China's Great Rail Leap Forward Is Looking More And More Like A Disaster

[FarCenter]

Jefferies identifies some areas where the Great Leap Forward went wrong [our summary follows]:

1) Poor people make up most of the rail passengers, and they don't care how fast the trains go.

2) China is too big a country for rail to compete with air travel when it comes to rich travelers.

3) Planners assumed land value would increase infinitely. Thus they built tracks in sparsely populated and deserted areas, like between Lanzhou and Xinjiang.

4) Many tracks provide overlapping service. Between Beijing and Shanghai, for instance, there are currently three high-speed rail lines and one regular track.

5) China spent illogical amounts to maximize speed.

6) HSR train stations tend to be located far away from city centers. This can be blamed on rushed development, incentive to build new stations rather than expand old ones, and optimism about future urban growth.

7) China cut corners on equipment and safety.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-great-rail-leap-forward-is-looking-more-and-more-like-a-disaster-2012-2

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. #7 surprises me.. not.

[leftyohiolib]

2. number 7 is always the one taking cuts thats what brought us the bp oil disaster

and probably every other man made disaster. bp's negligence killed 11 people and no one went to jail

[hunter]

4. Ha! The BP disaster was caused by automobiles...

If we didn't have to feed all these automobiles we probably wouldn't be building oil platforms out in the Gulf of Mexico.

The automobile age is one of the great catastrophes of human civilization, ranking right up there with World Wars.

Trains in China don't even come close.

[Safetykitten]

3. The first point is so absurd, it's amazing.

So poor people don't care about how fast the trains go. Do they do a poll? Or is it that poor people in general just have nothing better to do?

Transporation is only sucessfull when it follows a people with lots o' money model? Geez who knew?

Idiotic article.

[FarCenter]

6. Chinese traveling for reasons like the New Years trip home have taken the conventional trains.

So far they have been unwilling to pay the higher fares for the high-speed trains.

China has an extensive network of conventional passenger trains which are already heavily used, unlike the US' Amtrak. So the competition there is between conventional rail, high-speed rail, and airlines.

High-speed rail isn't cheap enough to compete with conventional rail, and it isn't fast enough to compete with airlines.

[hunter]

5. This article must have been too absurd for The Onion.

I'm looking at #3 especially, having recently visited brand new USA suburbs, well served by public roads and highways, where every second or third house is empty or surrounded by vacant lots littered with decaying vandalized utility stubs and construction debris.

#1 is pretty good too. How long does it take to drive from Downtown Los Angeles to the beach or Promenade in Santa Monica and then find a parking place? It really doesn't matter how wealthy you are, your average speed is probably around 20mph much of the day.

[On the Road]

7. Geographically, China is Like the US in a Lot of Ways

including the distribution of population centers.

High-speed rail makes sense in the US for the NE corridor and a few other areas where total door-to-door time is faster than air and it enables a business trip to be completed in one day. It makes sense for a few areas of China as well, such as as Beijing-Tianjin and Shanghai-Nanjing.

Countrywide, rail service between most major city pairs is about $120-150 and is overnight by sleeping train -- on longer routes like Beijing-Chongching it's two nights. This is fine for passengers who value saving money over saving time (it is what's meant by 'poor people don't care about how fast the trains go'). But putting in high-speed service won't get business travelers who need the extra day or two, and won't attract poor people who can't afford the extra cost.

Beijing-Shanghai is about 800 miles and originally took four hours. (Since the accident, it has slowed down to 4:48). That is farther than New York-Savanna GA, and might be a bit far to compete with air for a business travel. Three parallel sets of tracks certainly seems to be a bit much.

I love these trains, but the article may be right in saying it has been overbuilt and is due for a fall.

[magical thyme]

8. what about cargo?

I've tended to think of hi-speed rail as a way to ship cargo around faster and maybe cheaper/cleaner/safer than semis. Don't know if it works out that way. I just kind of assumed...

[FarCenter]

10. Cargo on conventional 50 mph rail moves about 1000 miles / day

Intermodal shipments using containers are big business. E.g. offload a container in Long Beach onto a container rail car, exchange it from a western rail to an easter rail mid-continent, and load it onto a truck on the East Coast for final delivery. It takes about three days. With improvements to freight rail, such as double tracking and electrification, speeds could be increased to about 70 or 80 for light freight. Coal, cement, grain, tank cars, etc. need to go at lower speeds because their weight beats up the track and roadbed at anything above 50 mph.

If it has to get there overnight, it goes by air or by express ground service. But container ton-miles by rail are going up rapidly and displacing semi trucks due to high diesel prices.

[FarCenter]

14. Ride The Rails To Retirement

It's been a mild winter here in Bumpass, Virginia. We had thunder-snow yesterday, but with the 42 degree temperature, it melted quickly. This mild weather has put a damper on energy usage, especially coal and wood. My daughter got a good deal on two dump truck loads of fire wood due to lack of demand. The high price of diesel fuel has hurt her trucking business as it has affected long-haul truckers. One industry in the transportation sector that has done well is railroads.

Railroads have efficiencies for long-haul deliveries of bulk materials, such as coal, metals, metallic ores, petroleum chemicals and farm products. "Put another way, trains are anywhere from 1.9 to 5.5 times more fuel efficient than trucks. No wonder companies that have rail access are making the switch." Manufacturing is picking up and providing more jobs in this slow growth economy. Freight rates are rising due to contract renewals and built in surcharges. Transportation is one of the first industries to respond to the demand pickup at the beginning of a business cycle.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/379771-ride-the-rails-to-retirement

[Ganja Ninja]

9. Sure they have some kinks to work out but wait about 25 years.

I'm sure few people realized how valuable our interstate highway system would eventually be back in the 50's. Frankly this article is likely is aimed at killing any enthusiasm for high speed rail here. Just read the comments on it.

[hunter]

11. Our interstate highways will be much less valuable as the price of petroleum rises.

Any highway with more than two lanes either direction is overbuilt.

[FarCenter]

12. Robotic electric buses won't require that many lane miles

And streets and roads can be narrower, because there will be no need for parallel parking of cars. Even now, some communities are starting to narrow streets and eliminate on-street parking.

[Better Believe It]

13. The U.S. can sure show the Chinese a lot about how to build a national railroad system ..... AMTRAK

AMTRAK can nearly get you coast to coast in about a week now!

And they serve sandwiches on the trains .... if they don't run out.

Who cares about the speed as long as you get to where you're going?

And AMTRAK sure beats a stagecoach!

Well, maybe not all the time.