTrain fulfills (rather poorly).
7% of US national debt is held by China. Seven percent.
Truth. No mass transportation system has ever been profitable to my knowledge. (Sure, particular stretches of toll road have sometimes - but even most of them have been "gimme's" handed over after being built with state funds or at least government-backed low-interest bonds. But the state subsidies are (in theory at least) justified by the increased economic activity generated, which generates tax revenue. So in that sense, one could say they are profitable to the state. Transportation systems are also justified by the need for fast communication across the realm for defense and control purposes.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The USA ruled the second half of the 20th century because unlike others, we had taken the plunge and invested in 20th century infrastructure (interstate highways, airports) whilst most the world was stuck with 19th century infrastructure. Now, whilst our politicians procrastinate, China are investing in 21st century technology, whilst we are stuck with 20th century technology. The result is obvious.
Oil has double in price over the past decade. All indications are we will be lucky if it only doubles in price over the next decade, as costs and demand both rise. In thirty years time these infrastructure projects will be worth their weight in gold (as ours from the 50s/60s proved 30 years later) whilst countries like ours will become less and less competitive as fewer and fewer can afford to utilize our inefficient, oil-dependent 20th century infrastructure.
Chinese didn't manage to build 50km of the A2 motorway in Poland. Building anything and a railway in particular, between the Chinese border and the Polish one (~4000 km) doesn't seem to be any easier than that.
Greyhound sucks in the US, too, but that's not the service I'm talking about - I'm talking about premium bus lines. And even those do it for such a small fraction of the cost that anyone who is price-sensitive is going to use them.
The passenger rail system in the US may be archaic, but the freight system is one of the best (if not the best) in the world. These are mutually exclusive to some degree; the time-sensitivity of passenger traffic means that it screws up freight all the time.
Furthermore, if Europeans love trains so much, why have Ryanair and similar made such inroads? Yes, trains on dedicated tracks are a pretty good way to get between closely spaced cities, but once you start traveling any meaningful distance it's time to get in the air - and in the US, it's almost always a pretty meaningful distance.
Most commerce is shipped by road, not rail. Why? Not enough rail. Rail is far more fuel efficient, and it's also more labor efficient. If we had more rail lines we'd ship far more of our goods by rail.
As it stands now, rail is used for coal -- and for many power plants, they're paying twice as much for the shipment via rail as they pay for the coal itself. New England gets most of its coal from South America by barge. Know why? There's not enough rail capacity to get it from the West (Appalachia coal is too sulfur-rich for New England air quality standards).
The fact is that there isn't enough rail capacity in tUSA for passengers or for freight, and adding capacity would help to reduce travel times, reduce prices, add choice, and add robustness to our personal travel and commercial shipping networks.
I'm a Taxi driver, you insensitive clod!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They'll just fund it with Uncle Sam's "minimum monthly payment" -snicker-.
If people would today choose trains if they were an option, couldn't some people get together to re-establish them, eyeing profit?
Have a look at OpenTTD. It's a train game rather than a full-blown transport sim, but it can be as challenging as you want.
The U.S. transcontinental railroads were built terribly poorly. That's how they were able to lay 10 miles of rail in one day. The assumption was that once there was an operating railroad, that it would be very much less expensive to lay good track. It worked, we still have an intercontinental railroad through the same route that was originally laid.
It might be true that large portions of the China route are similarly without good roads.
It should also be noted that in North America rail is used a lot for transporting goods, rather than people. In Europe, it's largely the opposite: people take trains, goods take trucks. Either way you're making use of rails for fairly efficient transport.
Once big difference between the two continents though is that Europe was fairly built up before the automobile arrived, so they have have more higher density parts of cities, where public transit and bicycling is more practical. North America was largely built up in the 20th century, and especially post-WW2, so the automobile was (for better or for worse) taken into account.
Hopefully the now-growing areas (China, India, South America) will look at the two experiences and learn from them. Hopefully both Europe and N.A. will also learn a bit and adjust they way they're doing things.
If the US were the only country in the world where people drive cars, you might have a point. Fact is that people are also choosing cars over trains in Europe, despite high subsidies for railway lines, an extensive railway and transit network, and much higher taxes on gasoline and car ownership. Per capita car ownership is actually even higher in Germany than in the US.
We won't be able to address the environmental and urban planning problems that cars cause until we face the fact that people generally like and prefer cars. And it's only going to get worse with new technology. Merely offering trains, even at a competitive price, will not be enough to get people to switch.
Taxes on gasoline in Europe are nearly 100%; I believe they actually add a surplus to the economy. The rail systems, on the other hand, are still government subsidized, and they are extensive. You really can live in many places in Europe without a car. Yet, European car ownership is pretty much comparable to the US: if you can afford it, you buy a car. And some nations like Germany are really car nuts, with higher car ownership rates than the US.
If you want to get people out of their cars and onto rail (and there are good reasons to), merely making driving much more expensive and subsidizing railway systems doesn't seem to be enough.
It gives me freedom to go wherever I want, whenever I want. I am hostage to nothing but the supply of gasoline.
Roads?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
> You can rent a car by the hour for those trips to IKEA.
Funny you should mention that. Don't IKEA have their own buses where you live? They do here. Free transport to and from the warehouse every hour. I wonder why large warehouses outside cities don't do that more often.
They don't do that where I live, the bastards. Even getting into the store as a pedestrian requires frightening slaloming between the hundreds of cars.
And don't get me going about the horror that is trying to get them to deliver stuff instead of taking it away in your car.
Which I don't have.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
But your personal automobile does operate at a profit. That's tru whether it's in Europe, due to its high fuel taxes, or in the US, due to the lack of money spent on road maintenance. Sure, it's not a profit to you, the car driver, but we were discussing the profitability of the network operator.
And how much of a car's operating costs are subsidized by the government? I'm talking about highways, streets, police, traffic signals etc.
The reason that the government subsidizes transit isn't because of some liberal conspiracy to help the indigent. It's because shifting that money over to more automobile subsidies wouldn't produce enough additional capacity to handle the influx of drivers.
I live in a city that has the most expensive mile of road ever built. Yet more than half the commutes into the city are *still* by transit. We might have spent ten times what we did on that road and still not have enough additional auto capacity to replace transit. On the other hand, we probably could have endowed a fund which eliminated transit fares in perpetuity for less than we spent on that road. So why didn't anyone consider that?
