The contrast to the UK, where we might someday build the HS2 line London-Birmingham-Manchester, is massive. I am left with a feeling of awe at China's development, and frustration at the UK's stagnancy.
While the UK does feel particularly stagnated on several fronts, I'm not sure abandoning the rule of law, protection of private property, labour protections, at least an attempt at the appearance of corruption-free tenders, high safety standards and the principle that people who are affected should be consulted is worthy of much awe.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/15/hs2-rail-arc...
In this case (and also in e.g. building new power stations, new housing, widening roads, expanding London's airports, etc) the contrast is so stark. For sure the UK needn't abandon rule of law in order to build infrastructure in a timely manner.
The U.S. has some of this problem as well, though more in its environmental legislation. Having environmental legislation is good, but it's currently extremely bureaucratic. For example, Illinois is doing a relatively minor upgrade to the Chicago - St. Louis rail line, to upgrade it from 89 mph to 110 mph top speeds. This isn't a newly built line and involves very little alignment change, mainly rebuilding of crossings and stations and signalling upgrades. One of the parts of the process that has slowed it down the most is the required reporting under the National Environmental Policy Act [1], not because they're worried everything won't ultimately be approved (it eventually was), but because the amount of required documentation and procedures to go through are just so numerous and slow, that it takes a substantial portion of the resources of the entire project just to do the paperwork.
[1] http://www.progressiverailroading.com/high_speed_rail/articl...
Actually the Chinese government builds a lot of the high speed rail tracks on elevated tracks in order to avoid interfering with the owner. Which is why most of it looks likes this:
http://www.people.com.cn/mediafile/pic/GQ/20160229/56/325223...
If you have, say, farmland beneath a track you are virtually unaffected after that section of the track is completed.
They also build a lot of the stations on the outskirts of cities for the same reason (and then connect it up to the center with a metro).
So it does seem like they're using tracks elevated by concrete pillars pretty widely, but are you sure your image shows a high-speed rail track? To my untrained eye that seems like a really aggressive curve radius for a high speed rail track. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_railway_curve_radius#L...
I'm flabbergasted by people implying that there's a good excuse for why the Western nations can't build HSR the way China does. China has entire lines like this that don't touch the ground for dozens of miles at a time. These lines are out in the country connecting major city centers, and I'm very skeptical that they disrupt any landowners in between. China has perfected the technqiue of low-cost construction of this elevated track. Meanwhile in California every property owner along the CA HSR right-of-way has the right to sue the state and claim not that they haven't been compensated (they have), but that there will be environmental damage (even though it has already been studied), delaying the construction and making it cost even more.
Many Western countries' ability to build large infrastructure is broken, because they give too much power to the landowners and unions.
E.g. if it's through the middle of your field you can cross the track at any point, as opposed to going out of your way to get under a tunnel. Most of the land underneath the track can still be farmed, so why wouldn't it be cheaper?
Neither your or your parents photo represents "elevating the rails to avoid interference with the property below".
What's happening in these photos is that either there is a flood plain below the tracks and/or there is a maximum grade (elevation) change that they need to respect and so they are "flattening" the track with those pillars.
Those pillars are not there to be nice, they're there because of physical constraints.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/10/co...
"Laying track on viaducts is often preferred in China to minimize resettlement and the use of fertile land"
I rode across a lot of the country on HSR in 2013 and it was obvious that huge swathes (perhaps most) of the network is on viaducts.
Either China is about 40% "physical constraints" (which would make this high speed rail network an even more impressive and our lack of one an even greater failure) or they're actually there to be "nice" (i.e. avoid the need for resettlement/compulsory land purchase).
I wonder, though, how much time is wasted slowly backing it up to the staging area to pick up each new beam section. Maybe they sometimes use a beam carrying machine to bring more beams to the erecting machine.
Japan seems to prefer to build at ground level outside of cities.
How is this different from, say, oil pipelines in the United States? They are constantly trampling on the rights of (Usually indigenous) people living in the area - and you currently have a Congress, a Senate, and a President that have all made it very clear what side they are on in this battle.
The primary difference to me is that China seems to consider train transportation infrastructure to be critical to its economic development - whereas the United States considers that to be the case for private oil extraction.
At least high-speed train spills are far less likely to cause long-term ecosystem damage then bitumen.
All 100% unnecessary in order to build a lot of high speed rail.
