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World's Longest High-Speed Rail Line Opens In China
An anonymous reader writes "Today China continued rolling out the future of high speed rail by officially unveiling the world's longest high-speed rail line — a 2,298-kilometer (1,428-mile) stretch of railway that connects Beijing in the north to Guangzhou in the south. The first trains on the new route hit 300 kph (186 mph), cutting travel time between the two cities by more than half."
Still faster than 90% of Amtrack.
To go from Buffalo NY to Toronto Canada by car takes about 1.44 hours, by train it takes 4.5 hours. As a trip I make on a fairly regular basis for pleasure it would be great to be able to avoid driving as I do not need a car once I arrive. Wasting half of a day of vacation on a train is not something I intend to do.
Enjoy your slide into obsolesce. If you remove all the emotionalism from those proposing pure capitalism, your are left holding a big, empty, "I don't want to spend any more" motto. It is religious fanaticism.
Countries thrive when they invest, undertake massive projects, improve themselves. They slide into nothingness when the accountants take over as their infrastructure falls apart and all the bright people find themselves working abroad.
The ultimate failure of religious fantatics like the parent is that they think the race ends. That once you won, that is it. The race never ends. And China right now is winning by default because everyone else has stopped. You can smirk about North-Korea's rocket attempts but at least they are trying. In the west, people worry about the costs to much to do ANYTHING anymore. Great nations were not build by accountants.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The GP insists, first and foremost, that it not be subsidized by Government money (tax payers).
That immediately sets an impossibly high barrier. One that can't be met by any transportation system, water system, sewer system, or communication system.
Ignorance of the proper place for government expenditures is an unfortunate trait of ultra-conservative types. When any government involvement with societal life other than national defense is arbitrarily off the table, you have an impossible situation and a recipe for an agrarian society.
Roads, and railroads, necessarily require government money and government powers. If one stubborn farmer can stand in the way of a road or railroad (as would be the case in a purely private development) it would be legally impossible to build anything, not just cost prohibitive.
I suspect the GP never thinks about that while driving to work on that government road, or flushing his toilet to that government sewer while surfing the web on that government bandwidth.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
you mean, dumping money down the drain on unneeded big ticket military contracts that often the military does not even want.
I wonder why we don't make these kinds of railway advances in the US
Really? You actually wonder about this?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/17/california-high-speed-rail-lawsuit_n_2150455.html
Since this should be self evident, I'll keep the explanation simple.
China is run by authoritarians that are hell bent on prosperity. They do not indulge: environmentalists, humans rights, property rights or special interests that aren't immediately aligned with said goal. The rail line goes here and you step aside quietly or spend years of your life making Walmart SKUs in a labor camp.
The US is run by statists and the comfortable electorate they've purchased with bennies. Prosperity is something we have far too much of so we spend our time squabbling in court, creating whole new forms of legal jeapody and liability as we go. This precludes large scale, capital intensive ventures such as continental scale rail systems. The lead times to get through the legislatures, courts, etc. is just too damn long. Capital won't tolerate this and seeks better venues, most of which are in Asia.
Enjoy your decline.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
From Rome to Berlin... Maybe you should open a map of Europe and see what's in between these two cities : Huge mountains. Try Paris to Barcelona instead (7h25), for example, and tell us if taking the plane is really worth it, considering all the security circus you've got to live with when taking planes and the fact that trains will bring you directly to near the center of each city.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !