13 ms·

China approves $36B railway plan for Jing-Jin-Ji megacity

72 points by temp 10y ago

ff10 10y ago
It still baffles me that there are over 100 cities that have more than 1 Mio citizens in China and I haven't heard of most of them. I wonder what their everyday life is about, what kind of subcultures exist, who are the people that are important for their local communities, what problems each city has. It can't be that each of those cities is just merely a copy of each other, although I understand that a lot of copy and pasting has been used in the planning of those cities. I also understand that the cultures in each city is not as heterogenous as western cities for a couple of reasons. But I still wonder: where will they go from there?
- beachstartup 10y ago
  just think of dozens of omaha, nebraskas, filled with chinese people. it's the exact same thing. including the old billionaire at the center of it all, and probably a bit more pollution.
  - rileymat2 10y ago
    Except Omaha is not even half a million.
    - greeneggs 10y ago
      Chinese cities often include the entire metropolitan area, and then some. For example, Chongqing has 30 million people, in 31,800 square miles. Omaha-Council Bluffs has 915,000 people, in 4400 square miles.
      - josu 10y ago
        That's just journalist doing a bad job. There is Chongqing the municipality (equivalent to a US state) and there is Chongqing the city. According to the source used on the wikipedia page the city's population is 18M.
        vorg 10y ago
        The contiguous urban area of Chongqing is about 12 million. You get 18 million if you count all the urban areas contained within Chongqing municipality, which is the equivalent of counting Beijing-Tianjin as being a single city, or even Guangzhou-Dongguan-Shenzhen.
  - ashark 10y ago
    > just think of dozens of omaha, nebraskas, filled with chinese people. it's the exact same thing. Well, at least that means they've all got an excellent zoo and a really good used book store.
- ragebol 10y ago
  Last year, I was in Hefei, for RoboCup. 4.5 million inhabitants, yet I've never heard anything about that city for anything not related to our trip there. There was construction work going on everywhere, new apartment buildings going up, completely new airport, roads: busy everywhere. Unfortunately, I didn't see the sun for a week because I was either inside, programming for RoboCup and the times I was outside, the smog limited visibility. I have no idea what the skyline of the city looked like or get and idea of how big the city really was because I simply couldn't see further than 500m.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Hefei is at least the capital of Anhui and pretty famous for overseas adoptions (at least 10 years ago). The holiday inn has a revolving restaurant at the top, and that is all I really remember about it. I've been to dozen of cities like it and they all look the same to me. Even Kunming, which has nice weather and an awesome flower market, is much drabber than it should be.
- narrator 10y ago
  There are a few low-key disgruntled ex-pat forums around that give some interesting and hilarious on the ground anecdotes about stuff that goes on in China. It's a billion people though, so who knows. Based on my totally ridiculously uniformed foreigner viewpoint, they don't have the kind of societal narrative distribution like they do here in the west. The official one is patriotic and contrived, and it doesn't go very deep. There's not that progressive push to change the country in one direction or another through influence and advocacy that seems ever present in the west. People are pretty much focused on what's right in front of them and that's it.
- devy 10y ago
  My suggestion is to take a trip to China seeing them in real life instead of reading from media!
- turingbook 10y ago
  Native Chinese here. There were many cultural and regional differences between cities. China is a country compared to the whole Europe in scale. People in different cities even can not talk with each other. The dialects are very different, especially in the south. Unfortunately, nowadays nearly all cities in China are more and more similar during mass construction in recent 20 years. When travelling in different cities, I often had a moment to forget which city I was in. Same building, same street, same chained stores.
  - dmix 10y ago
    > Same building, same street, same chained stores. As Tyler Cowen said in Creative Destruction the cities, architecture, and culture may begin to merge and look the same but this modernization ultimately helps create a greater variation among individual people. Subcultures still flourish they are just less regional and local. Our creativity is stimulated due to greater contact between the various global (and cross-China) cultures creating a greater variety of culture or an enhanced breadth of existing cultures. So it's not all bad, just different. https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Destruction-Globalization-Changing-Cultures/dp/0691117837/ https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Destruction-Globalization-Ch...
- kalasoo 10y ago