If we're subsidizing 90% of the cost of the bus, why not go to 100%? Not only would that attract more riders, it would eliminate the cost of fare collection systems and personnel. That means we'd need a lot less than an 11% increase to eliminate fares, and we'd get additional savings by having less car infrastructure. The reason is that car drivers would get bent out of shape over transit riders getting something "for free", even though they themselves use free and very expensive auto infrastructure and would benefit by having reduced traffic. It's simply not rational to fund 90% of the cost of the bus, and not go all the way to 100%, but the rational thing isn't politically correct.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not just something they can use themselves, a great product demo for potential clients. Japan's JR and Siemens own the high speed rail market at the moment but it looks like China is throwing vast amounts of money around to get a stake.
This point often seems to be missed on Slashdot. The same goes for green energy, electric vehicles, high speed passenger jets and a whole host of other potentially lucrative technologies. Germany's decision to ditch nuclear power is more about making it the number one vendor of renewable energy gear in the world than about nuclear fears, at least on a political level. Japan has been doing the same since they invented the first high speed passenger train back in the early 60s.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Bruce!!!
Even premium bus lines can't give you the comfort of a train ride; I for one feel sick when I try to read in a bus.
A very simple reason: Ryanair is cheap. I have traveled by Ryanair many more times than I've traveled by train. Let's say you are at Berlin and wants to go to Paris. About 900 km apart, a meaningful distance in my opinion. Who would want to take a bus, go to Schönefeld, grab a plane, descend at Charles de Gaulle (or a shitty airport 100 km apart from Paris, if you chose Ryanair), take another bus, and get to Paris, instead of taking the subway, going to Hauptbahnhof (central station), getting on a train, and getting down at downtown Paris? Me, who can't afford the train always. But I'm just a poor boy from a poor family, and when I can afford to not suffer the inconvenience, I won't anymore.
It's true that for very large distances the speed of the airplane beats the convenience and comfort of the train. But it's very large distances, not just meaningful distances.
entropy happens
Ryanair have made inroads because it's a British/Irish company and oddly enough we're one of very few island nations in Europe. As a result, trains to the continent are a lot more expensive than trains within the continent. So it's no surprise that a budget airline is popular. I know people in most of the countries in the EU and all of them would take the train over flying anywhere on the mainland. The US has the downside of being huge, but the distance between, large neighbouring cities isn't that much. Say, New York - Boston or New York - Washington, both under 250 miles which is well under two hours by modern electric rail. Amtrak quote around $200 and over 3 hours for a fast service. For comparison, we're bringing in a high speed rail line from London to Edinburgh (around 400 miles) that will do the job in just over 2 hours. The tickets will be steep, but I imagine an advance ticket will cost £50-60.
Flying in itself is highly unprofitable. On the average Easyjet flight, only two seats are making a profit (source was an ATC manager, but it's likely to be true). The rest is made up flogging you perfume in duty free, exorbitant check in/baggage charges, overpriced sandwiches and car rentals/health insurance. Ryanair are god-awful to fly with and most of the time it's cheaper to fly with a reputable airline after all the hidden costs. Not to mention they rarely, if ever, fly to the airport you need to go to.
There is nothing really similar to Ryanair, there are many budget airlines and imitators, but nothing comes close to their abrasiveness.
Not only that but the Minister of Transportation has said that the existing track is not safe and recommended a reduction in top speeds to, hopefully, reduce the chance of a major accident.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
There is no way the chinese are building rail lines as part of a cunning military plan. Transporting military assets by rail makes locating, tracking and targetting them far too easy for your opponents. Rail worked back in WW2 in the pre-sat and pre-guided missile era.
Any references or citations or you just pulling numbers out of your ass?
Hope is the currency of fools
10 miles of rail in one day
This makes me sad. In my state we're going to take several years and $25 million dollars to add a 1.5 mile section alongside an existing track.
http://www.projo.com/news/content/KINGSTON_STATION_05-28-11_KDOB7US_v9.3040bfb.html
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Trains need those, too. And some vehicles actually can go without roads.
If I drive, I'm at work in in 17-20 minutes depending on traffic, but if I use public transport, it's one hour if everything is perfectly on time.
I can't dispute that even under the best of circumstances, there will be trips that are inefficient or circuitous by mass transit. In densely urbanized centers these 'difficult' trips can be minimized (or nearly eliminated) by grid-layout bus systems coupled to light rail and subway backbones, but not every urban area has the population density to support that level of infrastructure, nor the geography (and absence of geographic and architectural obstacles) to permit it. There will also be populations (particularly in rural areas) which are difficult or prohibitively costly to serve. The car (or some other means of individual, independent transport) will almost certainly always be a practical necessity for some fraction of people.
That said, when you chose to live where you do, did you make access to transit a high personal priority? Or did you choose a place that had ample parking and easy access to the highway? On the flip side, it's almost certain that your employer didn't consider access to public transit an important issue when siting their offices. (In the United States, there is almost universally an assumption of car ownership, and access to transit is an afterthought. In all but the largest cities, public transit is for poor people; a sop for the lowest classes who can't (yet) afford a car.)
Regarding your other comment about the disruption caused by a transit strike, it is possible to declare transit workers an essential service and eliminate their right to strike. Contract disputes are settled through a binding arbitration process, rather than through strikes (or lockouts). Yes, this generally results in slightly higher personnel costs, but it eliminates the massive economic dislocations that can be caused by the temporary loss of mass transit. Other classes of public workers (particularly police officers, firefighters, and ambulance crews) are often declared essential and subject to similar provisions. A number of jurisdictions (including the city of New York) already bar transit workers from striking.
~Idarubicin
Right, but the Northeast Corridor is the only place in the US where rail makes sense. And the construction costs for a real high speed rail line would be astronomical.
But it still takes nine hours, about as long as driving. By contrast, you can fly from Tegel to CDG in an hour and a half, meaning at most four hours total travel time including check in. I fail to see the appeal unless your time is really unimportant to you.
It's not the price relative to other choices that make high speed rail usage in China relatively low. It is the fact that the average monthly wages in China are something like 2000-3000 Yuan. Sure there are plenty of people in a company the size of China that make more then that, but the majority just plain can't afford to travel at all.
So, you just drive through peoples back gardens to express the ultimate freedom that your car gives you.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
This comment is only half-true. While the American automakers helped, the main reason they were able to buy up these rail systems is because no one else wanted them. In fact, in many places where the automakers did not have influence, the rail systems failed anyway.
