Hey now, that's a misrepresentation of both the US and China.
China had way nicer locomotives in 96. It wasn't 1896.
And in the US, that guy would have either been replaced by a machine, or replaced by someone younger who won't be expecting the seniority and pay raises that being there for over 20 years usually gets you.
it's not even capitalism at this point. there's various definitions of capitalism out there, which makes it blurry and difficult-to-talk-about, but most of them feature some element of wealth maximization. in the current trajectory, nobody's wealth is increased.
trump's policies hurt not only the common people, but also the economy. if the common people have less money, they spend less on consumerism and that cripples the economy. that is actually what's already happening rn. and it's only going to get worse. we need handouts, so people can spend money.
You'd have to harness carbon nanotubes first... then deal with all the debris in LEO, then come up with an elevator that doesn't take days to reach GEO (granted the counterweight can rest there and the cab can stop sooner).
Easy, just attach a huge rocket to the bottom of the elevator, problem solved. Oh, use AI to design the rocket, make the ticketing system use block chain, and when you get to orbit, a robot remotely operated by a human on the ground (but prentends to be fully autonomous) takes a picture of you and generates an NFT of it that you can purchase for 35000 USD in the gift shop.
i agree with your sentiment completely, just to point out a small technicality:
space elevators aren't technically feasible. i've done the calculations a while ago and practically, the weight of the space elevator itself would be so much that it wouldn't be able to carry its own weight. remember that it would essentially be a tower several hundred kilometers high. the highest buildings on earth today aren't even a single kilometer high.
yeah, anti public transit has several motivations, the most American is racism. if we have robust public transit, they can't be "whites only" and you can't force the not-whites to sit in the back. so right there. Then you have white land owning hegemony. Why do the busses only go downtown and not to the shopping center half way to the suburbs? because they don't want the filthy poors mucking up their white fort, if you let busses go up to the suburbs then THEY can get there and do all the things they get blamed for!! Lastly, profit motive. mass transit means people can choose to have a car or not. the powers that be are making a lot of money off cars and mass transit will upset the apple cart.
You know, I've been thinking about this a lot. And your comment reminds me of it. The aesthetics of evil. Racist segregation is an obvious evil. So if you tell black people to stand at the back of the bus because they're not allowed to mix with the whites, that's rather obvious and a horrific picture to have. But, if you handicap them, make sure they can only live in the cheapest communities and then limit the mobility of them. Same result. But because you didn't see it, and the enforced segregation is rather subtle... Well, looks better, doesn't it? So people are more likely to accept it. And if you say things like "The city has marked this black community unfit for investment." then it sounds already like a conspiracy theory. Making you the weirdo for speaking out. Horrid, but an elegant and efficient system for censorship, isn't it?
And to be absolutely clear: I reject racial segregation and censorship, obviously.
i think it's not only racism though. surely, there's also a lot of kicking-downwards on the poor. the poor shouldn't get a nice life, so they're motivated to work harder and be successful, so since public transport helps everyone, including the poors, we don't want that.
(not my words, just a common sentiment i've heard)
It's exaggerated and massively understated depending on location.
There are several metro areas in the US with over 1 million people that has zero metro/subway or light rail, some of them don't even have a passenger train connections or stations, or at most it stops by once or twice a day. Places like Columbus Ohio that has literally zero rail passenger rail for over 2m people in the metro area. If you want to take the train from there to NYC you'll have to spend a couple of hours on a bus to a different city first. And it's not like they never had it, they razed the train station in the 70s.
Other places that lack light rail or metro and have 1m+ people in the metro area: Tampa, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Oklahoma, Memphis, Richmond, Louisville, Rochester, etc. with many of them having a very bad outside passenger train connections. There are also a bunch of others that almost slipped by or did stay off the list over technicalities like having a single tram line going up and down main street or similar. Places like Orlando, Cincinatti, etc.
I recently planned out a trip to Chicago using trains. The fastest and most cost efficient route was to drive 3 hrs to Indianapolis and then take a 3 hr train to Chicago from there. Literally, the passenger rail network in the US is so bad that the fastest and cheapest way to travel by train is to do it as little as possible.
Id argue the northeast corridor is effectively the only place we have intercity rail.
While there are other routes, it’s mainly just keeping the lights on. How can rail be useful at 1-2 trips/day, travelling at glacial speeds? We shouldn’t even count it. If we ever start funding rail seriously, we’ll save a crap load of money where Amtrak kept the right of way sort of in use but that’s the only benefit.
The 2022 infrastructure bill would have made a huge difference increasing several routes to “plan to be useful” or even “sort of useful”, but even then a decent rail system would be a century out until we actually start spending. It doesn’t even have to be much, compared to road spending, but it has to be a lot more than we do now, in percentages more similar to road spending, and it needs to be consistent, long term. It can’t just disappear every time a Regressive is in office.
That requires political will to achieve objectives other than wealth maximization, or in other words a political philosophy other than Capitalism which, at least sometimes, is dominant over Capitalism.
The whole point of Neoliberalism from the beginning was eliminate those and make Capitalism the dominant political philosophy rather than just a trade philosophy, so almost 50 years into it the effects are all around us and painful to see.
This is because public transportation is socialism and we can't have tax dollars going to that pretext for communism. Capitalism is far superior which is why we are instead spending over $150 billion on deporting immigrants, which will help promote a free and open capitalist market.
as much as I'd like to call this a win for socialism, I don't think socialism is actually necessary for good transit. Japan is very capitalist and has private rail networks which are comparable in quality and extent to China's.
the "Socialism" is in quotes as were aren't really talking about actual socialism. Its now a boogeyman dogwhistle used by rich people to steal public property and convert it into private capital.
In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).
The same thing will happen in China now that they're getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.
This slowing of improvements of course itself accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism the entirety of politics, hence unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money, so ever less policy was done for the greater good.
Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn't have direct and reasonably immediate action-consequence links such as situations where negative effects are very delayed in time (for example, companies enshittifying their products but keeping on going for years on the inertia of brand name) or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).
The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
China: "We're working on our next five year plan, as part of a grand fifty year plan for full national modernization. We haven't had a recession in 40 years and we've functionally eliminated poverty within our borders. We're currently working on a network of trans-continental railroads and global shipping lanes to bring our modern industrial capacity to the planetary scale. As we slough off the productive surge of capitalism and turn state owned enterprises into the foundation of our economic model, we are enjoying an era of wealth and social stability not enjoyed by any country on earth in human history. This is just as Karl Marx predicted, two-hundred years ago."
American: "No, that's just capitalism. You're doing capitalism right now."
Also American: "We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins. Our GDP is up to 15 digits. No, we don't care about our measles epidemic, it builds character."
American: "We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins."
China: "Sounds great, we'll gladly make and supply 90% of all bitcoin hardware to make a quick buck off of your global ecological crisis machine (100% not capitalism I promise)"
Capitalism is when there's an owner-class controlling production via capital. It doesn't really matter what they're producing or at what cost or who's consuming.
Capitalism is when there’s an owner-class controlling production via capital.