  I studied in western countries since undergraduate and came back to Beijing, my hometown, after my graduation from Cambridge. It was surprisingly simple to adapt to the current Beijing culture as everything has been changed towards American and western style. We have H&M, Zara and Uniqlo everywhere and we eat pancakes, waffles and Full British Breakfast for brunch during the weekend morning. Although, my family is quite old-fashioned and most of my middle school classmates stay in Siheyuan 四合院 when they were children. People living in Beijing and other modern cities in China have changed a lot because of the explosion of Internet. By 2000, the Internet was free without the Great Firewall so I could search on Google, read news on CNN and even met some friends on reddit. Then, we tried so hard to find resources of American/British TV series, movies and many TV programs. At that time, American dream was somehow another formation of Chinese dream, to study abroad. Young people like me who study abroad for several years are very common in Beijing and Shanghai now. We enjoy the great opportunities to work in China while still miss our school life in US so we want more western-style restaurants, bars, gyms and even apartments. There was a Harvard meetup I attended where people spoke in English even though 90 percent of them were Chinese. Then, we tried so hard to find resources to overpass the Great Firewall in order to use Instgram, Facebook and Whatsapp. But lately, I find out that these young people start to complain about Beijing and they feel uncomfortable about this crowded city. People are everywhere and you can hardly find a place to be quite and peaceful unless it's expensive. Although these young people have excellent background, they always find themselves helpless to work in such a business market with no fixed rules. Then, we tried so hard to find resources to learn how to survive here and forget everything learned abroad. As China has grown stronger and stronger, the young generation has no preference between mainland and Hong Kong / Taiwan or even western countries and they were told to have their Chinese Dreams. But, we still have many many things to learn from the success of western societies in the last several decades otherwise China will fail quickly.
  - acchow 10y ago
    > we eat pancakes, waffles and Full British Breakfast for brunch during the weekend morning. Is this an image thing? I really can't understand how you can learn to prefer poached eggs and bacon over dim sum for the same price when your taste buds started off with the latter.
- jballanc 10y ago
  Are you from the US? I ask because I (also originally from the US) used to think similarly: how can you have so many 1M+ cities? Then I moved to Turkey. Istanbul is almost 2x the population of NYC and Ankara (Turkey's capital and 2nd city) has a greater population than Los Angeles...but it doesn't feel like that. Now, I don't know if China is like Turkey in this regard, but I suspect it is. Turkey (and most of the world) never experienced the kind of suburban expansion that occurred in the US. So while Istanbul has 15M+ people, that's it. Yes, it's more than NYC's 8M, but if you include with NYC the entire tri-state area, then NYC's population jumps to 25M+. Ankara has 4M+ residents, but from my apartment on the edge of the city you could walk 15 min and be in the middle of a wide open field that stretched out probably 30km or more in all directions. So I'd hazard a guess that China's 100 cities with 1M+ residents are probably more akin to a US city of 300-400k residents plus suburbs, just more compacted. According to Wikipedia, there's 53 MSAs in the US with 1M+ residents...so by that measure China's lagging a bit behind.
  - acchow 10y ago
    "New York City" with 8M is only the political and corporate entity of "New York City", which is not relevant to the "feeling" of a city. New York City metro has about 20 million people. That's what you experience when you're there. If you talk about political entities, then San Francisco is tiny at about 860k, less than Jacksonville and San Jose. Does SF feel smaller than either of those?
- davidiach 10y ago
  I think cities in China will improve in the coming decades and develop their own unique identity. Many look similar now, but as they age, cities tend to change in thousands of little ways and all those changes add up to something new and unique.
- azurezyq 10y ago
  Well, cities are not created from cavity. China has a long history. So a lot of cities got created along the way, for a variety of reasons. I agree with turingbook, a fair comparison would be all cities in China vs all cities in Europe. (Similar length of history and similar amount of population) Some cities in China may be not that famous, but histories of them are also interesting. Take my hometown for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yantai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yantai), it has 2M urban population, and it is unique because: * The administration history of the region dates back to 567 BC. * One of the few harbors for foreign trades opened in China in 1861. You can still find antique eu-style houses in the city. * One of the cities close to South Korea, foreign trade is a big topic there.
drusepth 10y ago
$36,000,000,000 is such an unfathomable amount of money. I know it's mostly done in debt/etc, but jesus, taking a second to think about the quantity itself is mind bottling. Edit: 36B, not 360B, but still damn -- that's a lot of money.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- smeyer 10y ago
  >$360,000,000,000 is such an unfathomable amount of money. The article says $36B, not $360B. I'm not sure if you misread or made a typo.
  - drusepth 10y ago
    Was a typo, thanks!
- nkozyra 10y ago
  Thinking of modern fiat as a finite, palpable concept is your first mistake ;)
- CPLX 10y ago
  It's cheaper than three new U.S. aircraft carriers.
  - gorkemyurt 10y ago
    Can anyone explain how US policy makers justify the US military spending? Is it just about creating jobs? So why not build trains hospitals schools with that money? Is it just because the defense industry lobbies the shit out of US politicians? Surely our new mega rich class have the resources to lobby against this.
    - CPLX 10y ago
      The dynamics of American hegemony in the latter half of the 20th century are too complicated to recap in a forum reply, but the short answer is that projecting economic and military power around the world are intricately linked.
CPLX 10y ago
Every year I wonder if Americans will finally learn how to build some proper trains. Not like hyperloop or self-driving fantasies, not fake trains like dedicated bus lanes or incompatible Airtrain type projects. Just some normal fucking trains. Trains with steel wheels that go pretty fast, that run on a consistent schedule between center city downtown areas and airports and so on. Like the kind every European country figured out how to do properly like decades ago, and that northern Asia has completely leapfrogged us in by now as well. Like I want to go somewhere, so I figure out where the nearest train is, get a ticket, get on the train, and go to the place. Why is this so fucking difficult?
