China's Yearly Budget For High-Speed Rail: $100 Billion 230
An anonymous reader writes "For all of those wondering about China's massive high speed rail network, it costs some serious cash. Running high speed lines across the nation is expensive — to the tune of $100 billion dollars a year. This covers the cost to maintain the network, build it, and pay all of the staff. The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head. The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result. There is also the problem that many of Chinese poor make so little money they can't afford to ride it. The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count."
WTF, submitter and green-lighter?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Where's the scandal?!
$100B divided by 2 million employees equals $50,000 per employee -- high for China, maybe, but matches the MEDIAN male income in the U.S.
Given that the $100B actually includes much more than employee salary, like, uh, the material costs of BUILDING the railroad, and trains, and stations, etc, the figure seems rather like a bargain.
"The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head." : When does that not happen to some extent?
"The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result." : This happens everywhere.
"There is also the problem that many of Chinese poor make so little money they can't afford to ride it." : Maybe China is planning for the future, maybe?! You know, like when their middle class is comparable in size to that in other developed nations?
"The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count." : Then what is the "$100 Billion" figure?! Sheesh! Make up your mind!
the material suppliers are also likely taking ther (Score:2)
the material suppliers are also likely taking there cut as well.
also you need to count up keep and running costs in that 100B
Re:WTF, submitter and green-lighter?! (Score:5, Informative)
This New Yorker article [newyorker.com] might add to the context of corruption and where the money is going.
Re:WTF, submitter and green-lighter?! (Score:4, Funny)
BOSS RAIL
The disaster that exposed the underside of the boom.
BY EVAN OSNOS
OCTOBER 22, 2012
Wow, an article that was posted two days in the future! Slashdot has really come a long way from posting old news...
date of publication (Score:3)
The New Yorker is a magazine. That's the date of release of the issue the article will be appearing in.
Re:WTF, submitter and green-lighter?! (Score:5, Informative)
Where's the scandal?!
$100B divided by 2 million employees equals $50,000 per employee -- high for China, maybe, but matches the MEDIAN male income in the U.S.
You should read the linked article [newyorker.com] (not the link from the story, but one linked from it.) The scale of the corruption seems to be reaching epidemic proportions. The story lists the yearly salary of the #2 official in the railway ministry as being $19k/yr and yet had a fortune over $100m. Another associate of the head of the railway ministry built a ~$700m business through bribes and kickbacks. The workers are, no doubt, being paid less than $1k/yr. Redo your calculations based on that and you'll find just how much money has gone missing. It's very common for officials that have been caught to have been found with tens of millions of dollars worth of bribes. One of the biggest impediments for these officials isn't actually accepting the bribes but, instead, finding a place to store all the cash since the largest bill in circulation is a 100 yuan note worth ~$16. It's gotten so bad that bribes are now commonly made in gift cards since they're able to store value more densely.
Read the story...it's really shocking.
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What to do...
Cash in the mattress? pfft! fiat money, not worth the paper it is printed on.
Gold? - bubble, you can't eat it.
Just have lots of kids! Think of the children. They are the future!
Everything comes down to an existential question. If you can't answer it, your heirs will.
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Except... this is china. The scale of corruption in ANY third world country boggles the mind. China is not particularly surprising - because this is what happens there. In America your CEO is getting a 25% raise this year, where you'd be lucky to get anything. And ceo pay is 200x the median worker pay (up from 26 in 1970), in china CEO pay is probably 25x worker pay, but they collect bribes - which by the way go in part to pay bribes up the chain to senior government officials, of 175x worker pay or mo
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The difference is in China if you're in the wrong faction[1] and get caught for corruption you get _executed_.
Those in the right faction are probably untouchable, but you better be sure you stay in the right faction ;). Anyway in most countries being in the right faction makes you safe from the law too (unless you really really screw up).
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/19/china-corruption-executions-idUSL3E7IJ0H720110719 [reuters.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/23/business/global/china-mobile-executive-sentence [nytimes.com]
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By definition, I guess. In the civilized world such things are called lobbying and capitalist genious.
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FWIW: 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index -- Results [transparency.org]. China is #75 out of 182 countries, slightly behind Italy. They also rank better than most of Eastern Europe and any part of the FSU, again FWIW.
Also seen in another developing country (Score:3)
Railroad development in the 19th century USA was a cesspool of explicit and implicit corruption. It also created vital infrastructure.