It's funny, because I've seen more than a few libertarians assert that Communism is the Worst Form Of Capitalism because any kind of regulation is just Government Ownership of Production. The only true path to socialism is a fully devolved privatization of all territory and commodities.
So you have people go out into the woods to create this ultra-orthodox free market absent any kind of iron grip of Big Government. They spend millions on marketing their liberal utopia to attract a large base of like-minded people. They take over the local government, abolish the regulations, end the tyranny of the Woke Government Leftists, and finally unleash the power of individualist John Galt style ingenuity. And then their city fills up with bears.
So long as the workers' pockets are being filled, being the number one producer of literal trash, propping up global consumerism and burning the planet is irrelevant.
After all, it's those dirty capitalists that forced us to pillage our own country and disregard our worker's health and safety. But at the same time don't forget that we're the #1 shining world leader and those capitalist pigs can't boss us around! 🇨🇳💪🇨🇳
I don't know if this analysis is true generally, Japan is pretty fucking capitalist.
I would argue it's more a matter of what wing of the capitalist oligarchy has the upper hand. In the US and Canada, it's the extractive fossil capital and that ultimately holds power. In Japan, or the Netherlands it's more the manufacturing.
Don't extrapolate from the US to capitalism in general. It's more nuanced than that.
Whilst I can't speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.
Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don't have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.
They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven't been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.
The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, have a decay of those over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.
You might ask if capitalism is the sole definer of policy, what’s the purpose of our elected parasites? If they can’t define a reason for their existence, they too need to be replaced with ai.
Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.
I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).
In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn't really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).
I wonder if the early proliferation of rural cars / mega expressways kinda fucked us. When your transportation network grows around trains, upgrading the trains/rails makes good economic sense. We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
No the auto industry has lobbied against trains and similar projects. It’s not about the science but more about how our politicians have been selling their souls for centuries.
No, because cross-country trains and heavy use of them to move goods and people predates cars by quite a bit. Trains were a key component of the North winning the Civil War, for example.
Lots of existing train infrastructure needed to be torn out to make room for car infrastructure.
I definitely think this is the case. Something akin to tragedy of the commons (or maybe Braese’s paradox?) where small investments for short term gain trumps bigger investments for, comparatively, bigger gains.
Sweden, where I live, is in this situation too where the rail network is 50 years in reparation debt but it’s easier for politicians to budget for small road repairs and say that they make meaningful infrastructure work
If anything, shouldn't that make it easier? The US has quite open and wide streets/roads. You have more space to build stations and rail tracks than for example Europe with much narrower streets/roads.
I know enough that it wasn't so much lobbying as it was advertising to the to the US citizens that made cars more popular. Ford figured out how to make it affordable then a bunch of companies that stood to make money on cars bought up streetcars and shut them down in favor of busses, but that doesn't actually answer the demise of long distance rail.
Not just trains but all transportation services and systems is severely lacking in this country. Along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible build quality of cars and trucks and you got a recipe for disaster. But no one will care cuz Merica!
yeah it's so funny when people think the US has good car infrastructure, the truth is that the US just generally fucking sucks
yeah sure there's a lot of interstate highways which i guess you can consider good, but most people aren't using them for very large distances, most people are driving to and from work every day and that part is so hilariously miserable that i don't think people in the rest of the world truly believe it's a real thing that happens..
not just that, but the design itself is often actively counterproductive, and the fact that driving is often the only way to get around means the roads are forced to handle an insane amount of traffic.
i like to say that the nordics are an example of actual car-centric design: the roads are simple and efficient and the other modes of transport are good enough, which means there aren't thousands and thousands of incompetent and unwilling drivers on the roads.
I mean this is sorta one of the things an autocracy does well. You might get substandard work and a lot of graft but when the order comes down no one gets to complain when they run a train line through your house.
Another reason good urbanism and walkability is super important: the emissions don't just come from the cars, they come from the excess roads themselves, too.
Concrete doesn't house CO2. When they created Biodome2, the engineers didn't factor in the curing time and CO2 output and the scientists had to vent the facility or suffocate.
cement releases large amounts of CO2 when it is being produced, i.e. when the cement powder is being produced from limestone. this is due to a chemical reaction: CaCO3 (limestone) -> CaO (cement) + CO2
later, when you mix the cement with water and sand to make concrete, it re-absorbs (approx. 43% of) that CO2. you've got it backwards :D
curing reaction: CaO + CO2 -> CaCO3 (facilitated by water presence)
edit: ok i looked it up and concrete only absorbs about 43% of the CO2 that is emitted during cement production. Source
It’s because US companies dominate the internet, plus English is the de facto language of discussion. I’m not sure how to deal with this since we probably are the majority.
Your moral and intellectual superior was not talking about literal population, but that wasn’t the point. I was saying that US citizens most likely predominate US sites that are written in US English.
That was number of online users, not total population. And 50% of internet companies are Chinese, only 6% are American.
I'm sure you'll twist that fact to suit you too :)
Number of online users has nothing to do with what your superior was talking about. This is like saying most of the world speaks mandarin or something. Maybe you should learn how to think before being an obnoxious prick to your masters.
Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
An inefficient government has groups investigating other groups to see if what they are doing is correct. This process takes time, so things move much slower. But is generally a much better protection against corruption.
That's because they're politically illiterate. The important difference is the economic model and its end goal. Is it to make a small elite super rich? Is it to meet the peoples' needs? The US is extremely efficient in creating a small class of super rich people (and by that I mean corporations too) while China is extremely efficient in switching to renewable energy and expanding high speed rail.
Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways. That the Chinese people have no questions about the positives regarding HSTs, especially crunchtime during holidays where railway stations would be jampacked. That they're rolling their HSTs to show their technological prowess.
Why the US HST programs and passenger rail transport in general are at glacial pace is partly because of the usual car lobby, because of NIMBYs, because of cheap air transport, and some people now on online gambling instead of touching grass and tossing dice in Vegas.
That just changed completely, far cry when there was this Robert Moses had whole neighborhoods demolished for highways and rearranging whole cities. Now any sort of public infrastructure in the US does have to undergo scrutiny, whether it's going to affect people or their mortgages or both. And most of the homeowners will oppose anything that shatters their idyll.
Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways
I've heard people claim as much, but at the same time, Stuck Nail Houses exist, I'm not sure how to reconcile the two. I think it's that their eminent domain is limited to property that was purchased after a certain point, so if it's property your parents owned since the 80s, it's literally easier for developers to route the highway around your home than win that lawsuit, but if they bought in like 2010, they can just give you a similar or better property, or the cash to buy one, and that's that.
stuck nail houses 釘子戶 may apply in limited situations but there is no such thing as land ownership in China. When you purchase real estate in China you are buying the right to use the land for a period of time (I think it’s 80 years but don’t quote me on that number, I’m going off memory here) but the state owns the land. When the party wants to build something they are going to build it.
There do exist stubborn nail houses but those are very rare occurrences in China where they do indeed fight to hold onto the land they consider their birthright property or believing to be much more valuable than their government tries to buy from them, the only few outbursts of dissent in a country that quashes dissent.