- mlvljr 10y ago
  coz econumy!
- dashundchen 10y ago
  Two rail specific issues I know of that drive up project costs (without getting into the blown up infrastructure costs we seem to face): * Extremely heavy rail cars, some almost twice the weight as their European counterparts. This is determined by Federal Rail Administration requirements about crash safety with freight trains on shared lines. Crash safety here being just throwing more steel in the cars. This drives up design, capital, fuel costs, and rail maintenance, not to mention severely limits train performance. Compare two trainsets from around when Amtrak's Acela was built: German Siemens Velaro E; Top design speed: 350 km/h Weight: 439 tons Capacity: 405 passengers Acela Express: Top design speed: 266 km/h Weight: 565 tons Capacity: 304 passengers * FRA mandated "Buy American" requirement, which forces federally funded rail projects to buy equipment manufactured in America. Of course we long ago killed off our domestic passenger rail industry, so now projects must pay European manufacturers to tool essentially temporary factories to build already overpriced rail cars on a project by project basis. Projects can apply to the FRA for waivers for both, such as the case with the California HSR project, but it adds friction. http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-new-northeast-corridor-locomotives-arrive-for-testing/ http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-n... http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185 http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185
chrishacken 10y ago
It still baffles me how the United States is unable to do anything similar. Our projects are half the size and double the cost. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cost-final-20151025-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-c...
- JoelBennett 10y ago
  The more fingers in the pie, the higher the cost. At least that's my guess. I imagine more expensive labour and tighter regulations also greatly increase costs.
  - laurentoget 10y ago
    France and Germany both have expensive labour and regulations, yet they have working trains.
    - privong 10y ago
      It's not just the cost of labor and associated regulatory costs. I think a lot of the overhead in the US has to do with such projects often being funded by the federal government, yet implemented by state/county/city governments. Each of those wants to get involved and get a slice of the pie, so to speak...
      - DasIch 10y ago
        You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects? In Germany at least such projects also involve funding from the state, federal government and possibly the EU, usually those funds make up the majority of the money. Without such funds nothing would get done at all.
        privong 10y ago
        > You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects? No, I don't think that. But I do think it's likely that the various levels of US government like to stake their claim to more autonomy compared to the various levels of government in Europe (particularly at the local level -- I'm sure the EU and national governments love to "get involved").
dx034 10y ago
And at the same time they're thinking about connecting Beijing and Shanghai via maglev train. [1] Could be hugely successful, the current line (5hr trip) is already at capacity and there's a lot of air traffic. Offering a 2.5hr drive between the 2 major cities should pay off financially. [1] http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2049785/china-tries-catch-japan-maglev-train-can-exceed-600km/h http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2049785/china...
- gnipgnip 10y ago
  Do they have the tech though (the Pudong one is built by Germans I think) ? Chuo Shinkansen in neighboring Japan is likely not be completed until 2045 (!).
  - dx034 10y ago
    The Japanese train is already running on a test track. The reason it takes so long to build is that they want to keep costs down to finance it privately. They could probably open it in '25 if they threw a lot more money into the project (which China will likely do). I'd guess that they have the tech to build a maglev train. The German technology is mostly 20-30 years old and well known. They already have trains running, so figuring out how to build a train and track shouldn't be too hard.
    - aninhumer 10y ago
      Hmm, I assumed that part of the reason it would take so long is that it's mostly going to be tunnels through the mountains, and ultimately you can only bore so fast.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    That's for the full route to Osaka, the section to Nagoya is scheduled to be finished by 2027 (which is still a major city, and will probably cut overall travel times, especially if they schedule for quick transfers to the existing Tokaido Shinkansen). Apparently they're also trying to get a demonstration service running from Tokyo to Kofu by 2020 for the Olympics, although I don't know how optimistic that is.
devy 10y ago
This could be a infrastructure stimulus project that helps millions of construction worker (railway construction for the most part) stay employeed. And it will also help alleviate the pressure of highly populous capital metro: skyrocketing real estate market (due to supply-demand imbalance), traffic congestion, garbage processing, food/water supply, all become a big headache when Beijing has to support 23 million people (probably more if you count those unregistered migration workers etc.)
siquick 10y ago
Just spent 2 weeks in Japan using their incredible Shinkansen trains. Every single train was on time and they were so clean and comfortable with about a metre of leg room.

