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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."
...the United States has the longest Slow Speed rail lines of the world.
For reference, that's about half the width of the U.S., or about the length of Japan.
There's already a high speed rail connection from Guangzhou to Shenzhen North. The high speed rail connection through to Hong Kong is scheduled for completion in 2014, and will shorten travel time for that last link from 2 hours to 38 minutes. (Except that there's a border control point between Shentzen and Hong Kong that takes longer than the travel time.)
Another step has been taken in tying China more closely together. That's part of the political motivation. Traditionally, China's provinces were not closely connected. Each province was expected to be self-sufficient in food and other essentials. That continued through the Mao era, and it's not completely gone. There are still some inter-provincial trade restrictions.
Of course, the South still speaks Cantonese, while the North speaks Mandarin. This despite half a century of effort by the central government. "The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away".
So should we get rid of the interstates as well?
What about airports? Should they all be closed for the same reason?
I propose HSR not for any romantic notions, but because I have ridden it in Europe. I have been on the damn things and seen how well they work.
How about you name a method of travel that meets those goals so we can compare it to HSR.
Yeah I donno about that. "My time" for the train is like 15 minutes to get aboard and literally 5 minutes to cross the street on the NYC side. "My time" for the airplane is a half hour out to the airport in the middle of nowhere and parking, two hours sitting around for security theater playtime, you can't do what you want on a plane so thats about two hours lost during flight time, and finally a nice $50 hour long cab ride on the NYC side, so that's like 5 hours of "my time" if flying.
As for the restaurant, the amtrak food was "nice" sure not a $200 steak house but no worse than a family restaurant, and the cabin was comfortable enough to sleep in. I had a little sleeper cabin with desk, one entire wall is a giant window, and all that.
Booze? Oh god yes. Some day you should take an observation car out west where the obs car has a bar in the middle of the top floor (the observation area). The west coast trains are double decker two floor and much nicer than the east coast single floor dumpy-trains. None the less booze is booze... Nicotine addicts would have serious issues with Amtrak, but the alkies will be just fine, well lubricated, whatever. Also if you have a cabin unless they're peeking in the windows you can drink or eat whatever you can haul aboard...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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 interstate highway system is paid for by the federal government. $425 billion. Apparently the largest public works system since the pyramids. Why exactly Americans think of this as "a brilliant economic success" and state funded medicine as "socialist" the FSM only knows.
Well actually we do know. Because that's how lobbyists chose to frame them.
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.
Hmm where have I heard this somewhere before, oh yeah a bit further down on the page where Lockheed was crying that SpaceX couldn't possibly be doing anything this much cheaper and better than them without compromising safety. Sure, if you go look at the crap they deliver to Wal-Mart your idea of Chinese quality might be low but they also do rocket science putting men in space and probes orbiting the moon and I'm pretty sure they do brain surgery too. That they often ignore emissions is not the same as being ignorant of them, unless it's say the Olympics in Beijing where they make a huge temporary clean-up effort. They might be more willing to trample the individual's rights than in other countries but the progress they make is very much real. Real income has more than tripled for over a billion people in the last decade:
GDP per capita measured in purchasing power terms more than tripled from $2,800 in 2002 to a forecast $9,100 in 2012 according to the International Monetary Fund.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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!
If it is anything like the Japanese HSR system these trains are in station for less than 2 minutes, usually around 90 seconds. There isn't a baggage car, no baggage offloading. You keep your bags with you at all times and when you get near your stop they announce it and you stand up and head to the doors. When the train stops you just get out (the platforms are level with the doors, so no hopping down awkwardness, its very quick. Then the train is off again. Since these are all EMU train sets that means they do not have a single engine, but powered bogies along the entire train. They can accelerate and decelerate very quickly.
I think I read 35 stops on the route, if a train stops at every stop then that is roughly 70 minutes in station at 2 minutes a stop. So out of the 8 hour trip, thats 6 hours and 50 minutes you are moving, which means that the trains are going somewhere over 300km/h (336km/h to be exact). I doubt this is the actual speed, I am guess that the 8 hour trip is for express trains, which will skip some of the stops on the way, only stopping at major stations, while other trains will stop at all or more stations (this is how it works in Japan). That'd put the speed at around 280-300km/h which is about what Japanese systems run at.