Congratulations, you figured out that China is a large country! It would be ridiculous to think that a country with 1.4 billion people would have less people dieing in traffic than a country with a smaller population.
If you just go by absolute numbers, a large country will have more of absolutely everything than a small country.
Now go back to your link and sort by "Je 100.000 Einwohner" and see how that changes the list.
But you understand that "je Einwohner" means shit with that density of cars?
cant have a car crash when you ride a donkey.
per car would make much more sense but that's the least the regime would care about which is why say 50k ppl died. i guess from how much their culture sucks it is 500k per year. :-)
If only that metric was included in the link above. Well, luckily it is. And guess what: When sorting by "je 100 000 motorisierte Fahrzeuge" ("per 100 000 motorized vehicles"), China ranks even much better.
Sorting by per inhabitants puts China as the 68th worst country, so 67 countries are worse. Sorting by per motorized vehicels puts China as 115th worst, so 114 countries are worse.
When looking at "per motorized vehicles" China is on par with Lettland.
If only there was a way to follow the link and look at actual numbers before spouting made-up misinformation.
this misinformation you are talking about it what i am talking about! yeah. finally.
ofcourse the numbers are MUCH higher. coercion or killing of others is legit for motorists and the governments that need the industry.
i am sure china is always and will always be among the worst of the worst.
one of the oldest countries and still tourture,regime government and imbecile citizens.
If it was only about competence, I think throwing dice might yield better results than what many politicians are doing.
that you and nUmbErS?
that is called being disconnected with the world. maybe 4chan convinced you to love pervy chinese regime but "AFK" is where those cars actually drive. should check it out some time.
You are what appens if someone is too dumb to understand anything but extremes. Being able to understand nuance requires at least the mental level of a 10yo.
It is an quite extraordinary feat to be so dumb that you think a country has to be either terrible at everything or great at everything and anyone who says a country is not terrible at everything must be totally in love with everything that happens in that country.
so? even if that's true, that doesn't mean high speed rail is bad. it means you should be more careful with the planning, not "don't try new shit for the next forever years"
Realistically what the United States really needs isn't high speed rail but just passenger rail service. Standard speed mainline passenger service to more places and with more frequency than three times a week at 3am (which I wish was an exaggeration)
If I were totalitarian dictator of the US I'd first have the federal government sieze control of the entire rail network, including all dispatching and all of the private rail maintaince companies and lease trackage rights back to the railroads, keeping rail construction, dispatching and maintenance in house. Next I would create a true national passenger rail network, restoring service to every city possible that still has active right of way. Then, I would use my ownership of the rail network to force the class 1 railroads to construct and operate their trains in a manner condusive to actually moving freight and not blocking other trains (it's incredible how railroad company executives seem to hate railroads and do everything they can to avoid operating a functioning railroad) plus open up the rail network to new private freight and passenger companies, and finally I'd build new rail coordidors first following the existing interstate network and as those new rail coordidors bed in I'd start reducing lanes on the interstate and introducing tolls to further discourage the use of private vehicles. Maybe some would be converted into bikeways, maybe some would be re-greened. It would be a decision made on a case by case basis what to do with all of the space reclaimed by the highway network
We used to dream big and our governments used to undertake projects like this to improve our countries. And despite our governments being richer than ever they choose to stagnate and not take risks on big public projects like this
I read half the article and i strongly disagree with a lot of its points.
First, it lists corruption as a reason to halt the HSR (high speed rail) program. Corruption is however not specific to rail and exists in every branch of the economy, including car and road construction. So that's not a reason to target HSR.
Secondly, it says that HSR is not "economical", which completely ignoring that HSR does not have to be economical, at least not in the classical sense.
To a political party, the cost of a project is the popularity or unpopularity of the project; i.e. to the party, the actual cost is the cost of voters who dislike projects. However, the Chinese people are overwhelmingly looking at HSR as a positive thing and an excellent idea. So it has a very positive benefit for the state.
Also, note that good transportation facility is valuable for all the other branches of economy, and therefore has positive economic by-products.
These considerations make me wonder whether actually the article is paid for by the oil lobby, trying to perpetuate outdated and expensive airlines and car transport methods.
Given that we here in the US are still trying g to work out from under 150 year old rail infrastructure, I don’t think they need to worry about it for a while.
Rail generally lasts longer than roads even if you don’t maintain it. We’ve proven that
A feature of rail is very high building costs. If they wasted money on building HSR on a lot of places where it's not needed, this means there's gonna be a debt that never gets paid by the utilization of the rail. Bad investment.
So it's not about maintenance, but the up-front cost.
Not doing an investment where an investment would make a lot of money is of course a kind of reverse of this, but which leads to a similar outcome.
I would say that there's quite a lot of reason to believe that infrastructure investments can be one of the best ways to help poor people rise economically. Which has obvious paybacks.
This still requires creating infrastructure that is actually needed, otherwise it's just wasting money (which ultimately is just an abstraction over wealth, opportunity, materials, workers' finite time and energy, etc etc).
infrastructure investments can be one of the best ways to help poor people rise economically
And specifically consider how much we can help by not requiring all the expenses of owning a car. Transit and intercity rail could be among the best investments when you consider those indirect benefits. Such a shame that short sighted people want them to be profitable in utilization
you're looking only at the return-on-investment of rail as if passengers would have to pay for it with tickets and such. that is not at all the case.
the benefit of rail or any transport infrastructure in fact is the fact that it facilitates the rest of the economy. almost every economy depends a lot on transport, and by making transport possible, the rest of the economy becomes possible, and then that pays takes, and that's the advantage in having transport capabilities.
If they wasted money on building HSR on a lot of places where it’s not needed
There's no such thing as "HSR where it's not needed", especially in a country that's building housing at an insane pace. Each HSR station will just get a city built around it (hopefully not a car-dependent hellhole) and people will flock there.
this means there’s gonna be a debt that never gets paid by the utilization of the rail. Bad investment.
Chinese government can print an infinite amount of Yuan out of thin air. They don't care about internal debts, what they do care about is popularity among their people, and "build more HSR" is a really popular policy in China because it obviously and immediately improves quality of life for loads of people. While it definitely will not "pay itself off", this is not the point of such projects.
Thinking about everything in terms of "profit motive" is exactly why the US is the way it is.
There are certainly reasons to dislike Chinese government. They are allowing overproduction of single-use plastics (which is horrible for the planet), they are building new coal plants in 2025 (which is horrible for the planet and the quality of air in China), and they are still sometimes building car-dependent hellholes for more affluent people. But it is still like the least bad government on this planet (or at least one of them), all things considered.
Ok, so infinite Yuan is a hyperbole, but for something so relatively cheap and so massively beneficial as rail, profitability really doesn't matter. China has more than enough resources and influence to eat the cost now and reap the benefits for the next century.
China has an ambitious urbanization plan, so they're building the cities before there are people actually living there to get ahead of demand. It's not like China has a shortage of people to live in these cities and they have central planning, they can just move production into these developments and people will move there for work. In fact, it's happening right now. They don't just build empty cities that just sit empty forever.
