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We need investments in rail infrastructure to take trucks off the road and to improve safety and to keep goods moving. For some reason, our railroad are privat
by kiba 3y ago
We need investments in rail infrastructure to take trucks off the road and to improve safety and to keep goods moving.
For some reason, our railroad are privately owned rather than owned by the states or the fed.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> For some reason, our railroad are privately owned rather than owned by the states or the fed Who do you think built them? We have the world’s largest rail network for a reason.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bugglebeetle 3y agoAnd yet the Chinese rail network is infinitely more productive, smaller in size, transports millions of people around a comparably sized country, in addition to the inputs and outputs of its massive industrial base, and is largely a state construction. It would seem that extent of rail is not the measure of value here, nor is that correlated with private ownership, but instead we should assess the overall productive capacity of the infrastructure.
- jdlshore 3y agoYou’re comparing a passenger rail system to a freight rail system. Totally different beasts.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago…as the parent did when they asserted that the US has the largest rail network, which encompasses both, so no, not really “totally different beasts.”
- sitharus 3y agoLets quickly check Wikipedia China: Total length: 155,000 km (100,000 km electrified) Total passenger/km: (1,470.66 billion passenger-kilometres, 2019) Total freight: 3,018 billion cargo tonne-kilometres (2019) US: Total length: 257,722 km (160,141 mi) (I can't find figures on electrified length, seems at most 2000km?) Total passenger/km: (10.3 billion, 2014) Total freight: 1.71 trillion short ton-mile, approx 963 billion tonne-kilometres (I used wolfram alpha for that conversion) So if my calculations are correct - which they may not be - on fewer rails China transports an order of magnitude more passenger and freight traffic.
- anonexpat 3y ago94% of China's population lives in the 43% of the country closest to the ocean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line
- ses1984 3y agoWhat percent of people in the US live in the 43% of the country closest to the ocean?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoYour conversion is wrong. 1 mile is about 1.6 kilometers; 1 short ton is about 0.9 tonnes. One short ton-mile will be about 1.5 tonne-kilometers.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoRail networks aren't capacity-limited by the number of miles of track and China has three times the population. But the premise is meaningless. It's easy for a government to affect the usage of something by subsidizing it or constraining alternatives to it, which has little to do with whether it would be more efficient or well-managed as a public agency.
- Almondsetat 3y agoChinese rail network is a money sink
- onepointsixC 3y agoInfinitely more productive? That's a claim. China's rail has $900B in loans, and profits haven't covered servicing that debt for nearly a decade.
- volkl48 3y agoUS freight rail moves roughly 40% of the cargo in the country, China's moves about 15% (and is in long stagnation/decline in terms of how much it moves). Roughly 80% of what moves within China does so by an endless sea of trucks. That's a pretty huge difference in terms of modal share. And even with the sprawling size of the US network (and differences in things like labor costs), US freight rail is still more efficient at moving cargo in terms of costs.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago> That's a pretty huge difference in terms of modal share. Now do comparison of transporting people and that’s impact on the economy
- kevingadd 3y agoWasn't much of the US rail network funded by a public-private partnership? Why should the rails be privately owned? Didn't the government provide a lot of the land, too?
- davidw 3y agoThe checkerboard pattern you see in Oregon's forests from a satellite are because the government gave away a crapload of land to fund railroad development https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7155994,-122.829874,73748m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7155994,-122.829874,73748m/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_and_California_Railroad_Revested_Lands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_and_California_Railroad...
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago> Who do you think built them? We have the world’s largest rail network for a reason. I don't know if shear size is a great way to evaluate what method of rail ownership is superior. The US is literally the third largest country on earth so it makes sense that we have a lot of "largests" when it comes to infrastructure networks. What probably would make more sense would be a rail density metric instead. Something like km of rail per sq km of land would work (but has it's own flaws). But that metric then shows a number of other countries that clearly beat the US despite having nationalised or hybrid rail networks. A good example would be Japan which has roughly triple as much rail relative to the size of their country and I doubt many people would argue that Japan's rail network is less effective than the US rail network.
