China approves $36B railway plan for Jing-Jin-Ji megacity | Hacker News Reader

China approves $36B railway plan for Jing-Jin-Ji megacity

reuters.com

72 pointstemp117 comments

It still baffles me that there are over 100 cities that have more than 1 Mio citizens in China and I haven't heard of most of them. I wonder what their everyday life is about, what kind of subcultures exist, who are the people that are important for their local communities, what problems each city has. It can't be that each of those cities is just merely a copy of each other, although I understand that a lot of copy and pasting has been used in the planning of those cities. I also understand that the cultures in each city is not as heterogenous as western cities for a couple of reasons. But I still wonder: where will they go from there?

just think of dozens of omaha, nebraskas, filled with chinese people. it's the exact same thing. including the old billionaire at the center of it all, and probably a bit more pollution.

Except Omaha is not even half a million.

Chinese cities often include the entire metropolitan area, and then some. For example, Chongqing has 30 million people, in 31,800 square miles. Omaha-Council Bluffs has 915,000 people, in 4400 square miles.

That's just journalist doing a bad job. There is Chongqing the municipality (equivalent to a US state) and there is Chongqing the city. According to the source used on the wikipedia page the city's population is 18M.

The contiguous urban area of Chongqing is about 12 million. You get 18 million if you count all the urban areas contained within Chongqing municipality, which is the equivalent of counting Beijing-Tianjin as being a single city, or even Guangzhou-Dongguan-Shenzhen.

> just think of dozens of omaha, nebraskas, filled with chinese people. it's the exact same thing.

Well, at least that means they've all got an excellent zoo and a really good used book store.

Last year, I was in Hefei, for RoboCup. 4.5 million inhabitants, yet I've never heard anything about that city for anything not related to our trip there.

There was construction work going on everywhere, new apartment buildings going up, completely new airport, roads: busy everywhere.

Unfortunately, I didn't see the sun for a week because I was either inside, programming for RoboCup and the times I was outside, the smog limited visibility. I have no idea what the skyline of the city looked like or get and idea of how big the city really was because I simply couldn't see further than 500m.

Hefei is at least the capital of Anhui and pretty famous for overseas adoptions (at least 10 years ago). The holiday inn has a revolving restaurant at the top, and that is all I really remember about it.

I've been to dozen of cities like it and they all look the same to me. Even Kunming, which has nice weather and an awesome flower market, is much drabber than it should be.

There are a few low-key disgruntled ex-pat forums around that give some interesting and hilarious on the ground anecdotes about stuff that goes on in China.

It's a billion people though, so who knows. Based on my totally ridiculously uniformed foreigner viewpoint, they don't have the kind of societal narrative distribution like they do here in the west. The official one is patriotic and contrived, and it doesn't go very deep. There's not that progressive push to change the country in one direction or another through influence and advocacy that seems ever present in the west. People are pretty much focused on what's right in front of them and that's it.

My suggestion is to take a trip to China seeing them in real life instead of reading from media!

Native Chinese here.

There were many cultural and regional differences between cities. China is a country compared to the whole Europe in scale. People in different cities even can not talk with each other. The dialects are very different, especially in the south.

Unfortunately, nowadays nearly all cities in China are more and more similar during mass construction in recent 20 years. When travelling in different cities, I often had a moment to forget which city I was in. Same building, same street, same chained stores.

> Same building, same street, same chained stores.

As Tyler Cowen said in Creative Destruction the cities, architecture, and culture may begin to merge and look the same but this modernization ultimately helps create a greater variation among individual people.

Subcultures still flourish they are just less regional and local. Our creativity is stimulated due to greater contact between the various global (and cross-China) cultures creating a greater variety of culture or an enhanced breadth of existing cultures. So it's not all bad, just different.

https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Destruction-Globalization-Ch...

I studied in western countries since undergraduate and came back to Beijing, my hometown, after my graduation from Cambridge. It was surprisingly simple to adapt to the current Beijing culture as everything has been changed towards American and western style. We have H&M, Zara and Uniqlo everywhere and we eat pancakes, waffles and Full British Breakfast for brunch during the weekend morning.

Although, my family is quite old-fashioned and most of my middle school classmates stay in Siheyuan 四合院 when they were children. People living in Beijing and other modern cities in China have changed a lot because of the explosion of Internet. By 2000, the Internet was free without the Great Firewall so I could search on Google, read news on CNN and even met some friends on reddit. Then, we tried so hard to find resources of American/British TV series, movies and many TV programs. At that time, American dream was somehow another formation of Chinese dream, to study abroad.

Young people like me who study abroad for several years are very common in Beijing and Shanghai now. We enjoy the great opportunities to work in China while still miss our school life in US so we want more western-style restaurants, bars, gyms and even apartments. There was a Harvard meetup I attended where people spoke in English even though 90 percent of them were Chinese. Then, we tried so hard to find resources to overpass the Great Firewall in order to use Instgram, Facebook and Whatsapp.

