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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

The greatest obstacles to constructing high speed rails in Europe or the US is expropriating land, environment feasibility studies, somewhat convincing plans for sustainable financing through user payments or otherwise, and the fact that rails traverse several political units (whether borders between countries, states, regions or municipalities) that all have to cooperate.

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?

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> The greatest obstacles to constructing high speed rails in Europe or the US is expropriating land, environment feasibility studies, somewhat convincing plans for sustainable financing through user payments or otherwise, and the fact that rails traverse several political units (whether borders between countries, states, regions or municipalities) that all have to cooperate.

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).

Pure politics. You can buy tickets for Taiwan's trains only in Taiwan, or online of course.

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_High_Speed_Rail

They're also missing the Alishan Forest Railway.

also isn't the red line the Taiwanese HSR?

Yes. But it is missing in the GIF. Because there it would have to be the first line to show up.

And, critically, it was well known what the results would be when those policies were bought in. The West purposefully made a trade off to have a better environmental and social outcomes and worse economy.

> The West purposefully made a trade off to have a better environmental and social outcomes and worse economy.

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).

Unless the “west” doesn’t include Europe, this is incorrect. Europe has extensive train and metro systems.

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.

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