Except possibly the protection of private property (it would require eminent domain). But, since most British homeowners have been subject to one of the largest handouts in history (in the form of house price appreciation directed by the state), I think the a little leeway on that one is affordable
Plus, like the Chinese (who don't completely ignore property rights), there's nothing stopping us from building railways on stilts.
I assume the U.K. is rather flat and you wouldn't use stilts at all.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/10/co...
"Laying track on viaducts is often preferred in China to minimize resettlement and the use of fertile land"
>There are hardly any stilts between Beijing and GZ
I guess land acquisition costs are lower then.
I've seen a lot of flat farmland in China with CRH stilts in Western China. Beijing-Tianjin line is pretty much all on stilts.
I've never seen stilts in flat terrain before, outside of SH/GZ elevated ring roads. I'm very surprised BJ-TJ is elevated when almost nothing else in urban Beijing is.
I'd compare what China is doing with the high speed trains now with what the US did with the regular train tracks. Look at what it did to the US in terms of economy, and the cost for the native people and nature.
Where there is clear wider community benefit, IMO consultation should be relatively narrow ('we will build this but if small changes can provide major benefit please make sure we know about them and we should be held to account in planning for them') however compensation should be generous. Few heritage items should be sacrosanct however not many will be affected and losses in heritage should be compensated by greater heritage contributions elsewhere (eg money for conserving heritage items on the at risk register). It really shouldnt have to be so controversial if the right systems are in place. We have to plan for the future and this should not be questionable...
Rule of law, labour practices and corruption-free practices arent incompatible with these projects.
The chinese revolution led to complete overhaul of the property system, land ownership and land reform from the 50s.
Being developed countries a lot of development happened in a different era in most western countries when the rules, environmental awareness and current standards just didn't exist. China is doing it now. It's a completely different ball game.
China is a huge country compared to most european countries and has more than 1.3 billion people. Its unlikely the things that apply to Europe or the US will apply here.
Two points:
1. The income tax that pays for the UK's lavish welfare system violates private property (and privacy) rights on a massive scale. It just doesn't seem that way to you because it's been normalized in the society you've lived your entire life in. Conversely, the type of property that was not made by man, and thus, should be under greater government purview: land, is treated as nearly absolutely private, with the state having very little power to expropriate it for the public good.
2. Laws prohibiting particular labour arrangements are not "labour protections". As Peter Schiff put it, "mandatory vacations, sick days, and bonuses do not expand worker's right, they restrict them. They do not raise compensation, but rather force workers to accept compensation based on government requirements rather than personal preference." It is only demagoguery and ideological group-think that makes people believe otherwise. The same applies to mandatory "high safety standards", which violate the right of consenting adults to engage in voluntary actions and interactions, and ultimately result in top-down cookie cutter standards created by a small body of bureaucrats replacing a wide assortment of personal standards, that would be based on the localized knowledge diffused throughout the economy.
And yet somehow a handful of generations ago a large number of consciences were pretty definite about the rights of black Africans. Seems impossible to today's conscience.
Consciences change over time. Every generation thinks theirs is the One True Correct belief system. Bah.
We must ultimately live by a set of values that make the most sense to us. I see no reason why I should not.
In particular, the system often rewards politicians who delay making tough (or expensive) decisions.
For example, building a new power station using the latest green technology causes more protests and opposition than keeping a decrepit, polluting power station running for an extra five years. At which point, in all probability it'll be someone else's problem.
So often, a politician presented with a chance to either approve a power station, or call for more impact assessments/consultations/reviews, will be rewarded for choosing the latter.
I saw this happen once in my constituency. The protest was ridiculously meek and likely astroturfed but it had the backing of the local Tory MP.
Thus the department of energy and climate change refused permission to build a wind farm.
China is lifting almost a billion people out of poverty with all these projects. Think back to the West in the early to mid 1900s for the right comparison context.
I only hope China's rise into modernity is not accompanied by mega wars of the type that happened with the Western nations rise.
On the lines I most often use the carriages don't have automatic doors. I'm constantly embarrassed when I have to show visitors how to open the window, stick their hand out and use the handle on the outside to open the door (which is how it's done).
Or: passengers were not supposed to operate those doors, there was railway personnel for that (this assumes very old trains)
Check: there is something about that issue here https://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/horrible-door...
