Slashdot Mirror
China's Yearly Budget For High-Speed Rail: $100 Billion
An anonymous reader writes "For all of those wondering about China's massive high speed rail network, it costs some serious cash. Running high speed lines across the nation is expensive — to the tune of $100 billion dollars a year. This covers the cost to maintain the network, build it, and pay all of the staff. The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head. The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result. There is also the problem that many of Chinese poor make so little money they can't afford to ride it. The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count."
Where's the scandal?!
$100B divided by 2 million employees equals $50,000 per employee -- high for China, maybe, but matches the MEDIAN male income in the U.S.
Given that the $100B actually includes much more than employee salary, like, uh, the material costs of BUILDING the railroad, and trains, and stations, etc, the figure seems rather like a bargain.
"The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head." : When does that not happen to some extent?
"The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result." : This happens everywhere.
"There is also the problem that many of Chinese poor make so little money they can't afford to ride it." : Maybe China is planning for the future, maybe?! You know, like when their middle class is comparable in size to that in other developed nations?
"The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count." : Then what is the "$100 Billion" figure?! Sheesh! Make up your mind!
That's is a huge amount of money... can't they do what they did in the West to build the railroads and just hire cheap Chinese workers? [yes, this is a tasteless joke, as circumstances back then were horrendous and many people died]
I don't know what kind of reputation "THE DIPLOMAT" has in the field of journalism, but this article is just pure crap. Despite the title, the article has almost nothing to do with high speed rail in China. Using recent problems that have come to light with the management of China's rail system, the article is actually just a mostly unflattering portrayal of the fiscal situation in China's military. A more accurate title for the article should be something like "Corruption plagues the PLA".
An excerpt for you:
This breakdown suggests that 100% of the PLA’s budget was diverted towards real requirements. But the parable of the railways strongly suggests that this cannot be right. How much of the PLA’s budget has been spent on retirement homes for generals in Florida, or funneled into private business ventures, or used to buy promotions? How much has been wasted on bogus capabilities that the military doesn’t really need, but whose purchase helped to line influential pockets? And how much has been spent on genuine capabilities, but capabilities whose price tag was hugely inflated so that highly-placed officials could skim off the surplus?
There is almost nothing of value on high speed rail that has not been already revealed from other media sources.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
"...The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head."
No, I'd say the problem is anyone assuming or painting a picture that a project of this magnitude did not have corruption built into it years ago before ground even broke.
Please don't make it sound like "corruption" is some new concept that was magically birthed from a $100 billion dollar program just last week that no one has ever heard of.
the material suppliers are also likely taking there cut as well.
also you need to count up keep and running costs in that 100B
Well, obviously, the extremely poor can't afford to ride the train. American or European poor couldn't afford to ride the train either. I just got back. The cost of a ticket from Fuzhou to Xiamen (around 2 hours at about 200 km/h) was 122 RMB. That converts to just over $20 US dollars. Extremely inexpensive, in my opinion. There are many slower trains that are much cheaper. Many migrant workers travel by train to the cities, and back home during the holidays.
I don't know what kind of reputation "THE DIPLOMAT" has in the field of journalism, but this article is just pure crap. Despite the title, the article has almost nothing to do with high speed rail in China.
Yes, it's a very weird and completely pointless article. It really does start off talking about high speed rail, but then inexplicably jumps to corruption in the PLA (People's Liberation Army) and then proceeds to jump back and forth between the two topics for no apparent reason, making absolutely no worthwhile comments about either.
What is it with Americans' hatred of passenger rail? It works, it's safe, cost-effective, and requires less government subsidy than highways or airport travel. It's also a hell of a lot more pleasant than flying.
"The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count." Except in the US, guys like this are sending millions in Medicare money to Cuba to give Castro's economy a much-needed boost: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/10/18/2734149/laundering-ring-moved-medicare.html
1 - i don't know where that shift button is when the capital form of myself is needed.
// I had to add a third thought...
2 - 100 million is nothing compared to what that amount was worth 10 years ago
3 - we have sent china a lot of our manufacturing machinery - are we really surprised?
Central Planning does NOT work.
The key to progress in society with as little strife as possible is evolution, not revolution.
As with every other system of complexity, society can most effectively evolve (that is, adapt to the needs at hand) when there are robust processes of variation and selection (what some call the "Free Market"), which implies the localization and decentralization of the power structure; centralized power—by its very nature—inhibits the process of evolution by quashing variation and stifling selective forces. There is no such thing as an Intelligent Designer; it is foolish to put your faith in a "noble" bureaucrat, who gazes into his crystal ball and then—at everyone else's expense—pushes and pulls naive levers and buttons based on what he thinks he sees.