But lately, I find out that these young people start to complain about Beijing and they feel uncomfortable about this crowded city. People are everywhere and you can hardly find a place to be quite and peaceful unless it's expensive. Although these young people have excellent background, they always find themselves helpless to work in such a business market with no fixed rules. Then, we tried so hard to find resources to learn how to survive here and forget everything learned abroad.

As China has grown stronger and stronger, the young generation has no preference between mainland and Hong Kong / Taiwan or even western countries and they were told to have their Chinese Dreams. But, we still have many many things to learn from the success of western societies in the last several decades otherwise China will fail quickly.

> we eat pancakes, waffles and Full British Breakfast for brunch during the weekend morning.

Is this an image thing? I really can't understand how you can learn to prefer poached eggs and bacon over dim sum for the same price when your taste buds started off with the latter.

Nobody eats dim sum in Beijing. It's a Cantonese thing.

It's not about the favor but young people miss their school life in US or Europe. And for those who haven't been to other countries, they just think it's a fashion

>we still have many many things to learn from the success of western societies in the last several decades otherwise China will fail quickly.

What makes you think that? Reading The Economist?

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but one thing I think that's good about Chinese society that is very different from the west is the whole anti-personality cult thing they put in place since Mao. They are very careful to avoid elevating people to god status and except for Xi, most government officials are anonymous and avoid publicity.

In the west we have this really outrageous culture of fame. Everyone wants to know what famous people are thinking and what their opinion about anything is. I think our society might be better without celebrities and the culture of fame.

Haha, no, not exactly.

There is a very popular word in China - 网红. The meaning is a person who has millions of followers online. They might be singers, movie stars and celebrities. And one portion of them belong to 公知 who spread their opinions about the society and social affairs. Normally, they study in top university all over the word and have many shining titles.

Because of the low price of labor, China grows faster than almost any other economic parties. On the contrary, Chinese economy faces a great challenge if the average price of labor increases even for a little bit. Meanwhile, the crazy development of cities / railways / factories also lead to serious environmental and social problems.

Are you from the US? I ask because I (also originally from the US) used to think similarly: how can you have so many 1M+ cities? Then I moved to Turkey. Istanbul is almost 2x the population of NYC and Ankara (Turkey's capital and 2nd city) has a greater population than Los Angeles...but it doesn't feel like that.

Now, I don't know if China is like Turkey in this regard, but I suspect it is. Turkey (and most of the world) never experienced the kind of suburban expansion that occurred in the US. So while Istanbul has 15M+ people, that's it. Yes, it's more than NYC's 8M, but if you include with NYC the entire tri-state area, then NYC's population jumps to 25M+. Ankara has 4M+ residents, but from my apartment on the edge of the city you could walk 15 min and be in the middle of a wide open field that stretched out probably 30km or more in all directions.

So I'd hazard a guess that China's 100 cities with 1M+ residents are probably more akin to a US city of 300-400k residents plus suburbs, just more compacted. According to Wikipedia, there's 53 MSAs in the US with 1M+ residents...so by that measure China's lagging a bit behind.

"New York City" with 8M is only the political and corporate entity of "New York City", which is not relevant to the "feeling" of a city. New York City metro has about 20 million people. That's what you experience when you're there.

If you talk about political entities, then San Francisco is tiny at about 860k, less than Jacksonville and San Jose. Does SF feel smaller than either of those?

I think cities in China will improve in the coming decades and develop their own unique identity. Many look similar now, but as they age, cities tend to change in thousands of little ways and all those changes add up to something new and unique.

Well, cities are not created from cavity.

China has a long history. So a lot of cities got created along the way, for a variety of reasons. I agree with turingbook, a fair comparison would be all cities in China vs all cities in Europe. (Similar length of history and similar amount of population)

Some cities in China may be not that famous, but histories of them are also interesting.

Take my hometown for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yantai), it has 2M urban population, and it is unique because:

* The administration history of the region dates back to 567 BC. * One of the few harbors for foreign trades opened in China in 1861. You can still find antique eu-style houses in the city. * One of the cities close to South Korea, foreign trade is a big topic there.

Every year I wonder if Americans will finally learn how to build some proper trains.

Not like hyperloop or self-driving fantasies, not fake trains like dedicated bus lanes or incompatible Airtrain type projects.

Just some normal fucking trains. Trains with steel wheels that go pretty fast, that run on a consistent schedule between center city downtown areas and airports and so on. Like the kind every European country figured out how to do properly like decades ago, and that northern Asia has completely leapfrogged us in by now as well.

Like I want to go somewhere, so I figure out where the nearest train is, get a ticket, get on the train, and go to the place. Why is this so fucking difficult?

Two rail specific issues I know of that drive up project costs (without getting into the blown up infrastructure costs we seem to face):

* Extremely heavy rail cars, some almost twice the weight as their European counterparts. This is determined by Federal Rail Administration requirements about crash safety with freight trains on shared lines. Crash safety here being just throwing more steel in the cars. This drives up design, capital, fuel costs, and rail maintenance, not to mention severely limits train performance.