"they firstly removed the interior door handles as a dirt-cheap “safety” measure to discourage people from getting out of the train before it stopped, then realised that they hadn’t actually discouraged everyone and had instead made jumping early even more dangerous, so they added a central locking system to keep the doors locked until the train stopped. Of course, in a quintessential piece of British train-related incompetence, they didn’t bother to put the handles back on once they had central locking."
It was still an odd design decision, though. There had been electric doors on BR multiple units since the 70s.
I don't know whether the crash standards for 125mph running were higher at the time. The Mark 3s are generally very strong, and have held up to high-speed crashes better than their predecessors, so something was definitely done right.
They weren't fitted with central door locking until the early 90s, though, and even now it's not interlocked with either the train power or an 'actually closed' sensor - so it relies on the guard to make sure the train doesn't set off with a door open.
After 3 years, I am still not quite confident opening those doors. I try to let another passenger do it for me.
There have been a few converted to more conventional power doors, but the original design is not such that this is easy; it's a pretty major rebuild and it's not clear they're going to be in service long enough to make it worthwhile.
The west in comparison gets bogged down in NIMBYism and haggling over land value pr CM of track/road. Never mind multiple rounds in court if one of the would be contractors can find any reason to claim the government was biased...
Whether this is a good or bad thing, well, see debates in other comments.
Japanese rail companies manage this: they run the trains at cost - or even a loss - and make profits back from (for example), building malls around the stations and leasing space to retailers.
The UK could really use high speed rail around the London commuter belt. If land value increases are captured it would probably pay for itself, in fact.
Rail is typically never profitable
unless the increase in land value
around stations is captured.
I wonder if the same is also true with public transport in cities, in particular rail-based underground system like London's tube.
Of course, ideally both would be run exactly at cost via user fees (i.e. train tickets, tolls etc.), but this is not an often-shared opinion.
Actually the public is strongly in favor of spending public funds on trains, but the British oligarchy (reflected by the media's default opinion - which some people confuse for the public's), is vehemently against it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11867259/What-J...
Note the Telegraph accusing the general public of being communists:
"the majority of the electorate who have no love for bankers and are positively Trotskyist when it comes to trains and utilities"
"A recent YouGov poll showed that the majority of people support the renationalisation of railways, including those who identified themselves as Conservative or UKIP voters."
>Of course, ideally both would be run exactly at cost via user fees
Why are you against capturing the increased land value like Japan does?
Isn't that a fairly succinct summary of the Telegraph's political stance on pretty much everything?
Building high speed rail in London would alleviate a lot of commuter stress and pain and it could be used to regenerate a lot of the more run down areas on the outskirts of London if they suddenly had a ~12-15 minute commute to the center.
Since you mentioned Coventry, it's intercity capacity to London will actually be reduced if HS2 comes to be due to extra trains to Birmingham occupying the track. Same for many other towns and cities in the Midlands. [1]
[0] https://beleben.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/friday-capacity-to-... [1] http://stophs2.org/news/13115-13115
To be fair, the UK was overspending on railway long before it was cool :-)
From Edward Chancellor's "Devil Take the Hindmost" [1]:
> In January 1845, sixteen new railway schemes were projected. By April, with rail receipts continuing to grow rapidly, over fifty new companies had been registered...
> By June 1845, plans for over eight thousand miles of new railway -- four times the size of the existing railway system and nearly twenty times the length of England -- were under consideration by the Board of Trade. In the following month, new schemes appeared at the rate of over a dozen a week.
> At the end of October [...] over twelve hundred railways were being projected at an estimated cost of over £560 million. The total amount of outstanding railway liabilities was nearly £600 million. This figure exceeded the national income, estimated at around £550 million, of which perhaps £20 million a year could be spent safely on the railways without starving the rest of the economy of capital.
> In Britain, [...] the spirit of laissez-faire dictated that the development of the railways should be left entirely to private enterprise. The uncontrolled expansion of the railway system, in the hands of semi-criminal entrepreneurs, produced a haphazard network. For instance, by the 1850s there were three independent routes from Liverpool to Leeds and three alternative routes from London to Peterborough.
> The results of the mania, however, were not entirely negative. With over 8,000 miles of track in operation by 1855, Britain possessed the highest density of railways in the world, seven times greater than that of France or Germany.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Specula...
That said though, it's a shame Heathrow still can't get the extra runway it desperately needs...
The noise of flights landing over London for 17 hours a day, pretty much every 90-120 seconds, is miserable.