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Funny that you use the high speed rail network as an example. While China built an impressive amount of it in a short time, they also built way too much of it.
by thworp 4y ago
Funny that you use the high speed rail network as an example. While China built an impressive amount of it in a short time, they also built way too much of it. The routes between smaller cities and some of the routes between larger ones lose ridiculous amounts of money and most of the network is just getting to the age where the first major maintenance is becoming necessary.
The network as a whole is deep in the red and it accumulated $ 1T of debt, alot of which was underwritten by the local governments. Because the fares are so high, most chinese cannot afford the high speed trains and they instead use the slower service. In essence local taxpayers are subsidizing the high speed journeys of the rich.
Contrast this with Germany, where sure buildout is slow and >250km/h sections are rare, but all train operators combined only have something like 5B € in debt and the high speed sections are about break-even.
- dirtyid 4y ago>built too much ... debt Infra net benefit goes beyond basic balance sheet math, no serious analysis suggest US high way system or 1T infrastructure bill to get US infra unfucked a massive waste. The purpose of infra is to generate more economic activity than it consumes. Analysis of net benefit of PRC HSR a few years ago was ~400B, or ROI of ~7%. It's a solid investment. The other context is PRC pop concentration of 1.3B east of Heihe–Tengchong Line, denser the closer to coast, where military aviation gets priority due to proximity of neighbours makes mass civilian air travel not feasible - HSR is replacing capacity for air travel not slow rail. Imagine if all US aviation, military and commercial are biased towards one coast to the point where capacity to move bodies becomes functionally saturated. Hence the joke that once PRC reunites with TW, they can afford to push military aviation further out from coast and then civilian aviation (notorious for delays in mainland) wouldn't be such a shitshow. Also why it's not useful to contrast to Germany since connecting requirements for a long trip (i.e. 600km Berlin-Munich) in a small country is different from long trip (i.e. 1500km Beijing-Shanghai) in a large country. Ultimately, PRC HSR is impressive reflection of CCP state capacity because it's not just about laying down fuckload of tracks, but being able to politically realize enormous projects for the right reasons. Also for reference this entire idiotic PRC HSR boondoggle narrative was popularized by Indian nationalists after PRC nationalists made fun of them for not being able to build HSR, then amplified by customary western PRC bad bubbles.