The crash in China reads at first glance like any other Horrible Example from systems safety engineering: lack of redundancy and communication, and poorly interacting emergency procedures.
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This is why we can't have nice things in the US. Instead of doing something and possibly wasting some on corruption we spend 6x the budget debating minutia and auditing the auditors. In the end we have nothing and spend decades accomplishing nothing for fear of doing something wrong.
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"The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head." : When does that not happen to some extent?
It doesn't happen here. We passed a law saying that nobody can use the word "corrupt" when referring to a public official.
"The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result." : This happens everywhere.
True, but when people die on our railways, we investigate what happened to them. We don't just go "Well, they must have gotten lost... or... something. Oh well."
Maybe China is planning for the future, maybe?! You know, like when their middle class is comparable in size to that in other developed nations?
From what I've seen in my country of late, it's less about China trying to develop a middle class as big as ours, but us eliminating the middle class like them. But it's not much of a point... They are building out a high speed r
Re:WTF, submitter and green-lighter?! (Score:4, Insightful)
You wouldn't build a high-speed network if efficient movement of freight was your primary goal. HSR is much more expensive to build and maintain, a network built primarily to move people will go different places than one built to move things like coal and petrochemicals. The US probably has the most efficient freight network in the world in terms of $/mile/ton, but if you live anywhere outside the Northeast you may as well not bother even looking at intercity rail. Unless you're a lump of coal.
In the case of China the network links major population centers. They even blew a large fortune on a maglev line that was supposed to go from Shanghai to Beijing , though it doesn't go maglev all the way for cost reasons. They also built a line to Tibet for strategic reasons. I don't know if that's high speed, though - looking at the web site [chinatibettrain.com] it seems to average about 100 km/hr.
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Chinese HSR is often pretty slow. There's some really fast stuff, but most of it is only moderately high speed. But as you say, it's not low-cost freight lines (which China als has plenty).
Re:WTF, submitter and green-lighter?! (Score:5, Informative)
"The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result." : This happens everywhere.
Not like this it doesn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision [wikipedia.org]
Here's a picture of the accident scene: http://i.imgur.com/YJAAA.jpg [imgur.com]
There was a string of preventable events, from the lowliest track worker to the people that designed the control systems, which led up to the accident.
The Chinese Government tried to throw a blanket over the whole event, but the public outrage forced a review of the events.
/The USA actually has a lot of rail accidents, with injuries, but almost no one dies.
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I am not certain how you got NYC to LA so cheap.
FUD ... even in Germany people die ... (Score:3)
I love the high speed rail in Germany and use it almost every day. However, every HSR system will have accidents. It's the cost of doing business when you're propelling people at 200mph for hundreds of kms or more at a time. It's almost impossible to police the entire system.
Link to German accident where 101 people died. [wikipedia.org]
Don't get me wrong, I hate the Chinese government's response. And I hate the fact that when you watch the videos of the train cars being buried without investigation that you can see bodie
Re:WTF, submitter and green-lighter?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Where's the scandal?! $100B divided by 2 million employees equals $50,000 per employee -- high for China, maybe, but matches the MEDIAN male income in the U.S.
Because that money doesn't go to the workers.
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100B is 0.1 Trillion for a country the same size of the US. Compare that to the military budget of either country and you should see that the problem is not necessarily cost of the project, it's the will power of the governments to invest in it.
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$100 billion budget, 1 million riders. Seems pretty scandalous to me.
Re:WTF, submitter and green-lighter?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it? That's $100,000/rider, which sounds like a lot, but that's also including a lot of capital investment. In the UK, commuter rail tickets can cost over £5000 ($8000) [bbc.co.uk], so that's about 8% of the cost, but that cost only has to cover maintenance, not construction. For an infrastructure project on this scale, break even is typically meant to be somewhere in the 10-25 year mark. If they're still constructing infrastructure, then that's quite plausible.
For comparison, the channel tunnel cost £9.5bn to build, and finished in 1994. Eurostar made its first operating profit in 2007 and the only reason it is nominally in the black is that they effectively sold most of the company to the banks that loaned them the money. They're making something like £150m/year in operating profit (most of which goes towards financing their debt), and so it will take them a very long time to make back the initial investment. The banks are making around a 2.5-3% annual return on investment in terms of interest on the debt, but they also own the majority of a profitable company with a very valuable asset, so they have a very good long-term investment.
