The Chinese build a 50000 km high speed railway network in 18 years. The first high speed train was in 2008. If there is a will, there is a way. Infrastructure benefits the people.
In California for example the high speed railway was authorized in 2008 for only 795 kilometers long. The project is expected to be completed between 2031 and 2033.
So in the same time frame, China build 49205 additional kilometers of track.
In western countries, everything and everyone needs to be consulted and 99% of the time a court case follows because of some animal found or it is too close to houses or whatever shit people think of, causing massive delays. Than of course there are the changes in government. Think about the Biden infrastructure bill that got scraped like the second day the current regime took over.
Yeah the changes in government is a big thing I think. In the US nobody can be president for more than 8 years (in theory at least, I guess you guys will be testing that in 2028) and in place like the UK no Prime Minister really lasts more than about 10 years at most, and that’s pretty rare. Nobody wants to do all the work and spending on something that will pay off for the next person, so it’s sort of hard-coded into these systems that any project which takes more than a decade to finish probably won’t get done.
China can do it faster because it’s a dictatorship that simply takes the land on which it wants to build rail and pays the previous owner. In the US, there are far more legal hurdles for the government to acquire that land. Too many hurdles IMO, but going full dictatorship in order to have rail built faster is not the way.
Again with the propanda. China is not a dictatorship. People actually have a lot of rights and power.
Even more than in the US, strangely when it comes to privacy for example. China has a system almost stricter than the European GDPR. American citizens can only dream of this sort of protection because your government is run by tech lobbyists.
Anyway you’re making excuses for the inability of ‘the greatest country on earth’ to even build proper infrastructure for the people. Not only high speed rail, but the state of the roads, bridges and other crucial infrastructure is deplorable.
China has had the most dramatic high speed rail transformation, but plenty of European countries have developed solid systems without going “full dictatorship.”
Also, the USA used to skip over a lot of those legal hurdles when it came time to build a railroad (hence the phrase, “getting railroaded”) but for various reasons we’ve lost the political will to do this.
I wonder about that with the UK. We already have a rail network, it’s just old. Presumably we could upgrade it if we really wanted to without having to worry about securing the land, but there’s presumably just no will to do it.
I think part of the problem is that in order to achieve such high speeds, high speed rail lines have to be really, really straight, and as flat as possible. Older railroad right-of-ways are often too twisty, curvy, and hilly. So, sadly it’s not just an issue of new tracks & trainsets, in some cases there will need to be new routes.
At least, this has been an issue for Amtrak here in the USA. Their new Acela trains are pretty fast, but most of the line between Boston/NYC/DC was laid out in the 19th century. So it can only get up to its full speed on short sections of the track.
The Chinese build a 50000 km high speed railway network in 18 years. The first high speed train was in 2008. If there is a will, there is a way. Infrastructure benefits the people.
In California for example the high speed railway was authorized in 2008 for only 795 kilometers long. The project is expected to be completed between 2031 and 2033. So in the same time frame, China build 49205 additional kilometers of track.
In western countries, everything and everyone needs to be consulted and 99% of the time a court case follows because of some animal found or it is too close to houses or whatever shit people think of, causing massive delays. Than of course there are the changes in government. Think about the Biden infrastructure bill that got scraped like the second day the current regime took over.
Yeah the changes in government is a big thing I think. In the US nobody can be president for more than 8 years (in theory at least, I guess you guys will be testing that in 2028) and in place like the UK no Prime Minister really lasts more than about 10 years at most, and that’s pretty rare. Nobody wants to do all the work and spending on something that will pay off for the next person, so it’s sort of hard-coded into these systems that any project which takes more than a decade to finish probably won’t get done.
China can do it faster because it’s a dictatorship that simply takes the land on which it wants to build rail and pays the previous owner. In the US, there are far more legal hurdles for the government to acquire that land. Too many hurdles IMO, but going full dictatorship in order to have rail built faster is not the way.
Again with the propanda. China is not a dictatorship. People actually have a lot of rights and power.
Even more than in the US, strangely when it comes to privacy for example. China has a system almost stricter than the European GDPR. American citizens can only dream of this sort of protection because your government is run by tech lobbyists.
Anyway you’re making excuses for the inability of ‘the greatest country on earth’ to even build proper infrastructure for the people. Not only high speed rail, but the state of the roads, bridges and other crucial infrastructure is deplorable.
China has had the most dramatic high speed rail transformation, but plenty of European countries have developed solid systems without going “full dictatorship.”
Also, the USA used to skip over a lot of those legal hurdles when it came time to build a railroad (hence the phrase, “getting railroaded”) but for various reasons we’ve lost the political will to do this.
I wonder about that with the UK. We already have a rail network, it’s just old. Presumably we could upgrade it if we really wanted to without having to worry about securing the land, but there’s presumably just no will to do it.
I think part of the problem is that in order to achieve such high speeds, high speed rail lines have to be really, really straight, and as flat as possible. Older railroad right-of-ways are often too twisty, curvy, and hilly. So, sadly it’s not just an issue of new tracks & trainsets, in some cases there will need to be new routes.
At least, this has been an issue for Amtrak here in the USA. Their new Acela trains are pretty fast, but most of the line between Boston/NYC/DC was laid out in the 19th century. So it can only get up to its full speed on short sections of the track.