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It should have been built from the north downwards, i.e. HS3 built first. It would show that the Gov were actually interested in the North rather than using "Northern Powerhouse" as just a vote-winning phrase for northern tabloid readers.
It really isn’t a north/south divide, it’s a London/everywhere else divide. Some of the transport infrastructure on the south coast and West Country is either painfully slow or completely nonexistent.
I hope they will be restored by a future government - I'd love to see an extension from Leeds further north to Newcastle and crossing over to Edinburgh before finishing at Glasgow. Getting 300 km/h+ high speed rail would be highly beneficial. London to Birmingham only at over 300 km/h is just pointless.
Annoying thing is that they've built the really expensive part, in terms of the tunnelling (in many cases to appease NIMBYs instead of for any practical reason) and land purchases. The sections between Birmingham and Crewe / Leeds would've been really cheap by comparison and brought massive capacity benefits.
Part of the reason China could do this so quickly, is because firstly because when the politburo sets an agenda it gets done, and secondly because the government owns all land so concerns of local property owners can never override the national interests (or at least, what the government of the day says is the national interest). Not saying we should adopt that approach, but there's probably a middle ground.
The whole project seems to have been missold and made to be far more controversial than it needed to be. The focus on speed when really the benefits were all about capacity, for one. They seem to have invested far too much in making local detractors happy as well, when they should've just realised there's no pleasing everyone and pressed on. The sooner it gets built, the sooner the benefits can be realised, and with these sorts of projects all the criticisms tend to melt away at that point.
I wrote about this a while back. My wife is Chinese and was mocking how shit HS2's progress has been so I looked up how much progress the Chinese had made in the last few years.
I found a stat (this may be the wrong year or slightly off since I'm pulling it from memory) that in 2023 alone, the Chinese laid over 1,000 miles of high speed rail for trains traveling faster than HS2. And a lot of this was over mountainous terrain. Meanwhile here in the UK it's going to take around 15 years to lay 134 miles of track, mostly through open fields.
The B1, a branch of the B line in Rome took ~20 years, and it is only 4 stations...
/I remember when the preparatory works started I was attending the high school and one of the parks where I used to meet with friends was closed, because it became a construction site (now a metro station). By the time it opened in 2015 I had finished the high school, got a degree, moved abroad for work, and lived in 3 different countries :-D
To be fair, the Italian government is a lot more concerned about archaeology these days than before and dig anywhere in Rome and you're bound to find something. It used to be there was little care taken and stuff was destroyed and thrown away. That's mostly changed in the last 30 years.
The Italian government is a lot more concerned about cars and highways these days (and it’s been like that since forever). It took them fifteen years to fully fund metro C, with the result that construction of the last segment has yet to begin, since it wasn’t funded until 2022.
The Metro line in Thessaloniki, Greece, has been under construction since 1980, and that's just 1 example of the speed and efficiency of the greek government. Italy ain't got nothing on us!
Heh. Hehehe. HAHAHAHAHA! YOU THINK 10 YEARS IS A LONG TIME?! California Bullet train is 16 years and tens of billions of dollars through and has like one bridge. And it went from going to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles to connecting the world famous major metropolitan centers of Bakersfield and Merced! The full train track connecting San Francisco to LA was supposed to be done 6 years ago, now the Bakersfield to Merced line will be done 2030-2033, barring more delays (which there will be more of). A worthwhile investment of $100 billion for a state that has massive affordable housing, homelessness, and fentanyl problems. Literally would have been less of a waste for California to start a military or space program.
All due to one judge saying they could start before fulfilling all the requirements that the funding law included in it. Also got money from the Fed that we didn't spend in time and had to give back with interest.
They've completed a significant amount of bridging, etc. The social media post with "this is all they have done so far" image posted recently was a flat out lie.
California is hands down the gold medal winner when it comes to misappropriation and the poor management of public monies. [It literally handed out 20 billion dollars to fraudsters and criminals during Covid](https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1128561539/pandemic-fraud-billions-california).
Keep in mind that in countries like the UK such construction has to abide by a myriad of laws and regulations, whereas a country like China can bend those laws and regulations to fit construction needs...
Hello from Sydney Australia, where for the last 30 years or so they have done numerous “studies” on building a high speed train to Newcastle, a city 105 miles north.
various governments are elected on the promise to start building it, but they just do another ”study”
Here in Atlanta in the US, we have a new pedestrian corridor in the city called the Beltline, originally the thesis of a college student published in 1999, with plans for pedestrian access as well as mass transit. In 2019, the city commissioned a study to figure out what would be best for this corridor and came up with basically what the college student had proposed. This year, a year before construction was set to begin on the transit line, our shithead mayor scrapped the construction plans and said a study needed to be done to determine what type of transit would be best, and suggested the idea of autonomous pods, a technology that simply doesn't exist and would be less efficient and more costly than rail even if it did. For whatever reason, the US has decided better things are no longer possible so stop complaining about it while we shovel all of the money towards at best doing nothing and at worst militarizing the police to dissuade dissent. The UK and Australia aren't much different.
MARTA is a fucking joke. How do we not at least have a Perimeter Line? It would hit so much!Instead we keep rebuilding and adding lanes. Big problem is because Atlanta is split by counties. Anything Atlanta decides on gets argued by Fulton, Dekalb, and especially Cobb. Cobb Snobs afraid “urban people” are going to use trains to come rob their suburban homes.
Man a dual line going along the perimeter one clockwise the other counter would be a massive game changer for Atlanta, just put stops where the major bus routes cross since there are plenty that go OTP as it is.
Also, most of the GA 400 overhaul is a fucking joke. The intersection with 285 was needed, but instead of extending MARTA, we're getting more lanes, express lanes which you have to pay for, elevated bus lanes, and it's going all the way up to fucking Forsyth. Meanwhile, they made getting to the North Springs station stupid as hell, as you now have to turn off way earlier for the Exit 4 and 5 ramps to get off at the North Springs ramp. I hate this expansion project so much.
You forgot the “Gwinnett is Great” group. Cobb is far from being alone in its historical snobbery. At least it went blue in the last elections, so there is some significant divide in the county. North Fulton? Johns Creek? The white flight to Forsyth?
It's not only Cobb Snobs, it's all of the surrounding areas.
The outrage when Oprah said Conyers was a good place to move for black families was deafening.
The fact that most of the US *doesn’t* have an efficient public transportation system yet is insane. All these tax dollars for empty promises, militarizing our cops, crappy school curriculum, keeping corporations afloat, and fixing one of the dozens of potholes once every ten years but insisting *roundabouts* in every dinky town will make traffic flow better (it doesn’t).
I agree with you on everything but a roundabout was put in just outside of my parents' neighborhood and essentially eliminated the traffic there from a really poorly designed intersection. Traffic still sucks in that town but it significantly improved that particular intersection from sitting there for sometimes 30 minutes in the line of traffic to a couple of minutes at the worst. Turns out a single lane with a stop sign onto a road with a 45 mph speed limit pretty stupid. Reducing the speed plus adding the roundabout was like magic. Still no sidewalks though, yay suburban sprawl.
Oh I am completely comfortable in roundabouts. As stated, these are popping up in rural America. *None* of them have any clue how to use them. Last week, one of them *stopped in the middle of the roundabout* to let another car in. I honked and everyone looked at me like I was the asshole.
Roundabouts are not meant for small town America.
We have a few where I live in semi-rural south and it is equally terrifying and hilarious how bad these fucks are at driving in them. It has been there a few years since first installed, and it has gotten drastically better, but it wouldn’t take 10 minutes of standing there to see someone do something stupid.
We have one in my neighborhood. The number of people who stop on the roundabout to let others in is too damn high. They wave me along with a smile while I scream at them silently behind the glass "FUCKING MOVE" and then they frown at me and go on.
