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Originally Posted by Onn
All about money. If the system is not running at peak performance they can't pay the bills. Japan had to bail out their high-speed rail system in the 80s to the tune of 400 billion dollars. Today, for China, I would think that could be a trillion or more.
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Any piece of infrastructure which is constantly at peak performance is a failure, not a success. Highways and airports are only designed to be congested at certain times, and even then there are complaints. So you can't expect the several line segments of high speed rail scattered across China (no network exists as of yet) to be constantly full, do you?
China's highways are constantly and outrageously bailed out by their own users (see below), yet you're not complaining about that. Besides, China's railway trackage is still less than 40% of the US figure (not counting the 4:1 population difference), so there is a long, long, long way to go before there is overinvestment.
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You don't do that through high-speed rail, which is much too expensive. HSR is luxury transportation. The reason why the Chinese government went with it is mindboggling when looking at the scale of the system, and the effects of them doing so will be equally mindboggling.
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If you've ever been to China outside Beijing and Shanghai, you'll know what you wrote is wrong. All expressways are tolled, and even the slower "national" and "provincial" roads have toll booths at least every hour. China has more than two-thirds of the world's tolled roads. Then there are corrupt and closed-minded officials who make life hard for anyone doing business who is not close to them. The result is that often goods made in Guangdong or Zhejiang are much cheaper in North Dakota than in the inland parts of their own country.
The primary purpose of high speed rail is not luxury transportation. It's to release desperately needed capacity for the regular lines for freight trains, where the chances for corrupt local officials to take extras are lower. The implied alternative, building freight-only express railways, will not be very cheaper than building passenger-only express railways. The cost of shipping goods *as well as* people will fall dramatically. Hopefully this will force local officials to do away with the pesky toll booths.
If you can criticise the Chinese government for overbuilding, a better argument can be made for the scores of new regional airports (most of which were pork barrel projects for influential Party officials) recently opened and under construction. Some such airports have actually led to city insolvencies and will probably lead to many more.