Compare two trainsets from around when Amtrak's Acela was built:

German Siemens Velaro E;

Top design speed: 350 km/h Weight: 439 tons Capacity: 405 passengers

Acela Express:

Top design speed: 266 km/h Weight: 565 tons Capacity: 304 passengers

* FRA mandated "Buy American" requirement, which forces federally funded rail projects to buy equipment manufactured in America. Of course we long ago killed off our domestic passenger rail industry, so now projects must pay European manufacturers to tool essentially temporary factories to build already overpriced rail cars on a project by project basis.

Projects can apply to the FRA for waivers for both, such as the case with the California HSR project, but it adds friction.

http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-n...

http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185

We need to let technical people make technical decisions. The things I'm reading are ridiculous.

``` “All my engineers thought the rules were nuts,” he said, calling the Acela a “high-velocity bank vault.”

The Federal Railroad Administration likes to think that America is special, and so our trains have to be special too. ```

> The Federal Railroad Administration likes to think that America is special

The concept of "American exceptionalism" is a strange thing that still has lots of real-world consequences, apparently.

I think there is an affect where nobody resisted regulation creep because nobody was building a lot of passenger train lines anyway.

There is something analogous with city center housing in Sweden. For decades not much was built. The population is fairly stable and many were moving to suburbs anyway. Today, not everyone wants a suburban house, and nobody wants to live in '60s concrete "housing project" exclaves, so central apartment prices and rents skyrocket. But now you cannot build the kind of central flats people want any more, because of decades of accumulated regulations about noise, sun angles, parking quotas, etc. The market is dominated by 50-100 year old buildings that predate the regulations and are very popular.

Same thing here in Boston--three story detached houses, with one apartment per story, are the most popular form of housing here, and yet have been illegal to build for the past 100 years (with a few exceptions) due to being too dense for single-family zoned areas and being a fire hazard. It's odd that there is no "build out of non-flammable materials" exception for the latter.

Sounds like a subsidy/payout to the steel making industry to me.

So like almost all problems in America it goes back to a broken federal government and regulatory regime which is partially to do with a corrupt, pork barrel Congressional culture and partially do with aggressive "starve the beast" underfunding approaches to government due to disdain for it.

As someone who has recently spent a few months in various Western European countries for work: You would be surprised

In many urban areas, it is basically NYC. Which is great, and makes getting around easy. But once you get farther out, things dry up fast. And a good comparison would actually be Amtrak and the like on the East Coast of the US. Considerably cheaper (I would guess, off the top of my head, 60% of the cost for a comparable trip). But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time. And a lot of the time, those savings aren't particularly significant once you factor that in.

As someone who travels a lot for work, I didn't see a huge difference in how I approached things while working on budgets. Fly to major city nearby and then get a train/rent a car to go to a smaller town (if needed). The former was more of an option, which was nice, but the latter was a lot faster if there were a few connections. And even when there was the option to just do pure train, the amount of time versus savings wasn't worth it.

And for personal travel? Even then, a flight was a lot more logical and not a lot more expensive once I factored in vacation hours and the like to handle transit times.

In terms of cities? Yeah, we are horrible (although, the UK and Ireland is almost as crap as we are once you get out of London). In terms of general (inter)national travel? A car is a lot less required, but not to the extent that a lot of us would think.

Pretty much. There's this notion that you can practically teleport around Europe for next to nothing using trains that just isn't true. On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying.

The US doesn't have great train systems for the most part but, as you say, in the region that's most comparable to much of Western Europe, the Northeast, it really isn't all that different.

ADDED: What you tend not to have in the US is compact walkable towns and small cities once you get out of the large cities. Though I'd also say, that at least in the UK, small towns away from the main railroad lines will have bus service that's probably better than the US equivalent but it may still just be a few times a day.

>> On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying.

That comparison is a little disingenuous, of course flying between two cities with an airport, that are not major hubs connected directly by hi-speed rail, will be faster and cheaper. Now consider how you'd get to Dusseldorf or Paris from whatever random smaller city with a train station (in western Europe basically any city with a population over ~100K). I'm not sure if there even are international airports around western Europe that arent directly accessible by train...

Besides traveling for business or pleasure, trains here are heavily used for commuter traffic as well. If you live and work close to a train station, which is quite common in the more densely populated countries, traveling by train will 100% be faster that sitting in a traffic jam every day. And in many cases your employer will even cover most or all of the cost (at least here in the Netherlands).

Obviously trains are still only point-to-point transportation, so if you need to be somewhere without a train station, or without many connections to larger hubs, you will lose time. But compared to the pitiful state of passenger rail in the US (or at least that's how I experienced it), it's pretty great here. I took the train from San Jose to SFO once: there was only one train every hour or so, which took something like 2:30 hours at a snails pace to get to San Francisco, then I had to get on the BART (which is actually pretty good), then I needed to get on the AirTrain, all just to get to the departures. By car it usually takes less than an hour... There really is no excuse for that...