Wrong on many levels. The West Coast Main Line (WCML) is forecast to hit capacity soon. In fact, they have had to reduce stops, remove stops etc, to keep the line running with any reasonable frequency. So a new line is needed. If you are building a new line, there is no good reason to not build HSR line. The costs will be fairly similar anyway. The high speed element is something nice, but not the main point of building a new line.
Isn't that about what we pay to China every year just to cover the interest on the money our country has borrowed from them? At least all that interest money is being put to good use.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
"One hundred... BILLION... dollars." Well, now we know what Dr. Evil is doing in his retirement. He's building a high speed rail network in China, with frickin laser beams attached.
Command economies result is massive misallocations of capital compared to market economies, and this is also true of China. The "Ghost Cities" are the biggest manifestation of economic distortion, but hardly the only one.
On the plus side, communist China is only killing thousands of its own people every year, a vast improvement on the millions (or tens of millions) killed in the past. Progress!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
See, who says the US isn't investing in high speed rail! Whose $100B do you think that is?
Don't be a d-bag. In 2011, a high speed train flew off the tracks. Almost everyone was killed, and those that survived were silenced. It's buried there to this day along with incriminating evidence of negligence and you can go dig it up if you feel like it.
They link to the New Yorker's article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/22/121022fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=all Corruption is continuing in China, but it will take a major reform/progressive movement to stop it all. The New Yorker is mainly on the railroad budget and you will have to go elsewhere to find dirt on the PLA's progress/threat.
The total capacity of riders is increasing at a slower rate than their population so technically the "amount" of available high speed rail is going down, lol.
Sorry, dude.
I've worked in the health care field and Medicare and Medicaid are literally a license to print money. These systems are horrifically expensive and do not provide the kind of medical treatment you would want for your parents or grand-parents. We need something, but the existing system is making someone very rich and the elderly and poor are not getting the care they need.
The horrifically expensive part is the American approach to provisioning health care. It costs a third more per capita than other first-world countries and provides worse outcomes. But that does not mean the solution is to dismantle the only single-payer system in the US and replace it with vouchers, making the elderly go to insurance providers that would prefer to place them on an ice floe.
Medicare may suck but it is better than anything else the US is doing in health care.
Remain calm! All is well!
"The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result." : This happens everywhere.
At least here in France, rail accidents are extremely rare events. A quick search at wikipedia suggests that this is no exception
You are asking if I was paid to post this? No, but I, like thousands of other fraud examiners, am paid to track down fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. It is an enormous problem - very real. I don't have a right-wing or a left-wing agenda at all - politicians from both sides of the aisle are fully engaged in helping fight Medicare fraud - this is a completely non-partisan issue. The link I copied is to a news story from two days ago involving a real case from Miami - where a fraudster is accused in criminal court of funneling millions in Medicare funds to banks in Cuba. Maybe YOU want to play politics with this issue, but I don't know any serious folks who look at this as a political football at all.
Railroad development in the 19th century USA was a cesspool of explicit and implicit corruption. It also created vital infrastructure.
The crash in China reads at first glance like any other Horrible Example from systems safety engineering: lack of redundancy and communication, and poorly interacting emergency procedures.
If you are building a new line, there is no good reason to not build HSR line.
Except if the igher cost of the high speed rail line outweighs the increase benefits of the line. A high speed rail line does cost more than a more modest approach. What I've been hearing worldwide is that most such HSR lines lose money. Meaning they aren't passing the most basic economics test (that is, having a positive ROI).
I see a bunch of name-calling here. What I don't see is a sane reason to build high speed rail.
As to California, they've already killed their HSR attempt with environmental regulation red tape. The project needs federal funds to work and those federal funds are conditional on California starting the project soon. But that just isn't going to happen due to the several year delay for preparing reports on the environmental impact of the project.
I figure the current leaders picked a face-saving way to back out without appearing to.
1. I don't have an agenda. Healthcare fraud examination is my job - I don't know about "almost every government program". 2. I was referring to a specific, timely news article about a Miami criminal case involving Medicare funds leaving the US and showing up in Cuban banks 3. What you are saying regarding private insurance admin expenses is very interesting. Do you have some special insight into the problem? I'm like Ross Perot - I'm all ears. Contacting me is simple - my name + gmail.
"There is also the problem that many of Chinese poor make so little money they can't afford to ride it. The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count."
Shouldn't that read:
The sad fact is many of the Chinese are too poor and make so little money they can't afford to ride it. The problem is that so much money is being spent no one can even keep count.
I love the high speed rail in Germany and use it almost every day. However, every HSR system will have accidents. It's the cost of doing business when you're propelling people at 200mph for hundreds of kms or more at a time. It's almost impossible to police the entire system.
