Posted on 12/26/2012 10:06:23 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
The line, which runs roughly the equivalent distance of a journey between London and Gibraltar, will halve the travelling time from the country's capital Beijing to Guangzhou
The first trains have taken to the track on the world's longest high-speed rail line which stretches a staggering 1,400 miles across China.
The line, which runs roughly the equivalent distance of a journey between London and Gibraltar, will halve the travelling time from the country's capital Beijing to Guangzhou, an economic hub in the south.
The first train along the 2,298km track set off from Beijing at 9am with a train heading in the opposite direction an hour later.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
They build it in the time it takes us to put the EIR and EIS out to bid
Another piece of junk that will cost passengers’ lives. Has the world forgotten Wenzhou that quickly?
Incidentally, the average speed calculated from the distance cited is 178.5 mph (287 km/h), rather than 186 mph (300 km/h). It’s impossible to maintain an average speed that fast anyway if all 35 stops are served—you’d be stopping every 41 miles on average.
This will have some spectacular crashes and some staggering death counts
The first train along the 2,298km track set off from Beijing at 9am with a train heading in the opposite direction an hour later.
At least they won’t run into each other...
Although I would hate to ride all that way
backwards...
Good. The more public works the Chinese have to subsidize, the less economically competitive they become.
“High speed” or “Low speed”, it’s all Amtrak to me.
I’ll part ways with most Freepers on this one. We are falling further and further behind the rest of the world as far as transportation goes. Say what you will about Europe but their transportation has ours beat hands down. And don’t start talking subsidies - taxpayers pay for airports, air traffic control, FAA, etc.; taxpayers pay for highways for trucking. If we subsidized rail travel at 10% of the amount we give to aviation and highways we might have a transportation system that wouldn’t have us at the bottom of the heap anymore.
Dat you Willie?
Public transportation requires a combination of high population density and common destination. It also doesn’t hurt public transportation ridership numbers to make private travel extremely expensive. Europe accomodates all three.
The U.S. only has that in the NE, where incidently, we have all kinds of public transportation.
Take a look at the airport departure/arrival boards. To do that with even high-speed rail would mean turning tens of millions of work hours into butt-on-train hours.
As for subsidizing, it would be far better to end all subsidies, instead of trying to make offsets.
Train travel worked great in this country with a lot less population density. I had to travel from VA to AL two years ago. Airline schedule had me going through Atlanta to Memphis to AL. Total travel time was 12 hours, including airport waits, TSA, etc. Took the train instead, overnight with sleeper compartment, from Manassas, VA to Tuscaloosa. 15 hours travel time, much of it asleep. Meals paid for, able to walk around the train and saved $350, including tip for the porter.
I say day 12.
Anybody want to take that bet?
Rail travel in China is VERY different from rail travel in the US. American rail lines can never be profitable, because they can never consistently fill trains. Chinese rail lines, on almost every departure and destination, are universally nearly filled to capacity. They don't need subsidies. (But even if they did, China could afford it. They have no Social Programs, no major unions, no law lobby that triples costs with lawsuits, and a very meager environmental lobby to slow down progress.)
High-speed rail may have a role to play here and there, but its true enemies are NIBMYism and unions, not conservative disinterest.
With all due respect, this is not the place to sell Red China. I could quote a goodly number of sources that tell of the incredible corruption surrounding their high-speed rail program, and that would merely be scratching the surface. If you put these people in charge of the US space program, the Panama Canal (which Clinton put Red China in charge of anyway) et cetera, you would have a lot of disasters due to that central planning—and it is insulting to compare anything in Red China to the USA’s successes, frankly.
If you could take a regular train (not high speed) 500 miles or less it is usually quicker than flying since you don’t have to be at the train station hours ahead of time for security, etc. If your destination is a downtown in a city you save even more time since you don’t have to find an airport shuttle,etc. You don’t have to wait for your baggage on a train since you usually have it with you. You don’t sit on a tarmac waiting to take off or waiting for a gate to open. No long lines getting off the train waiting for everyone ahead of you to get their carry-ons. High speed trains will up that 500 mile limit to closer to 1000. Don’t get me wrong, I love aviation (private pilot myself) but train travel is 1000% more comfortable than those tiny airline seats.
I don’t buy that. Besides, air travel had government support in a major way since the 1950s, which is why I am not very “attuned” to it; the private railroads could not compete because of what the government was doing to them aside from funding the airports (taxation, overregulation, on top of the union pressures; NIMBYism can’t stand in the way of an extant active rail line). It’s not like the private railroads did not try to improve in terms of speed, but every speed improvement was met by a federal regulation with regards to signaling, track “classes”, crashworthiness of passenger and locomotives, and so on.
And I must confess that I have the same antipathy towards the highways that I have towards airports; I regard them as government trust fund babies, especially when they ought to be able to stand on their own two feet as it were, financially speaking, instead of having the federal and state governments throw tax dollars at them. It might be fun for a little while to be able to drive at an average speed well over 130 mph on the highway, but with all the potential obstacles, you will find very few who wish to attempt it, and the necessary tires (more expensive due to the speed rating and faster-wearing to boot), suspension settings, engine tunings, larger brakes et al won’t make for a comfortable or cheap journey anyhow.
>>>I’ll part ways with most Freepers on this one.
You certainly have with this one.
>>>We are falling further and further behind the rest of the world as far as transportation goes.
Many say the same thing regarding health care metrics: life-expectancy and infant-mortality, to name but two. They’re wrong. You are, too.
>>>Say what you will about Europe but their transportation has ours beat hands down.
I hear that often. Especially from Europeans. What I don’t hear is any cognizance on their part of a connection between their sleek high-speed trains and their +20% chronic structural unemployment, or their gleaming new airports and their noticeable lack of innovation in medical devices, pharmaceuticals, information technology, etc.
Don’t be so quick to envy others. Know this:
Every activity in an economy has an opportunity cost: if it chooses to do more of “X”, it has less remaining to do more of “Y”, and vice-versa. Europe has made its choice, and I don’t see that they are any better off because of it . . . though don’t expect the rank-and-file leftist European to admit it.
In the meantime, you can read this:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-31/opinions/35277677_1_infrastructure-rankings-airports
“The U.S. infrastructure argument that crumbles upon examination”
I disagree that it was “this country” in terms of the choice of individuals that “chose” air travel. If it were, then all of our airports, regional and international, would have been privately owned and operated and never received a dime of tax money in revenue. But instead it was central planning and government funding that brought it about—same with highways—while private railroads (in both infrastructure and rolling stock), which helped the country win WWI and WWII, were regulated and taxed nearly into oblivion, certainly 100 percent in terms of their passenger business and for the most part with their freight business.
BTW, I think you overestimated California HSR, whose last total costs were figured to be $100 billion (or $125 million per mile based on the 800-mile estimate, which by itself is about five times more expensive than what they spend on high speed rail elsewhere on the planet save in England). $500 billion works out to the unheard-of per-unit-length cost of $625 million per mile, and so far, the most expensive high-speed rail proposal is Amtrak’s one for the duplicate Northeast Corridor or “next-generation” service currently estimated at $151 billion, or (based on 438 route miles between Washington and Boston) a whopping $345 million per mile on average. These kind of cost estimates seem to only happen in this country; in France, they spend about $12 million to $20 million per mile.
Going back to the 1960s, the federal government was promising that the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Metroliner (later Penn Central) would eventually travel at 160 mph, BTW (and “eventually” did not mean waiting until the third decade of the twenty-first century).
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