it is an option. usually not the cheapest one, but in quite a few cases makes more sense/convenience compared to flying - ie if you have less than 5-6 hour distance to cover it's faster, plus the hassle of airports, security, baggage limits, ending in the middle of nowhere compared to city centre etc are not that great.

another good thing is, you can buy in most cases tickets just days ahead, most trains have constant prices so your price isn't within 50-1000 eur boundary for same flight, same seat, depending on timing.

I don't really disagree with that. Especially if you're travelling between downtown locations that aren't too far apart on main railroad lines, e.g. York to London or London to Brussels, the train makes a lot of sense. (As indeed is the case in the Northeast US.)

It just isn't the panacea that it often seems to be painted as.

I literally have no idea what you're talking about. I recently returned from Switzerland, and there is a good fast train going basically everywhere, whenever you want to go, and it's amazing and stone cold simple to figure out. You can do seemingly impossible things like wake up in an entirely different city to a place like Zurich, get on a train, and get off in the Zurich airport terminal and check right in. It's not cheap, but nothing in Switzerland is and it's relatively inexpensive by those standards.

It's amazing. And Switzerland has an unusually strong reputation for rail but honestly my experience in places like France and even the UK has been similar. If you want to go somewhere else, you go to the nearest train station and buy a ticket to that place, and then you go to that place.

I live in NYC and it's not even close, and this is the best rail served area in the country by far. I can't get on a train anywhere in this city and get off in an airport terminal. Let's pause and think about that for a second. I live in New York Fucking City and I can't get on a train and get off at an airport. Newark is as close as it gets if you're near Penn Station, but you're still dropped off a long and tedious "Airtrain" ride away. And the PATH that runs from lower Manhattan just inexplicably stops short of that Newark Airport Airtrain, despite the fact that the same mainline track system continues right along. Same story at JFK. And Laguardia they don't even bother to pretend.

It's completely fucking dysfunctional, obviously so. The idea that U.S. rail transport, or transport in general, is even semi-remotely comparable to northern and western Europe is frankly ludicrous.

Switzerland can't support TVG-style speeds because of its topology (too many mountains, curves), but then again, the country is small enough that you can get to Zurich from Geneva in ~2 hours 46 minutes.

According to this, they have more hsr than the US:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_l...

For Geneva to Zurich, only one segment of it (beyond Bern, stopping before Zurich) is > 200 km.

Now try the same in Italy or Spain...

But seriously, Swiss and German trains are well known for their punctuality and reliability. Italian and Spanish trains, not so much. (I've seen all of them first hand, and found the stereotypes pretty accurate.)

Italy seems to be better now than 20 years ago...

I visited this past May. Flew into Rome and immediately hoped onto the fast train to Florence. Spent a few days there, then took the fast train to Bologna, transferred to an inter-city (not as fast) down to Riccione for a few days cycling around San Marino. Then took another train from Rimini back to Rome (not high speed, but cut across the central mountains).

Anyways, it worked well. The cost was far less than flying Rome/Florence/Bologna. Might not have worked as well if we wanted to venture out of the cities, but for a typical city-based vacation, it was great.

Also a New Yorker, but my reference point is Hong Kong instead of Europe.

Hong Kong has a high speed rail link from the middle of the airport that gets to city centre in 30 mins flat, making two stops along the way at major mass transit junctions.

How does the 7 not go to LGA? Why doesn't the E go to JFK What stopped the PATH from extending to EWR?*

* I actually know the answer to this one and it's actually a technical constraint. The PATH system uses MTA like third rails for power. The mainline track system uses overhead lines for power. Having the PATH continue to EWR would require investment in parallel infrastructure between Newark Penn Station and EWR. Of course PATH is maintained by the Port Authority and the mainline track by NJ Transit, each of which has its own agenda and budget so it'll never happen.

> * I actually know the answer to this one and it's actually a technical constraint.

Not really. I mean sure in the sense that they'd have to run the third rail as you mention, but that's not a technical constraint given how simple it is. And theoretically it's in progress.[0]

The problem here is plainly political. If the politics of building trains in this country weren't completely broken it would have been done long, long ago.

[0] http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2016/04/newark_elizabeth_l...

Oh while we're talking about dysfunctional PATH decisions based on mindless political/organizational divisions here's another one that'll make your blood boil: http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/09/the-port-authoritys-missed-c...

> * I actually know the answer to this one and it's actually a technical constraint. The PATH system uses MTA like third rails for power. The mainline track system uses overhead lines for power. Having the PATH continue to EWR would require investment in parallel infrastructure between Newark Penn Station and EWR. Of course PATH is maintained by the Port Authority and the mainline track by NJ Transit, each of which has its own agenda and budget so it'll never happen.

Why is that a technical constraint? The mainline system uses third rail from Grand Central Terminal to Pelham, where it switches to overhead line equipment, so even in a US setting it's clear that switching between power supplies on the move and dual-compatible stock is no problem.