Link to German accident where 101 people died.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the Chinese government's response. And I hate the fact that when you watch the videos of the train cars being buried without investigation that you can see bodies falling out. I also hate the fact that they cancelled the S&R operation and a few people disobeyed and found a living baby. But, stating that deaths due to HSR only happen in China is quite naïve.
And, FWIW, the US doesn't have HSR, so you can't compare rail accidents between China/Germany and the US. The Acela Express is a huge POS (not ever really HSR), and it seems to be getting worse every time I use it :(
1. From the article description: "The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count".
2. From an NPR report dated October 11, 2007: "There's a nationwide crime epidemic going on that rakes in $35 billion or more each year. Exactly how much is being stolen is impossible to say, because the federal government doesn't try to measure it. It's Medicare fraud." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15178883
3. See the similarity? I do.
4. From the Miami Herald newspaper two days ago: "An offshore remittance company called Caribbean Transfers financed a complex money-laundering ring that moved more than $30 million in stolen Medicare money from South Florida into Cuba’s banking system, federal authorities said Thursday." Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/18/3056554/feds-remittance-firm-at-center.html#storylink=cpy
5. Is this so hard to see the relationship? Do you see that I'm not politicking?
You must be fun at the watercooler with your facts and logic and reasonable thinking.
Anyway, the Brits cut costs on their rail network and it resulted in lots of people dying when infrastructure collapsed and years of totally disrupted service around the country. And the US rail system is a joke with also many many deaths thanks to lousy infrastructure.
Corruption is indeed a problem in China but at least they are dealing with it, and not with leisure resort prisons but with death penalties. It ain't perfect but the west is hardly any better. It is one of the reasons health care is such a problem in the west, turns out that the more money you put in, the less the nurses get and the more managers you get with paychecks totally unrelated to the worth of their work. But hey, it ain't in brown envelopes, so everything is alright or so says the party of managers (Tories, VVD, Republicans) and they are trustworthy surely.
Oh wait, no, VVD Senator turns out to be corrupt was in the news yesterday, what a suprise. And this week, top managers of health care insurers in Holland make salaries closing in on the half a million euro's, far more then was agreed upon, not that the right wing government did anything to check of course. Nope it is a total surprise to them...
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can't comment about California, but the Chineese goal is quite good. HSR to connect South East Asia to the Middle East and Europe. There is lots of trade between those regions, that right now goes over the sea. Slow and limited. HSR that could traverse the continents in 2 ro 3 days, would be great for trade, and much more economical. The goal is a lofty one. How it is being carried out may be a different situation.
China may not be the president of the US, but the Prime minister of Canada is currently setting up special trade deals with China, so that Chineese corporations will have more legal clout in Canada than our provinces and municipalities. If they say our eco-friendly, decomcratically chosen laws are harming their revenues and profits, they can sue us, and at that is is not even public. The new laws state that it has to be kept from the people.
The issue for China is there isn't enough high quality fly ash around to make the cement needed to build its railway network in a sustainable manner. Without the proper ash, rail tracks have a lifespan of a dozen years vs the usual century, and thus need to be constantly maintained and rebuilt. The whole adventure reeks of money wastage...
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/is-china-overreaching-on-high-speed-rail/69490/
ROI is very difficult to calculate for infrastructure like this. I used the channel tunnel as an example in an earlier post. It will probably be another 15-25 years before the investors make their money back on that, so by some metrics it's not a good investment. But that doesn't take into account the secondary benefits. How much extra profit was made by companies in the UK and France being able to send people and equipment to each other very quickly? That's much harder to calculate: every business passenger on the Eurostar is working for a company that thinks that sending them is more valuable than the cost of the ticket, so that gives you an absolute lower bound, but the upper bound is mucuh harder to find.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The issue is the "distrust" of government. Rather than government death panels, we have private death panels who are (sometimes literally) paid to deny treatment, when the government ones don't have a vested interest in your death.
But for some reason, the private ones are fine and the government ones are evil.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah, and I had an FBI friend that was paid to track down FEMA fraud. There's millions of that as well. You would be the worst person to ask about medicare fraud. It's like asking prison guards about crime statistics. Everyone they see all day long is a criminal, that's what they do. It's also why they'll have no grasp on crime in general. You can't see the forest when you are inside a tree.
Learn to love Alaska
This should be stomped on. It's a shill response from the cretins doing this criminal activity. They should be executed as so many are considering the moral turpitude of Chinese culture.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I don't see the relationship. You live medicare fraud, so you see it relevant to everything. Nobody else does. Sorry.
Learn to love Alaska
I see a bunch of name-calling here. What I don't see is a sane reason to build high speed rail.
