Comment by nacc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nacc | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who grew in China, I just want to point out that besides the engineering, it is a political wonder as well.

Before the bullet train network was built, China already has an extensive railway network. The first step is to run the bullet train on traditional railways, with a peak speed of 180km/h. People think it's great. No objections.

But to raise the speed further, a new network has to be built, almost side-by-side to traditional railways. This idea horrored almost everybody: new railways for 10s of thousands kms, new train stations (yes for most of the place it needs a separate station), just to be a bit faster? Of course it got a constant concensual blaze from both the citizens and all the official and unofficial media. This state maintains from the beginning of the project all the way a couple years into it operates (which spans many years).

The head of the project, Liu Zhijun had to be in jail of course. Then everything changes, 180 degree. People took the trains and realize it's great. What I (and probably many people too) didn't know before was with the speed increase, the perception of distance changes. The trains run like buses: between major cities, the train runs across in every several minutes. You can just get a ticket, go to the station, an hour later you are on the subway of another city. Many times when we were holding a meeting, people from other cities actually took less time to arrive than someone driving from suburbs.

Then the new railway network gets praise from both national and overseas. The official media shut up about Liu. People start to think Liu as a fanatically great engineer.

I cannot imagine how this project can even get started, and what Liu had to do to get this to work. There must have been a great story, but we may never know.

I have ridden those trains (spent 2011-2016 in China), and they're pretty great, but they're hard to justify economically:

> The overall bill is already high. China Railway Corporation, the state-owned operator of the train system, has debts of more than 4trn yuan, equal to about 6% of GDP. Strains were evident last year when China Railway Materials, an equipment-maker, was forced to restructure part of its debts. Six lines have started to make operating profits (ie, not counting construction costs), with the Beijing-Shanghai link the world’s most profitable bullet train, pulling in 6.6bn yuan last year. But in less populated areas, they are making big losses. A state-run magazine said the line between Guangzhou and the province of Guizhou owes 3bn yuan per year in interest payments—three times more than it makes from ticket sales.

I wish it weren't so, but they look like Iridium, as mentioned by a very-downvoted comment. The builder makes enormous losses.

But they're built now, and that isn't going to be undone. I hope.

It's a very fine line to walk though: too much profit, people hate it (it's taking money from them), run at a loss, people hate it (it's a waste of tax money).

But since it is built and owned by the government, the economical benefit is also in the equation other than operation profit. A province would welcome the bullet train network even if it has to pay, if it attracts a capital influx to the province. This is usually true: given the convenience of taking the train, a city get connected means you are almost merged into a mega city, economically.

Right now the bullet train is for passenger, but cargo trains are on the timeline now. Think of goods shipped by train but arrive almost as fast as by air: this alone would make the investment a bit worthier than it looks.

Compare this overall bill to the total amount of public and private money spent on interstate highways, bridges, interchanges, rolling stock (aka automobiles) etc in the United States.

By back of the envelope math the comparison seems to favor China. It's not even close.

Obviously also has roads bridges etc. But with a functioning train network you can build far fewer of them compared to America.

> But they're built now, and that isn't going to be undone. I hope.

I work in a city where bike commuters have to dodge trolley tracks from electric trolleys that stopped running decades ago. We're converting an old train viaduct into an elevated park, although where that viaduct goes below grade, the construction of a building within the old right-of-way prevents full utilization of what had been old railroad tracks.

In municipalities across America, you can see the scars of old train tracks criss-crossing the landscape, creating curved cuts through square city blocks, turning into hiking trails along rivers, past abandoned ruins of old mills.

With any luck, China's rail system won't suffer the same fate.

I'm pretty sure I know what city you are talking about and I've definitely been caught in the tracks all over town. At least the active line on Girard has bike lines running parallel

Are these supposed to make a profit? Isn't this a state-run project, like highways?

Aren't the debts covered by the state anyways, via taxes?

Also, economic justifications are broad concepts.. how would it compare against a country like the US that has oil and people can therefore drive cars for cheap, whereas China doesn't have oil?

Is high-speed rail a more economically efficient system than cars?

> Are these supposed to make a profit? Isn't this a state-run project, like highways?

Yes, high-speed rail could be worthwhile even if it doesn't make a profit. I haven't seen any figures about high-speed rail so it may be a good investment. But in general I think China's investment boom is bad in the long term. By taking on so much debt to fund projects that have little economic return China is setting itself up for a lost decade or two like Japan.

> Aren't the debts covered by the state anyways, via taxes?

Yes, the debt is effectively passed on to taxpayers.

> Also, economic justifications are broad concepts.. how would it compare against a country like the US that has oil and people can therefore drive cars for cheap, whereas China doesn't have oil?

Sure, you need to look at the economy as a whole and the cost of energy is a factor. But that would include the cost of coal-fired power to run the trains - including costs of pollution.

> Is high-speed rail a more economically efficient system than cars?

China already had slow-speed trains and fast airplanes. So the better comparison is between (a) upgrading the capacity of the existing rail and airport systems; (b) building an entirely new rail network.

The rail doesn't have to be profitable itself (which is a benefit of being state-owned). The more important thing is the bigger picture, is how much economic advantage it generates.

Japan does not seem to get much growth out of it.

undone, maybe not directly but indirectly. it is quite easy to keep on deferring maintenance until a line is not viable. this will be key to determining if this is a successful expenditure. what gets cut first

I don't get why the part where Liu Zhijun had to be in jail. Fast trains are intrinsically a great thing for China. People don't just "realize" it's great because of Liu or anybody else. Your "then" logic is misleading. Liu got into jail because embezzlement and favors from project contractors, at least that was part of the story, aside political factions.