My dad and I went on a driving trip around England and the Isle of Skye. The only destinations we couldn't have reached with train were Mediobogdium and Uig when we got to the Isle of Skye.

> But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time.

That's the difference though. In the US, trains are so expensive that they're almost always more expensive than flights.

Also, comparing to NYC is disingenuous. NYC has by far the best public transport in the US. There's a very significant drop-off in quality (other major cities have poor public transport, and for smaller cities it's nonexistent).

Once you get wherever you wanted via train, you are now pretty much stuck at a train station.

So much of America is not walkable, and we don't have great public transportation within cities and towns, so if you arrive somewhere without a car there's not much for you to do.

edit: of course, ride sharing helps.

But the same is true of flying. Once you get wherever you wanted via a plane, you are pretty much stuck at an airport.

The difference, of course, is that airports tend to have sufficient passenger numbers to justify car hire agencies locating there (or at least providing a shuttle), but that case is harder to make as long as there are comparably few trains per day.

I've never once been to an airport that didn't have either a bus or a train link to the nearest city.

> Once you get wherever you wanted via a plane, you are pretty much stuck at an airport.

Adding insult to injury, that airport generally isn't feasibly reachable by public transportation.

Not going to happen. Americans fight HSR like the plague:

http://singularityhub.com/2012/09/04/can-high-speed-rail-com...

The CA HSR should have been built decades ago. In the meantime, China has built 12,000 miles of hsr, and will double that within 10 years.

China is also building maglevs. The Beijing S1 has should be live within months:

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-11/28/content_275...

The US is a case of "too much democracy." Sometimes you just need to give power to a commission / body and let them do what they need to do. If you need every village, suburb, unincorporated city and "advocacy group" to give votes on any plan, you're going to fail.

We had trains, and we still do. We just stopped moving people on them, and shifted it all to freight.

That is correct. America actually has a remarkable freight rail system. But the vast majority of Americans are not involved directly with freight rail so most people don't think about it.

I think in most of Europe there's a relatively painful 50/50 balance between passenger and freight traffic. The freight trains run mostly at night. The tracks are used really, really hard, which causes maintenance issues.

It's quite hard to do track maintenance well when there's a train passing by every 5-10 minutes, 24/7. Maintenance windows can become really expensive.

Because at American distances, airplanes are very time-efficient for moving people. And that's today -- they were even more so before TSA.

Trains would mostly be effective at covering those distances that are currently "puddle jumper" flights. Things which are an hour flight on a slow prop plane, but which take at least twice as long real-time due to airport and security hassles.

I don't think anyone is seriously proposing a US-wide HSR network; the US-wide population density obviously makes that non-viable.

There's definitely parts of the US where the population density could easily sustain HSR, though; California from San Diego–Los Angeles–San Francisco is one, and Boston–New York–Philadelphia–Baltimore–Washington is another (quite how far you could stretch that network west is an interesting question, and I don't know enough about current travel trends to comment, certainly Pittsburgh is close enough that travel time-wise it could beat out aviation), as is Miami–West Palm Beach–Orlando for example.

What is interesting is it is likely the case that the North East is the only place where there's a sufficient population density in a larger general area that crosses state lines.

The problems seem to be frequently the fact that nobody wants a train line near them that doesn't stop near them, whereas current aviation routes simply overfly them, and adding in extra stops completely destroys the business case by making them comparatively slow (v. aviation).

Agree completely with the stops issue. Personally, I think that focusing any amount on intercity trains is wasted effort without first having intracity transport worked out. What's the point of having a fast train between Orlando and Miami if I can't do anything without a car on the other end?

No Florida city has a good public transit story. Hell, in the Tampa Bay area, you can't even get from the Tampa International airport to Pinellas county without two hours of buses, because the cross-bay express buses only run for commuters. (Only on weekdays, only during rush-hour times.) So what's the point of a train that goes from Tampa to Miami if it takes me another two hours to get to Clearwater or St Petersburg? That's half of the four hours already to drive direct!

Without even trying to figure business cases out, I think it should be obvious that going after busy aviation routes should succeed without more intracity transport: there's obviously "enough" public transport for aviation to succeed there (where that "enough" might be the fact there are plenty of car hire agencies at the airport along with one or two bus services!).

Unless the alternate mechanism is going to have the same termini,like as the air routes (as in, at the airport itself), it still likely needs additional local transit, even if the existing network is adequate to support the airport.

Pittsburgh is on the other side of the (eastern) continental divide--the Appalachian Mountains--from NYC. They're not the highest but they'd still cause a lot of difficulties to HSR. I also doubt you'd have enough traffic just to Pittsburgh and NYC-Chicago is too far. Even if you wave your hands and reduce the current travel time by half to about 8-10 hours, very few people will take that rather than fly.

NE Corridor already works well for train obviously. Amtrak has various plans to upgrade service though I don't know the current status of those plans.