- lamp_book 3y agoIn the US, rail is used for freight, while in Japan it’s used for passengers. Both are successful in their own ways but Japan’s rail network is much more visible.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoOh for sure but that's a very different discussion than just "largest rail network" as a qualifier for success. If we want to talk freight utilisation, Japanese freight rail usage is low because of the country's geography/generally easy access to water/maritime shipping (since shipping by water is always more cost/energy effective per tonne relative to rail). So a comparable example in that case would be China who has similar geography, a similar sized country, and a rail network roughly 70% the size of the US rail network (#2 largest network). However China moves nearly 3x more raw mass per year relative to the US and 50% more tonne kilometers per year relative to the US. Point being that US freight rail is massive because it geographically and economically makes sense for it to be so. Similar networks exist in other countries that take nationalised or hybrid rail approaches yet those countries consistently outperform US rail in basically every metric but shear size.
- criddell 3y ago
- tremon 3y agoWho do you think built them? Slaves?
- newsclues 3y agoCapitalist. Exploitation and cheating sure, but the railroads are recent.
- skyyler 3y agohttps://railroads.unl.edu/topics/slavery.php https://railroads.unl.edu/topics/slavery.php The slaves were also recent. >Southern railroad companies began buying slaves as early as the 1840s and used enslaved labor almost exclusively to construction their lines. Thousands of African Americans worked on the southern railroads in the 1850s There is a temporal overlap between "slave america" and "railroad america".
- newsclues 3y agoSlavery didn’t account for the majority of railroads built
- skyyler 3y agoI know. But your comment seemed to imply that railroads are much more recent than slavery when there is in fact significant overlap. This type of subtle historical revisionism is used to distance ourselves from the horrors of slavery. I don't think it was a conscious effort on your part, though. Don't take this as an attack, please. It's just a gentle reminder that slavery isn't actually all that ancient of a practice.
- screenothethird 3y ago[dead]
- jMyles 3y ago> rather than owned by the states or the fed. Are those actually the only options for public goods focus though? I generally lean softly toward anarchic solutions, so of course my mind goes toward some kind of non-profit NGO or DAO rather than the same government structures that lead to war for oil, etc. > or the fed. Is there another example of a central bank owning a railroad? I don't doubt that it has happened historically, but this is the first time I've even thought of it as a possibility.
- oatmeal1 3y ago> For some reason, our railroad are privately owned rather than owned by the states or the fed. Because we want them to work well? Look at how the government handles the infrastructure it owns.
- velcrovan 3y agoWhich government? State-owned trains in Europe and Japan are amazing. The US could do fine too if it cared to actually fund infrastructure rather than letting it whither on the vine.
- jdminhbg 3y agoThe problem isn't the amount of funding, the problem is competence administering the funding. California's HSR has tens of billions invested and no track laid. I'd love to import European or Japanese rail administrators so that the investment could result in trains actually running, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
- creato 3y agoThey'd run into the exact same problems getting rights of way. There may be incompetence in administration, but it's not the only problem.
- njarboe 3y agoBrightline is a privately company building a bullet train from LA to Las Vegas opening in 2027. The same company recently completed a new bullet train from Miami to Orlando.
- bobthepanda 3y agoAn interesting feature of the Brightline West project is that it does not go deep into populated urban areas to save money. The terminus in Las Vegas is south of the airport and the Strip. The terminus in “LA” is in Rancho Cucamonga, 37 miles east of LA and in a whole different county. CAHSR was partially sold as a downtown revitalization project, and so has expensive full speed approaches into Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, etc.
- njarboe 3y agoJapan's famously on-time and efficient rail system is made up of many privately owned systems.
- bobthepanda 3y agoEfficient if you look at the big three JRs (Central, East, West). JR Shikoku, JR Hokkaido, and JR Freight are basket cases.
- switch007 3y agoIt’s tragic in the UK at the moment. The government has taken over some large rail operators and are busy reducing services and increasing costs. They’re making many other detrimental changes to the railway system too We can’t believe it but some of us enthusiasts are actually wanting privatisation back Public can be good. Private can be good. Public can be bad. Private can be bad…