72 points by temp 10y ago

ff10 10y ago

It still baffles me that there are over 100 cities that have more than 1 Mio citizens in China and I haven't heard of most of them. I wonder what their everyday life is about, what kind of subcultures exist, who are the people that are important for their local communities, what problems each city has. It can't be that each of those cities is just merely a copy of each other, although I understand that a lot of copy and pasting has been used in the planning of those cities. I also understand that the cultures in each city is not as heterogenous as western cities for a couple of reasons. But I still wonder: where will they go from there?

beachstartup 10y ago
just think of dozens of omaha, nebraskas, filled with chinese people. it's the exact same thing. including the old billionaire at the center of it all, and probably a bit more pollution.
- rileymat2 10y ago
  Except Omaha is not even half a million.
  - greeneggs 10y ago
    Chinese cities often include the entire metropolitan area, and then some. For example, Chongqing has 30 million people, in 31,800 square miles. Omaha-Council Bluffs has 915,000 people, in 4400 square miles.
    - josu 10y ago
      That's just journalist doing a bad job. There is Chongqing the municipality (equivalent to a US state) and there is Chongqing the city. According to the source used on the wikipedia page the city's population is 18M.
      - vorg 10y ago
        The contiguous urban area of Chongqing is about 12 million. You get 18 million if you count all the urban areas contained within Chongqing municipality, which is the equivalent of counting Beijing-Tianjin as being a single city, or even Guangzhou-Dongguan-Shenzhen.
- ashark 10y ago
  > just think of dozens of omaha, nebraskas, filled with chinese people. it's the exact same thing. Well, at least that means they've all got an excellent zoo and a really good used book store.
ragebol 10y ago
Last year, I was in Hefei, for RoboCup. 4.5 million inhabitants, yet I've never heard anything about that city for anything not related to our trip there. There was construction work going on everywhere, new apartment buildings going up, completely new airport, roads: busy everywhere. Unfortunately, I didn't see the sun for a week because I was either inside, programming for RoboCup and the times I was outside, the smog limited visibility. I have no idea what the skyline of the city looked like or get and idea of how big the city really was because I simply couldn't see further than 500m.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Hefei is at least the capital of Anhui and pretty famous for overseas adoptions (at least 10 years ago). The holiday inn has a revolving restaurant at the top, and that is all I really remember about it. I've been to dozen of cities like it and they all look the same to me. Even Kunming, which has nice weather and an awesome flower market, is much drabber than it should be.
narrator 10y ago
There are a few low-key disgruntled ex-pat forums around that give some interesting and hilarious on the ground anecdotes about stuff that goes on in China. It's a billion people though, so who knows. Based on my totally ridiculously uniformed foreigner viewpoint, they don't have the kind of societal narrative distribution like they do here in the west. The official one is patriotic and contrived, and it doesn't go very deep. There's not that progressive push to change the country in one direction or another through influence and advocacy that seems ever present in the west. People are pretty much focused on what's right in front of them and that's it.
devy 10y ago
My suggestion is to take a trip to China seeing them in real life instead of reading from media!
turingbook 10y ago
Native Chinese here. There were many cultural and regional differences between cities. China is a country compared to the whole Europe in scale. People in different cities even can not talk with each other. The dialects are very different, especially in the south. Unfortunately, nowadays nearly all cities in China are more and more similar during mass construction in recent 20 years. When travelling in different cities, I often had a moment to forget which city I was in. Same building, same street, same chained stores.
- dmix 10y ago
  > Same building, same street, same chained stores. As Tyler Cowen said in Creative Destruction the cities, architecture, and culture may begin to merge and look the same but this modernization ultimately helps create a greater variation among individual people. Subcultures still flourish they are just less regional and local. Our creativity is stimulated due to greater contact between the various global (and cross-China) cultures creating a greater variety of culture or an enhanced breadth of existing cultures. So it's not all bad, just different. https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Destruction-Globalization-Changing-Cultures/dp/0691117837/ https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Destruction-Globalization-Ch...
kalasoo 10y ago