Half that to 8–10 hours? It's only ~350 miles or so, and if we're talking HSR, by the standards of the past thirty years is only a couple of hours or so. The other thing worth remembering is that some of the steepest grades on railways in the world are found on HSR, up to 4% compared with 1.5% that would be considered steep by the standards of most railways.

Fair point about the grade (given right-of-ways for dedicated track). However, it's over 700 miles as the crow flies. It's academic in any case. This would be a project in the $10s of billions and isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.

Pretty simple actually--our rail system is optimized for freight, not passenger transport while our road and airway systems are the opposite. While this does mean rail transport is dreadfully slow and full of delays (since a car of wheat isn't particularly time-sensitive and doesn't need to go 300 kph), it also means that cargo transportation is incredibly efficient (both financially and energetically) and cheap.

I was going to make exactly this point. If you look at Europe and say "their trains are so much better!" then you're missing half the picture. They're not better, they're just different. Better in some ways, worse in other ways.

Given the size of our country, I'm not at all sure we made the wrong tradeoff here. Being able to cheaply ship goods from coast to coast seems far more valuable than having high speed passenger trains that "only" take a day or two to make that same trip.

Certainly, there are some corridors where we ought to to better. DC-Boston and LA-SF, for example, would probably benefit greatly from high-speed rail. But I don't think the idea of ubiquitous passenger trains is really a good one for us, much as I might like to see it.

While an interesting observation, I'm not sure this really addresses the point. The conversation was implicitly about passenger rail, and the US is clearly bad at that.

Also I can think of a few practical reasons why Europe might have less developed long distance freight rail off the top of my head. Not least the fact that most of Europe is a lot better connected by sea than opposite coasts of the US (especially before the Panama canal was built).

Our freight system is a big part of why our passenger system sucks, though. Most of our cities see infrequent or nonexistent passenger service because the rails are all tied up with freight.

That doesn't really follow. If freight rail is getting in the way of passenger rail then the cause is insufficient capacity, not the existence of freight. And the solution is to build more track (or allocate more of the existing capacity to passenger services) but that costs money, and there's no political will behind it.

If anything it sounds like the freight rail is the only reason you have any passenger rail at all.

That doesn't really make sense. If we got rid of the freight trains the rails would just start to rust, it's not like there's a ton of money/interest/profit in passenger rail thats stymied by all the jam packed tracks.

Or I can just say "their passenger trains are so much better" and not miss any of the picture.

Which, plainly, was the original point.

A lot of the infrastructure is shared between the two types, so you can't just ignore one.

> Being able to cheaply ship goods from coast to coast seems far more valuable than having high speed passenger trains that "only" take a day or two to make that same trip.

Why can't we have both?

In order to have both we need segregated passenger and freight rail systems, which is extremely expensive. AFAIK, China is the only country to have both, and avoids the high costs through a mix of weak property rights, lax environmental regulation, and a strong domestic supply chain.

America has only about 5x the freight rail traffic of Europe, while Europe has over 100x the passenger ridership that America has. I don't think the freight advantage (if it can be called that) justifies the disadvantage of our relative passenger immobility.

By the way 40% of US rail freight traffic by weight is coal, which is nothing to be proud of. If you erase the fact that USA is still a massive coal consumer, it starts to look like Europe moves as much freight as America does.

> America has only about 5x the freight rail traffic of Europe, while Europe has over 100x the passenger ridership that America has. I don't think the freight advantage (if it can be called that) justifies the disadvantage of our relative passenger immobility.

It is "justified" if the American configuration (cars & trucks carry people, trains carry goods) uses less energy than the European one (cars & trucks carry goods, trains carry people), which I suspect it does when you do an apples-to-apples comparison and leave out metropolitan rail systems, where people-vs-freight tradeoffs don't apply.

> By the way 40% of US rail freight traffic by weight is coal, which is nothing to be proud of. If you erase the fact that USA is still a massive coal consumer, it starts to look like Europe moves as much freight as America does.

Again, to do a fair comparison you have to subtract coal from European transport systems.

I'm not sure how you arrived at your conclusion. US transportation energy consumption for all purposes (goods and passengers) is much higher per GDP per capita than for any European country. For example Germany has a per-capita GDP about 2/3rds at much as USA, but uses less than 1/3rd of the energy for transportation.

Not sure what you're getting at with ignoring metro rail systems.

The US has to transport goods and people longer distances, so all other things being equal US transportation will be more energy intensive. However, having the US switch over to the German mode of transportation, where goods move on trucks and people move on rails, will make the system more, not less energy intensive since goods contribute more ton-miles than people.

I still think you are presenting a false choice. It isn't necessary for the US to put goods on trucks in order for us to put people on trains. Nobody today drives their cars from the coal field in Gillette, Wyoming to the electric power plant in Montrose, Missouri. Adding trains for people will not somehow make the coal-hauling railroads of America more congested or less effective.