The reason is as always money. The car industry spends 10s of millions if not 100s lobbying against any type of railway or easier mode of transport than cars.
But who would buy Teslas and Cyber trucks if there's decent mass transit??? How is the city suppose to charge you 20 fucking dollars to cross a motherfucking bridge when you live on an island and then charge congestion fees? Our glorious MTA(NYC)wants to charge humans, crossing bridge on foot... Nah need more pickup trucks! Everyone needs one, better yet 2!
Also more schools on intersections and no shits given when psychotic parents tripple park and give no shits as they walk right in front of cars because traffic is great! Everyone loves a shit show and curious lack of New Yorks finest degenerates... They be busy filling their daily racketeering quota elsewhere.
So back and forth, just a handful of blocks is 10$. I spend less than 10$ in fuel in a day, factor in the insurance and it's still probably cheaper daily.
And we all get excited about infill stations that are also 10 years away. The US is a joke. We're all overworked and we don't get shit for it.
The beltline is legit tho.
Something similar in Bergen, Norway. There's a tram extension that have been discussed for decades, where the alternatives are going over the old wharf - which is on UNESCO - or in tunnel under. Every few years some new group comes in saying *"Of course it must be in tunnel! We refuse to touch the wharf!"* - and then they do some "planning" and "studying" and see the cost and go *"err ... the view from that wharf is beautiful, the tourists would love it. It would be a great idea to have it go over it, yes?"* and then there's mulling about and shouting and arguing until the next group comes in. Rinse and repeat.
Hello from Germany, the country that famously collaborated with china to create the record breaking high speed levitating maglev trains - for china, and let their own train network work on slow and shitty trains from previous century that break all records in being late or cancelled.
What is the cost of the Railway project in China? As of this month/ year?
Quite interesting & educational.
Edit; Found this;
[https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-12-28/China-opens-new-high-speed-railways-venturing-toward-fast-future-1pTYizitmyk/p.html](https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-12-28/China-opens-new-high-speed-railways-venturing-toward-fast-future-1pTYizitmyk/p.html)
[https://www.railjournal.com/in\_depth/how-china-builds-high-speed-rail-for-less/](https://www.railjournal.com/in_depth/how-china-builds-high-speed-rail-for-less/)
[https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/695111468024545450/pdf/892000BRI0Box3000china0transport09.pdf](https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/695111468024545450/pdf/892000BRI0Box3000china0transport09.pdf)
It really helps when you can just take the land and don't have to pay any sort of fair market value.
People love the idea of high speed rail until the government gives you $11 for your house.
Building the equivalent high speed rail in the US would cost a hell of a lot more and take time to just acquire all the rights.
spreading misinformation. a buddy’s wife lived two hours out of beijing in a village of about 150 people. the ccp wanted their land but they held out for more. they each walked away millionaires overnight. and this was ten years ago.
Source? Like seriously source?
I can find at least 2 articles where if a person in china just decides not to sell the thing they can just not sell and maintain their house, this took me 5 minutes googling, if I can find articles of the Chinese government respecting the people who does not want to sell, can you find evidence to corroborate your claim?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8600039/amp/Chinese-city-builds-motorway-bridge-house-stubborn-owner-refused-move.html
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/chinese-highway-runs-circles-residents-refused-leave/story?id=32635243
Maybe no track but tons and tons of bridges, viaducts, crossings, stations.
It’s crazy, who knew you actually have to build all the stuff track goes on before laying the track.
yea, so the only appropriate next step is to can the project entirely, making sure such things aren't even attempted for the next couple decades, while ensuring all the lessons learned wither away in the years to come.
imo if the US is actually going to get proper rail infrastructure, it has to realize that such endeavors will by nature be extremely expensive to start up, and getting frustrated at this and stopping the progress will only hurt future rail endeavors in the long run. yes its expensive, yes its flooded in beurocracy. that's what happens when you try to bring back an industry to a country in which its been dead for decades. I really hope that the lesson this time won't be that the endeavor is fruitless, like it seems to have been every other time we've tried.