Actually, during WW2 they often blew them up guerrilla style with explosives planted on/under the rails themselves. It still didn't do any good.
Train, subway, bike or a combination of them.
When did trains and subways become free? How is paying for public transit better than paying for a car?
Are you sure that you aren't actually enslaved to your car because you have no transportation choice?
Enslaved? What is your problem with cars? And having public transit as an option doesn't automatically 'free' you from your car. I had an hour+ commute each way for several years, and tried out the transit options, (which were actually pretty good). After a while, I realized that it cost nearly the same as driving my car, and it turned my 2-3 hours of driving into 4 hours sitting on buses. I quickly started carpooling, and it was far superior to taking the bus in every way. Yes, the car was far better than public transit [gasp].
It would be a very bad manager that only considered a tool to be a liability.
Well, then you must be a bad manager, because in your other comments in this discussion, you said:
Your automobile is an expense that you bear as part of the cost of having employment.[snip]Therefore, your car does the opposite of making a profit.
So is a tool that helps you make a profit good or bad? You can't really seem to decide.
I pursued an MBA for a while some years ago.
Given some of your comments regarding costs, liabilities, profit, etc, that I've seen in this discussion, I can see why you stopped.
My "analogy" was not strange or bad.
Well, yes it was. And here is why:
Do you sell your services as a carpenter, or do you rent the customer your hammer and come along as the operator of the hammer?
OK, so let's say I sell my services as a carpenter for $100 to nail in some boards to a fence. I make $100, and the fence boards get nailed in.
Now, let's say I rent my customer the hammer for $100, and I show up to 'operate' the hammer and nail some boards to a fence. I make $100, and the fence boards get nailed in.
So, the problem with your analogy is that there is no difference between the two scenarios, so the entire question was pointless.
It's just that you need to work on your understanding of microeconomics.
You need to work on your understanding of economics of any scale.
Manchester, England, falsified this theory in the 90s with their light rail system. It wasn't between particularly congested routes, but it sliced 1/3rd off the total cars on the road, boosted the number of places in the city that were practical to reach and was judged an astronomical success. Most of Scotland also falsifies this theory, as there isn't a population density high enough to cause significant congestion but there are distances great enough to make mobility a severe problem.
Congestion over short distances is better resolved through wider roads or traffic calming schemes. Since acceleration is the only point at which energy (and therefore resources) gets consumed, an object in a state of uniform motion only has to overcome friction. Friction at the speeds concerned is insignificant compared to the energy requirements of accelerating an object as massive as a goods train to high speeds. Even in a road car, you will have observed that stop/start traffic consumes fuel at a far greater rate than traffic that is moving uniformly.
Short hop trains are very, very fuel-inefficient. The efficiency rises with distance. Therefore long distance is Good.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was going to bring up the same point. I believe that the only profitable HSR line in the world is Paris-Lyon. So these lines are really much more expensive than they appear when sold to the taxpayers of the country.
The Amtrak Alcela express has been running at HUGE profits for YEARS now. In the USA.
Not really. Iraq II took many months to transport the men, vehicles and supplies. The logistics were terrible, since the aircraft had to fly to specific airfields. A train can unload anywhere along a track, but a plane cannot unload anywhere in the sky (ok, transport planes can but there's a limit to what you can parachute in).
If you hit a plane with a missile, you take out the whole plane. The chances of any survivors is remote. If you hit a coach with a missile, the odds are that people and equiptment in other coaches won't get through unscathed but that it won't be a total loss either. Even in the worst of the worst train accidents that have happened in history (and there have been some at very high speeds ploughing into bridges or vehicles), 100% fatalities are exceedingly rare. Had any of the transport planes flying into Iraq or Afghanistan been hit with a stinger missile, there's not the slightest chance anyone would have walked away. Hence the exceedingly dangerous flying that was required.
Now, we're actually quite fortunate that most opponents of the US are incompetent. There have been plans on the Internet for DIY cruise missiles with a 100 mile range for over a decade. Amateur rocketry is quite capable of launching a projectile in excess of 20,000' (the altitude considered safe against the kind of SAMs the US is ever likely to face). This is why Israel is interested in air-to-air missiles and other defences on passenger aircraft. Do you seriously imagine they'd be funding that kind of research if they thought air transport was safe?
(It is for now, as the weapons pose no threat without guidance systems and the kind of guidance systems needed require skills and other resources that hostile nations don't have. The V1, despite amazing range for the time, posed no military threat whatsoever - it was only effective as a psychological weapon.)
But if you don't have guidance systems, then the odds of hitting a train aren't much better than the odds of hitting a plane. From a long range, they're both very small targets.
Besides, attacking the vehicle is a bit stupid as the other nation would just send another. Take out an airport and it's a whole 'nother story. Sending another vehicle then becomes futile. Trains are another matter - as I've said, they can unload anywhere. As such, if a station is taken out it doesn't matter a whole lot. You just have a little further to jump to get to the ground and there's no waiting room.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
Fascinating, but completely irrelevant. The quote from the article was comparing high speed rail to low speed rail, not air travel:
I don't see the problem. Low speed rail should be dirt cheap, especially someplace like China where much of the population is very poor. High speed rail should be more expensive, but perhaps not quite as much as air travel, which should be the most expensive method as it generally consumes the most fuel, but also gets you there quickest.
Our perception in the USA and other western countries is screwed up because our transportation infrastructure is all screwed up: we simply don't have inexpensive low-speed rail (Amtrak isn't that cheap; I have no idea why anyone bothers), our high-speed rail is nonexistent or overpriced, and our airfare is too cheap.
Transporting military assets by any method leaves you vulnerable to being tracked. They tend to be high-volume and officers routinely say far too much when they visit strip joints.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Your comment is far from true. Europeans in general don't choose cars over public transport. That's far too general and a very dubious claim.
Europeans in large cities like Rome, London and Paris are far more likely to use public transport. Many young Europeans never bother to get a driver's license because it's not neccessary. Public transport is both efficient and inexpensive for the users in a large percentage of European cities of all sizes.
Germans as a people might own more cars than the US per capita, but it doesn't mean they're used for commuting... nor does that take into account the people that don't own cars in either country. There could be other factors such as purchasing power, salaries, local costs and cultural values.
I also believe that people generally like the convenience of cars, but we don't all prefer them over other options. At least not here in Europe... You're projecting your views on a huge group of people you don't know or have any data on (links?). The US and Europe aren't that similar culturally or socially.