Freight lines and passenger lines are usually (though not always) different, especially on the country-side where you have no electrification for freight lines and HSR-dedicated lines.

In the USA, all passenger rail outside the northeast is not electrified and freight lines are a strict superset of passenger lines.

> Like the kind every European country figured out how to do properly

While I can't compare to US railways, EU railways have their fair share of issues. There might indeed be a fairly large offer, the structures running them seem to be an organisational mess in many countries.

Just some examples I know of:

* The Netherlands and Belgium ordered trains that were never able to drive [1].

* Rail is sometimes referred to as Germany's inefficiency secret [2].

* Rail privatisation in the UK isn't very popular [3].

Obviously it isn't all bad. But it also isn't organised properly in many EU countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyra

[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-series-of-defe...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...

Took me two hours to go from San Francisco to San Jose by public transit, and I had to use an Uber for the last leg because the train for the last segment stopped running (this was for a journey started around 8 PM).

Took me two hours to go from Tokyo to Kyoto.

I have you beat with 1.5h from midtown Atlanta to east Atlanta via MARTA (subway + 1 or 2 busses, this was about 5-6 years ago.

There was no breakdown but this obviously depends on where in midtown you come from and where in east atlanta you go to, also just waiting on a bus can be 20-30 minutes per transfer.

I think a part of the problem is that most(?) rail lines are owned by a patchwork of companies. So while you can take an Amtrak from San Jose to LA, it will travel over BNSF and Union-Pacific lines (I think). It may not get right-of-way everywhere, resulting in delays.

We need the Federal Government to own the rail lines, just like it owns the highways.

It still baffles me how the United States is unable to do anything similar. Our projects are half the size and double the cost. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-c...

The more fingers in the pie, the higher the cost. At least that's my guess. I imagine more expensive labour and tighter regulations also greatly increase costs.

France and Germany both have expensive labour and regulations, yet they have working trains.

It's not just the cost of labor and associated regulatory costs. I think a lot of the overhead in the US has to do with such projects often being funded by the federal government, yet implemented by state/county/city governments. Each of those wants to get involved and get a slice of the pie, so to speak...

You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects? In Germany at least such projects also involve funding from the state, federal government and possibly the EU, usually those funds make up the majority of the money.

Without such funds nothing would get done at all.

> You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects?

No, I don't think that. But I do think it's likely that the various levels of US government like to stake their claim to more autonomy compared to the various levels of government in Europe (particularly at the local level -- I'm sure the EU and national governments love to "get involved").

How about San Francisco spending 1.6 Billion dollars for 1.7 miles of Subway? (http://www.enr.com/blogs/14-gold-rush/post/38027-san-francis...)

Most of the cost of the Central Subway is the stations, not the tunnel. Distance is perhaps not the best measure in that case.

Our country is of similar size, yet we have only 1/4th the population, and it's much more spread out. We don't have any megalopolises with 110 million people to connect.

Much of the cost difference is because we refuse to be efficient with our large government projects, but a lot of it is also due to the fact that we care at least a bit about stuff like poor people, endangered species, historical preservation, etc. Big infrastructure projects are a lot cheaper if you can just bulldoze whatever is in the way and not care about it.

Yeah - I recently had a conversation with a biologist - a profession that I don't normally have the opportunity to interact with.

She used to work for Caltrans and once I learned what she did it really shed a little light on why these big infrastructure projects can rack up such high bills.

As you said, if all we did was bulldoze and build we could probably build even faster than some of our foreign counterparts, but what we do is far from just bull doze and build.

This biologist, for example, explained to me that before new roads are built, an environmental impact assessment was done. I had heard of these but not how detailed they are.

They actually send biologists out in the field to tag and catalogue different species - all sorts of things from grizzly bears to salamanders. And not just tag and catalogue, but track them for long periods of time, often manually, to see how that particular species lives and moves about the environment. These are highly skilled and trained people who hike deep into remote areas and do this for weeks at a time.

It's a tough job to balance being competitive with the world while at the same time adhering to our principles.

I'm as enraged as the next guy when public projects take forever, but it made me genuinely happy to know someone is out there doing this kind of work. I can only imagine what other types of work are done during infrastructure projects that I can't even think of.

An interesting example of the differences is line 2 of the Beijing subway. The route was intended to roughly follow the old city wall around the city. The country couldn't afford expensive tunnel boring at the time (this was in the 60s, long before the economic reforms), but cheaper cut-and-cover techniques would have destroyed a ton of houses. Easy solution! That historic city wall is pointless in this age of nuclear warfare and jet airplanes, so just tear it down and build the subway there.

I think in the US, if we were faced with a similar choice (not that we have any city walls here, but imagine something of similar historical significance) we'd either put up with the much more expensive boring approach, or just decide we couldn't do the project at all.