Maybe I should explain better. I think with a project receiving so much opposition both from the government and citizens, I imagine Liu would have to use extraordinary methods to push it forward, which will hurt the power players hard (especially those who created the opposing voice).

The embezzlement and favours are usually just an excuse. Most people with power (at least in China) get away with it even if everyone knows about it. It only become important when someone who don't like you gets more power.

Because Liu is basically a railway enthusiast but in power. In order to push projects ASAP he bribed everyone thoroughly.

Each time a new HSR line is open he is the first passenger, and once on Chinese New Year eve he traveled to distant small rail stations and fire drunk station masters on premise.

But what percentage of the population actually uses a bullet train in a given week/month/year? (Not trips/population, the percentage of people who take one or more journies in a given timeframe.) Is this just a service for the urban elite? Or do farmers also use them?

The 747 and like jets made air travel affordable and now air travel is cheaper than by boat/rail over long distances (for people, taking into account food and lodging). If you need to attend a wedding more than a few hundred km away, you are going to consider flying. But high speed rail networks in many countries (uk, france) are either extreemly expensive or massively subsidized. All i see are suited office workers heading to jobs in downtown cores.

The carbon footprint of high speed rail, while not as bad as air, also remains much higher than other ground options. Speed always comes at some price.

This is a similar question to what percentage of people use all those empty condo-cities being built in China. The answer is: a perhaps-negligible number now (except around existing metropolitan centres, where there's respectable usage), but with projected growth toward capacity as GDP rises.

Because Chinese civil-planning policy isn't a matter of election promises, it isn't constrained to showing benefits within four-year periods. A lot of the things China is doing don't "make sense" from an intuitive standpoint if you're imagining anyone expected short-term gains, but do make sense if you imagine they were planning for 10 or 20 years down the line.

Those empty condos are unmarketable. As people become wealthier, they're going to change tastes. Even the middle class is going to seek out individual single family homes, instead of the concrete jungle of repetitive jail cells that are those new condos.

They're the poor mans idea of what the middle class wants.

A lot of those cities have the apartments built and sold before they put in commercial areas and most importantly things like subways. There was an episode of Sinica where a guest was talking to a person that bought one of the ghost apartments but wasn't living in it because there wasn't a subway line. The guest went back to the area once the subway opened and most of the apartments were full and roads were being used. I think it was this episode[0] but not 100% sure. I know the section I'm talking about was towards the end of the episode.

0 - http://supchina.com/sinica/beautiful-country-middle-kingdom-...

There can be little doubt that, in terms of environmental impact per passenger kilometre:

bus and train better than car better than air plane.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4003718

The ticket price of the bullet train is usually cheaper than by air (and the train is much, much more convenient than flights), and affortable by average citizens. This has created a huge headache to the airlines, which leads to some healthy competition.

Air transportation is only more affordable for a very small portion of the travelers who get the highly discounted fairs. On aggregate of costs for all travelers air travel is more expensive.

As the other comment stated, please do some research before openly spreading false information. Its very dishonest and in the end leads to great damage for countries.

My reciepts say otherwise. When planning trips to europe from NA the train options between cities end up costing almost as much as the intercontinental flight. Jumping on a discount airline from a secondary airport is ussually the cheaper option.

Can't compare prices in Europe with China.

Also, European rail operators now do what airlines have done for a long time: discounted tickets if you book a fixed train early, expensive tickets if you book last minute or with full flexibility.

This is wrong. High speed rail networks in France are profitable. Please do some research

I have. I bought tickets and they were very expensive. Im flying vancouver-sf round trip next month for 1/3 the price i paid for london-paris a few years back.

Doing the math again today, round trip paris-london on eurostar is 600$ in my money (320bp on eurostar site +fees +conversion to cad, leaving next monday). Vancouver-sf by air can he had for 275$ (corporate account, no visible discount).

I just checked the Eurostar prices. A ticket for London-Paris tomorrow and Paris-London on Wednesday can be had for $247. If you book a month ahead of time, it's below $50 one-way.

The airport in London and Paris aren't very convenient if you actually have to go to the city, and you need to add transportation costs to and from the city on both sides. Eurostar takes you to locations where people actually want to be.

AS for your 600 euros for a ticket, it's likely a last minute bought one at the most expensive time, it goes as low as 39 euros for a single, most people will pay under 300 for the round trip I guess...

Heathrow is pretty convenient to London with both tube and Heathrow Express service but train is generally more convenient than air if you're going to either downtown Paris or Brussels. Personally, I'd probably never fly those routes unless they were legs on a longer trip.

In general, I've found that in Europe there are pretty consistent large savings to booking rail well in advance, which is not nearly so much the case in the US. This can be the case with flying but air prices tend to be all over the map without an easily identifiable pattern.

The parent post was about French high speed rail. Your rebuttal was about a specialty link (the Eurostar) between London and Paris. That's 2 different countries and a massively expensive 35mi long undersea tunnel.

You're not wrong that French rail is relatively expensive, but I think a specialty link was not really a "normal" rail ticket to use to compare.

You can get a round-trip on the Eurostar for USD 140 in Economy, maybe USD 200 for popular departure times. That brings you right in the middle of the city, unlike a flight. There's a reason the Eurostar is popular.

Every time I made the trip, the train London-Paris was cheaper than the corresponding air travel (and significantly more pleasant).

If the Eurostar were typically that expensive, then its competition (both aviation and coaches/ferries) would be absolutely crushing it in the market, and they aren't, which suggests that that is unusual.

The HSR drove down airfares over night when it opened so you ought to praise it.

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