More importantly, a large piece of infrastructure was built and is getting regular use. Last year, around 17 million people used the channel tunnel (plus a load of freight), and that has a huge economic impact on Britain and France. It's now feasible for someone who works in London to go to Paris or Brussels for a meeting and be back the same day, for example. But if you'd done the same sums that you just did for its 1994 then you'd have seen a £9.5bn investment for 0.3 million passengers. That's £31,500/passenger, or around $50,000/passenger. In other words, about half the per-passenger cost of the Chinese high speed rail network. Clearly a waste of money...
Rail accidents are quite rare events (Score:2)
"The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result." : This happens everywhere.
At least here in France, rail accidents are extremely rare events. A quick search at wikipedia suggests that this is no exception [wikipedia.org]
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The New Yorker article should be the one posted, not the stupid crap of "The Diplomat". I think that the problem with chinese corruption from american POV is that they are not getting their share of it. For the corruption that Walmart or Halliburton promoted in Mexico that are in significant ways the cause of our security crisis they are only getting a slap in the wrist.
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Where's the scandal?!
$100B divided by 2 million employees equals $50,000 per employee -- high for China, maybe, but matches the MEDIAN male income in the U.S.
Given that the $100B actually includes much more than employee salary, like, uh, the material costs of BUILDING the railroad, and trains, and stations, etc, the figure seems rather like a bargain.
"The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head." : When does that not happen to some extent?
"The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result." : This happens everywhere.
"There is also the problem that many of Chinese poor make so little money they can't afford to ride it." : Maybe China is planning for the future, maybe?! You know, like when their middle class is comparable in size to that in other developed nations?
"The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count." : Then what is the "$100 Billion" figure?! Sheesh! Make up your mind!
Typical of those living in developed countries, you are applying your values to the money. Think not of what $100B is worth in the US. Think of what it is worth in China.
You say that 50,000 is the median for the median male income in the US. This is a meaningless statement relative to the discussion for two reasons.
- 50,000 is enormous in China
- median doesn't mean shit. Most of the workers will be making a dollar a day and those in charge will take the balance.
You say that in addition to
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The pay for a professionally trained engineer in China is not far off from the US numbers (having had discussions with an EE working for a power company there). Well, he probably makes about half a US salary, but $50k isn't unheard of for a PE equivalent.
Even if we take your small sample as indicative, how many of the people working on building the train system will make anywhere near that much? Some few will be engineers, yes, but most will be unskilled physical labor making (relatively) nothing.
Geez, way to spoil things (Score:2)
You must be fun at the watercooler with your facts and logic and reasonable thinking.
Anyway, the Brits cut costs on their rail network and it resulted in lots of people dying when infrastructure collapsed and years of totally disrupted service around the country. And the US rail system is a joke with also many many deaths thanks to lousy infrastructure.
Corruption is indeed a problem in China but at least they are dealing with it, and not with leisure resort prisons but with death penalties. It ain't perfect
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"The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying as a result." : This happens everywhere.
Actually the Japanese high speed rail system, the Shinkansen (bullet train), has never had a fatality. It was the first one in the world, is still the fastest in the world, exists in a country prone to earthquakes and other natural disasters, but has an almost flawless safety record.
Damn shills (Score:2)
This should be stomped on. It's a shill response from the cretins doing this criminal activity. They should be executed as so many are considering the moral turpitude of Chinese culture.
Don't bother reading the actual article. Its fake (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what kind of reputation "THE DIPLOMAT" has in the field of journalism, but this article is just pure crap. Despite the title, the article has almost nothing to do with high speed rail in China. Using recent problems that have come to light with the management of China's rail system, the article is actually just a mostly unflattering portrayal of the fiscal situation in China's military. A more accurate title for the article should be something like "Corruption plagues the PLA".
An excerpt for you:
This breakdown suggests that 100% of the PLA’s budget was diverted towards real requirements. But the parable of the railways strongly suggests that this cannot be right. How much of the PLA’s budget has been spent on retirement homes for generals in Florida, or funneled into private business ventures, or used to buy promotions? How much has been wasted on bogus capabilities that the military doesn’t really need, but whose purchase helped to line influential pockets? And how much has been spent on genuine capabilities, but capabilities whose price tag was hugely inflated so that highly-placed officials could skim off the surplus?