I studied in western countries since undergraduate and came back to Beijing, my hometown, after my graduation from Cambridge. It was surprisingly simple to adapt to the current Beijing culture as everything has been changed towards American and western style. We have H&M, Zara and Uniqlo everywhere and we eat pancakes, waffles and Full British Breakfast for brunch during the weekend morning. Although, my family is quite old-fashioned and most of my middle school classmates stay in Siheyuan 四合院 when they were children. People living in Beijing and other modern cities in China have changed a lot because of the explosion of Internet. By 2000, the Internet was free without the Great Firewall so I could search on Google, read news on CNN and even met some friends on reddit. Then, we tried so hard to find resources of American/British TV series, movies and many TV programs. At that time, American dream was somehow another formation of Chinese dream, to study abroad. Young people like me who study abroad for several years are very common in Beijing and Shanghai now. We enjoy the great opportunities to work in China while still miss our school life in US so we want more western-style restaurants, bars, gyms and even apartments. There was a Harvard meetup I attended where people spoke in English even though 90 percent of them were Chinese. Then, we tried so hard to find resources to overpass the Great Firewall in order to use Instgram, Facebook and Whatsapp. But lately, I find out that these young people start to complain about Beijing and they feel uncomfortable about this crowded city. People are everywhere and you can hardly find a place to be quite and peaceful unless it's expensive. Although these young people have excellent background, they always find themselves helpless to work in such a business market with no fixed rules. Then, we tried so hard to find resources to learn how to survive here and forget everything learned abroad. As China has grown stronger and stronger, the young generation has no preference between mainland and Hong Kong / Taiwan or even western countries and they were told to have their Chinese Dreams. But, we still have many many things to learn from the success of western societies in the last several decades otherwise China will fail quickly.
- acchow 10y ago
  > we eat pancakes, waffles and Full British Breakfast for brunch during the weekend morning. Is this an image thing? I really can't understand how you can learn to prefer poached eggs and bacon over dim sum for the same price when your taste buds started off with the latter.
jballanc 10y ago
Are you from the US? I ask because I (also originally from the US) used to think similarly: how can you have so many 1M+ cities? Then I moved to Turkey. Istanbul is almost 2x the population of NYC and Ankara (Turkey's capital and 2nd city) has a greater population than Los Angeles...but it doesn't feel like that. Now, I don't know if China is like Turkey in this regard, but I suspect it is. Turkey (and most of the world) never experienced the kind of suburban expansion that occurred in the US. So while Istanbul has 15M+ people, that's it. Yes, it's more than NYC's 8M, but if you include with NYC the entire tri-state area, then NYC's population jumps to 25M+. Ankara has 4M+ residents, but from my apartment on the edge of the city you could walk 15 min and be in the middle of a wide open field that stretched out probably 30km or more in all directions. So I'd hazard a guess that China's 100 cities with 1M+ residents are probably more akin to a US city of 300-400k residents plus suburbs, just more compacted. According to Wikipedia, there's 53 MSAs in the US with 1M+ residents...so by that measure China's lagging a bit behind.
- acchow 10y ago
  "New York City" with 8M is only the political and corporate entity of "New York City", which is not relevant to the "feeling" of a city. New York City metro has about 20 million people. That's what you experience when you're there. If you talk about political entities, then San Francisco is tiny at about 860k, less than Jacksonville and San Jose. Does SF feel smaller than either of those?
davidiach 10y ago
I think cities in China will improve in the coming decades and develop their own unique identity. Many look similar now, but as they age, cities tend to change in thousands of little ways and all those changes add up to something new and unique.
azurezyq 10y ago
Well, cities are not created from cavity. China has a long history. So a lot of cities got created along the way, for a variety of reasons. I agree with turingbook, a fair comparison would be all cities in China vs all cities in Europe. (Similar length of history and similar amount of population) Some cities in China may be not that famous, but histories of them are also interesting. Take my hometown for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yantai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yantai), it has 2M urban population, and it is unique because: * The administration history of the region dates back to 567 BC. * One of the few harbors for foreign trades opened in China in 1861. You can still find antique eu-style houses in the city. * One of the cities close to South Korea, foreign trade is a big topic there.