Turns out when you decide to build a new city, of course it would be empty at first, then people will eventually move in. But we can't do that because we need to preserve the artificial scarcity of housing so they can be used as an investment.
It's China. I guarantee you that loads of people got fucked over one way or the other for this improvement. The Chinese government usually doesn't care much for the rights and lives of the individuals
You say that, but medical debt? Homelessness? Ice concentration camps for brown people? Highest incarceration rates, social credit (credit score), pedophile leaders...
Europeans, feel free to complain about China. Americans have no right to complain about China.
Not to be a tankie, but China taking over the US government would be an improvement
Having said that, the US is a shit show and the Empire pretty much needs to be rebuilt from scrap at this point but it's still better than China.
If you disagree I would suggest you go to China and start posting lots of tiananmen square videos from the 90's and then tell me which place is better.
Yeah, never mind. You know what I mean, of course, but you got your head so far up Pooh's ass that you can taste his lunch
I don't care for the US, let it fucking burn, it deserves to die fast at this point. However, at least you can still have some open expression there (for as long as that is lasting under the Cheeto)
But the likes of you pretending that China has it all covered and is doing great and totally doesn't fuck entire populations over are just the worst.
I'm guessing correctky that you're of the types that think that tiananmen square was just a big happy dance party?
At least I recognize both empires for the evil shit they are
Well I don't really have any reason to doubt the quality of the rail system. It's one thing to go over-budget on transit (which they apparently did); it's quite another to go over-budget and build the whole system to a poor standard where it won't even last.
The Chinese government has definitely run ahead of the pack on domestic investment. But you could play the same game with Spain or Japan or Turkiye. The numbers simply would not have been as impressive.
Their buildings are collapsing.
This is a meme from 2008. You won't find any more crumbling buildings in China than you'd find in the UK or Korea.
And the Chinese peope themselves. They suffer.
They'll never know the joys of bumper to bumper traffic
Explain the sinking just finished metro. The ghost towns. The buildings collapsing. The bridges decaying because of concrete rot.
There are so many current projects going bad because of the use of bad materials and dodgy practices.
Skipping a geo research before building etc.
The Chinese are surpressed by the CCP. More than 90% of the drinking water is not fit for consumption. Aside from the AI cleaned up videos and pictures, there isn't much of a clear sky with the smog.
And where are the birds?
... Also have you seen China. They too have traffic jams.
No country is a wonderland.
And if someone is really really really trying to convince me they are that magnificent, and better than everyone else.
I. Do. Not. Trust. Them.
Actions say more than words. And the actions have spoken.
when you're used to propaganda that says china is awful, seeing people say "china is pretty okay actually" looks like glorification.
No one is saying china is amazing, they're saying china is not actively stabbing themselves in the stomach. China is doing the blitheringly obvious things a country like that should be doing, things that most other countries can't be arsed to do because the people in power benefit from the status quo of things being shit.
They're not perfect, things go over budget and things get built shittily by bad companies, just like what happens in every other country on earth.
Trains everywhere connecting the entire country is a very worthwhile goal for a country, regardless of profit motive. If we can see the benefit of doing that with roads, why can’t we see the benefit of doing that with rail?
Sold out trains still sell standing tickets, which let you pick seats if available. I've seen old ladies choose to stand so they can all be in a group.
Also sometimes they're not totally sold out, but you'll be choosing between a standing ticket and an expensive first-class ticket or hard seat and soft-sleeper for a slow train.
Hey now, that's a misrepresentation of both the US and China.
China had way nicer locomotives in 96. It wasn't 1896.
And in the US, that guy would have either been replaced by a machine, or replaced by someone younger who won't be expecting the seniority and pay raises that being there for over 20 years usually gets you.
Replaced by machines that can't transport humans or even freight for that matter
https://youtu.be/YUpST_cQ1hM
now I want to watch an entire playlist of Adam Something videos about dumbass tech bros trying to invent the train over and over again
What hypercapitalism lobbied by big oil does to your country.
it's not even capitalism at this point. there's various definitions of capitalism out there, which makes it blurry and difficult-to-talk-about, but most of them feature some element of wealth maximization. in the current trajectory, nobody's wealth is increased.
trump's policies hurt not only the common people, but also the economy. if the common people have less money, they spend less on consumerism and that cripples the economy. that is actually what's already happening rn. and it's only going to get worse. we need handouts, so people can spend money.
China 2060: ..... a space elevator
USA 2060: .... still the same rail service
You'd have to harness carbon nanotubes first... then deal with all the debris in LEO, then come up with an elevator that doesn't take days to reach GEO (granted the counterweight can rest there and the cab can stop sooner).
This is a joke meme that doesn't mean anything ..... just like the American public transport system.
Easy, just attach a huge rocket to the bottom of the elevator, problem solved. Oh, use AI to design the rocket, make the ticketing system use block chain, and when you get to orbit, a robot remotely operated by a human on the ground (but prentends to be fully autonomous) takes a picture of you and generates an NFT of it that you can purchase for 35000 USD in the gift shop.
I'll be over here swimming in my money pool.
i agree with your sentiment completely, just to point out a small technicality:
space elevators aren't technically feasible. i've done the calculations a while ago and practically, the weight of the space elevator itself would be so much that it wouldn't be able to carry its own weight. remember that it would essentially be a tower several hundred kilometers high. the highest buildings on earth today aren't even a single kilometer high.
i believe in spaceflight though
yeah, anti public transit has several motivations, the most American is racism. if we have robust public transit, they can't be "whites only" and you can't force the not-whites to sit in the back. so right there. Then you have white land owning hegemony. Why do the busses only go downtown and not to the shopping center half way to the suburbs? because they don't want the filthy poors mucking up their white fort, if you let busses go up to the suburbs then THEY can get there and do all the things they get blamed for!! Lastly, profit motive. mass transit means people can choose to have a car or not. the powers that be are making a lot of money off cars and mass transit will upset the apple cart.
You know, I've been thinking about this a lot. And your comment reminds me of it. The aesthetics of evil. Racist segregation is an obvious evil. So if you tell black people to stand at the back of the bus because they're not allowed to mix with the whites, that's rather obvious and a horrific picture to have. But, if you handicap them, make sure they can only live in the cheapest communities and then limit the mobility of them. Same result. But because you didn't see it, and the enforced segregation is rather subtle... Well, looks better, doesn't it? So people are more likely to accept it. And if you say things like "The city has marked this black community unfit for investment." then it sounds already like a conspiracy theory. Making you the weirdo for speaking out. Horrid, but an elegant and efficient system for censorship, isn't it?
And to be absolutely clear: I reject racial segregation and censorship, obviously.
i think it's not only racism though. surely, there's also a lot of kicking-downwards on the poor. the poor shouldn't get a nice life, so they're motivated to work harder and be successful, so since public transport helps everyone, including the poors, we don't want that.
(not my words, just a common sentiment i've heard)
It's exaggerated and massively understated depending on location.
