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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
He never makes a reference to China, as China does not have Central Planning. I think it is just some off-topic rambling.
See, who says the US isn't investing in high speed rail! Whose $100B do you think that is?
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.
I love the Free Market. And maybe with luck, I'll live long enough to see one.
Fact is, there is no free market on the planet. They're all run by economic royalists out to fill their own pockets at everybody else's expense, and regulated to assure the big dogs their profits at the expense of the little guy. But keep on spouting the 'free market' line.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
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 :(
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.
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
We got close once. We had companies with paid murderers that killed unionists and trouble makers. Monopolist tactics that make MS look like Mother Theresa. That's what we call the "good ol' days."
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.
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.
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).
The New Yorker is a magazine. That's the date of release of the issue the article will be appearing in.
Please help metamoderate.
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
"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."
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
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.
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