That is probably just because your american and you whole way of life and cultural identity revolves around car use. It makes it far more difficult to see a world where cars simply cease to exist in their current form.
Sorry, but every other developed country recognises that us all having our own, incredibly energy hungry tin box that goes where we tell it is just not sustainable after the oil runs out and even before then is just not the most efficient way of doing things. It might take 100 years for us to run out of oil completely but how long is it before it simply becomes too expensive for a large part of the population to afford to drive to work every day?
You guys in the states have spent decades building cities that are just too spread out for their own good. Sooner or later you are going to have to build more cities like New York where you have an incredibly high population density. Then you can build a decent mass transit system that takes people most of the way, then lets them walk the remaining few hundred yards.
The alternative is to cope with fuel costs that constantly spiral upward until it runs out, this has already started. Even if you build an entire countries worth of electric cars in order to power them all you would need a nuclear plant on every street corner to generate that much power.
The simple fact is that in the decades to come mass transit and densely populated cities where most of the population live is simply going to become more and more like the only option unless someone cracks a way of getting energy for nothing without drilling it up out of the ground like we do currently.
China might be throwing money at their high speed rail industry now, but sooner or later they might end up selling the expertise they gain to every other country in the world.
I dont read
You don't understand what T-Bucket is saying. He's saying that when a Chinese worker assembles a phone for $17/day, in a shift of 14-16 hours, living in a dorm with 15 beds in a 12x12 box, and then that phone is sold for $400 in America, netting China $8 of that $400... that that $8 is stolen from the US. That, really, that $8 belongs to America... and it was produced by overcharging Americans for Chinese goods.
China then takes those unjustly earned funds, and loans them back to America.
T-Bucket would never personally work for $1/hr, nor would he consider that a fair wage for his work. But when someone in China works for $1, that is $1 stolen from America.
In other words, T-Bucket is a fucking moron.
Bits of the WCML are set to hit capacity. Travel to Manchester at 5pm from London and you'll find the trains largely empty because the 4tph schedule is way in excess of demand.
The original plan for the WMCL upgrade would have allowed for 150mph running - which would have been pretty much sufficient - but was canned on cost grounds (although extremely modest compared with an entire new high-speed line). The (electric) ECML trains have been capable of 150mph for years but the track was never signalled for that line speed, except experimentally. We've already written off higher-speed rail twice when the full costs became apparent.
Now you could argue that the real constraint is the need to mix freight and passenger traffic on the same track. And that certainly constrains capacity as well as operating speed. However, you could relieve that problem by providing additional lower speed routes for freight - and that would be significantly cheaper because you could do without electrification, simplify signalling and you don't have to pass through centres of population with expensive land and the need for expensive engineering solutions - and just do some remediation of bottlenecks on the existing passenger lines.
There's only an economic case for HS2 if the alternative is to do nothing. If you're looking at ways of getting the best return on your rail investment, HS2 is way down the list.
Because the ability to move people and goods around very quickly efficiently and with minimal pollution is a good thing?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I've never fully understood this concept that you build infrastructure to make money directly. That's crazy. Infrastructure is a sunk cost that has secondary benefits; for example, building HS2 will allow more people to live in places like Manchester & Birmingham instead of the South East, which reduces the pressures on infrastructure in the South East, which means you don't need to invest so heavily in things like transport, housing, water and power in an already densely populated area.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I live 10 minutes from work, 5 minutes from my wife's school, 3 minutes from my son's school, 2 minutes from the grocery store and 5 minutes from church. I live 20 minutes from a major airport and 25 from another one. I am positive that you have heard of the city I live in. This year I ate grapes from my own grape vines, peaches from my own peach trees, asian pears from my own trees, and citrus from my own tree and a vegetable garden. It isn't huge, but I can see the sky above my head.
My wife is from Europe, and I have lived in two European capital cities for a year and half, and pretty much lived a month in New York City. Living in a shoe box surrounded by other shoe boxes is hell. I don't know what is going to happen 10-15 years from now, let alone 100, but what you describe sounds awful, like one of the worst types of dystopia. The funny thing is that the first thing most Europeans do when they get here is buy the biggest Buick or Mercury Grand Marquis they can find.
I've never fully understood this concept that you build infrastructure to make money directly.
It's not complicated. Infrastructure which makes a profit is completely self-funded. And it's a reasonable measure to look at for something which has a lot of claimed value. Let's look at your example. If it really is beneficial to have more people live in Manchester and Birmingham rather than South East (and use the train), then they'll be willing to pay for the location change in one way or another.
For a government which can also be funded by property taxes, it is possible to make a profit even with an overly cheap train fare by increased property taxes on the land along the route (though such efforts usually ignore the areas that declined in value, such as a decline in South East property values in your example above).