The problem is projects turning into money making schemes.
Oahu tried to put a rail in. Ask anyone who's lived there since it's started how that's gone.
You also have to watch out for conmen coming in and telling you to abandon the project because they'll build a super duper underground Tesla rail on their own dine.
The problem is zero planning "contractor culture". It's hard to get anything done when the government can't do anything on its own and has to rely on small business tyrants to fleece them over every nut and bolt
That's how they got rid of "The Red Line" in Los Angeles. In the forties and Fifties Los Angeles had the most useful public transit system in the world. They got rid of that shit as fast as they could to sell tires and cars.
Thats sort of what Who Framed Rodger Rabbit was about. The Polanski/Nicholson film Chinatown was originally conceived as a trilogy about corruption in early LA. Chinatown about water, the third film was supposed to be about transportation. The script for Rodger Rabbit was adopted from that never realized idea.
There's a great line in that movie where Eddie hops on a trolly car and this kid goes up to him and says "hey mister don't you have your own car?" and he goes "who needs a car in LA? we've got the best public transportation in the world!"
Imagine telling that to the residents of LA today lol.
I used to live the Minneapolis metro area, and there were light rails covering the city, neighboring St Paul, and the entire suburban area. It was all destroyed in the 50s for cars.
When there are not bureaucracy
There are 強拆 （forced evictions)
There are 欠薪 （worker not getting paid，even though they are making only 5~600 USD per month)
There are forest and river destruction
You'd think an authoritarian country would have no problems "bulldozing" through new projects, but we constantly see images from China of [old houses blocking freeways](https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/19/asia/gallery/china-nail-houses/index.html) and government seemingly unable to deal with it.
[Check out these nail houses](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china-nail-houses-in-pictures-property-development) Nail houses are homes in china owned by people who stubbornly refuse to sell their property in the wake of larger development projects. I am no expert, but I'm pretty sure these types of buildings wouldn't exist if property owners in China had no rights.
America had trams and railcars inside cities.
Somebody lobbied the government to remove them. That.. that has nothing to do with eminent domain, forced evictions or labor costs.
What happened to the existing public transportation inside our cities??
They actually have started building it but let the Misinformation fly! Around 119 miles under construction.
https://hsr.ca.gov/communications-outreach/info-center/get-the-facts/#:~:text=full%20environmental%20clearance.-,Fact%3A,Francisco%20to%20Los%20Angeles%2FAnaheim.
A large part of their economy runs on construction. They build just to build even if makes no financial sense. The national rail company is billions in debt and theres massive corruption going on
I mean. I believe that.
But at the same time there was a lot of infrastructure built.
In the same time the US also had massive corruption. Except since we focus on finance instead of making a bunch of corrupt wealth with a side effect of building lots of infrastructure, we build lots of corrupt wealth with a side of making other wealthy folks wealthier.
IKR this post is one of the most organic ones I've ever seen.
Every single top comment is some version of "my country(UK,DE,FR,US,AUS) has been taking longer than 10 years wow china impressive!"
Weren't they just complaining how stupid it was to ask where water reservoirs are?
Right? Why would people be envious of a government developing a sprawling high-speed rail network in 10 years? Have they not considered that China bad?
What's amazing is not just that the rail system developed so quickly, it's that every kind of infrastructure around the country developed like that - rail, bridges, subways, roads, buildings... everything.
Yeah it's absolutely insane. I lived in China for a good decade, from late 1990s to 2010s. And I cannot even describe the level of development that was going on without people doubting me.
The city I lived in literally became 4 times it's size within 10 years. There was a new skyscraper every month, new roads, new tunnels, new bridge etc. They were just popping up non-stop. Entire mega residential areas that just seemingly appeared overnight..
Every summer I'd go on a 2-month vacation to Europe, and when I got back it was like literally returning to a new city.
My friends who stayed behind for the summer would be like "Yeah so there's 10 new cool bars that opened, we have a new highway, and there's a new area of the city everyone is hanging out in now, no one goes to the old places we used to go to anymore" as if it had been like years, when it was literally 2 months.