There is almost nothing of value on high speed rail that has not been already revealed from other media sources.
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I don't know what kind of reputation "THE DIPLOMAT" has in the field of journalism, but this article is just pure crap. Despite the title, the article has almost nothing to do with high speed rail in China.
Yes, it's a very weird and completely pointless article. It really does start off talking about high speed rail, but then inexplicably jumps to corruption in the PLA (People's Liberation Army) and then proceeds to jump back and forth between the two topics for no apparent reason, making absolutely no worthwhile comments about either.
Re:Don't bother reading the actual article. Its fa (Score:4, Informative)
Has the author ever been to China? (Score:3, Insightful)
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However the article's point is still not a good one: it is unlikely any train system could compete in price with the cheapest buses, s
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This argument always comes up when talking about any large project in a country with lots of poor people. Why does India have a space programme when there are hundreds of millions living wretched existences in extreme poverty?
The only way to you get everyone's standard of living up is to improve your country. Transport links create opportunities and new business, which creates jobs and wealth for the poor. Even if they can't afford to use these trains today they will in a decade or two.
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I'm in Beijing. I've never been to China before, and this is only night two.
The metro is Y2 a ride. Buses are apparently Y1. That's about 20% of the prices in Europe.
It's clear there's a *huge* middle-class, with money to spend. A soft drink at a tourist site is Y5, a soft drink at a non-tourist (no English menu) restaurant maybe Y10, as at the nice hotel. A nice meal at a normal-looking place just cost Y40 each.
Some (special?) tea they sell here at the hotel is Y400 or more! People are buying it. Th
Concern troll submitter is concerned (Score:4, Insightful)
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Here in the U.S., you get Amtrack. Subsidized, expensive, and slow. Doesn't own its own tracks, so regularly stops to let cargo trains through. It can cost twice as much as flying and take twice as long to get there. Sometimes it is faster (rarely), but never cheaper that I have heard of.
The U.S. is
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Did you know that Amtrak's only profitable line is also the nation's only high speed line, the Acela Express? It "made a profit of about $41 per passenger" [businessinsider.com] in 2008.
That's why all intercity passenger rail ought to be high speed rail!
We also have city pairs that have the population density to support high speed rail. B
Re:Concern troll submitter is concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't that the US is more spread out... the problem is that Europe actually HAS open space to cheaply build new rail corridors in between cities, whereas in many parts of the eastern US, you can drive a hundred miles or more without seeing anything more rural than an occasional vacant lot next to the interstate. Nebraska and Kansas might have cities surrounded by cornfields, but east of the Mississippi, our cities tend to be surrounded by hundreds of miles of single-family homes, strip malls, and office parks.
The other problem in the US is our obsession with either keeping high-speed passenger trains 100% separate every last inch of the way, or forcing them to be capable of surviving a head-on collision at full speed with a mile-long coal train if they share tracks with a conventional train anywhere along the route... even if they'd only be running at low speed in the areas where they shared tracks (like the last mile or two into a big city station). In Europe (particularly in Germany), they built the first segment of the new high-speed tracks, and tied them in to the existing rail network at both ends... then extended them from there. In America, we piously plan to do stupid things, like build isolated segments of high-speed rail that don't directly connect to *anything*, and would force passengers to physically switch trains for years, or forever.
HSR between ONLY Bakersfield and Corcoran, or ONLY Tampa and Orlando, is insane. Brand new HSR tracks between Bakersfield and Corcoran that continue into LA and San Francisco along the existing tracks and immediately cut an hour or two off the time it would take to make the trip at low speed, then fill in the gaps to reduce the time even more, are a great start to what's going to be an awesome HSR network someday. Ditto, for new HSR tracks between Melbourne and Orlando (eventually Tampa) that connect to the existing FEC tracks between Jacksonville and Miami.
Engineering-wise, Acela-type trains aren't ideal... but they're actually pretty good. Their 150mph speed limit is due to Amtrak, not engineering -- Bombardier's engineers designed them to run at 186mph, and in a flat state like Florida, they could do 200mph without breaking a sweat given suitable tracks and administrative approval.