There are several metro areas in the US with over 1 million people that has zero metro/subway or light rail, some of them don't even have a passenger train connections or stations, or at most it stops by once or twice a day. Places like Columbus Ohio that has literally zero rail passenger rail for over 2m people in the metro area. If you want to take the train from there to NYC you'll have to spend a couple of hours on a bus to a different city first. And it's not like they never had it, they razed the train station in the 70s.
Other places that lack light rail or metro and have 1m+ people in the metro area: Tampa, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Oklahoma, Memphis, Richmond, Louisville, Rochester, etc. with many of them having a very bad outside passenger train connections. There are also a bunch of others that almost slipped by or did stay off the list over technicalities like having a single tram line going up and down main street or similar. Places like Orlando, Cincinatti, etc.
I recently planned out a trip to Chicago using trains. The fastest and most cost efficient route was to drive 3 hrs to Indianapolis and then take a 3 hr train to Chicago from there. Literally, the passenger rail network in the US is so bad that the fastest and cheapest way to travel by train is to do it as little as possible.
Id argue the northeast corridor is effectively the only place we have intercity rail.
While there are other routes, it’s mainly just keeping the lights on. How can rail be useful at 1-2 trips/day, travelling at glacial speeds? We shouldn’t even count it. If we ever start funding rail seriously, we’ll save a crap load of money where Amtrak kept the right of way sort of in use but that’s the only benefit.
The 2022 infrastructure bill would have made a huge difference increasing several routes to “plan to be useful” or even “sort of useful”, but even then a decent rail system would be a century out until we actually start spending. It doesn’t even have to be much, compared to road spending, but it has to be a lot more than we do now, in percentages more similar to road spending, and it needs to be consistent, long term. It can’t just disappear every time a Regressive is in office.
Yeah but who would get to skim off the top of that?
Oh, you dont think Lockheed skimmed off the top of the Apollo program?
Sure by loke 60s standards. That would be like saying a cave that doesn't get too damp when it rains is luxury, because cave people thought so.
That requires political will to achieve objectives other than wealth maximization, or in other words a political philosophy other than Capitalism which, at least sometimes, is dominant over Capitalism.
The whole point of Neoliberalism from the beginning was eliminate those and make Capitalism the dominant political philosophy rather than just a trade philosophy, so almost 50 years into it the effects are all around us and painful to see.
US Train travel has actually gotten worse since 1996.
Yeah, the only reason we still have tracks most places is for freight.
Came to say this. If it had literally remained unchanged they'd still be doing pretty good.
This is because public transportation is socialism and we can't have tax dollars going to that pretext for communism. Capitalism is far superior which is why we are instead spending over $150 billion on deporting immigrants, which will help promote a free and open capitalist market.
as much as I'd like to call this a win for socialism, I don't think socialism is actually necessary for good transit. Japan is very capitalist and has private rail networks which are comparable in quality and extent to China's.
the "Socialism" is in quotes as were aren't really talking about actual socialism. Its now a boogeyman dogwhistle used by rich people to steal public property and convert it into private capital.
In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).
The same thing will happen in China now that they're getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.
This slowing of improvements of course itself accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism the entirety of politics, hence unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money, so ever less policy was done for the greater good.
Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn't have direct and reasonably immediate action-consequence links such as situations where negative effects are very delayed in time (for example, companies enshittifying their products but keeping on going for years on the inertia of brand name) or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).
China: "We're working on our next five year plan, as part of a grand fifty year plan for full national modernization. We haven't had a recession in 40 years and we've functionally eliminated poverty within our borders. We're currently working on a network of trans-continental railroads and global shipping lanes to bring our modern industrial capacity to the planetary scale. As we slough off the productive surge of capitalism and turn state owned enterprises into the foundation of our economic model, we are enjoying an era of wealth and social stability not enjoyed by any country on earth in human history. This is just as Karl Marx predicted, two-hundred years ago."
American: "No, that's just capitalism. You're doing capitalism right now."
Also American: "We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins. Our GDP is up to 15 digits. No, we don't care about our measles epidemic, it builds character."
American: "We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins."
China: "Sounds great, we'll gladly make and supply 90% of all bitcoin hardware to make a quick buck off of your global ecological crisis machine (100% not capitalism I promise)"
Capitalism is when you... produce low cost surplus for general consumption?
What happens when you ban crypto trading and mining because its exploiting the SOE low cost electricity?
Capitalism is when there's an owner-class controlling production via capital. It doesn't really matter what they're producing or at what cost or who's consuming.
It's funny, because I've seen more than a few libertarians assert that Communism is the Worst Form Of Capitalism because any kind of regulation is just Government Ownership of Production. The only true path to socialism is a fully devolved privatization of all territory and commodities.
So you have people go out into the woods to create this ultra-orthodox free market absent any kind of iron grip of Big Government. They spend millions on marketing their liberal utopia to attract a large base of like-minded people. They take over the local government, abolish the regulations, end the tyranny of the Woke Government Leftists, and finally unleash the power of individualist John Galt style ingenuity. And then their city fills up with bears.
So long as the workers' pockets are being filled, being the number one producer of literal trash, propping up global consumerism and burning the planet is irrelevant.
After all, it's those dirty capitalists that forced us to pillage our own country and disregard our worker's health and safety. But at the same time don't forget that we're the #1 shining world leader and those capitalist pigs can't boss us around! 🇨🇳💪🇨🇳
My man, what are you even on? You seem to have China confused with West Virginia.
I don't know if this analysis is true generally, Japan is pretty fucking capitalist.
I would argue it's more a matter of what wing of the capitalist oligarchy has the upper hand. In the US and Canada, it's the extractive fossil capital and that ultimately holds power. In Japan, or the Netherlands it's more the manufacturing.
Don't extrapolate from the US to capitalism in general. It's more nuanced than that.
Whilst I can't speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.
Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don't have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.
They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven't been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.
The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, have a decay of those over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.
You might ask if capitalism is the sole definer of policy, what’s the purpose of our elected parasites? If they can’t define a reason for their existence, they too need to be replaced with ai.
Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.
I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).
In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn't really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).
That's nature in general.
I wonder if the early proliferation of rural cars / mega expressways kinda fucked us. When your transportation network grows around trains, upgrading the trains/rails makes good economic sense. We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
No the auto industry has lobbied against trains and similar projects. It’s not about the science but more about how our politicians have been selling their souls for centuries.
Pretty much part of the plot from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
People choose those politicians, too sensitive for fear of even slightly bigger government. Paired with racism, nowadays.
No, because cross-country trains and heavy use of them to move goods and people predates cars by quite a bit. Trains were a key component of the North winning the Civil War, for example.
Lots of existing train infrastructure needed to be torn out to make room for car infrastructure.
I definitely think this is the case. Something akin to tragedy of the commons (or maybe Braese’s paradox?) where small investments for short term gain trumps bigger investments for, comparatively, bigger gains.
Sweden, where I live, is in this situation too where the rail network is 50 years in reparation debt but it’s easier for politicians to budget for small road repairs and say that they make meaningful infrastructure work
If anything, shouldn't that make it easier? The US has quite open and wide streets/roads. You have more space to build stations and rail tracks than for example Europe with much narrower streets/roads.