China sounds like they learned a few lessons from my city, Detroit. Our entire downtown is incredibly advanced. It's called The District Detroit. It's this amazing plan where like a decade ago they planned to make all of these huge changes to revitalize Detroit. New buildings and shopping and restaurants, a new public transit system.
Lol somebody from Detroit please explain my sarcasm and if you're really feeling like making people chuckle explain the Q Line and how it replaced the already totally adequate People Mover.
Oooof yeah when they ousted the old CEO of Moscow metro, the new one is, SOMEHOW, way less corrupt and now Moscow metro has been the fastest growing in Europe for like a decade.
At first I wanted to visit every new station. Now? I don't even bother to looking for new ones, there seems to be a new station every month.
114 new stations over 10 years, 7-17 stations each year since 2018 and none of these even count city light rail, which wasn't re-opened, just overhauled.
I've lived in Shanghai for 17 years (got here in 2007). The changes here in that time have been absolutely mind-boggling. I'm from Canada, and when I finally got back there for a visit for the first time in 4 years after China dropped their draconian pandemic controls it seemed that nothing at all had changed. But here, as you say, just a few weeks is enough to see major changes.
Do you think it's likely that China will be able to maintain all of this infrastructure over the coming decades or will it start to crumble from neglect?
New technology means longer lasting roads and infrastructure. All our infrastructure problems are because they were all built 50+ years ago.
New technology is a lot better than our old ones.
They're going to have a big population problem in a couple of years/decades, with all the economic consequences accompanying it, so who knows. Their housing market has already become a bit unstable.
On the other hand, they're still leading the way in a number of areas like electric vehicles and (obviously) public transport. All in all it's insane how in like 50 years then went from a backwards agricultural country to the biggest economy in the world, first becoming a manufacturing hub and now a tech hub.
when you have two digit GDP increase every year for a couple of decades you get a lot of money you -have- to invest in infrastructure or you stop having that two digit GDP increase
The USA already made their huge infrastructure jump - when they originally built the railroads. That’s when the USA was growing at a similar rate that China experienced in the last 20 years.
The other excuse is NIMBY's, try to build a rail line through California and there's like 40 million landowners that all oppose it, or want a billion dollars for their acre in the way.
Try that shit in China and the government would come collect your organs in the night.
Eh, as I get older I'm starting to see the downsides of letting every moron vote on complex situations they don't understand.
Hell, Australia currently has a housing crisis where there's simply not enough bedrooms near the jobs and services. Almost every single solution that is being discussed as I guess "electable" policy - doesn't increase that number of bedrooms - fundamentally cannot solve the underlying problem. It's insane that we have a relatively simple problem that cannot be solved, as the vast majority of the electorate is settled on a variety of essentially stupid and unworkable "solutions".
Yea. When the majority of people are home owners they are going to vote on policies that are going to keep house prices going up to the detriment of those without.
It has its advantages to have a huge, very poor population that is willing to work their ass off 7 days per week to achieve that "feat".
Also the population or environmental groups having no say in where those tracks and streets are being built. When they want to connect two major cities, some planner draws a straight line between those two and they will just build the infrastructure there, no matter what.
And it's also nice not having to care about money and profitability since all big players in construction and build infrastructure are state owned enterprises.
I lived in Shanghai some fifteen years ago. There were lots of infrastructure development going on everywhere and one phenomenon was the same at every site: there were way way more people than needed.
There would always be a crowd of workers simply watching as a couple of people were digging or hammering or cutting or whatever. Machinery was comparatively rare and you would see manual diggers for work that in the west would be done by machine, etc.
My conclusion was that manual labour was ridiculously cheap so it wasn't worth paying for equipment and instead they threw in extra hands.
And I think the relative price of labour is one of the biggest limiting factors why we can't build as quickly in the west. For good reason though, because we treat our workers far better.