As to the alleged transport, housing, water, and power costs, they'll have to be pretty high (and something actually paid by the government in question) to counter the cost of putting in a high speed rail line.
Because the ability to move people and goods around very quickly efficiently and with minimal pollution is a good thing?
And what does that have to do with high speed rail? Keep in mind that the high speed rail projects of which California was the last hold out, were remarkably inefficient in their construction. Aside from the high cost, two of the lines, in Florida and California, would have started with particularly low demand routes that would have guaranteed low ridership for years in the beginning.
Second, no one bothered to connect any of these routes. There were a bunch of disconnected routes. You'd have to hop on an Amtrak or something else to connect between systems.
Even by the low standards of urban transportation systems, the US examples were remarkably inefficient and poorly thought out.
It's also worth noting that the US already has an efficient rail system for transporting goods. So there's no need for high speed rail for that purpose.
Frankly, I think the automobile system in conjunction with bikes and walking for short distances is the best system for point to point travel at minimum pollution. High speed rail might be useful, but it's got a remarkably poor business case for it.
Perhaps the cities in the US are too far apart for high speed rail to make sense, but if you want to for example get from London to Paris, I can't really think of any reason why you won't go by Euro Star (the high speed rail service between those two cities).
How do you calculate that?
Put a toll on them.
The New Yorker is a magazine. That's the date of release of the issue the article will be appearing in.
Please help metamoderate.
The reasoning behind it is that people might be more willing to set up their business in Birmingham if London is only a 50 minute train journey away.
That is probably just because your american and you whole way of life and cultural identity revolves around car use. It makes it far more difficult to see a world where cars simply cease to exist in their current form.
We've had a number of disaster movies where this happens. One merely needs to watch an alien invasion or zombie apocalypse movie to easily see a world without the car. So it's not hard at all.
What is hard is to come up with a competitive system that we'd voluntarily forego the car for. High speed rail just doesn't cut it as a rival.
The simple fact is that in the decades to come mass transit and densely populated cities where most of the population live is simply going to become more and more like the only option unless someone cracks a way of getting energy for nothing without drilling it up out of the ground like we do currently.
And there are already a number of ways to do that (biofuels as replacement for petroleum and electric cars, for example). So it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
You asked about High Speed Rail, not the specific (apparently extremely brain dead) plans in the United States. Perhaps a better question is why is the USA now failing to implement major infrastructure projects?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
The real constraint is not so much the need to mix freight and passenger traffic on the same track. It is the need to mix intercity and local train services on the same track. If the Virgin train were to travel up the line at 150 mph, it would crash into the back of a London Midland train loading and unloading passengers at one of the many smaller towns along the way.
Which they will, through ticket sales. However your simplistic reasoning doesn't take a lot of factors into account. If the UK government don't make it attractive for people to live and work in places outside of the South East, they're going to have invest heavily in infrastructure in the South East: transport, power generation, water and housing being the obvious ones. That infrastructure will have to be paid for. Will it cost less, or more, than HS2?
Think of reducing pressure on London and the South East as a "loss leader" to break the vicious circle of investing huge amounts of money in the South East to the detriment of the rest of the UK, which then makes the South East a more attractive place to live, which then increases the demand for investment in infrastructure in the South East, which...
Syllable : It's an Operating System
We've had a number of disaster movies where this happens.
Soylent Green comes to mind. Heavy population density, people living in cars with no gas and they could not even afford to cut their massive sideburns. Horrible.
"For all of those wondering about America's massive interstate highway network, it costs some serious cash. Running roads across the nation is expensive - to the tune of $50 billion dollars a year. This covers the cost to maintain the network, build it, and pay all of the staff. The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head. The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result. There is also the problem that many of America's poor make so little money they can't afford to ride it. The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count."
Don't blame environmental regulation for the delay in HSR. The EIR is the weapon of choice used by people who either were upset that the HSR wasn't coming through their town, were uneasy that it was coming through their town or didn't want the thing built in the first place.
Kind of a reflex action you're showing, eh?
Perhaps, though a commonly (and in this case poorly) employed fallacy is a justifiable reason to have a rhetorical reflex.
I watched that documentary. Terrible situation, but at least they were able to work out a solution in the end. Not every tale has such a happy ending.
if you want to for example get from London to Paris, I can't really think of any reason why you won't go by Euro Star (the high speed rail service between those two cities).
Well, it looks to be about the same cost as the airlines, but takes longer. Perhaps it is more comfortable. I haven't been on it. I am sure that the security is, for now, less obnoxious than the airlines, but it's only a matter of time.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
How much extra profit was made by companies in the UK and France being able to send people and equipment to each other very quickly?
