Too bad we can't have good public transportation
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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.
Chinese government can print an infinite amount of Yuan out of thin air.
That's not how any of this works. Sure they can do that, but they cannot control the effects of having done so.
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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.
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Now do aircraft carriers!
Setting that cash on fire would be more practical use of tax payer money
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Doesnt the us also have those powers and didn't they use them liberally in the construction of both the railways and interstates?
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
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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.
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.
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Chinese government can print an infinite amount of Yuan out of thin air.
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.
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Now do aircraft carriers!
Aircraft carriers don't let me travel to my destinations
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Weird to compare a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular vs a democracy which violates human rights a little less.
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America: if ain’t broke don’t fix it
Every other country: yah it’s time, what are our new requirements?Then there’s “if it ain’t broke… how can we break it to extract a few extra bucks from it?”
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Weird to compare a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular vs a democracy which violates human rights a little less.
So far...give Trump time and he'll catch right up.
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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.
Its so naive to think that this was the cause lmao
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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_Länder_nach_Verkehrstoten
but good they have a few trains for 1 billion ppl. sure thats going to help. LOL. -
This one is from 2024
Let that sink in
Home not alone, just unfinishedOne 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?
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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
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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_Länder_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.
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Aircraft carriers don't let me travel to my destinations
Your fault that you weren't born as an aircraft!
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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
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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.
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Weird to compare a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular vs a democracy which violates human rights a little less.
a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular
Don't you think you're a little harsh on the US?
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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.
We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
Do you know any US history
