Comment by gaoshan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaoshan | Hacker News Reader

Having ridden the trains of China fairly extensively and over a long period of time I am essentially ruined for what we have in the US. The older style Chinese trains were fine and I always enjoyed the journey (and remember excitedly riding the maglev when it first opened in Shanghai) but the newer generation of high speed trains is what pushed me from "It would be so pleasant to have this system in the US" to "We are losing out and falling behind the modern world".

Trips that take me 3 hours in normal traffic here would take less than 45 minutes in China... possibly as little as 30 minutes. Trains would be leaving for the main destinations in 15 minute intervals, travel times cut by an order of magnitude, arrivals would be in stations that connect to clean, modern, efficient, inexpensive and safe subway systems.

A typical journey. Hangzhou to Shanghai used to be a 3 hour bus ride for me. On top of that it was 45 minutes from home to the bus station. Now I can walk a few hundred meters to a gleaming, state of the art metro station (seriously, you've never experienced anything like this if you've never left the US), arrive in the ground floor of the train station, catch a glass smooth, spacious high speed train to Shanghai that leaves every 15 minutes and takes only 45 minutes and go downstairs to the subway to travel wherever I need to go in the city (usually within a couple of blocks of whatever destination I have).

We are so far away from this that I find it a bit distressing. We cannot afford it, we cannot overcome the legal and political hurdles to make it happen... we are just going to fall further and further behind.

China can do it because they have a command economy and the government can just take property to do what it wants.

To do this in the USA you'd have a thousand different emminent domain claims to get through, at least some of which will be contested, you'll need to pay the property owners fair market prices for the land you are taking, there will need to be environmental impact studies, planning commission approvals, fights with every interested locality over station locations and ammenities and how many trees will be cut down. China doesn't have to worry about any of that they just do it.

The US built stuff though. Not even that long ago.

Subway systems don’t take all that much land from private parties and are effectively too expensive to build here. Not to mention how long they take.

It’s because we decided it must be this way. If we decided (as a society) building stuff was important we could do so. It will take an existential crises for this attitude to shift though.

When you propose building quite literally anything here you will have people saying “no” crawling out of the woodwork. We decided to empower such people both legally and socially.

Los Angeles is building a ton of new subway systems ( I think maybe more than anywhere else in the US ) where it is far from easy. If LA Metro can pull it off then so can elsewhere!

Long-distance passenger rail isn't something we (as a society) want. So it doesn't get built. We still build highways for cars. We still build commuter rail, where population density supports it.

While I don't disagree with you as you described the US situation, many places out there have societies and government regulations closer to the US than China and they have built successful railway networks, including high speed ones. Many countries in Europe, for example.

It might be useful to compare the US with those countries instead, and find out what differs in the US so it's holding it back.

I think this narrative is kinda trueish but I still dislike it because it masks the real problem. Those property rights and review processes don't actually get us any benefit, they just allow a small number of people to grift the state and blow up costs for no reason and frequently for self-enriching nefarious reasons. So it's not like there's an upside to our system. This narrative suggests "well, we don't have great trains but at least we're free, unlike the Chinese" which I think is a load of shit.

People do get railroaded in China, it's true. But people get railroaded here in the USA too, because they have to live next to a loud choking freeway that gives them cancer and alzheimers, instead of a clean train line. And it costs $300 for car payment insurance etc to get anywhere which is basically a tax. 3 children a day have to die in car crashes because our whole society has been captured by the automobile. And in any case, they built all these freeways by railroading immigrant and black communities all over the place anyway. We got the worst of all worlds. Honestly net I think it sucks more than chaiqian because at least under their system you can ride the fucking train.

And even aside from this, China has way more civil engineers than the USA does and those engineers have many large projects under their belts. I think they are also just way better at executing large projects on time and under budget. Their engineers simply are better than ours. They build bigger things faster and cheaper than we do full stop.

Same. I lived in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China for about 10 years, and I only came back with my wife because we want to buy a house here in the States. After that, we're going back to Japan and China.

The US is so far behind in public infrastructure (trains, pedestrian, cycling, etc) that I can't see the States being a good place NOW, much less the next fifty years.

Why do you want to buy a house in the United States that you never plan to live in?

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