Personally I prefer relaxing on the train while commuting home from my [European] capital, but I live in a rural suburb where I need a car...
A transportation system in theory shouldn't be highly profitable; its function is to help society by facilitating commerce. The faster and easier (and cheaper) people can get around, the more they can work together and create wealth by doing work, starting companies, coming up with new ideas, moving goods and services around, etc. It's similar to how important communications are.
In a socialistic country trying to grow its economy, investing a ton of money into transportation infrastructure (esp. infrastructure that's cheap to operate, as trains use less fuel than planes) makes perfect sense. In a lot of ways, it also makes more sense than sitting around waiting for some private investors to put it in place hoping to make a big profit.
With your binary thinking and complete lack of ability to reason, you must be an American. I'm ashamed I have to share a country with people as dumb as you.
The idea is that public transit is cheaper than private cars. Instead of paying $10k (borrowing the OP's numbers) per year to own and operate a car, you let some company (or the state, or a state-owned company, or a state-regulated company) operate a train/subway system. The cost of running that system is more than a single car, but since the train and tracks are shared by so many people, the per-person cost is far cheaper than paying for the purchase price, repair/maintenance costs, and fuel costs for a private car (don't forget the road costs, which in the USA are partially paid by fuel taxes and partially paid by income taxes).
So instead of paying $10k per year for a private car, you pay $1k per year to ride the subway/train. Now you have $9k per year extra money that you can spend on other things, such as a nicer house, a nice vacation, investments, college tuition for your kids, hookers and blow, or whatever you want. That's $9k in extra profit.
On top of that, your chances of dying in a train accident are a tiny, tiny fraction of your chances of dying in an auto accident.
I don't see the problem.
The problem was that the poster didn't understand that the comparison was to low speed rail, not air travel.
Low speed rail should be dirt cheap, especially someplace like China where much of the population is very poor.
It is. That was the point of the quoted article. No one is taking the expensive high speed trains, because the low speed trains are more economical.
Speaking as an Arizonan, if you bother to look at a map of the East Coast US, all the cities there ARE closely spaced. It's only when you come out here to the West that they're somewhat far apart, and even that it's not that far: the distance between Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, and LA really isn't that much, and would be well-served by trains. A high-speed line running up the West Coast, stopping at SD, LA, SF, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver would also be very useful.
The key, however, is "high speed". Using 1800s train technology and traveling at 50mph or whatever will yield trains that no one wants to ride on, because it's simply too slow. China knows this, which is why it's investing heavily in HSR, while we Americans stupidly sit around and complain about government subsidies while driving on government-built, subsidized interstate highways between cities.
If you read the contemporary newspapers, you see why: it was top-down decisions, and the argument was always _trams are becoming old-fashioned. Buses are the future._ Now where did they get that idea? (which was, by the way, entirely wrong, despite its self-fulfilling character).
That sounds just like what's going on here in Phoenix with shopping centers. The mall companies have been building big, open-air outdoor shopping centers lately, instead of closed-in malls with A/C. They keep claiming, "malls are old-fashioned, people like being outdoors" like a mantra. But while these centers actually do pretty good in the wintertime (when it's cool and mild outside), no one here wants to walk around in 100+ degree temperatures during the summer, no matter how much the marketeers tell us we do.
You must be an American. No wonder this country can't manage its finances, with people like you who can't understand the simplest fundamentals of economics.
This is a straight up lie!
Maybe you should invest (or should have invested, it looks like you're in a different situation now) in a bicycle. I used to live in a college town, and while the college operated a bus service, it was indeed quite slow, as buses only came every 30 minutes or so, and didn't travel that fast anyway. I also walked for a little while, because it was about as fast, or slightly faster, than taking the bus, unless the bus happened to be arriving just as I was starting my walk home.
Then I bought a bike, and that completely changed everything. The bike was far faster than the bus (let alone walking), and of course just about as convenient as walking, since buses only go to certain stops while I can bike right to buildings and use the handy bike racks provided.
Of course, this was all in a college town of about 30k (including students), so riding a bike wasn't all that dangerous. I wouldn't try biking in the big city where I live now; for one thing, things are much farther apart than in that college town, but for another, there's far more car traffic, and it's not very friendly towards bikers. Big American cities are very very bad places for bicycling if you value your life.
Public transit would be much better if they'd build Personal Rapid Transit systems instead of mass people-movers like buses and light rail.
It would still suck and be really slow.
That's why these stupid buses need to be abandoned, and replaced with a Personal Rapid Transit system. Then you get everything: speed, privacy, convenience, low cost.
Isn't this the same high speed line that had its speed limited due to safety concerns? Why do those in other asian countries even want this?
It's a nice system...until they go on strike. What a shitty winter that was.
Since acceleration is the only point at which energy (and therefore resources) gets consumed, an object in a state of uniform motion only has to overcome friction. Friction at the speeds concerned is insignificant compared to the energy requirements of accelerating an object as massive as a goods train to high speeds. Even in a road car, you will have observed that stop/start traffic consumes fuel at a far greater rate than traffic that is moving uniformly.
Not true. Just look at the city vs. highway fuel economy figures for any car. Highway is always higher (except for hybrids), but not hugely so, maybe 20-35%. That's nowhere near an order of magnitude. The problem is cars are simply inefficient, even when operating at constant speed on level ground. The tires have lots of friction, and there's a lot of air resistance at any decent speed. Trains do much better because the entire train share the air resistance hit, and steel wheels on steel track have much lower rolling friction than rubber tires on asphalt, and internal engine friction is shared by the whole vehicle (economy of scale). Plus, trains are series hybrid-electric vehicles, so they don't need to size their engines for the peak torque loads, only the continuous power needs.
Every country can do that. Printing money is something every government does, and printing money doesn't create debt, and never has.
However, printing more money does cause inflation. If you want your country to be like Zimbabwe, then go ahead and just print all the money you need for your government to do anything it wants.
That's a very common mistake. Creating money from debt is also creates inflation. When a banker lend you 10, he has only 1 in asset. Then the 10 are spent in the economy, and eventually makes it to a banker, who can create even more debt with it. At the end, with the fractional reserve system, it can create 100 times more inflation asking Goldman/JPMorgan for a loan, than when the government prints money directly.
Just paying for the land that's being taken to widen the right of way would be Millions, today.
Bruce Perens.
With your binary thinking and complete lack of ability to reason, you must be an American.
