China Railway Map (2021)
cnrail.geogv.org
cnrail.geogv.org
I've been to the country a few times now and hated every second of air travel there, it's messy, people behave really badly regarding rules and pilots are always changing altitude/speed during (supposedly) level flight to the point that you feel like you are on a rollercoaster.
In comparison train travel is incredibly pleasant and efficient, albeit sometimes quite busy. I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion but many countries in the West should hire the Chinese to construct and build HSR in their countries with foreign labour under local direction. The benefits are huge for rail. Airports for short journeys just seem wasteful and incapable of dealing with climate change problems. Not to mention the stress of security hassles.
Here's the last 12 years of rail in China: https://image5.sixthtone.com/image/5/4/861.gif
In Australia we have been debating the high speed rail issue and doing feasibility studies for two decades now. The cost of AUD $100 billion was considered to not be worth it. Federal covid cash handouts to individuals in the last year alone topped $200 billion.
you didn't have the same problem when riding HSR trains? next time maybe just check how many are smoking on the platform.
another interesting experiment you can have is to visit both those old train stations and stations dedicated for HSR, you'd easily spot differences in terms of how people behave.
No, not really, there was some very busy queues but for the most part it was civilised, Saw a few times a guy trying to walk to front of a ticket queue and the station lady yelling at him, then the people in the line started yelling too and he walked to the back. That's about it.
On planes I have repeatedly seen groups of people unbuckle their belts and start opening the overhead luggage about 30 seconds before touchdown, multiple air hostesses would get on the intercom and scream for them to sit down but no one listens and gets their bags anyway. Honestly chaotic stuff.
My experiences over a decade anyway.
There's absolutely no reason to do it, most (if not all) western countries are perfectly capable of building highspeed railway technically speaking. The reason why it's not done is political and financial. Also in the current climate you'll have a hard time justifying hiring a chinese companies over a domestic company to build critical infrastuctures (and rightfully so imo). In fact I believe public contracts should always be awarded to domestic companies, granted domestic companies with the required skills exist (which is absolutely the case in Europe for railway).
We tried that with highways in Poland. Chinese company Covec came in, underbid for 30 and 20 km pieces of A2, got paid advances, hired local labour, didnt pay contractors for finished work, decided they didnt like the project any more and wanted more money, packed up and left with half the contracted work done.
One of the reasons cited for the failure was arrest of Liu Zhijuna, Chinese minister of rail, for alleged corruption. Covec was a China Railway Group subsidiary.
Those are not necessarily issues in a one party, socialist system.
Why is Taiwan on the map of Chinese railroads? Can you actually buy a ticket to Taiwan's system at a Chinese station?
How is people flying and driving better than using electric trains? Also in this case there is no "west", the US decided to keep people on the road an in the air, but in western europe we built extensive HSR networks exactly to reduce pollution (and create competition to short-distance airlines, but that's another story).
Secondly, I’m not sure how driving combustion engine cars has better environmental outcomes than electrified trains. Even if the trains weren’t electrified, they’re still orders of magnitude more efficient than a car that generally has 1-2 people in it.
Plus, they missed to include Taiwan's high speed railway system. I am sure that was on purpose, too, since it was build before the Chinese one (2007).
also isn't the red line the Taiwanese HSR?
You cannot really put Europe and the US in the same bucket when it comes to HSR. France, Spain, Italy, Germany all have extensive HSR that connects major cities. We also have several projects to connect HSR across countries (other than Eurostar).
Cost per km in Germany and Spain was also lower than in China (mostly because in China they decided to use viaducts so that they had to buy less land, which goes against your claim they could just seize land).