As far as subsidies go, EVERY transportation mode is subsidized from general tax revenues. Gas taxes haven't fully supported road construction and maintenance costs since the mid-1990s (they USED to, but as gas prices have increased, the federal and state governments have gradually reduced them to levels that no longer cover 100% of costs). In 2011, Amtrak's total subsidy came out to about $4.25 per American. Nothing to really be proud of, but far from the scandalous rape some would have you believe it is... and most of THAT is for fixed costs that are basically the same regardless of whether Amtrak runs one train or ten trains through any given station per day. Under the current status quo, Amtrak can't "win" regardless of what it does. If it raises fares, it gets decried for being expensive. If it lowers fares, it gets attacked for requiring subsidies. The point is, Amtrak is Amtrak. For better or worse, right now it's all we have. In a few years, we'll have the backbone of California HSR, and FEC Railroad's new passenger service in Florida running along with Amtrak.
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"If it doesn't work somewhere, then don't build the tracks there. And then we have plenty of cities that are close to each other, and which would benefit from such a chain."
Maybe. There is the POV that if you have to maintain an airline infrastructure to support travel for many destinations, it might just be more cost effective to not duplicate that with a separate competing infrastructure.
OTOH it could be the airlines lobby to prevent said competition to maintain what profits they can.
The truth is likely t
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I have taken a number of Amtrak trips more recently than you, but in a different region. Here's my story:
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I took the train from Hong Kong to Beijing in China, much cheaper than flying, and it was an adventure.
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I'd say that anything requiring a subsidy is inherently inefficient if anything other than externalities are being accounted for.
Amazing - i have two thoughts (Score:2)
2 - 100 million is nothing compared to what that amount was worth 10 years ago
3 - we have sent china a lot of our manufacturing machinery - are we really surprised?
$100 billion (Score:2, Flamebait)
Isn't that about what we pay to China every year just to cover the interest on the money our country has borrowed from them? At least all that interest money is being put to good use.
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The money owed to China is around $1tn. I don't know what interest rate it is at, but it certainly isn't as high as 10%.
Obligatory (Score:2)
The Entire Chinese Economy is a Mirage (Score:2)
Command economies result is massive misallocations of capital compared to market economies, and this is also true of China [battleswarmblog.com]. The "Ghost Cities" are the biggest manifestation of economic distortion, but hardly the only one.
On the plus side, communist China is only killing thousands of its own people every year, a vast improvement on the millions (or tens of millions) killed in the past [battleswarmblog.com]. Progress!
Who says the US isn't investing in high speed rail (Score:5, Funny)
See, who says the US isn't investing in high speed rail! Whose $100B do you think that is?
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You don't understand what T-Bucket is saying. He's saying that when a Chinese worker assembles a phone for $17/day, in a shift of 14-16 hours, living in a dorm with 15 beds in a 12x12 box, and then that phone is sold for $400 in America, netting China $8 of that $400... that that $8 is stolen from the US. That, really, that $8 belongs to America... and it was produced by overcharging Americans for Chinese goods.
China then takes those unjustly earned funds, and loans them back to America.
T-Bucket would never
but then there's this (Score:2)
Not enough high quality fly ash around to succeed (Score:2)
The issue for China is there isn't enough high quality fly ash around to make the cement needed to build its railway network in a sustainable manner. Without the proper ash, rail tracks have a lifespan of a dozen years vs the usual century, and thus need to be constantly maintained and rebuilt. The whole adventure reeks of money wastage...
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/is-china-overreaching-on-high-speed-rail/69490/ [theatlantic.com]
/Rolls Eyes (Score:5, Funny)
"For all of those wondering about America's massive interstate highway network, it costs some serious cash. Running roads across the nation is expensive - to the tune of $50 billion dollars a year. This covers the cost to maintain the network, build it, and pay all of the staff. The problem is, corruption has reared its ugly head. The network itself has had its share of problems, with people dying [cdc.gov] as a result. There is also the problem that many of America's poor make so little money they can't afford to ride it. The sad fact is that so much money is being spent, no one can even keep count."
Re:What Is It ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong on many levels. The West Coast Main Line (WCML) is forecast to hit capacity soon. In fact, they have had to reduce stops, remove stops etc, to keep the line running with any reasonable frequency. So a new line is needed. If you are building a new line, there is no good reason to not build HSR line. The costs will be fairly similar anyway. The high speed element is something nice, but not the main point of building a new line.
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If you are building a new line, there is no good reason to not build HSR line.
