4 ms·
China's secret sauce in building their rail lines: Ignore environmental mitigation. Extremely low labor costs. Little or no cost for the land over which the lin
by sillyquiet 5y ago
China's secret sauce in building their rail lines:
Ignore environmental mitigation.
Extremely low labor costs.
Little or no cost for the land over which the line ran.
Probably pretty extreme control over every supply vertical. I very much doubt it's a matter of 'expertise'
- gpvos 5y agoI recently read that China is expanding their rail network extra-fast now because the labour costs are still low; they expect them to rise soon. The other things are a factor as well, of course, and their expertise must definitely be growing by leaps and bounds as well.
- akg_67 5y agoHow do you think US built their rail network?
- sillyquiet 5y agoWell yeah, but I don't think it'll fly nowadays. And shouldn't
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoHow does your food get made, your food get picked, your grass get cut, your meat get packed, etc? Well being that this is the federal government, it doesn't get to use the immigrant labor that the private sector does, so you are right.
- sillyquiet 5y agoYou’re not going to get much argument from me about how private industry exploits under-the-table labor. Doesn’t mean it’s a good thing when done under government aegis
- FreakyT 5y agoRealistically you can’t get big infrastructure projects built without angering some group of people. People here in the US love the highway system, but there’s absolutely no way anything like it could be built today. At some point we just need to decide that a project is worth building, and will be built, regardless of the opposition.
- tolbish 5y ago"Angering some group of people" is one way to put it. "Railroad labor camps" would be more accurate.
- dilap 5y agoI could recast each of those as: - Effective cost benefit analysis that realizes rail is a net win environmentally - Ability to control costs & graft on large projects to keep labor costs reasonable - Effective government that understands it's worthwhile to allow some private loss for the net public good At the end of the day, I believe we'd all be better off with more highspeed rail in the US. There's is no fundamental lack of resources preventing us from doing it; the problem is a lack of competence and political organization.
- willyt 5y agoBetter to compare to France then. They build high speed lines for between 1/5th and 1/20th of the cost of the one the UK is building. Just to prempt the France is flat and land is cheap arguments. 1/5th is the cost of the section of line between Lyon and Marseille that crosses the Massif Central with 50 tunnels and bridges and plenty of earthworks. The cost of land acquisition is only £8bn of the £100bn+ cost of HS2.
- beowulfey 5y agoEurope is a much better indicator then. Tunnels are a good example, but you could do the same analysis for other types of infrastructure. For whatever reason, tunnel costs are significantly cheaper in other countries compared the USA [1]. There has to be a good reason! [1] https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world/ https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-...
- throwawayboise 5y agoExactly. You can be sure that when China wants to build a new rail line, there are no environmental impact studies, or objections from NIMBYs. They just do it.