drusepth 10y ago

$36,000,000,000 is such an unfathomable amount of money. I know it's mostly done in debt/etc, but jesus, taking a second to think about the quantity itself is mind bottling. Edit: 36B, not 360B, but still damn -- that's a lot of money.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
smeyer 10y ago
>$360,000,000,000 is such an unfathomable amount of money. The article says $36B, not $360B. I'm not sure if you misread or made a typo.
- drusepth 10y ago
  Was a typo, thanks!
nkozyra 10y ago
Thinking of modern fiat as a finite, palpable concept is your first mistake ;)
CPLX 10y ago
It's cheaper than three new U.S. aircraft carriers.
- gorkemyurt 10y ago
  Can anyone explain how US policy makers justify the US military spending? Is it just about creating jobs? So why not build trains hospitals schools with that money? Is it just because the defense industry lobbies the shit out of US politicians? Surely our new mega rich class have the resources to lobby against this.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    The dynamics of American hegemony in the latter half of the 20th century are too complicated to recap in a forum reply, but the short answer is that projecting economic and military power around the world are intricately linked.

CPLX 10y ago

Every year I wonder if Americans will finally learn how to build some proper trains. Not like hyperloop or self-driving fantasies, not fake trains like dedicated bus lanes or incompatible Airtrain type projects. Just some normal fucking trains. Trains with steel wheels that go pretty fast, that run on a consistent schedule between center city downtown areas and airports and so on. Like the kind every European country figured out how to do properly like decades ago, and that northern Asia has completely leapfrogged us in by now as well. Like I want to go somewhere, so I figure out where the nearest train is, get a ticket, get on the train, and go to the place. Why is this so fucking difficult?