Do you know any US history
I know enough that it wasn't so much lobbying as it was advertising to the to the US citizens that made cars more popular. Ford figured out how to make it affordable then a bunch of companies that stood to make money on cars bought up streetcars and shut them down in favor of busses, but that doesn't actually answer the demise of long distance rail.
The US was built on steam trains going literally everywhere
That's kind of the problem though. They're not everywhere now. There's a whole lot of places that are nowhere near a train line.
Its so naive to think that this was the cause lmao
Not just trains but all transportation services and systems is severely lacking in this country. Along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible build quality of cars and trucks and you got a recipe for disaster. But no one will care cuz Merica!
yeah it's so funny when people think the US has good car infrastructure, the truth is that the US just generally fucking sucks
yeah sure there's a lot of interstate highways which i guess you can consider good, but most people aren't using them for very large distances, most people are driving to and from work every day and that part is so hilariously miserable that i don't think people in the rest of the world truly believe it's a real thing that happens..
Agreed! I live in a very rural part of the country and the conditions of the roads and highways are laughable.
not just that, but the design itself is often actively counterproductive, and the fact that driving is often the only way to get around means the roads are forced to handle an insane amount of traffic.
i like to say that the nordics are an example of actual car-centric design: the roads are simple and efficient and the other modes of transport are good enough, which means there aren't thousands and thousands of incompetent and unwilling drivers on the roads.
What's the problem? The rich have private planes.
America: if ain’t broke don’t fix it Every other country: yah it’s time, what are our new requirements?
I mean this is sorta one of the things an autocracy does well. You might get substandard work and a lot of graft but when the order comes down no one gets to complain when they run a train line through your house.
actually, they do get to complain
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/gallery/chinas-extraordinary-nail-houses-show-5727566
And then turn a blind eye to all the broken stuff because "we have been living with it so it's not broken"
Then there’s “if it ain’t broke… how can we break it to extract a few extra bucks from it?”
Yabbut somebody think of the car companies!!!
While continuing to produce the worst cars imaginable
Every three years China pours more concrete than the US has since WWII.
Just a reminder that concrete releases huge amounts of CO2 as it cures. Empty cities don't help anyone.
Another reason good urbanism and walkability is super important: the emissions don't just come from the cars, they come from the excess roads themselves, too.
It wasn’t even necessarily a bad idea given property growth, but it will be interesting to see what happens if they can’t stop population decline
Their intention was to bolster the economy with busy work, but that's not a long term solution.
That's comparing Apples to Shampoo. To completely different concepts and it's not an either/or situation.
Concrete doesn't house CO2. When they created Biodome2, the engineers didn't factor in the curing time and CO2 output and the scientists had to vent the facility or suffocate.
Houses don't stand long on their own. It takes a significant amount of time and money to keep these things from filling up with mold or collapsing.
cement releases large amounts of CO2 when it is being produced, i.e. when the cement powder is being produced from limestone. this is due to a chemical reaction: CaCO3 (limestone) -> CaO (cement) + CO2
later, when you mix the cement with water and sand to make concrete, it re-absorbs (approx. 43% of) that CO2. you've got it backwards :D
curing reaction: CaO + CO2 -> CaCO3 (facilitated by water presence)
edit: ok i looked it up and concrete only absorbs about 43% of the CO2 that is emitted during cement production. Source
Bragging about encasing the natural world in a synthetic crust and displacing wildlife... Great flex
Hyperloop any day now!
Is this some sort of US problem that I'm too not-US to understand?
Public transportation in USA sucks, and people from USA often use we on social media platforms, assuming they are the majority :P
It’s because US companies dominate the internet, plus English is the de facto language of discussion. I’m not sure how to deal with this since we probably are the majority.
You're third, after China and India. Now tell me how those don't count ;)
Your moral and intellectual superior was not talking about literal population, but that wasn’t the point. I was saying that US citizens most likely predominate US sites that are written in US English.
That was number of online users, not total population. And 50% of internet companies are Chinese, only 6% are American. I'm sure you'll twist that fact to suit you too :)
Number of online users has nothing to do with what your superior was talking about. This is like saying most of the world speaks mandarin or something. Maybe you should learn how to think before being an obnoxious prick to your masters.
They don't speak English, so they're just not present in these forums. Way to needlessly start ab argument tho
India has a billion english speakers. But they do tend to their own sites/fb
Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
An inefficient government has groups investigating other groups to see if what they are doing is correct. This process takes time, so things move much slower. But is generally a much better protection against corruption.
You say that, but... Iraq was a dictatorship, and they weren't all that efficient at anything other than killing Kurds.
That's because they're politically illiterate. The important difference is the economic model and its end goal. Is it to make a small elite super rich? Is it to meet the peoples' needs? The US is extremely efficient in creating a small class of super rich people (and by that I mean corporations too) while China is extremely efficient in switching to renewable energy and expanding high speed rail.
I mean... some people do, but they're weird.
Weird to compare a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular vs a democracy which violates human rights a little less.
Don't you think you're a little harsh on the US?
Now do aircraft carriers!
Aircraft carriers don't let me travel to my destinations
Your fault that you weren't born as an aircraft!
Setting that cash on fire would be more practical use of tax payer money
This isn't even about government styles. This is just investing in infrastructure vs not doing that.
Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways. That the Chinese people have no questions about the positives regarding HSTs, especially crunchtime during holidays where railway stations would be jampacked. That they're rolling their HSTs to show their technological prowess.
Why the US HST programs and passenger rail transport in general are at glacial pace is partly because of the usual car lobby, because of NIMBYs, because of cheap air transport, and some people now on online gambling instead of touching grass and tossing dice in Vegas.
Doesnt the us also have those powers and didn't they use them liberally in the construction of both the railways and interstates?
That just changed completely, far cry when there was this Robert Moses had whole neighborhoods demolished for highways and rearranging whole cities. Now any sort of public infrastructure in the US does have to undergo scrutiny, whether it's going to affect people or their mortgages or both. And most of the homeowners will oppose anything that shatters their idyll.
I've heard people claim as much, but at the same time, Stuck Nail Houses exist, I'm not sure how to reconcile the two. I think it's that their eminent domain is limited to property that was purchased after a certain point, so if it's property your parents owned since the 80s, it's literally easier for developers to route the highway around your home than win that lawsuit, but if they bought in like 2010, they can just give you a similar or better property, or the cash to buy one, and that's that.
stuck nail houses 釘子戶 may apply in limited situations but there is no such thing as land ownership in China. When you purchase real estate in China you are buying the right to use the land for a period of time (I think it’s 80 years but don’t quote me on that number, I’m going off memory here) but the state owns the land. When the party wants to build something they are going to build it.
There do exist stubborn nail houses but those are very rare occurrences in China where they do indeed fight to hold onto the land they consider their birthright property or believing to be much more valuable than their government tries to buy from them, the only few outbursts of dissent in a country that quashes dissent.
i mean from what i read there is only one country with more ppl die in traffic which is india https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_L%C3%A4nder_nach_Verkehrstoten but good they have a few trains for 1 billion ppl. sure thats going to help. LOL.