Oh, please. Get off your high-horse, and stop acting like you are so much smarter than everyone else.
So instead of paying $10k per year for a private car, you pay $1k per year to ride the subway/train.
I'm ashamed I have to share a country with a person as dumb as you. Your really think that the cost ratio of private to public transit is 10:1? I rode public transit for a lot of years, and switched back to driving my car because the cost difference was so negligible that it didn't make sense to add an hour or more to my daily commute to save so little. Never mind the fact that a majority of my bridge toll was going towards funding the same public transit that I rode before. Yes, you read that right. Not only did my bus ticket not cover the costs of operating the bus service, but they had to take from car drivers to make up the difference!!! So, even though I, as a car driver, was subsidizing the bus riders, the costs still came out almost even.
The cost of running that system is more than a single car, but since the train and tracks are shared by so many people, the per-person cost is far cheaper than paying for the purchase price, repair/maintenance costs, and fuel costs for a private car
Yeah, but to operate my car, I don't have to hire a driver, ticket salesperson, bureaucrats to run the union, buildings for all of these people to work in and store the buses and maintenance equipment, etc.
You just don't understand how money works. I hope you don't vote. Others will manipulate you in your ignorance.
Bruce Perens.
I rode public transit for a lot of years, and switched back to driving my car because the cost difference was so negligible
You're a moron, and another stupid American who thinks that roads are all built for free. Your car is cheap to drive because you don't pay the true cost of building and maintaining roads, that cost is spread around and paid by other things like income taxes. Cars are indeed cheap to drive, compared to public transit, in the USA because of the government subsidies for roads, plus the fact that the entire society is designed for cars, not buses or trains. Take a look at NYC to see a society that's the other way.
Yeah, but to operate my car, I don't have to hire a driver, ticket salesperson, bureaucrats to run the union, buildings for all of these people to work in and store the buses and maintenance equipment, etc.
You have to pay for buildings for maintaining the cars, employing people to repair them, etc. That why it costs $500 for a few repairs on a car these days. You don't pay for bus repairs. Bus drivers drive a lot of people in a day, so that cost is spread out. And China doesn't have unions or fat-ass union bosses to inflate costs; that's a western invention.
Personal car ownership has a big net benefit to me, both directly and in terms of opportunity cost. And the externalities don't affect me much: they are mostly environmental degradation and wars far away. The increases in pollution and global warming from my choice are negligible.
China building a transit system is completely different: opportunity cost doesn't exist, and it is questionable whether China as a whole ever will be able to derive a net benefit from it. Furthermore, at the level of a nation, the externalities do matter a great deal.
Whatever point Bruce was trying to make, his analogy is stupid and doesn't work.
In a few places with high housing density and horrendous traffic jams, public transport can be faster on some routes. That's true for SF/Berkeley and Manhattan, and maybe a handful of other places around the US. But the world isn't SF/Berkeley, not even close. Even in the South Bay, public transit is barely usable.
In most places with good public transit (and I have lived in many of them and use public transit frequently), it takes 50-100% longer to get anywhere by public transit than by car. That's because trains tend to be slower and need to make many stops, and because changing trains and buses adds time, while a car usually takes you directly from point A to point B without any delays.
The notion that the popularity of the car is due to some evil machinations of the car companies falls flat on its face when you look at Europe, where cars are also enormously popular and public transit systems are also in trouble.
Public transit is important, but it's not going to catch on more if people just plain misrepresent how it works and misdiagnose its problems. Public transit may catch on more if we can build something like PRT systems, if we make car ownership much more expensive and much more of a hassle, and/or if we make existing train and bus service much more comfortable. But merely putting in more buses and rail lines is doomed to failure. And with self-driving cars, public transportation will become even less attractive.
Well, I need transportation to get to work, to shop, and to obtain services. A car does that cheaper and better than public transportation. Not only is its per-mile cost lower for me (and many other people) on the routes I regularly need to travel, it is also faster, and it lets me take advantage of goods and services that I simply couldn't take advantage of with public transportation.
As a matter of fact, I actually do usually use public transit anyway most of the time (I take the car out of the garage about once every other week). But I don't kid myself about it: that's a luxury that I can afford. If I were pressed for time and money, the rational thing would be to drive everywhere and never take public transportation, not even in the Bay Area.
You're a moron, and another stupid American...
Ah, name calling. The finest tool in the art of debate.
And why am I a 'moron' and 'stupid American' for making an informed decision about my transportation? It was simple: the amount of money I saved was so little that it wasn't worth wasting my time to sit on a bus for an extra hour or more a day. Where's the problem?
...who thinks that roads are all built for free.
Please point out where I said that roads are built for free.
Also, what exactly is it that you think those buses are driving around on? Sidewalks?
And trains and subways ride on tracks, which have to be built and maintained, just like a road.
You have to pay for buildings for maintaining the cars, employing people to repair them
I do? News to me.
That why it costs $500 for a few repairs on a car these days.
Except for when my car is under warranty. Or I just make the repair myself. Labor costs to me? Zero.
You don't pay for bus repairs.
Buses get repaired for free? Awesome.
Bus drivers drive a lot of people in a day, so that cost is spread out.
You know what I have to pay myself to drive my car around? Zero, which is less than whatever your 'spread out' cost is for the bus driver.
Well, you just don't understand how money works, so there. See how easy it is to just make statements about other people without any justification for those statements?
I find it funny that you continue to accuse others of ignorance in the ways of money, yet you actually had to go to a class to learn about cost-benefit. And you aren't very good at it, either. People are constantly telling you how a car is a 'benefit' to them by allowing them to get to work, and you go on and on about how a car costs money, so it must be bad. Yet then you turn around and say it is better to replace a cheap tool (hammer) with a more expensive one (nail gun). Since you never answered me before, I'll ask again: Are tools that help you make money good or bad?
Others will manipulate you in your ignorance.
Just because you say I'm ignorant doesn't automatically make it true.
