Posted on 07/25/2010 6:38:48 PM PDT by PugetSoundSoldier
PEAK OIL
Amtrak ridership will continue to increase whether you like it or not.
That is what I said in my post. If you read it, you wouldn't be lumping me in with Willie. I was trying to tell him he was full of shit. You just did it way better than I did.
I took that as an FYI ping and not directed at you.
“Amtrak ridership will continue to increase whether you like it or not.”
Well it couldn’t get much lower.
Learned from the Steam-engine Willie school of debating techniques
Totally, it wasn’t to lump you in with fantasy-land Willie at all. Just some fleshed out concepts that I know Willie will ignore, but others may glean some education from.
High speed rail in the US makes ZERO economic sense. If it happens, it happens simply for political reasons only. Because someone wants a jobs bill, or wants to “be like Europe” or some other nonsense.
FWIW, there is a high speed train between Shanghai and Xiamen; it takes about 7 hours and costs 500 RMB. I looked at it for this Thursday’s trip down to Southern China. But considering a business class airplane ticket costs 650 RMB (about $20 more), and takes about 80 minutes, well, I can now fly down in the morning, do my 5-6 hours of work, then fly back. All in one day, versus a minimum 1 night stay in Xiamen if I went via train.
Xiamen’s a beautiful city, but I’m not looking to vacation right now...
They always want to force me to ride public transportation, but they never put a bus that will take me where I want to go, when I want to go there.
FYI, in 1865, when the first NYC subway opened, Manhattan's population density was 35K per square mile. It is now 70K per square mile. Most Chinese cities are like the biggest American cities, ex-NYC, in terms of population density - closer to Long Island than NYC. Shanghai's population density is only 7K per sq mile. Beijing's is 3.4K per sq mile. Bombay and Madras are far more densely populated, with 59K and 69K per sq mile respectively. Again, just FYI.
Shanghai’s only that low-density if you include Jiading, Baoshan, Minhang, and Pudong, all of which have thousands of acres of undeveloped land waiting for more people. AND then tack on the outer suburbs (Songjiang, Fengxian, etc) and the islands (Chongming).
It would be like taking Los Angeles and including all of Ventura County and Riverside County in the density calculation. Yeah, it’s “only an hour” to those areas, but they’re well outside of the urban core.
Get inside Shanghai “proper” (inside the Puxi area - the core 9 districts inside the A20 ring road) which is 281 square kilometers, about 110 square miles, and you’re over 28,000 per square kilometer, which would be about 72,000 per square mile (2.56 square kilometers per square mile).
And I think yesterday nearly all of them were on lines 2 and 9 as I traversed Shanghai...
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