Except if the igher cost of the high speed rail line outweighs the increase benefits of the line. A high speed rail line does cost more than a more modest approach. What I've been hearing worldwide is that most such HSR lines lose money. Meaning they aren't passing the most basic economics test (that is, having a positive ROI).
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How much extra profit was made by companies in the UK and France being able to send people and equipment to each other very quickly?
You measure that by willingness to pay. If companies are making money from Chunnel services, they'll pay money for it. The ticket price itself becomes your feedback. This is the great simplification which a market-based system provides for such things.
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I've never fully understood this concept that you build infrastructure to make money directly.
It's not complicated. Infrastructure which makes a profit is completely self-funded. And it's a reasonable measure to look at for something which has a lot of claimed value. Let's look at your example. If it really is beneficial to have more people live in Manchester and Birmingham rather than South East (and use the train), then they'll be willing to pay for the location change in one way or another.
For a government which can also be funded by property taxes, it is possible to make a profit even with an
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The reasoning behind it is that people might be more willing to set up their business in Birmingham if London is only a 50 minute train journey away.
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Think of reducing pressure on London and the South East as a "loss leader" to break the vicious circle of investing huge amounts of money in the South East to the detriment of the rest of the UK, which then makes the South East a more attractive place to live, which then increases the demand for investment in infrastructure in the South East, which...
If everyone wants to live in South East, then what's the point of building a high speed rail to a place where people don't want to live?
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How do you calculate that?
Put a toll on them.
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Bits of the WCML are set to hit capacity. Travel to Manchester at 5pm from London and you'll find the trains largely empty because the 4tph schedule is way in excess of demand.
The original plan for the WMCL upgrade would have allowed for 150mph running - which would have been pretty much sufficient - but was canned on cost grounds (although extremely modest compared with an entire new high-speed line). The (electric) ECML trains have been capable of 150mph for years but the track was never signalled for tha
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The real constraint is not so much the need to mix freight and passenger traffic on the same track. It is the need to mix intercity and local train services on the same track. If the Virgin train were to travel up the line at 150 mph, it would crash into the back of a London Midland train loading and unloading passengers at one of the many smaller towns along the way.
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Fact is, there is no free market on the planet. They're all run by economic royalists out to fill their own pockets at everybody else's expense, and regulated to assure the big dogs their profits at the expense of the little guy. But keep on spouting the 'free market' line.
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We got close once. We had companies with paid murderers that killed unionists and trouble makers. Monopolist tactics that make MS look like Mother Theresa. That's what we call the "good ol' days."
Those guys were still economic royalists. They were for everything but competition in a free market. And they're still with us today, they just changed tactics.
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He never makes a reference to China, as China does not have Central Planning. I think it is just some off-topic rambling.
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Sorry, dude.
I've worked in the health care field and Medicare and Medicaid are literally a license to print money. These systems are horrifically expensive and do not provide the kind of medical treatment you would want for your parents or grand-parents. We need something, but the existing system is making someone very rich and the elderly and poor are not getting the care they need.
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The horrifically expensive part is the American approach to provisioning health care. It costs a third more per capita than other first-world countries and provides worse outcomes. But that does not mean the solution is to dismantle the only single-payer system in the US and replace it with vouchers, making the elderly go to insurance providers that would prefer to place them on an ice floe.
Medicare may suck but it is better than anything else the US is doing in health care.
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But for some reason, the private ones are fine and the government ones are evil.
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As to California, they've already killed their HSR attempt with environmental regulation red tape. The project needs federal funds to work and those federal funds are conditional on California starting the project soon. But that just isn't going to happen due to the several year delay for preparing reports on the environmental impact of the project.
I figure the current leaders picked a face-saving way to bac
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The terrorists would just blow up the HSR trains, there's too many groups that have an interest in screwing it up.
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Exactly right. HSR is a waste of time, because terrorists could blow it up.
Similarly, airports and air travel is a waste of time, because terrorists could blow it up. We need to just shut down all the airports.
Similarly, bridges are a waste of time and money, because terrorists could blow up these critical points in the highway infrastructure. We need to just not have any bridges and transport people and cargo across rivers using rafts.
Similarly, government buildings, like courts and administrative offic
Re:Conservative Hit-piece (Score:4, Insightful)
I see a bunch of name-calling here. What I don't see is a sane reason to build high speed rail.
That is probably just because your american and you whole way of life and cultural identity revolves around car use. It makes it far more difficult to see a world where cars simply cease to exist in their current form.