You measure that by willingness to pay. If companies are making money from Chunnel services, they'll pay money for it. The ticket price itself becomes your feedback. This is the great simplification which a market-based system provides for such things.
Perhaps a better question is why is the USA now failing to implement major infrastructure projects?
Because we are in a constant battle between trying to decide whether to spend all our money on the military or spend all our money on making everybody dependent on the government for sustenance.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The terrorists would just blow up the HSR trains, there's too many groups that have an interest in screwing it up.
Think of reducing pressure on London and the South East as a "loss leader" to break the vicious circle of investing huge amounts of money in the South East to the detriment of the rest of the UK, which then makes the South East a more attractive place to live, which then increases the demand for investment in infrastructure in the South East, which...
If everyone wants to live in South East, then what's the point of building a high speed rail to a place where people don't want to live?
Why would it be "a matter of time"? Are terrorists going to figure out how to hijack a high speed train and fly it into a building?
"if someone criticizes what I hold dear, he/she must be a conservative"
this why Slashdot is such a hostile environment for the non-partisan people
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
> "The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head."
Reared? Corruption is why these projects are being done to begin with. Go read the sordid details of the Three Gorges Dam. "Useful Idiots" trumpeted it as a model of a government project while decrying its environmental impact. Meanwhile the officials pocketed billions, which was the acual point of the project all along.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Cars are more convenient than public transportation, even if its a good transportation system. This is true everywhere except where there are too many traffic jams.
In America, we're working on alternatives, we keep building electric cars, and they get cheaper and cheaper. The world will have electric cars available long before oil runs out, and we'll have fusion power plants long before coal runs out. Energy is not our problem (although cheaper electricity always makes things better).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Slashdot is rapidly becoming the eternal September of "Dog Bites Man". Read any story submission. Does it continue to explain how emotional outrage of the moment is any different today than yesterday?
Why yes, it does, and it's a catastrophe: there hasn't been 600 slashdot comments extactly the same as last week's posted since midnight.
You build infrastructure to handle peak demands. Yes, there will be empty trains at some times during the day, but at the peak, more capacity helps. By way of analogy, the M25 is the busiest motorway, or at least the most congested in the UK. However, there will be times when it will be relatively empty.
There are also quality of life issues involved. A lot of people live in Birmingham and work in London. Cutting their journey times by 30 minutes makes a measurable improvement in your life if you don't have to spend it sitting in a carriage instead of being home, or somewhere else where you would rather be.
The upgrade to allow 150mph running was probably expensive and not worth it precisely because it wouldn't have been a new line. The slower trains would constrain the capacity increase anyway. A new line allows you to move the fast trains to a new, faster line, and optimise schedules on the older line for the slower trains. It also allows for more services with multiple stops to be scheduled. At the moment you can do that because it will constrain the express or limited stop services that you can run.
Because then you increase the probably that people will want to live in those places rather than the South East, and that businesses will want to establish offices in places other than London.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
$100 billion/year is a STEAL compared to what the US spends on travel. Consider our highway system, which already costs billions a year, and then EVERYONE needs a car for it, and all the GAS for those cars (which alone probably costs more than that whole high-speed rail system), and most people will be using a GPS so they don't get lost. And then for those people who don't want to sit in a car and stare at the road for 5-10 hours or more, just consider the upkeep costs on our air travel and airports. $100 billion is nothing compared to all that.
There's also the little fact that high-speed rail is by far the safest form of travel available. Accidents almost never happen, it's actually faster than air travel up until the 4-hour mark, AND most trains have wifi service (at least in the EU).
The reason our cities are generally low-density is that there's just so God damned much empty space in the U.S. I'm guessing you're from Europe, as it seems common for Europeans to not appreciate just how far apart the cities are in the U.S. Heck, I've watched the sun rise and set before I finished crossing Texas alone...
Mass transit is not sensible for 95% of the U.S. There are areas it does make sense (the megalopolises on the east and west coasts, for instance) but it would never work in the spaces between them. And those megalopolises are losing population as people move to less densely populated, less authoritarian, more economically active states.
There are alternatives to fossil fuels to power personal transportation, and with fossil fuel costs going up and the alternatives becoming cheaper, eventually they will be widely deployed. The car isn't going away anytime soon in the U.S, and probably not in my lifetime.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
It might take 100 years for us to run out of oil completely but how long is it before it simply becomes too expensive for a large part of the population to afford to drive to work every day?
At least for vast groups of employees today I would say the answer is telecommuting, not moving downtown which is crazy expensive and while you have mass transit you also have congestion and many other issues. More automation, more self-service, more telepresence of knowledge workers and more robots and remote control for physical labor. Both the culture and the tools for it are a work in progress but ultimately it'll come down to economics - if travel costs become a huge burden both on salary requirements and finding the right people employers will adapt. In fact it's already started with quite a few people I know working on virtual teams, where they have the physical facilities and social environment of an office but the people they actually work with are located somewhere else.