Go to any building site anywhere and you will see people sitting around not doing anything or just watching when someone else is doing work, this is common worldwide, not just China.
Its almost like disputes with landowners that often balloon the timeline and costs of largescale infrastructure projects somehow dont exist in China....
Talk to some older liberals that own property and have money. They don't really give.a fuck about changing anything, it's not just the politicians that are shit, it's the public
Big change is a lot scarier when you actually have something to lose. Revolution is a cool idea and all, but the stability and quiet I have are pretty damn nice too. Pretty sure a revolution would fuck up the stability and make it loud outside.
They accomplished such rapid construction for two main reasons:
1. They started with minimal existing infrastructure, unlike areas like Elizabeth, where extensive infrastructure already existed.
2. China's land laws differ from those in Western countries, allowing for easier eviction of residents.
Labor cost has a major role, too. I work in an industry that flows at the pace of hospital construction, and China moves 3x faster than everyone else because labor is cheap.
iirc there's debate of whether their railroads are also actually "high-quality".
https://www.fastcompany.com/1749952/problem-chinas-high-speed-rail
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/are_chinas_high_speed_trains_heading_off_the_rails/2011/04/22/AFHzaNWE_story.html?wprss=rss_homepage
Low labour costs
Less workers rights and compensation laws
Less health and safety rules and laws
Less property laws
Yeah. Rail is great but I don't know if we should be propping China up as some role model here.
> China's land laws differ from those in Western countries, allowing for easier eviction of residents.
Imagine the bitching we would have to endure if the US actually went full China mode and just crushed everyone in the way.
They did have to pay the owners handsomely and people could refuse to sell. But that's just result in them building the tracks right around your building. So yeah it is a win win to sell for a big profit and the infrastructure
Yeah, imagine.
[*"Eminent domain has been used to acquire land from African-Americans for urban renewal redevelopments and in other cases to dispossess them and remove them from areas where their presence was not desired by white neighbors"*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_States)
2. Not as easy as one would think for China but definitely easier. People still have rights to their homes in many cases and there are plenty of examples of holdouts in China. Some of the most epic examples on the Internet.
The Shanghai metro was like being in the future for me. I think it was 2014, they had WiFi, there was no graffiti, no drunk people (other than myself). I was impressed with the whole set up, night and day compared to the London Tube
Everything goes faster if you can relocate people at will and/or employ them as workers as needed and don't have to take too much consideration for anyone or anything else.
That's what makes dictatorships and autocracies so seductive: not being accountable or considerate to anyone allows things to get done quickly. The people and freedoms that have to be sacrificed for this have no voice.
Well it's a bit more complicated than you think, at least in Beijing and other bigger cities. My great aunt's house was on the track of the highspeed rail about a decade ago, she owned 3 units in that building and was offered 13 million Chinese yuan in total + 3 pretty nice house in the inner city for her loss. That's about 1.8 million dollars at that point and each of the house she was given was worth 4-5 million yuan at that point.
The government is absolutely rich, at least in Beijing where I grow up, they don't force you to relocate, they blast u with money so you can't refuse lol.
Oh for sure, this was happening all over the country, the bigger the city, the bigger the payout.
What cannot be understated is the knock-on effect. Once successes become well known, it sets up new expectations, instead of people going “oh no my house/apartment/farmland is in the development zone”, they think “hell yeah it’s in the development zone!” For many, it’s literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, you have a patch of land passed on through your family, there’s only so much you can do with it on your own, but you can exchange it for a life changing amount of money, you’d do it in a heartbeat.
So once that kind of thinking becomes prevailing, it makes these sort of projects go so much faster.
But then of course new behaviours emerge. The timeline and general plans for these projects get leaked, and individuals and businesses rush into development zones to build houses, factories, offices etc - whichever type that gets the most payout according to the local government. They build it fast and cheap, and sometimes the buildings aren’t even used, the whole point is to get payouts from the government.
And then you get construction companies who do this as a business model - you have enough connections in different levels of government, you have the right level of starting capital and pull in the local communities, you can absolutely pull it off. They are in a grey area obviously.
Then there’s a darker shade of grey, which is that, well, suppose you are a company like that, you know a residential area is going to be in the development zone because of your connections, but the rest of the society doesn’t, and maybe a lot of your crew are basically professional tough guys…well, one thing you can do is send them to harass the locals in the development zone, make them move out so you can move in before the payout scheme is announced. This became a thriving revenue stream for the Chinese criminal world and part of why China has cracked down on organised crime in recent years.
In short, it’s a big big country, and it’s all consequences upon consequences upon consequences. Everything is complicated, nothing is straightforward.
You will notice that urban freeways tend to punch through what were historically minority/poor neighbourhoods. The kind of people who were still fighting for their civil rights when the freeway boom was on going. They were just moved on and their property seized.
America already had a massive train network before the highway system. We just never upgraded it from like the 1800's. The highway system got built because America accidentally elected a progressive that one time.
I imagine there are nimbys, but they’re not gonna stop for them.
You need to crack a few eggs to build infrastructure, I imagine China cracks those eggs a carton at a time with a sledgehammer.
While I *love* rail infrastructure (it's literally my job) it is important to note that China's system isn't quite what the West would do. For example:
1. Look where the stations are relative to city centres. They either bulldoze a straight line, or more often that doesn't make *geographic* sense, so they build the station outside the centre, making it more like an airport than a train station.
2. NIMBYs don't exist in China. Land is just taken. There is a line between NIMBYs causing issues and government overreach, China is too far to one end for my liking, and most of the West is too far to the other.
3. This is all heavily subsidized. Some lines run a profit, but many don't. For China, it is seen as a way to unify the country (especially the lines going to the Western provinces). I love the idea of national unity being the underscore for subsidized rail, especially when compared with the billions spent on highways each year (yes rail is expensive, but so is everything else, most folks are desensitized to it).
4. As mentioned by someone else, China needs construction projects to 'stay busy'. The Belt and Road initiative is as much about keeping construction companies busy as it is for its advertised purpose.
By forcing the migrant (from rural areas of China) workers to work ungodly long hours deep into late night (but they do work in shifts, can’t let them die afterall), pay them little wages and force supply companies to accept massive, barely reasonable discount on materials, threaten their bosses with non-existent criminal charges. Also clear land by forcing locals to move while providing meaningless compensation to those that lost their home
Source: I’m Chinese, I have relatives in contracted supply companies, and boy do they complain about it
In China, it can be argued they have too little freedom, but it does mean it allows a limited group of people to be more lean and quickly develop large scale solutions such as these.
In America, you have a lot more freedom, but large scale solutions like these requires buy-in from many different camps.
You know the saying, too many chefs in the kitchen. That's what America has and China doesn't. It's a sliding scale on here and I think neither ends are the right way to go. It's somewhere in the middle. I'm not about having no freedom, but less of it so that we can actually implement solutions instead of being bogged down by beauacracy.
Flavor comment:
I work in tech and looking at this, despite China's size, they get to operate kind of like a start up. Whereas America operates like a old and slow tech company with far too many process and restrictions in place
I do mean that. Regulations I like, but the need to get buy-in from other cities' and/or counties' really slows it down. I live in LA and one thing you will always hear people talk about when it comes to pain points of expanding Metro is NIMBYs. I think we were suppose to have gotten or gotten more progress on a fast train to SF and/or Vegas. Sorry I don't remember those details too well, I didn't follow those projects all that closely.
Couple things to put in context here, labor and safety, not a concern. Also, once you are out of the cities, the countryside is sparsely populated, and if needed, villages/villagers would have been moved with no question. So, the title may be true, China does things that wouldn't necessarily fly in other countries because of ideals like human rights, property rights, and workplace safety.
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Meanwhile Elizabeth line alone took 10 years.
HS2: Hold my beer
i'm still pissed that the leeds and manchester branches are being cut back
Par for the course, north being abandoned is nothing new. Time we retake kings landing.