Sorry, but every other developed country recognises that us all having our own, incredibly energy hungry tin box that goes where we tell it is just not sustainable after the oil runs out and even before then is just not the most efficient way of doing things. It might take 100 years for us to run out of oil completely but how long is it before it simply becomes too expensive for a large part of the population to afford to drive to work every day?
You guys in the states have spent decades building cities that are just too spread out for their own good. Sooner or later you are going to have to build more cities like New York where you have an incredibly high population density. Then you can build a decent mass transit system that takes people most of the way, then lets them walk the remaining few hundred yards.
The alternative is to cope with fuel costs that constantly spiral upward until it runs out, this has already started. Even if you build an entire countries worth of electric cars in order to power them all you would need a nuclear plant on every street corner to generate that much power.
The simple fact is that in the decades to come mass transit and densely populated cities where most of the population live is simply going to become more and more like the only option unless someone cracks a way of getting energy for nothing without drilling it up out of the ground like we do currently.
China might be throwing money at their high speed rail industry now, but sooner or later they might end up selling the expertise they gain to every other country in the world.
I don't like living in a shoe box (Score:4, Interesting)
I live 10 minutes from work, 5 minutes from my wife's school, 3 minutes from my son's school, 2 minutes from the grocery store and 5 minutes from church. I live 20 minutes from a major airport and 25 from another one. I am positive that you have heard of the city I live in. This year I ate grapes from my own grape vines, peaches from my own peach trees, asian pears from my own trees, and citrus from my own tree and a vegetable garden. It isn't huge, but I can see the sky above my head.
My wife is from Europe, and I have lived in two European capital cities for a year and half, and pretty much lived a month in New York City. Living in a shoe box surrounded by other shoe boxes is hell. I don't know what is going to happen 10-15 years from now, let alone 100, but what you describe sounds awful, like one of the worst types of dystopia. The funny thing is that the first thing most Europeans do when they get here is buy the biggest Buick or Mercury Grand Marquis they can find.
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That is probably just because your american and you whole way of life and cultural identity revolves around car use. It makes it far more difficult to see a world where cars simply cease to exist in their current form.
We've had a number of disaster movies where this happens. One merely needs to watch an alien invasion or zombie apocalypse movie to easily see a world without the car. So it's not hard at all.
What is hard is to come up with a competitive system that we'd voluntarily forego the car for. High speed rail just doesn't cut it as a rival.
The simple fact is that in the decades to come mass transit and densely populated cities where most of the population live is simply going to become more and more like the only option unless someone cracks a way of getting energy for nothing without drilling it up out of the ground like we do currently.
And there are already a number of ways to do that (biofuels as replacement for petroleum and electric cars, for example). So it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
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We've had a number of disaster movies where this happens.
Soylent Green comes to mind. Heavy population density, people living in cars with no gas and they could not even afford to cut their massive sideburns. Horrible.
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The reason our cities are generally low-density is that there's just so God damned much empty space in the U.S. I'm guessing you're from Europe
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Because the ability to move people and goods around very quickly efficiently and with minimal pollution is a good thing?
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Because the ability to move people and goods around very quickly efficiently and with minimal pollution is a good thing?
And what does that have to do with high speed rail? Keep in mind that the high speed rail projects of which California was the last hold out, were remarkably inefficient in their construction. Aside from the high cost, two of the lines, in Florida and California, would have started with particularly low demand routes that would have guaranteed low ridership for years in the beginning.
Second, no one bothered to connect any of these routes. There were a bunch of disconnected routes. You'd have to hop on an
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Perhaps the cities in the US are too far apart for high speed rail to make sense, but if you want to for example get from London to Paris, I can't really think of any reason why you won't go by Euro Star (the high speed rail service between those two cities).
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Well, it looks to be about the same cost as the airlines, but takes longer. Perhaps it is more comfortable. I haven't been on it. I am sure that the security is, for now, less obnoxious than the airlines, but it's only a matter of time.
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Why would it be "a matter of time"? Are terrorists going to figure out how to hijack a high speed train and fly it into a building?
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Because we are in a constant battle between trying to decide whether to spend all our money on the military or spend all our money on making everybody dependent on the government for sustenance.
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Kind of a reflex action you're showing, eh?
Perhaps, though a commonly (and in this case poorly) employed fallacy is a justifiable reason to have a rhetorical reflex.