Your examples do not justify your conclusions. That is, using the word "falsified" is incorrect.. Just because a rail system provides an alternative (and thereby reduces the number of cars on the road), doesn't mean the rail system is optimally designed. It only means that a less-than-optimal alternative is still an alternative. The fact remains that were transportation systems allowed to be self-financed, the most congested routes would be quickly covered multiple competing transportation providers. The gains that you get from energy savings by staying at cruising speed are marginal past a certain point. There are after all local and "express" trains. The express trains simply reach a higher cruising speed. The lower cruising speed of local trains allows for energy savings that you are so concerned with. But it's all irrelevant. The most relevant metric is not externalities of the system. The most relevant metric is occupancy rates. If a system can reach high occupancy without subsidies to the ticket prices (through any type of subsidies to the system at large), then it is successful. Unsubsidized profitability indicates advantageous allocation of resources.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
And why am I a 'moron' and 'stupid American' for making an informed decision about my transportation? It was simple: the amount of money I saved was so little that it wasn't worth wasting my time to sit on a bus for an extra hour or more a day. Where's the problem?
You're a moron and a stupid American because you can't see anything outside your own narrow worldview, which is the way things are in your location. Of course it makes more sense, living in most places in America, to own a car rather than take the bus. Buses are slow, stop too much, only come every half-hour or so, etc. On top of all this, there's all kinds of free government subsidies for driving cars, namely the fact that the roads are mostly free (you pay for it in other ways, rather than directly through a road-use tax, tolls, or similar). The entire system is set up to make public transport crappy, and car driving the most sensible choice.
Basically, just because America has done a ridiculously bad job at implementing public transit doesn't mean it's always bad. Try moving to (and working in) Manhattan and see how well driving works out for you there. Traffic is terrible, parking is a nightmare and horribly expensive, yet public transit costs about $20/week to go anywhere. The only way private cars make any sense there is if you're Donald Trump and can afford a personal chaeffeur for your limo.
Except for when my car is under warranty. Or I just make the repair myself. Labor costs to me? Zero.
So your time is worthless? Why even buy a car? You could just build your own for much less than buying a new, warrantied car. Since you have so much extra time to do it, this shouldn't be a problem for you.
Most people can't repair their own cars. That's why they hire someone else to do it. That cost adds to their "total cost of ownership" for their vehicle. (It's also why people buy new/newer cars every so often, because repairing the old one becomes cost-prohibitive.) And warranties aren't free; that cost is built into the cost of a car.
It's amazing how Americans have so little understanding of basic economics. No wonder this country is going broke. It's not just you, it's most of the people in this thread. It's just like all the dumb Americans on the streets protesting "socialism" while saying "don't touch Medicare!".
But that wasn't a grand conspiracy; you need a road system anyway, and once it's put in, of course cars are going to piggy-back on it.
In many places, the railroads are operated by the government and subsidized by the tax payer.
Yes, but none of those things are about how your car makes a profit. They are about how your car reduces your cost and increases convenience when there isn't good mass transit to a destination. Your car does not make a profit.
Bruce Perens.
Please read just one book on microeconomics. Your ignorance is inexcusable.
Bruce Perens.
...you can't see anything outside your own narrow worldview...
Try moving to (and working in) Manhattan and see how well driving works out for you there.
Well, if you think Manhattan isn't a narrow view of the world compared to the rest of the US...
Of course it makes more sense, living in most places in America, to own a car rather than take the bus...and car driving the most sensible choice.
Then why was did you call me a moron for choosing to drive my car vs. taking the bus? You seem to now say that I was right for doing it. You are sending mixed signals here.
namely the fact that the roads are mostly free (you pay for it in other ways, rather than directly through a road-use tax, tolls, or similar).
Um, you just yelled at me for claiming that roads are built for free (which I never said). Now you say they are? Also, I do pay road-use taxes (yearly car tax, gas taxes), and I paid a toll for crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of that toll actually went to supporting the bus system, so not only was I not getting a free ride, others were getting a free ride off of me. Which I mentioned before, but it appears that you are no longer reading anything I write.
just because America has done a ridiculously bad job at implementing public transit doesn't mean it's always bad.
...which I never said. Once again you are getting angry about things I never said.
So your time is worthless?
No, which is why I stopped riding the bus to work. It was wasting over an hour a day. Like I told you before. Twice. And you even quoted the sentence where I said that. Are you even reading anything I write?
You could just build your own for much less than buying a new, warrantied car.
It's amazing how Americans have so little understanding of basic economics.
I agree, and your statement above regarding building my own car for less illustrates how little you understand about economies of scale. Or do you think it's a coincidence that the only companies that build affordable cars are huge? I also find it hilarious that you equate fixing a care with building one from scratch.
Get back to me when you get a little more consistent with your statements, and when you start reading what I actually post.
Please answer just the one question that I posted. Your evasion of my question is inexcusable. As is the fact that you never say why I am ignorant, you just keep repeating it as though it is some sort of forgone conclusion.
You mean "Are tools that help you make money good or bad?". There are a lot of senses of good and bad, for example I can take it as an ethical question, which is probably not what you mean.
Perhaps you mean "are tools good or bad for your business?" This can be stated better, though. Does a tool enable you to perform a particular business? Does it reduce cost? Is it likely to cause injury, which would increase costs or cause you to not be able to continue to pursue your business? These make a lot more sense than good and bad.
Or, perhaps you mean is a tool an asset or a liability?
Tools are depreciable assets, not liabilities. The debt you owe for the purchase of a tool would be a liability. If you pay for the tool with cash on hand, there isn't a liability associated with it on the balance sheet of your business.
If the value of the tool depreciates faster than you pay off the debt you incurred to buy it, the liability is greater than the asset.
It seems to me that it makes much more sense to think of this as asset, liability, and depreciation than as good and bad.
Bruce Perens.
But to do real HSR, you're going to need a dedicated track. Good luck building one of those in California and Oregon.
Huh? We already have a road system. It will take me to just about any inhabited place. If you want to go to a remote and uninhabited place, you can get a 4x4 and drive to it - but it's not going to be someone's "back gardens".
Umm, what's the problem there? Other than the usual problems with securing eminent domain, hiring workers, etc.? Land shouldn't be a big problem as much of that area is sparsely populated outside the main cities.
I would ; the large majority of US journalists will have seen "The Taking of Pelham 123" and understood it's implications quite well. It doesn't even particularly matter which version of the film they've seen - I'm told the recent (last decade or so?) remake was competently done, if I remember the reviews properly.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It's the same sense in which anything "makes a profit": transportation is a necessity for me to do business (earn a living), and it's cheaper than the alternatives (public transportation), both in terms of direct expenditures and in terms of opportunity cost.
If you have a specific point to make about the cost of cars, why don't you make it?