I would also argue that a lot of people can't actually save that much by not commuting, because they want/need the car for other reasons so they're still seeing value loss and maintenance and repairs and insurance and taxes and whatnot - it's only the marginal cost of miles driven in fuel and wear that they save. The big savings you only get if you can skip the car altogether and manage on some combination of mass transit, taxis, rentals, car pools and such. Because there will always be exceptions where mass transit just isn't going to go from where you are to where you want when you want it. And I don't think people are willing to give up that freedom easily.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Exactly right. HSR is a waste of time, because terrorists could blow it up.
Similarly, airports and air travel is a waste of time, because terrorists could blow it up. We need to just shut down all the airports.
Similarly, bridges are a waste of time and money, because terrorists could blow up these critical points in the highway infrastructure. We need to just not have any bridges and transport people and cargo across rivers using rafts.
Similarly, government buildings, like courts and administrative offices, are all a waste of time, because terrorists could blow them up. We need to just shut down the government altogether so we can avoid terrorist attacks on these places.
Similarly, farms are a waste of time because terrorists could blow them up and eliminate our food supply. We should just shut down all farms and make everyone responsible for growing their own food individually.
Thanks! Now, THAT article is worth reading.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
The EuroStar takes 2:16 from (central) London to (central) Paris. It's unlikely that you can beat that on any aircraft, if you take times to and from the airport, check-in and check-out times, and waiting time into account. The Eurostar is not only international, but also leaves the Schengen area, which complicates travel a bit. But for national trains, I just go to the station with 5 minutes to spare and walk onto a train with an open ticket (although some discount options require the use of fixed connections).
Stephan
Let's see, $100 billion divided by 1.4 billion people. Hmm, how much did you pay for gas last year? Pizza? Cosmetics? Text messaging? Season tickets? Advertising? Superbowl advertising?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Why would it be "a matter of time"? Are terrorists going to figure out how to hijack a high speed train and fly it into a building?
I was talking about obnoxious security, which will eventually find its way into the train stations. You're talking about actual terrorist acts, which are almost completely irrelevant when talking about security.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
trade doesn't go by high speed rail, it costs too much. An ocean going cargo ship is very cheap. The only way rail can compete with that is if it is a much shorter path or if oil prices go really high.
Well, a land route is shorter than a marine route, and oil prices have been rising over the long term. I do not expect either to change, so in 20 years or so, the rail lines may be able to compete, and China will be there.
With terrorists going to blow up the HSR, and all the other reasons not to do anything, maybe we can just save them the trouble and not wake up tomorrow. Sleep through life, and just stop living. Now that will really piss off those terrorists, when there is no one left for them to terrorize, they won't know what to do either!
Sorry, but every other developed country recognises that us all having our own, incredibly energy hungry tin box that goes where we tell it is just not sustainable
I'm Australian, you insensitive clod!
I think traveling by flight is better/safer than traveling by high-speed trains
Casteism
I thought the project being pushed was this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsfq1mD-LOk&feature=youtu.be
'High speed rail' does not necessarily mean 300kph+ supertrains. It's a question of making the travel times reasonable... especially compared to what's required end-to-end in road vehicles. While there is a certain amount of smarm in the EWR presentation... and a bit of amusing subliminal suggestion in their choice of simulated train! ... there is also some good discussion of the types of traffic they expect to see.
Not quite sure how you figure that: energy-wise, rail is more efficient than sea (IIRC), and it's a shorter route, both in terms of time and distance. Certainly at the moment the trade doesn't go that way, but there's no decent route, so why would it?
I still reckon we should build partially-evacuated tunnels containing maglevs with linear electric motors to accelerate them... but maybe I'm still dreaming. :-)
the citizens defence force makes you impenetrable from the start and they seem to have it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJlPr2KHSFo
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Yeah, it does tend to go that way. The problem of course is that the private car is a horribly inefficient mode of transport, both in terms of energy and capacity. A single light rail line that's designed well can take more passengers at peak than a multi-lane highway, for less energy and without congestion, meaning it's much quicker too. If we were to design a city from scratch now, we'd build electric public transport infrastructure (rail plus PRT or similar for the infill, pedestrian-friendly bits in between, etc) and fewer roads. And everyone would love living there - you'd only own cars if you had to go outside the city. Pity it's so hard to fit that into an existing city though. :-/
Also, I disagree with you on the comment "energy is not our problem" - energy is always the problem: solve that and you solve almost every other problem we have (water, transport, cheap manufacturing, etc). The reason for most wars is resources, and we have already had at least two wars I can think of in recent history about oil, both involving your country. :-) I really do hope that you are right about fusion, because it's one of the few really good options that we have, but it's still a good way off (and the end of oil is probably closer than most realise)... though I think solar has merits too.
