Posted on 05/26/2019 8:32:31 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
On a recent weekday morning, Liu Ai’jun boarded one of eight daily high-speed rail (HSR) services between Urumqi, capital of China’s north-western Xinjiang region, and Hami, an oasis town 614 kilometers to the east.
The trip, along the longest and most expensive line in the country’s HSR network, took just three hours and cost RMB 167 ($24). Previously Liu, a self-employed elevator salesman and technician, used to rely on infrequent and expensive flights between the two cities. Before the new HSR line was completed in 2014, the train between Urumqi and Hami took seven hours.
“If you’re not in a rush, why not take the train,” Liu says. “The train is a lot more relaxing [than flying].”
The convenience to Liu has come at a considerable cost to state-owned China Railway Corp., which over the past decade has built the world’s largest HSR network with 25,000 kilometers of track. Today, just a decade after construction began, two-thirds of the world’s HSR tracks have been laid in China.
The December 2009 debut of China’s first long-distance high-speed rail service, which raced 1,100 kilometers between the southern city of Guangzhou and Wuhan in central China in just three hours, was a dramatic example of the Chinese Communist Party’s debt-fueled response to the global financial crisis.
In the decade to 2016, Chinese corporate debt levels rose from 100 percent of gross domestic product to 190 percent, or RMB 141 trillion. As of March, China Railway’s total debts stood at RMB 5 trillion. According to Li Hongchang, as much as 80 percent of the company’s debt burden is related to HSR construction. For critics, the HSR network is a debt crisis waiting to happen, dependent on unsustainable government subsidies with many lines incapable of repaying the interest on their debt, let alone principal.
(Excerpt) Read more at ozy.com ...
Who most happy?
Wirrie Gleen?
Amen.
Just remember, when you're dealing with vannrox, to check out his posting history. He's gone full ChiCom. He must love the forced abortions, the social-credit scoring system, the political prisoner organ harvesting, etc., etc.
A subway ride in the USSR cost me only 5 kopeks.
I would point out that HSR might make sense in limited, high traffic corridors in the US - and not government subsidized or controlled either. If a private company wants to try, should they be penalized?
Also, I would point out that the Amtrak Acela semi-high speed rail is the only part of Amtrak’s entire network that has good ridership and even begins to break even.
Riiiiiiight. Railways everywhere have the same problems as US railways: The value of the assets vastly exceeds the income generated. The Return On Net Assets (RONA) is miniscule. A very large chunk of the assets is land. As the country prospers, the asset value increases (the price of land goes up), and the revenue doesn't necessarily follow. High speed rail is even worse. The cost of the ultra smooth rail, aerodynamic equipment, high power locomotives, and fast ingress/egress gates is also much higher. An inherently corrupt communist governmental system exacerbates the problem even more. I wouldn't count on it lasting forever.
I was going to post a sarcastic reply with eye rolls and such saying that I had never thought of those things, but then I thought there is entirely too much of that going on these days.
A better way to respond is to say of course, I agree with you, which I do.
A better way to state it is, in a totalitarian state, which is a far easier way to control the movements of people: stopping them at the point of a train ticket purchase or denying them entry to a train and alerting police personnel (or shutting down the trains altogether) or sending police out to follow and intercept people driving cars?
Why make it easier for them to treat us like sheep being herded into pens?
Yes. They have gone quite a ways into pulling a velvet glove over an iron fist, but as you and I clearly see (but many Americans, including some here on FR don’t)...
An iron fist in a velvet glove is still an iron fist.
Interesting to see how this comes down when all this debt starts backing up on them like a dirty sewer. I can’t envision how they expect to operate this way for any extended period.
[A while ago there was a report that only one or two train systems in the entire world, high speed or not, actually turn a profit. I believe those are in Japan where they pack the passengers in like sardines. ]
Union Pacific, for instance, had net income of $6 Billion last year.
high speed rail systems are far more expensive to maintain - than ordinary trains which still must be subsidized by the taxpayers.
This started happening/happened in the US in the 50s and thats why there is virtually no long distance passenger train use in the US (note- short distance commuter trains likewise are not profitable and have to be subsidized)
Freight pays the bills. And bulk freight, at that. Coal, lumber, oil, grains, plastic pellets, chemicals. Bulk gondolas. and tank cars.
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