China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains

You're not going to get very many high cost infrastructure problems solved when the government doesn't force the issue. Socialism is a red herring, the real greatest enemy of capitalism is the unregulated free market.

The cost of labor, the cost of environmental studies, the cost of materials, and the need for the project to show a profit.

All of these factors are much different in China.

In the rest of the world, people are fine with ride sharing.

China also has the lowest organ recipient lists, maybe we should try to emulate that too:

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...

Everyone in the Central Valley will simply vote against whatever California wants to spend money on unless if overwhelmingly benefits them, or “hurts” those in the cities.

I know this isn’t the only reason the high speed rail project was canned, but those in the Centra Valley opposed it unless it connected some stretches like Fresno <-> Bakersfield together.

Yeah I can: approximately nothing. What exactly would you do with such a train? Neither LA nor San Diego have meaningful downtowns or local transit, so you'd still need a 45 minute drive on each end to get from/to where ever you're actually going. It's a 2.5 hour drive door-to-door today, so now you've just got a three-seat journey where there was once a one-seat trip, to maybe shave 30 minutes off journey time.

Moreover, there's no technology that could build such a train. LA to to San Diego is 200 kilometers. It would almost certainly need to make stops like Anaheim, Irvine, Oceanside, etc.. Oh, by the way, there's a mountain range between the two. Even state-of-the-art HSR would struggle to maintain 200 km/hour over the entire route. So now your train ride is an hour, and you've actually saved no time.

Skipping phase 0 design also eliminates any potential political and nimby dissent (where all options are ruled out as "unfeasible").

If your Federal Reserve stopping adding nonsense imputed and hedonic values to the tune of about ~$7 trillion to your economy's GDP, you would find yourself in second place.

Which might make help explain away your confusion :)

If you aren't concerned with cheap or green, and want to focus on fast... Then high speed rail might be a better option until the TSA is involved.

The United States wasn’t going to build these. Americans have been making excuses since the 1970s.

Jerry Brown tried to build the CA bullet train 4 decades ago.

Electric cars, electric buses, bullet trains, low-speed maglevs, high speed maglevs... China is making it happen!

In America, all we want is “drill, baby, drill”

Have you considered that richness is not measured correctly? Since GDP is effectively consumption, the more a person consumes, the richer a country is. A thousand people driving 5 hours between LA and SF will make the country richer. Not the people, which China appears to be wanting to do.

Although even then there are some disappointing Catch-22 processes at work. A State Senator is using the existence of a particular court case to try and delay/prevent funding, and the plaintiffs of a court case using the Senator's opposition (which cites their case) as an argument in favor of their case.

Nonetheless, I'm optimistic on the Dallas to Houston high speed rail. In my dreams, I see that project's completion as giving California a dose of motivation, so as not to be second fiddle to Texas.

A major problem with train systems in the United States (and this is both short and long haul) is that almost the entire country is sprawl - built around the automobile.

In dense environments (China and the north-east coast of the US (which has Acela), it's great to take a train into the core -- you beat traffic and are near your destination.

In sprawling environments (like most of CA), the benefit of ending up in the core is so much less (possibly even negative). Lower probability you are near your destination. And if you need to drive, now you are in a much worse situation (higher car rental prices due to high land values, you are stuck in traffic trying to leave the urban core, etc.).

In other words, even if you had a train, most individuals still will prefer driving (you have a car with you) or flying (faster than trains) -- killing the ROI on building the train in the first place.

1) We have the curse of being first. Our cities are old so our infrastructure is old.

2) We can't just say, "Your land is ours, get the fuck out, construction begins in one week"

They can also cut corners on safety and pollution. The ends always justify the means.

The Chinese government is much more autocratic yet it obviously does a much better job in building infrastructure

The problem with the US government is lobbyism. It does not work for itself, it does not work for the people, it works for big corporations and lawyers.

The elected and appointed officials of both parties serve their parties first. The party is more important than any one elected official and certainly more important than the voters.

high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless. In an authoritarian state like China the state can tell people were to live which makes it far easier to put services where those people are. Let alone the one item ignored is that much of the population does not travel long distance and that holds true for many countries. So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do and it makes a great jobs program and political payday as well

well, that train railway and its stops and other infrastructure would have to be build over somebody's lands/homes - the somebody's lives would have to be significantly impacted against their will. "The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few"? Especially that in practice those "Many" are frequently just some other, more influential, "Few".

>an autocratic and repulsive Government

that is a one [brutally] efficient way to outweigh the needs of the few ...

Any big economy has big incumbents.

> Can you imagine the impact of being able to train from San Diego to LA in 30mins?

Can you imagine what airlines and aerospace companies would think about it?

California has no shortage of funding for the transit. The failed bullet connection had more funding then the system in China that carries 10x people. Stop blaming "evil corporations" for failures of local and State governments.

What would be really depressing would be getting stuck with the hidden bill for this stuff. Sentiment like yours is why politicians can dangle the carrot of rail in front of the public for decades and keep cashing out.

It's just not that great a choice of transport on most legs in the U.S; and most places where medium- and high-speed rail makes sense in the U.S. already have it, at some price that keeps it somewhat occupied.

I hate that you use this term. Every government is like a flawed human being. I see it as a spectrum but HN sees it as The USA way or the HighWay.

The autocracy and maintenance of that autocracy is exactly how the Chinese government can show up the US. A centralized government with no ulterior profit agenda is exactly the central pillar to make unbiased decisions without resistance.

Don't despair. We have Greta Thundberg. Just look at https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/she - it's doing well!

Boston has infrastructure problems to a degree Seattle doesn't experience because when the Seattle core burned to the ground, it was rebuilt in some critical areas with newer infrastructure and thinking.

If you were a Bostonian or Chicagoan in that era, you were patting yourself on the back because your town hadn't burned in 20 years, and would not again. Today Seattle residence scratch their heads at some of the problems that Chicago and Boston have.

Similarly, residents of Tokyo were 'forced' into cellphones because even the 'burbs were so dense that installing new data lines was hugely expensive. 2-4 times the cost of a cellphone for a year. We were sucking down DSL+ speeds and looking jealously at their cool phones.

"If California was a country"

You (US) are now segueing into the introspective phase of Empire - that's when you learn a few lessons. When you realise that deploying more (aircraft)carriers than everyone else combined is simply a thing or spending way more on cough defence than anyone else is a thing as well, and it isn't as important as some other things.

Anyway, I hope your journey from Irvine to Los Angeles was at least comfortable.

The world turns ...

https://seattletransitblog.com/2016/04/07/st3-is-slow-becaus...

But I think it's a hard problem in the U.S. Autocratic governments just decide to do something and plow over anyone who gets in their way. The country I live in now is actually starting to lay track for a high speed rail system to connect the centrally located capital and major outlying cities, and all the way to the northern and southern borders. It did take a while to get started, because everyone had to decide how the contracts would be divided up among their cronies and how the kickbacks would be paid. But it is getting done, because if anyone stands in the way the government declares a threat to the security of the country and sends in the soldiers.

>>autocratic and repulsive... I agree the govt's autocratic but disagree it's repulsive.

Buy an car transporter, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Truck.ca...

Convert it to being an electric trolley bus https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/Va...

Haul people and their cars around from city to city, saving them gas, letting them work with wifi.

Unfortunately you don’t really get one without tending to get the other.

See in Australia how difficult it has been to build a high speed rail between Melbourne - Sydney one of the busiest domestic route in the world.

Edit - I dont mean to imply democracies are bad. It is just that things are hard to get done.

Dropping taxes on companies has nothing to do with it. Many European countries have lower corporate taxes than we do, and no OECD country raises significant revenue from corporate taxes. It’s a red herring and a distraction. The issue is we have a political system that makes infrastructure enormously more expensive and hard to build than in Europe (much less China). In Maryland, people are lobbying to get light rail stations torn down that have already been built! The average time spent in “environmental review” for a government project is 5 years, and its really just an opportunity for a small minority to hold up and delay infrastructure projects. But that system is a reflection of our values. We don’t build things because we would rather prioritize other values.

That is what it is. We are good at other things! We’re good at things like Silicon Valley, that don’t require centralized cooperation and people falling in line. Lots of countries have the political discipline to build rail. But there is no other Silicon Valley! (What more needs to be said about why California doesn’t have rail, beyond noting that the state’s most significant industry is based in the suburbs/exurbs of an otherwise second tier city?)

1. Corporate income taxes don’t generate much revenue, and the revenue they do bring in is even smaller relative to the amount of harm and economic distortion it causes. It really only carries on because it’s a useful political football and because having it appeals to a certain sense of “fairness.” There’s really no correlation between corporate taxation and infrastructure, and we might even be better off without the former altogether.

2. The US does spend a lot every year on infrastructure, but it gets relatively little bang for its buck, especially in comparison to places like China; even other advanced economies (France, UK, etc.) seem to be better at controlling costs for these types of projects.

3. We also spend a ton of money every year on precisely the wrong type of infrastructure. The Federal government, in addition to every state and local government, spends enormous sums every year on not only maintaining existing roads, but also widening, adding lanes, or even building new ones. In fact I remember reading that something like one out of every two dollars spent on roads goes to build new ones, even as people decry that the government isn’t adequately maintaining the roads that already exist. That’s insane - but it’s tied up in how funds are allocated, cost sharing agreements, etc. that often comes out of Congress. In short, the Feds will pick up an enormous proportion of the tab for building new state and local roads, but contribute very little to maintaining them. It should be easy to see, then, that building new roads is often more lucrative for contractors, politicians, governments, etc. than simply maintaining what they already have.

4. All the money we just talked about spending on roads is money that was not spent on upgrading sewers, water, power, public services, and everything else that help support denser urban areas like New York. So in effect, we are starving economically vibrant cities like NY of federal funds at the same time we subsidize the continued expansion of suburbia, none of which have the density required to make massive investments in things like railroads anywhere close to economically viable.

The US is a country of checks and balances. Viewed differently, it's easy to obstruct changes. On average this works well, as it's far more likely for any random change to be bad rather than good. The unfortunate side effect is that many good changes don't happen, because it's so difficult to overcome all the "checks and balances".

In an authoritarian regime, changes edicted from the top encounter very little opposition. In post-Mao China, lots of these changes were wise, but not all. In the majority of the authoritarian regimes though the story is a bit less rosy.

Can we have our cake (checks and balances) and eat it too (more good changes get done) ? That's a tough question, I personally don't have the answer. But it seems more likely that once China builds a larger network of high-speed rail, the US would get some type of competitive impulse, and start investing in this too. One can only hope ...

That's what California gets for electing governors George Deukmejian. Pete Wilson, Gray Davis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"green tech investment and high tech public transport systems" = actually helps the people

Start by fixing misinformation about what is the PRC and the "democractic" US.

That's the big one. What HSR needs is not even higher top speed but some control breakthrough that allows much higher train frequencies in order to cut down on stops via more trains that can serve more specialized connections (e.g. the local/through etc). No idea what that breakthrough might be, perhaps something as crazy as rocket-assisted emergency braking.

State-of-the-art high-speed trains at 350 km/h tend to waste less time than planes for distances shorter than about 1000 km if you include the time it takes to get to the airport, check-in, go through security, and all that nonsense. Beyond 1000 km journeys, planes tend to be more time-saving.

1000 km/h is about the cruising speed of an aircraft so if it were possible to achieve that with a train, it would no longer make sense to take planes for the same journey -- which would be HUGE plus for comfort for, say, trips between Europe and Asia. Imagine for a 10-hour journey that you could walk around freely, enjoy massive amounts of legroom, enjoy the views of Siberia, sleep in peace and quiet, dine at a dining table, and not have to be strapped into a seat all the time. For high-volume routes it is also likely to be lower-carbon in the long run than air travel, and at the very least, can be powered on something more sustainable and less polluting than jet fuel. The bulk of your environmental impact would come from laying the track itself, so it would have to be a route of extremely high tourism or business importance, e.g. Shenzhen-Shanghai-Beijing-Moscow-Warsaw-Frankfurt-Paris-London or some such. Or Los Angeles to New York.

https://twitter.com/metronorth

We're struggling with rain and leaves.

Please, I urge you to watch this. It explains thoroughly why the situation for railroads is very different between China and America.

tl;dw: America is more spread out, has better airline control, and less of a political incentive to expand public transport, than China.

At near sea level, the drag at those speeds is absolutely brutal. Airplanes win, although they’re harder to electrify.

If you extrapolate current Maglev designs to 1000km/h, for energy consumption per passenger mile is about 0.5kWh/(passenger-mile).

Airplanes are on the order of 100mpg/passenger, or 0.33kWh/(passenger-mile) even with the relatively low conversion of chemical energy to mechanical in a jet engine. An electric aircraft could get about 0.1-0.2kWh/(passenger-mile) with the same airframe if the battery chemistry is appropriate for that flight length. Improve the airframe, and <0.05kWh/(passenger-mile) is possible.

Length of electric flight is limited, but 1000km is possible with current chemistries. America’s near-term HSR routes are on the order of 500km, so electric flight is feasible.

This is why “Hyperloop” (or vacuum trains generally) are and were a good idea at the high end for high speed rail, in spite of all the mocking that Elon Musk incurred for the idea (which he/SpaceX popularized and funded student competitions for, although the idea is an old one). Otherwise airplanes win on efficiency.

From the Boeing 747 MAX incidents you can conclude that if there is a big pile of money involved then safety is a problem to be workaround of, though funny enough there are still people that blame the cause on the safety regulations, like if the regulations were not present then Boeing and the free market (with only 2 competitors) would solve the issues

Another reason could be that it wasn’t the time of the day when it goes up to max speed ( it only reaches 400km/h on certain time of the day, some days only. other time it’s just 350 or something like that)

You also need to accelerate and decelerate, so the average speed (Vavg) will be much lower than 1000km/h.

Though I was expecting that new materials and design could reduce the air friction even more in the future.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/helium-smartphones-fibre-op...

Pressurizing train tunnels with significant amounts of helium which would constantly need to replenished may be impractical

Also clear space requirements for interstates would likely be infringed, which is one of the biggest factors of safety.

A more workable approach would be to reclaim abandoned rail ROW, and purchased additionally required ROW to extend curve length, where required. However much of this ROW has already been reclaimed by landowners and built upon.

You can search here for other combos: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/China-trains/

I thought the unprofitable ones were subsidized by profitable lines and for strategic reasons.