Are you thinking of countries where the users pay the full the cost of the roads through tolls and gas taxes and other user fees, or governments that don't build roads?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Excellent info, thanks for the link!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
(Replying to myself, tsk tsk...) Back in the day (late 1970s?) Scientific American dedicated an entire issue to transportation. One of the interesting bits I retained from that was that, throughout history, people have been willing to commute up to about an hour each way. Back when everybody walked, commutes were up to about three to four miles; now folks drive up to an hour (at different speeds according to the roads etc.), and people who drive their own helicopters to work tend to live about an hour's flight from their work.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Uh, I've never met a construction contractor with no hammer. I have noticed that if you drive a lot of nails, the nailgun is worthwhile, but you will still encounter situations where you need a hammer. The same has not proven true with trains. Trains have rarely rarely (and today never) show benefit over cars for transporting people in the US (typically they cost more, and take more time, and are much less convenient). That's what they mean when they say trains have not been profitable. They're just saying that the train (nailgun in your example) has never been a superior alternative to the car (hammer, in your example), and hence installing a rail line will not be a worthwhile venture.
I pointed out that you'd forgotten that you need roads as well.
This seems to have offended you, first you quibbled that cars could go off road, now you seem to think that roads are just magicly "there" and don't need the same kind of financing, construction and maintenance as any other kind of transport infrastructure.
Your car isn't the source of your freedom, it's (as always) society.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'm not offended, I'm just acknowledging the world as it is: with roads. We have them, we are going to continue to have them. In that world, cars are freedom. Without roads, they're much less useful, but then without roads even walking is sometimes a challenge.
Every country can do that. Printing money is something every government does, and printing money doesn't create debt, and never has.
However, printing more money does cause inflation.
Kind of off-topic, but this is a common misunderstanding. The most direct causal link between inflation and printing money is that when inflation happens, you are eventually forced to print more money so that payment settlement can continue normally. [1] The misunderstanding comes from people confusing printing money with government spending.
There are a number of causes of inflation, but for this type of discussion, the relationship of productive capacity and aggregate demand is key. The short version is the following. When aggregate demand grows too fast for productive capacity to keep up, then you get inflation (because competition drives up prices). When productive capacity grows faster than aggregate demand, then unemployment results (because companies that cannot fill their order books lay off workers). Those are the key constraints of the economy.
From a sovereign government's point of view, this means that while it can obviously spend as much as it likes, there are real constraints to keep in mind. If the discretionary budget deficit is too large, there will be inflation. If the discretionary budget deficit is too small, there will be unemployment. (Of course, due to automatic stabilisers, the final budget outcome can be very large and unemployment can be high at the same time. In such a situation, the reasonable thing to do is to increase the size of the discretionary budget deficit. This often decreases the final budget outcome via automatic stabilisers.)
One cannot say a priori how large the budget deficit should be to be neutral with respect to both inflation and unemployment. The size of the neutral budget deficit changes over time, based on changing circumstances in the private sector's savings behaviour and the development of the external sector.
Fundamentally though, printing money is just a liquidity management operation. What really matters are spending flows.
If you truly have an open mind and want to learn more about the long version, I suggest you search for Modern Monetary Theory. A good starting point is here, and more thorough analyses can be found on this blog of an Australian economics professor.
[1] The recent story of Argentina in that respect is very educational. Basically, Argentina has long had quite high inflation, and the government believed - like most people do, unfortunately, due to that misunderstanding - that they could fight inflation by not printing any more money. Well, prices were rising anyway, and at some point there was a lack of physical money for people to make their payments. Keep in mind that electronic payments are not well developed in Argentina, so people might have had money in a bank account, but were unable to get it out simply because the ATMs ran out of notes. This was not in any way a bank run, it was just an under-supply of tokens, and the irrationality that goes along with that kind of problems hurt price stability on top of the inflation that was happening anyway. In the end, printing more money solved that problem, but crucially, it was really only about printing more money, purely liquidity management. By printing this money, the government did not increase its spending.
Very interesting. I'm not going to pretend to be a professional economist. What's your view of the things going on in the USA today with regards to the debt crisis?
I am not a professional economist either. I'm a mathematician who got interested in macroeconomics and I seriously started reading around about a year ago. I don't have a quick fix to the US situation, but the first thing that needs to happen is for the focus of the discussion to shift. People need to realize is that there is no debt crisis. The debt is basically just after-the-fact accounting (with the exception of interest payments, but those shouldn't be the primary concern).
Once that happens, the rough outline for what needs to be done is that somebody needs to start spending again. After all, the actual problem (from my political perspective) is the insane amount of unemployment, which is really the biggest kind of waste you can imagine. Any kind of squabbling over government inefficiency is just peanuts compared to that. And the unemployment is caused by the simple fact that not enough spending is happening to put the people into employment.
There are basically three sources of spending: private (consumption and investment), government, and external sector.
The private sector is still dealing with the aftermath of the financial crisis. Part of the reason why the stimulus has not been as effective as it could have been is that it consisted of a lot of tax breaks. I am not against that on principle, but you have to realize that when people who are deep in debt get a tax break, they're probably going to use it to pay down their debt. So spending doesn't increase and so it doesn't help the economy recover. (This is the balance sheet recession argument of Richard Koo) Businesses are in a similar situation, and they aren't going to invest unless they see spending go up first.
The external sector is also unlikely to be a source of spending soon (and it's questionable whether you even want it to be one; if you look at it simply in terms of cargo ships bringing stuff to the US vs. cargo ships taking stuff away from the US, then I would say that the trade balance is hugely in favour of the US - China just keeps sending you guys stuff for free!)
Which basically leaves the government to fill in the spending gap because there is nobody else left to do it. So if you want a soundbite, I'd say: build that high-speed rail (to fit with the article) or carpet the southern US with solar plants, or fix the roads, or something like that. Basically, any kind of labour-heavy infrastructure investment is the way to go.
And it's important to keep in mind that adding X amount of discretionary spending to the budget will not increase the budget deficit by X. After all, those newly employed workers are going to pay taxes and they will no longer receive unemployment benefits. And then realistically there's also the multiplier effect which orthodox economists don't like because it conflicts with their ideologies, but even they have to concede at least the first part of the argument. So increasing discretionary spending by X will increase the budget deficit by less than X, and it might in fact reduce the deficit (possibly with some delay).
Once that happens, the rough outline for what needs to be done is that somebody needs to start spending again. ...
I am not against that on principle, but you have to realize that when people who are deep in debt get a tax break, they're probably going to use it to pay down their debt.