mlvljr 10y ago
coz econumy!
dashundchen 10y ago
Two rail specific issues I know of that drive up project costs (without getting into the blown up infrastructure costs we seem to face): * Extremely heavy rail cars, some almost twice the weight as their European counterparts. This is determined by Federal Rail Administration requirements about crash safety with freight trains on shared lines. Crash safety here being just throwing more steel in the cars. This drives up design, capital, fuel costs, and rail maintenance, not to mention severely limits train performance. Compare two trainsets from around when Amtrak's Acela was built: German Siemens Velaro E; Top design speed: 350 km/h Weight: 439 tons Capacity: 405 passengers Acela Express: Top design speed: 266 km/h Weight: 565 tons Capacity: 304 passengers * FRA mandated "Buy American" requirement, which forces federally funded rail projects to buy equipment manufactured in America. Of course we long ago killed off our domestic passenger rail industry, so now projects must pay European manufacturers to tool essentially temporary factories to build already overpriced rail cars on a project by project basis. Projects can apply to the FRA for waivers for both, such as the case with the California HSR project, but it adds friction. http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-new-northeast-corridor-locomotives-arrive-for-testing/ http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-n... http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185 http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185

chrishacken 10y ago

It still baffles me how the United States is unable to do anything similar. Our projects are half the size and double the cost. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cost-final-20151025-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-c...

JoelBennett 10y ago
The more fingers in the pie, the higher the cost. At least that's my guess. I imagine more expensive labour and tighter regulations also greatly increase costs.
- laurentoget 10y ago
  France and Germany both have expensive labour and regulations, yet they have working trains.
  - privong 10y ago
    It's not just the cost of labor and associated regulatory costs. I think a lot of the overhead in the US has to do with such projects often being funded by the federal government, yet implemented by state/county/city governments. Each of those wants to get involved and get a slice of the pie, so to speak...
    - DasIch 10y ago
      You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects? In Germany at least such projects also involve funding from the state, federal government and possibly the EU, usually those funds make up the majority of the money. Without such funds nothing would get done at all.
      - privong 10y ago
        > You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects? No, I don't think that. But I do think it's likely that the various levels of US government like to stake their claim to more autonomy compared to the various levels of government in Europe (particularly at the local level -- I'm sure the EU and national governments love to "get involved").

dx034 10y ago

And at the same time they're thinking about connecting Beijing and Shanghai via maglev train. [1] Could be hugely successful, the current line (5hr trip) is already at capacity and there's a lot of air traffic. Offering a 2.5hr drive between the 2 major cities should pay off financially. [1] http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2049785/china-tries-catch-japan-maglev-train-can-exceed-600km/h http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2049785/china...

gnipgnip 10y ago
Do they have the tech though (the Pudong one is built by Germans I think) ? Chuo Shinkansen in neighboring Japan is likely not be completed until 2045 (!).
- dx034 10y ago
  The Japanese train is already running on a test track. The reason it takes so long to build is that they want to keep costs down to finance it privately. They could probably open it in '25 if they threw a lot more money into the project (which China will likely do). I'd guess that they have the tech to build a maglev train. The German technology is mostly 20-30 years old and well known. They already have trains running, so figuring out how to build a train and track shouldn't be too hard.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    Hmm, I assumed that part of the reason it would take so long is that it's mostly going to be tunnels through the mountains, and ultimately you can only bore so fast.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  That's for the full route to Osaka, the section to Nagoya is scheduled to be finished by 2027 (which is still a major city, and will probably cut overall travel times, especially if they schedule for quick transfers to the existing Tokaido Shinkansen). Apparently they're also trying to get a demonstration service running from Tokyo to Kofu by 2020 for the Olympics, although I don't know how optimistic that is.

devy 10y ago

This could be a infrastructure stimulus project that helps millions of construction worker (railway construction for the most part) stay employeed. And it will also help alleviate the pressure of highly populous capital metro: skyrocketing real estate market (due to supply-demand imbalance), traffic congestion, garbage processing, food/water supply, all become a big headache when Beijing has to support 23 million people (probably more if you count those unregistered migration workers etc.)

siquick 10y ago

Just spent 2 weeks in Japan using their incredible Shinkansen trains. Every single train was on time and they were so clean and comfortable with about a metre of leg room.