Congratulations, you figured out that China is a large country! It would be ridiculous to think that a country with 1.4 billion people would have less people dieing in traffic than a country with a smaller population.
If you just go by absolute numbers, a large country will have more of absolutely everything than a small country.
Now go back to your link and sort by "Je 100.000 Einwohner" and see how that changes the list.
But you understand that "je Einwohner" means shit with that density of cars? cant have a car crash when you ride a donkey. per car would make much more sense but that's the least the regime would care about which is why say 50k ppl died. i guess from how much their culture sucks it is 500k per year. :-)
If only that metric was included in the link above. Well, luckily it is. And guess what: When sorting by "je 100 000 motorisierte Fahrzeuge" ("per 100 000 motorized vehicles"), China ranks even much better.
Sorting by per inhabitants puts China as the 68th worst country, so 67 countries are worse. Sorting by per motorized vehicels puts China as 115th worst, so 114 countries are worse.
When looking at "per motorized vehicles" China is on par with Lettland.
If only there was a way to follow the link and look at actual numbers before spouting made-up misinformation.
this misinformation you are talking about it what i am talking about! yeah. finally. ofcourse the numbers are MUCH higher. coercion or killing of others is legit for motorists and the governments that need the industry.
i am sure china is always and will always be among the worst of the worst. one of the oldest countries and still tourture,regime government and imbecile citizens.
You really have trouble understanding numbers, right?
LOL.
that you and nUmbErS? that is called being disconnected with the world. maybe 4chan convinced you to love pervy chinese regime but "AFK" is where those cars actually drive. should check it out some time.
You are what appens if someone is too dumb to understand anything but extremes. Being able to understand nuance requires at least the mental level of a 10yo.
It is an quite extraordinary feat to be so dumb that you think a country has to be either terrible at everything or great at everything and anyone who says a country is not terrible at everything must be totally in love with everything that happens in that country.
Literally kindergarden level of argumentation.
https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-high-speed
Good luck dealing with that financial bomb.
so? even if that's true, that doesn't mean high speed rail is bad. it means you should be more careful with the planning, not "don't try new shit for the next forever years"
Realistically what the United States really needs isn't high speed rail but just passenger rail service. Standard speed mainline passenger service to more places and with more frequency than three times a week at 3am (which I wish was an exaggeration)
If I were totalitarian dictator of the US I'd first have the federal government sieze control of the entire rail network, including all dispatching and all of the private rail maintaince companies and lease trackage rights back to the railroads, keeping rail construction, dispatching and maintenance in house. Next I would create a true national passenger rail network, restoring service to every city possible that still has active right of way. Then, I would use my ownership of the rail network to force the class 1 railroads to construct and operate their trains in a manner condusive to actually moving freight and not blocking other trains (it's incredible how railroad company executives seem to hate railroads and do everything they can to avoid operating a functioning railroad) plus open up the rail network to new private freight and passenger companies, and finally I'd build new rail coordidors first following the existing interstate network and as those new rail coordidors bed in I'd start reducing lanes on the interstate and introducing tolls to further discourage the use of private vehicles. Maybe some would be converted into bikeways, maybe some would be re-greened. It would be a decision made on a case by case basis what to do with all of the space reclaimed by the highway network
We used to dream big and our governments used to undertake projects like this to improve our countries. And despite our governments being richer than ever they choose to stagnate and not take risks on big public projects like this
I read half the article and i strongly disagree with a lot of its points.
First, it lists corruption as a reason to halt the HSR (high speed rail) program. Corruption is however not specific to rail and exists in every branch of the economy, including car and road construction. So that's not a reason to target HSR.
Secondly, it says that HSR is not "economical", which completely ignoring that HSR does not have to be economical, at least not in the classical sense. To a political party, the cost of a project is the popularity or unpopularity of the project; i.e. to the party, the actual cost is the cost of voters who dislike projects. However, the Chinese people are overwhelmingly looking at HSR as a positive thing and an excellent idea. So it has a very positive benefit for the state. Also, note that good transportation facility is valuable for all the other branches of economy, and therefore has positive economic by-products.
These considerations make me wonder whether actually the article is paid for by the oil lobby, trying to perpetuate outdated and expensive airlines and car transport methods.
Given that we here in the US are still trying g to work out from under 150 year old rail infrastructure, I don’t think they need to worry about it for a while.
Rail generally lasts longer than roads even if you don’t maintain it. We’ve proven that
A feature of rail is very high building costs. If they wasted money on building HSR on a lot of places where it's not needed, this means there's gonna be a debt that never gets paid by the utilization of the rail. Bad investment.
So it's not about maintenance, but the up-front cost.
Not doing an investment where an investment would make a lot of money is of course a kind of reverse of this, but which leads to a similar outcome.
You could say the same about pretty much any infrastructure. It’s hideously expensive and will never get paid back by utilization.
All are hideously expensive and will never get paid back by utilization.
Are they all bad investments?
I claim they all are critical for their indirect benefits to an economy, a society, and rail is exactly the same.
I would say that there's quite a lot of reason to believe that infrastructure investments can be one of the best ways to help poor people rise economically. Which has obvious paybacks.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/infrastructure/publication/infrastructure-and-poverty-reduction-innovative-policies
This still requires creating infrastructure that is actually needed, otherwise it's just wasting money (which ultimately is just an abstraction over wealth, opportunity, materials, workers' finite time and energy, etc etc).
And specifically consider how much we can help by not requiring all the expenses of owning a car. Transit and intercity rail could be among the best investments when you consider those indirect benefits. Such a shame that short sighted people want them to be profitable in utilization
you're looking only at the return-on-investment of rail as if passengers would have to pay for it with tickets and such. that is not at all the case.
the benefit of rail or any transport infrastructure in fact is the fact that it facilitates the rest of the economy. almost every economy depends a lot on transport, and by making transport possible, the rest of the economy becomes possible, and then that pays takes, and that's the advantage in having transport capabilities.
why are you talking about building high speed rail where it's not needed? don't think anyone's advocating for that.
There's no such thing as "HSR where it's not needed", especially in a country that's building housing at an insane pace. Each HSR station will just get a city built around it (hopefully not a car-dependent hellhole) and people will flock there.
Chinese government can print an infinite amount of Yuan out of thin air. They don't care about internal debts, what they do care about is popularity among their people, and "build more HSR" is a really popular policy in China because it obviously and immediately improves quality of life for loads of people. While it definitely will not "pay itself off", this is not the point of such projects.
Thinking about everything in terms of "profit motive" is exactly why the US is the way it is.
There are certainly reasons to dislike Chinese government. They are allowing overproduction of single-use plastics (which is horrible for the planet), they are building new coal plants in 2025 (which is horrible for the planet and the quality of air in China), and they are still sometimes building car-dependent hellholes for more affluent people. But it is still like the least bad government on this planet (or at least one of them), all things considered.
