Chinese Launching Another High-Speed Rail Line.
It’s hard for Americans to imagine the scope of the high-speed rail system now being constructed in China.
In the summer of 2011, I took one of their high-speed trains from Beijing to Shanghai, a line that had only been opened a month or so earlier. The conventional trains cover that route in anywhere from nine to 12 hours. One train, obviously a “local”, leaves Beijing at noon and finally reaches Shanghai just after 8:00 the next morning.
But the new high-speed trains are something else altogether. Departing from Beijing’s huge and almost new South Station (above), they cut that former travel time in half, making the run to Shanghai in less than five hours at speeds topping out at a bit over 200 mph.
And now the Chinese have announced still another high-speedrail route, this one linking Beijing and Guangzhou (formerly called Canton). Test runs are being conducted with regularly scheduled trains to begin operating next month.
Conventional trains now complete the Beijing-Guangzhou run in about 20 hours; the high-speed trains will do it in eight!
Here’s my point: critics of high-speed rail in this country grudgingly acknowledge its success in Europe, but claim it won’t work in the U.S. because distances between major cities here are so much greater.
Really? Well, for the record, it’s 900 miles from Beijing to Shanghai … and 1436 miles from Beijing to Guangzhou.
See, this is what bothers me so much about the folks who loudly attack the idea of high-speed rail in this country:
They don’t know what they’re talking about!
Well, the betting here — and it’s heavy betting — is that once built, there will be more than adequate ridership to justify high-speed lines. Look at the dramatic and continual increase in Amtrak ridership, even with the old equipment, the slow trains and the delays. Imagine if those routes between Chicago and St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis had new equipment and run times were cut in half! I appreciate your views, but we’ll have to agree to disagree. Thanks for the comment!
Hi Jim,
I have always been keen about the high speed rail development in Japan and Europe. Being a Chinese living in the states, I couldn’t be happier to see the great change and advancement that HSR introduces to China, and I am happy to see that the success of Chinese HSR even at this early stage has proven a lot of naysayers wrong.
However, I am quite doubtful about the feasibility of HSR in the states. I don’t think that distance(or average distance between stops) is an issue for HSR. The biggest challenges for USA to build HSRs are the generally low urban population density and inadequate urban public transportation. The former makes any HSR financially unsustainable let alone profitable as an ideal ridership cannot be reached, and the latter forces a HSR to lose its major advantage: efficiency and convenience, as passengers have to drive or take taxis to and from the train stations. This was determined by half a century’s American urban planning policies and driving culture, and cannot be easily changed within a few decades. These problems generally do not exist in the urban clusters in Japan, Europe and South Korea. The rapid construction of urban transportation systems also enables China to smoothly transferred passengers to every corner within the cities (China surely does not have the problem of lacking passengers).
I think currently the only area without these two problems in the states is the northeast corridor, but again, let’s only imagine what the cost will be for a dedicated HSR in that area.
Best,
Wen