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Originally Posted by Onn
Except for the little problem that they (and everyone on this forum) actually believe money grows on trees. If you have unlimited bank loans, yes, you can pretty much do anything. The real fallout of all this is still coming.
Anyone can do that. The question is if it's effective or not as a form of transportation. Well, at least you don't have to be rich to use the Interstate.  |
HSR isn't a competitor for Interstates. Besides, in China you'd have to be rich to use the Interstates (at least in the manner most Americans use them, as in NOT by bus) because you'd have to own a car.
Besides, anyone at all familiar with Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year) in China knows that there's ALWAYS a transportation uproar for Spring Festival - the migration has its own name "chunyun". There are always accusations of price gouging and problems. Last year or the year before there were huge delays because of snow. I don't think it's reasonable to judge the overall effectiveness of a system based on its peak demand peformance.
The point of the article to take away shouldn't be that China is doomed to fail with HSR, but that China should be doing more to move jobs to where people are by providing a better overall intermodal network. I don't know enough about China's overall intermodal network to speak to that, but I think China is working on that, too. They certainly want to bring jobs into the interior. Their water shipping systems are pretty sophisticated, I'd imagine their rail shipping systems will eventually catch up. When Chicago was becoming the rail capital of North America in the 1920s, the U.S. population was no more than about 10% of China's current population, with a rate of urbanization similar to where China is now. China has a lot of catching up to do, and I don't think it should surprise anyone that sometimes one aspect or another gets ahead of or behind the general pace of change.
HSR continues to be successful in parts of Europe and in Japan. Parts of China are near Japanese densities, and all of eastern China is comparable in density with Western Europe. Whether or not HSR will be sustainable in China is not really much of a question in my opinion. Especially if oil starts to climb in cost, the economies of all electric rail versus buses or air travel will only increase as long as the majority of China's electricity comes from non-oil sources.