That's not how any of this works. Sure they can do that, but they cannot control the effects of having done so.
Ok, so infinite Yuan is a hyperbole, but for something so relatively cheap and so massively beneficial as rail, profitability really doesn't matter. China has more than enough resources and influence to eat the cost now and reap the benefits for the next century.
Oh trains! Now do pollution, or infrastructure, or empty cities...
A year ago I would have said Concentration Camps, but we both have those now.
You should try to find better criticism.
It's true that China's co2 per capita has gone up sharply, however it's still about 30% lower than the yanks. China is also dwarfing other countries with the amounts of renewable energy currently under construction https://globalenergymonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/solar_wind_in_construction_treemap_for_online-1.png
actually China's CO2 hasn't gone up in the past 12 months: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-chinas-co2-emissions-into-reverse-for-first-time/
it's likely that china has reached its CO2 emission peak, and now they're beginning to fall.
This is a good point, however the me meme is comparing to 1996. I think there's some way to go until it drops back that far.
China has an ambitious urbanization plan, so they're building the cities before there are people actually living there to get ahead of demand. It's not like China has a shortage of people to live in these cities and they have central planning, they can just move production into these developments and people will move there for work. In fact, it's happening right now. They don't just build empty cities that just sit empty forever.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_China
Not so empty anymore, and calling them empty was bullshit.
Turns out when you decide to build a new city, of course it would be empty at first, then people will eventually move in. But we can't do that because we need to preserve the artificial scarcity of housing so they can be used as an investment.
America has had a concentration camp since 2001
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-chinas-co2-emissions-into-reverse-for-first-time/
Jesus Christ. American liberals are champions at historical revisionism.
Yes, but.
It's China. I guarantee you that loads of people got fucked over one way or the other for this improvement. The Chinese government usually doesn't care much for the rights and lives of the individuals
You say that, but medical debt? Homelessness? Ice concentration camps for brown people? Highest incarceration rates, social credit (credit score), pedophile leaders...
Europeans, feel free to complain about China. Americans have no right to complain about China.
Not to be a tankie, but China taking over the US government would be an improvement
Hate to say it, but unironically, they would be better off under communist China.
The bar is so fucking low.
I AM European.
Having said that, the US is a shit show and the Empire pretty much needs to be rebuilt from scrap at this point but it's still better than China.
If you disagree I would suggest you go to China and start posting lots of tiananmen square videos from the 90's and then tell me which place is better.
yhea, that's not nearly as bad as paying taxes to a pedophile to finance a death camp for brown people.
Please think about that when you're in a nice Chinese re-education camp
You just gotta love people like you who can't fathom simple ideas like "both are really really bad"
And the West does? Hmm, you learn something new every day.
Or the US rail system that used exploited labor to build it out.
Yeah, never mind. You know what I mean, of course, but you got your head so far up Pooh's ass that you can taste his lunch
I don't care for the US, let it fucking burn, it deserves to die fast at this point. However, at least you can still have some open expression there (for as long as that is lasting under the Cheeto)
But the likes of you pretending that China has it all covered and is doing great and totally doesn't fuck entire populations over are just the worst.
I'm guessing correctky that you're of the types that think that tiananmen square was just a big happy dance party?
At least I recognize both empires for the evil shit they are
Plenty of people got fucked over for America's interstate system. You just don't care about them because they're poor minorities
One of the reasons it was built was to demolish black neighborhoods.
Are you suggesting that's why the US hasn't improved trains? Is there something about train improvements specifically that you think is harmful?
.....
Wut
You read that and were like "who cares about human lives and rights, why doesn't he want trains?"
Yeah, love trains, and as far as I'm concerned the US can replace all its highways with trains
But not at the expense of a couple of humans per kilometers because the government doesn't give a shit, or worse, you're an Uyghur
And now wait for five years and see if the Chinese one is still there.
It seems pretty improbable to me that this infrastructure will be replaced in China in just five years.
Didn't mean replaced. I meant collapse. Rotted away. Tofu dreg.
Well I don't really have any reason to doubt the quality of the rail system. It's one thing to go over-budget on transit (which they apparently did); it's quite another to go over-budget and build the whole system to a poor standard where it won't even last.
I hope that you are right but I doubt it.
It's been 16 years and counting.
This one is from 2024 Let that sink in Home not alone, just unfinished
One swallow does not make it summer. Shall we continue this path to see which one runs out first of resources?
Sorry, what do developers abandoning large housing projects have to do with longevity of train infrastructure?
Americans: "Nice infrastructure. Would be a shame if we had to come over there and liberate it."
I am as American as Pancetta. It is just the glorification of China that is rubbing me the wrong way.
Their buildings are collapsing. Yes, it is built fast, cheap and looks nice. And then it fails.
And the Chinese peope themselves. They suffer.
The Chinese government has definitely run ahead of the pack on domestic investment. But you could play the same game with Spain or Japan or Turkiye. The numbers simply would not have been as impressive.
This is a meme from 2008. You won't find any more crumbling buildings in China than you'd find in the UK or Korea.
They'll never know the joys of bumper to bumper traffic
Explain the sinking just finished metro. The ghost towns. The buildings collapsing. The bridges decaying because of concrete rot. There are so many current projects going bad because of the use of bad materials and dodgy practices. Skipping a geo research before building etc.
The Chinese are surpressed by the CCP. More than 90% of the drinking water is not fit for consumption. Aside from the AI cleaned up videos and pictures, there isn't much of a clear sky with the smog.
And where are the birds?
... Also have you seen China. They too have traffic jams.
No country is a wonderland. And if someone is really really really trying to convince me they are that magnificent, and better than everyone else. I. Do. Not. Trust. Them.
Actions say more than words. And the actions have spoken.
Source: it came to me in a dream.
Source. Straight out of mainland China. Not all does get stopped by the Firewall.
So still no source
when you're used to propaganda that says china is awful, seeing people say "china is pretty okay actually" looks like glorification.
No one is saying china is amazing, they're saying china is not actively stabbing themselves in the stomach. China is doing the blitheringly obvious things a country like that should be doing, things that most other countries can't be arsed to do because the people in power benefit from the status quo of things being shit.
They're not perfect, things go over budget and things get built shittily by bad companies, just like what happens in every other country on earth.
Plot twist, the bullet train only goes to an enormous city in which nobody lives or work.
Edit for reference, clearly y'all never heard of these:
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/chinas-ghost-cities-and-its-65-million-empty-homes
Reality: Trains in China go pretty much everywhere and are often sold out days in advance.
Trains everywhere connecting the entire country is a very worthwhile goal for a country, regardless of profit motive. If we can see the benefit of doing that with roads, why can’t we see the benefit of doing that with rail?
Trains being sold out days before is not a good sign, it means people are missing their appointments
It means they need to run more, longer trains.
Sold out trains still sell standing tickets, which let you pick seats if available. I've seen old ladies choose to stand so they can all be in a group.
Also sometimes they're not totally sold out, but you'll be choosing between a standing ticket and an expensive first-class ticket or hard seat and soft-sleeper for a slow train.