But doesn't that give the debt owners more money that they can then spend on other stuff, or loan out to other people to spend on stuff? Of course, that's not quite as effective as direct spending, but it's not like the money goes into a black hole.
So if you want a soundbite, I'd say: build that high-speed rail (to fit with the article) or carpet the southern US with solar plants, or fix the roads, or something like that. Basically, any kind of labour-heavy infrastructure investment is the way to go.
Unfortunately, it seems like these days, government spending never really seems to do much good. Instead of building roads (we don't really need a lot of new highways or the like, but we do need to fix up the ones we have, especially bridges), sending men to the moon and developing new technologies to do so, investing in fundamental research, etc., all I ever see is spending money on military hardware, sending money to other screwed-up nations like Mexico for them to waste, spending money on poorly-designed social programs that don't do anything to relieve poverty, etc. If they cut a lot of that stuff out, and spent the money instead on lots of medical research, a space elevator, a personal rapid transit system, etc., we'd put lots of people to work, create lots of very useful new technologies, and become a world leader in many things again. But we don't seem to want to do that.
Once that happens, the rough outline for what needs to be done is that somebody needs to start spending again. ...
I am not against that on principle, but you have to realize that when people who are deep in debt get a tax break, they're probably going to use it to pay down their debt.
But doesn't that give the debt owners more money that they can then spend on other stuff, or loan out to other people to spend on stuff?
Not necessarily. What we're talking about here is people paying debt back to their bank. The bank will be very happy about that, but being repaid won't make them give out more loans directly, because bank loans are not limited by the amount of money available to the bank anyway. So debts being settled will just cause the money supply to shrink - the M1-M3 type of money supply, not the monetary base; the latter is still very high in the US due to the Fed's monetary policy, but ultimately it's the private sector that determines the size of M1-M3, and the Fed's quantitative easing has demonstrated spectacularly that the orthodox theories about how those quantities are related are just plain wrong. You'll find a little more on this - light on the theory, but with pretty graphs - here.
This is one of the things that I had the most problems understanding, asking myself the "is it really like this?" question more than a few times. But a number of sources agree that at an operational level, the decision by the bank to give out a loan has nothing to do with how much money (reserves, to be more precise) the bank has. The people who make those decisions don't even know how much money the bank has. They just make the decision based on creditworthiness and interest rates, and then a different department at the bank worries about getting the money - if necessary - after the fact. This liquidity management is entirely separate. It takes a while to unlearn the incorrect elementary school picture of banking that we are all told.
So the total amount of debt, and therefore the size of the money supply, grows and shrinks based on changes in the demand for debt and the risk-averseness of the banks. Currently, the US economy is still settling debts, and the money just "disappears". In the accounting sense of assets and liabilities, the corresponding assets and liabilities (money and anti-money) cancel each other out and that's it, the balance sheet shrinks and nothing replaces the lost volume.
Unfortunately, it seems like these days, government spending never really seems to do much good. Instead of building roads (we don't really need a lot of new highways or the like, but we do need to fix up the ones we have, especially bridges), sending men to the moon and developing new technologies to do so, investing in fundamental research, etc., all I ever see is spending money on military hardware, sending money to other screwed-up nations like Mexico for them to waste, spending money on poorly-designed social programs that don't do anything to relieve poverty, etc. If they cut a lot of that stuff out, and spent the money instead on lots of medical research, a space elevator, a personal rapid transit system, etc., we'd put lots of people to work, create lots of very useful new technologies, and become a world leader in many things again. But we don't seem to want to do that.
It does seem like a kind of vicious cycle:
The almost inquisition-like hatred of everything to do with government spending prevents politicians from pushing for visionary projects like the ones you mentioned. As a result, only two kinds of government spending happen: the boring things that people just take for granted (and that are probably efficient as often as they are inefficient), and the ugly back room deals that continue precisely because they are ugly and dominated by ruthless vested interests. The latter is correctly identified as inefficient and wasteful,
The almost inquisition-like hatred of everything to do with government spending prevents politicians from pushing for visionary projects like the ones you mentioned.
It seems to me that the visionary projects are the ones which really boost the economy in the long term: look at the interstate highway system of the 50s, the space program (esp. Apollo) of the 60s, the Hoover Dam (though I like "Boulder Dam" better) in the 30s, the internet of the 70s-80s, etc. China's doing a lot of this too these days, building giant public-works projects, building a space program, etc., so it seems like they have the same idea.
I have no idea how this cycle could be broken. From where I'm observing, Obama probably had the necessary momentum to pull it off early in his presidency, but it seems like he wasted the opportunity.
I think Obama's totally wasted his opportunity to really turn things around in many ways. He pushed really hard for a horrible health-care "reform" that doesn't really fix much and just helps big insurance companies, rather than proving actual healthcare, and spent his first 1-2 years concentrating on that. Other than that, he hasn't really done much differently from Bush: we're still in the mideast wars, he actually expanded the Afghanistan campaign, nothing's changed in Gitmo like he promised, etc. For someone who made himself out to be a socialist, he's been almost completely the opposite, just helping corporate interests.
You only think a car means freedom because you have been deprived of a good transportation system.
I live in the near manchester in the UK which I consider to be an area with pretty good public transport and haven't yet learnt to drive. I can't justify the expensive of learning and starting to drive at the moment but not being able to drive seriously limits my options.
Sure getting to the uni in the city center (i'm a PHD student) is no problem and neither is visiting my parents because I picked where I live to be on the intersection of a train route for the former and a bus route for the later. but if I want to go anywhere in the area that isn't on a direct bus or train link from where I am the time from "deciding to go" to actually getting there is MUCH longer by public transport than by car and i'm very limited in what I can carry. The latter means if I want anything large i'm stuck with either getting it delivered (which means waiting in for ages since I live alone) or getting my parents to help (either to drive to where it's sold with me or to drop it off after it's delivered at their house).
And then there is the problem that public transport drops off sharply in the evenings and on sundays and stops almost completely in the middle of the night. This combined with the total number of hours in an evening makes going out in the evening largely impractical unless I go directly from uni
A car means freedom to go in the direction I want when I want rather than having to plan my life around the directions the public transport goes in and the times that the public transport runs. It means the freedom to stop off on a long journey without having to drag my luggage with me (or try to find a left luggage place but they seem to be rare and expensive and often have annoying restrictions on what can be stored). It means the freedom to take far more stuff with me rather than being forced to travel light all the time.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register