If we were to design a city from scratch now, we'd build electric public transport infrastructure (rail plus PRT or similar for the infill, pedestrian-friendly bits in between, etc) and fewer roads. And everyone would love living there - you'd only own cars if you had to go outside the city.
Doubtful. Cars are still more convenient. If people can afford them (and find parking) they will prefer them. The goal isn't to be 100% energy efficient, the goal is to have a good life.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Not always - for example, the city I live in is seeing a trend towards growing use of public transport (as the public transport systems improve and traffic demand grows). Certainly, if it costs $3 and takes 30 minutes to get to work by PT and the same by car, you're going to take the car, but if it's $2 and 20 minutes by PT but $8 and 50 minutes by car, the car is no longer more convenient and people start to change. Spending 2+ hours a day communiting isn't fun. The ideal transport system (I think) is one where you only have to walk a max of about a couple of hundred metres or so at each end, have no wait times, and don't have to drive the vehicle (so can read, relax, check Facebook, browse /. headlines, whatever while travelling), and PT systems like this are actually achieveable, and more convenient than a car-based system (and a better quality of life). It's just a matter of convincing people. :-)
However, you do have a point that people have this (sometimes irrational) love for their cars: when doing traffic modelling, correction factors for this have to be included as people will still use their cars even if they are more costly and less convenient... (This from a University lecture on traffic engineering).
With the train, there is a half hour check-in time to get through border control and security, and at the other end, you walk off the train straight onto a city centre street.
I recently flew from Nice (south coast of France) to London. It took 9 hours from boarding the bus at Nice Gare Routière (bus station) to arriving at the waiting area at Heathrow Central Bus Station. The actual flying time was only about 2 hours. Even for that journey, the train would have taken pretty much the exact same time, except I would be arriving at St Pancras rather than Heathrow Central. The entire door to door journey in my case would have been 10 minutes longer, but I wouldn't have to worry about luggage restrictions.
If you compare the London to Paris journey, about 1 hour of flying, 7 hours of not flying, the 2h 16m Eurostar trip beats it hands down.
In America, we're working on alternatives, we keep building electric cars, and they get cheaper and cheaper. The world will have electric cars available long before oil runs out, and we'll have fusion power plants long before coal runs out. Energy is not our problem (although cheaper electricity always makes things better).
Are you sure enough to bet the entire future of your nation on it?
Fusion has been talked about for decades and it still isn't here. Even when it gets here think how many people will object to having a fusion plant anywhere near them, they will simply associate it with fission anyway.
As to coal you are living in a dream world. If you try generating enough electricity to power an electric car for everyone using coal you will generate a stupendous amount of CO2. You guys may not believe in global warming but everyone else in the world does. It really does exist and if you even try that you can be fairly sure you can kiss Florida and every other low lieing area of the country good bye.
This would also involve building a huge number of coal fired power plants and nobody will want one of those next door either so unless you can solve nimbyism somehow your plan has a few flaws.
I dont read
Yes, if your city is so congested that driving by car is slower, then people will start preferring public transportation. That is not exactly ideal.
I've lived in a place that had a transportation system like you described (the max wait was 5 minutes, which is ok). People still preferred cars if they could afford them, because they were more convenient (you can carry your kids or groceries or old people in them easily), and because they were faster. The car is going to win over the bus every time because the bus has to stop frequently to let people off. Of course you can have express trains that will go direct without stopping, and those are nice, but still not as convenient because they don't go directly to your destination.
Finally commuting 2+hours a day isn't the norm, I personally live close to work so I can avoid commuting. Alternately you can listen to books on tape, etc, to improve your 'quality of life.' I knew a guy who used to lament that he didn't have a long commute he could use to learn Greek while he was sitting in traffic. So that's kind of a matter of opinion, although I probably agree with your opinion in that case.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Please go educate yourself.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When the politicians gave us a referendum on California's high speed rail, it was for a $10B bond issue, which was going to cover about 1/3 of the $30B cost, and the rest was going to be paid for by train tickets and Magic Money Falling Out Of The Sky. Then after the bond issue passed, they noticed it was really $40B, because they'd forgotten that they'd have to pay interest on the money. Now it's up to about $80-100B, depending on who's giving the speech. Also, the voter guide statements with the original bond issue said that train tickets from SF to LA would cost about $55, which is a bit cheaper than buying Southwest Airlines tickets in advance on a good sale; when they re-evaluated the costs, they started saying $110.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks