It’s popular among the wealthy. The common folk still use the cattle cars. I saw them all the time in Nanjing and Shanghai.
OK, but the claim is that it is suppression of dissent that allows HSR to be built. What evidence is there to support this claim?
I have no burden of proof on me, but I have still provided more by citing the high usage rate of HSR compared to conventional trains and airplanes and anecdotal information gathered from living in China for close to 6 years.
Yep; it’s just like with UHC: all that’s necessary is to find any difference between the US and any given country and that’s the reason why the US is just too “exceptional”. Even when that means 10 different excuses for 10 different countries.
“The wealthy” also have the option of flying or conventional trains, and HSR beats either of those.
Anyway, 1.5 billion passenger-journeys a year does not equate to some sacred form of transport for only the upper class.
We can play around with terminology but if we are going to call people who ride HSR “wealthy” then we can probably say China has more wealthy people than the entire US population (and yes, I know obviously that 1.5 billion number does not refer to unique passengers, but I would be surprised if unique passengers are less than, say, 300 million).
Technically, the wealthiest 25% of China’s population is larger than the population of the US. 
Sure, China has a big population, but if “the wealthy” now just means the top 25% of the population in a country with GDP of about $9k…it’s a pretty misleading use of the term. Many of those 25% are earning less than the US median income, so what would be the relevance anyway?
Yes, that’s the claim. HSR exists in
China because a handful of the ruling elite said it would exist regardless of public opinion on how tax money is spent. This is not in dispute. It’s a fact.
So? I went into great detail regarding transportation history in the United States and how it dictates transportation infrastructure going forward. Basically you’re ignoring differences in geographic layout, population distribution and transportation history between countries. HSR is a waste of money in the United States. It’s a resource sapping node of transportation that is severely limited to the few cities it would connect to. We had it a hundred years ago and it never generated the ridership needed to justify it.
If only there were threads about UHC where you could whine about it.
I’m late to the party and maybe it’s already been said, but Amtrak has been unprofitable for a long time requiring subsidies to just stay alive.
This seems to indicate that consumers analysis of the various travel options based on cost+service results in train travel being further down the list than other modes.
If that’s the case, why is it so important to build a high speed rail service?
Like the USPS, Amtrak has been hampered by deliberate Congressional interference. I remember years ago a national news report about a storage yard of hundreds of passenger cars that Amtrak had that needed to fixed up to be used. But Congress wouldn’t let them do it. So routes that were full and could handle more passengers with those cars were effectively underutilized.
Never say something that Congress is interfering with is performing badly solely because of other reasons.
Here’s what you actually said
The implication being that the public is or was against HSR in China but opposition was suppressed. Where’s the evidence for that?
And again, it has little to really do with this thread either way, because China is just one country among many with HSR.
There is no implication, I’m saying flat out that the citizens of China had no choice in the matter.
I’m truly not sure what part of WE DON’T WANT IT that you don’t understand. Seriously. What don’t you understand? It is a waste of money in the United States. We have the same basic land mass as China but 20 times the number of cars per 1000 people. We have 13,000 airports to China’s 500. We are not like China or any other nation in respect to transportation nodes. We abandoned train travel in the middle of the last century for cars and planes. They offer far greater mobility than HSR at less cost.
Deal with the fact that we would rather spend the money on roads and airports.
The voters of California disagree with you. They wanted it. Perhaps today, after huge cost overruns and every city, county and property owner fighting it tooth and nail- they might not, but the HSR prop passed with a very solid majority.
Wealthy by Chinese standards is wealthy. Why in the world would you impose our standards on another country? Someone who rides the HSR might make $25,000 USD per year, which (with a working spouse) is enough to buy a 900 square foot apartment, a car, and ride HSR. That’s wealthy compared to their parents who live in the countryside and perform subsistence farming. The ones who ride the cattle cars.
USPS:
Understood there are issues like pre-funding pensions and that rates can’t be set like a private company.
Amtrak and Passenger Rail in General:
Possibly congress hurts Amtrak, but based on what I am aware of, it doesn’t seem to be like the USPS pre-funding, the issue is that passenger rail is an expensive option compared to other modes. Whether in the US or in Japan or Germany, the things I read say that there are very few profitable passenger rail lines.
It’s possible there are arguments in rail’s favor, but what are those arguments?
I think the recent issue with Congress has been on the long-haul routes - those are not profitable and unreliable. The regional service in areas around the country are on a better financial footing, I believe. IMHO, the long routes between Chicago and Los Angeles, or from San Diego to Seattle, make no sense at all, but the shorter and more focused Pacific Surfliner and Capitol Corridor routes are more popular, and needed.
If you want to call 52% approval a solid majority I guess that’s your first amendment right.
However, that “solid majority” is down to 31% who actually want to pay for it.
"Californians still support the concept of a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but after months of troubling disclosures about the project’s cost and schedule, just 31% of voters across the state want to keep building it, according to a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll.
The survey confirmed what has been consistent in California public opinion for half a decade: The public has never abandoned its dream of a high-speed transportation system but rejects the rail authority’s performance in building it."
Firstly I dispute that this is necessarily correct and that 1.5 billion passenger journeys a year represent “the wealthy”.
Secondly, not everything is relative; the cost of creating and running HSR is broadly the same everywhere. China had to purchase German, French and Japanese technology to do it. Even if what you are saying is true, if only the wealthy in China can ride HSR then that tells us little about what proportion of the US population would be able to.
There’s so much dumb in this thread, so it’s perhaps unfair to single out this post. Nonetheless, the idea that the US is somehow more bureaucratic, environmentally minded, or unionized than the countries that already have high speed rail is ludicrous.
Not at all. You’re missing the subsidies. Every time I rode an HSR versus taking a plane, I was costing the Chinese government money. For 220 RMB, the trip might as well have been free. Only the very poor can’t afford 220 RMB.
This thread talks a lot about railroads and I know nothing about RRs and don’t really care to, so I have nothing to add to that part of the thread.
On the broader point of big projects in the US, those who bemoan our failure are too focused on big pieces of things. Sure, it is hard to build large railroads or airports in the US, but most of modern technology is small or discrete. It was quite an achievement to design an iPhone and even more of an achievement to build a company the size of Apple or Microsoft or Google or Facebook or Amazon…
The F-35 fighter, if you like big things, is a 400 billion $ achievement that no other country or group of countries can even begin to approach. And that doesn’t even account for how good the plane itself is. The human interface for the pilot, the integrated maintenance and software control that stretches literally around the world in real-time, the tactics, etc etc that went into that truly massive project is without equal in the modern world. Now one can certainly debate whether that was a worthwhile way to spend the money, but the achievement is unique.
The US isn’t building physically big things as much as we did back in the day, but large complex projects and innovations happen here more frequently than anywhere else on the planet.
Not quite, but we’re still doing pretty well.