And at the same time they're thinking about connecting Beijing and Shanghai via maglev train. [1] Could be hugely successful, the current line (5hr trip) is already at capacity and there's a lot of air traffic.

Offering a 2.5hr drive between the 2 major cities should pay off financially.

[1] http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2049785/china...

Do they have the tech though (the Pudong one is built by Germans I think) ? Chuo Shinkansen in neighboring Japan is likely not be completed until 2045 (!).

The Japanese train is already running on a test track. The reason it takes so long to build is that they want to keep costs down to finance it privately. They could probably open it in '25 if they threw a lot more money into the project (which China will likely do).

I'd guess that they have the tech to build a maglev train. The German technology is mostly 20-30 years old and well known. They already have trains running, so figuring out how to build a train and track shouldn't be too hard.

Hmm, I assumed that part of the reason it would take so long is that it's mostly going to be tunnels through the mountains, and ultimately you can only bore so fast.

That's for the full route to Osaka, the section to Nagoya is scheduled to be finished by 2027 (which is still a major city, and will probably cut overall travel times, especially if they schedule for quick transfers to the existing Tokaido Shinkansen).

Apparently they're also trying to get a demonstration service running from Tokyo to Kofu by 2020 for the Olympics, although I don't know how optimistic that is.

When I was last in China (2008), it took an overnight rail train ride to get between Beijing and Shanghai. They've already improved by leaps and bounds, it seems.

$36,000,000,000 is such an unfathomable amount of money. I know it's mostly done in debt/etc, but jesus, taking a second to think about the quantity itself is mind bottling.

Edit: 36B, not 360B, but still damn -- that's a lot of money.

>$360,000,000,000 is such an unfathomable amount of money.

The article says $36B, not $360B. I'm not sure if you misread or made a typo.

Was a typo, thanks!

Thinking of modern fiat as a finite, palpable concept is your first mistake ;)

It's cheaper than three new U.S. aircraft carriers.

Can anyone explain how US policy makers justify the US military spending? Is it just about creating jobs? So why not build trains hospitals schools with that money? Is it just because the defense industry lobbies the shit out of US politicians? Surely our new mega rich class have the resources to lobby against this.

The dynamics of American hegemony in the latter half of the 20th century are too complicated to recap in a forum reply, but the short answer is that projecting economic and military power around the world are intricately linked.

It is 3 weeks of US military budget.

Doesn't seem unfathomable to me. $36B is just a square grid of 190 x 190 San Francisco houses.

Visualizations like this are handy to get your head around big numbers. I remember thinking as a kid that a million was an incredibly huge number - how could you even fit a million dollar bills in a room! But then consider that a marble is (very roughly) one cc, and you could fit a million marbles in a cube one meter per side, and it doesn't seem so great. You could (very roughly) fit that much in a hot tub. A billion? Well, just cover a football field with hot tubs and that gets you around _10_ billion marbles. If marbles cost a buck a pop (they don't, but think of something that does and is the same size) China is building the project for the cost of covering a football pitch with hot tubs full of marbles.

Or, consider that copper is around $4800 per tonne (1000 kg, or one Megagram). Copper is about 9 g/ml, and the aforementioned cubes are a million ml each, so that's 9 Megagrams per hot tub. You could cover a football pitch with hot tubs and only fill them about 1/9th full of copper for the money China is using to build this rail system, which suddenly makes it seem like a pretty good deal.

Also, I never knew just how vaguely defined football pitches were : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch

" The two goal lines must be between 45 and 90 m (50 and 100 yd) and be the same length.[3] The two touch lines must also be of the same length, and be between 90 and 120 m "

You could have a field with over twice as much area as another and they'd both be legal.

Edit: I made a huge mathematical error thinking about the copper bit of the above. $36B buys 7.5 million tonnes of copper, which is about 750,000 hot tubs' worth. A football pitch holding 10,000 hot tubs (100x100) could be stacked with 75 layers of hot tubs of copper.

Really, I just need to think of a metal that costs $1 per ml.

You want a really unfathomable amount of money? The Department of Defence's Joint Strike Fighter program is forecast to cost $1.1 trillion over its lifespan. The program is already $117 billion over budget.

China is building a world class railway system for a third of the cost of the budget overrun of a single fighter aircraft project.

http://gao.gov/assets/600/591608.pdf

World class - maybe, but they have certainly cut corners on their high speed regional network that has resulted in some horrific accidents (that go unreported in the rest of the world). Also, something of like this in the US would be an order of magnitude most expensive to build. The current NEC 'high-speed' plan is around $151 Billion (in 2012 dollars) which is only about a 450 mile run between Boston and DC. Planned to be completed by 2040 (if ever funded), the travel time would still be just over 3 hours to go the ~450 miles.

This could be a infrastructure stimulus project that helps millions of construction worker (railway construction for the most part) stay employeed. And it will also help alleviate the pressure of highly populous capital metro: skyrocketing real estate market (due to supply-demand imbalance), traffic congestion, garbage processing, food/water supply, all become a big headache when Beijing has to support 23 million people (probably more if you count those unregistered migration workers etc.)

Just spent 2 weeks in Japan using their incredible Shinkansen trains. Every single train was on time and they were so clean and comfortable with about a metre of leg room.

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