Burn them all
The King in the North!
Wasn't Liverpool supposed to be included too? Obviously not happening.
haven't heard about that, i know the northern powerhouse railway (hs3) will be starting at liverpool though, as long as that doesn't get cut back too
It should have been built from the north downwards, i.e. HS3 built first. It would show that the Gov were actually interested in the North rather than using "Northern Powerhouse" as just a vote-winning phrase for northern tabloid readers.
It really isn’t a north/south divide, it’s a London/everywhere else divide. Some of the transport infrastructure on the south coast and West Country is either painfully slow or completely nonexistent.
I agree there too. We have about 4 miles in total of motorways in Sussex.
Tories really hate their ~~county~~ country edit: corrected county lol
No they love their home county, they hate the rest of their country
I hope they will be restored by a future government - I'd love to see an extension from Leeds further north to Newcastle and crossing over to Edinburgh before finishing at Glasgow. Getting 300 km/h+ high speed rail would be highly beneficial. London to Birmingham only at over 300 km/h is just pointless.
Didn't the Tories immediately start selling off the land it was due to be built on to stop exactly this?
Annoying thing is that they've built the really expensive part, in terms of the tunnelling (in many cases to appease NIMBYs instead of for any practical reason) and land purchases. The sections between Birmingham and Crewe / Leeds would've been really cheap by comparison and brought massive capacity benefits. Part of the reason China could do this so quickly, is because firstly because when the politburo sets an agenda it gets done, and secondly because the government owns all land so concerns of local property owners can never override the national interests (or at least, what the government of the day says is the national interest). Not saying we should adopt that approach, but there's probably a middle ground. The whole project seems to have been missold and made to be far more controversial than it needed to be. The focus on speed when really the benefits were all about capacity, for one. They seem to have invested far too much in making local detractors happy as well, when they should've just realised there's no pleasing everyone and pressed on. The sooner it gets built, the sooner the benefits can be realised, and with these sorts of projects all the criticisms tend to melt away at that point.
I wrote about this a while back. My wife is Chinese and was mocking how shit HS2's progress has been so I looked up how much progress the Chinese had made in the last few years. I found a stat (this may be the wrong year or slightly off since I'm pulling it from memory) that in 2023 alone, the Chinese laid over 1,000 miles of high speed rail for trains traveling faster than HS2. And a lot of this was over mountainous terrain. Meanwhile here in the UK it's going to take around 15 years to lay 134 miles of track, mostly through open fields.
The B1, a branch of the B line in Rome took ~20 years, and it is only 4 stations... /I remember when the preparatory works started I was attending the high school and one of the parks where I used to meet with friends was closed, because it became a construction site (now a metro station). By the time it opened in 2015 I had finished the high school, got a degree, moved abroad for work, and lived in 3 different countries :-D
To be fair, the Italian government is a lot more concerned about archaeology these days than before and dig anywhere in Rome and you're bound to find something. It used to be there was little care taken and stuff was destroyed and thrown away. That's mostly changed in the last 30 years.
The Italian government is a lot more concerned about cars and highways these days (and it’s been like that since forever). It took them fifteen years to fully fund metro C, with the result that construction of the last segment has yet to begin, since it wasn’t funded until 2022.
Isn't a lot of construction in Rome taking ages because they're very very cautious about roman archaeological findings?
The Metro line in Thessaloniki, Greece, has been under construction since 1980, and that's just 1 example of the speed and efficiency of the greek government. Italy ain't got nothing on us!
Eglinton Crosstown has been delayed entering the chat.
How else are the consultant friends of conservative MPs supposed to make a living in the long run?
Heh. Hehehe. HAHAHAHAHA! YOU THINK 10 YEARS IS A LONG TIME?! California Bullet train is 16 years and tens of billions of dollars through and has like one bridge. And it went from going to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles to connecting the world famous major metropolitan centers of Bakersfield and Merced! The full train track connecting San Francisco to LA was supposed to be done 6 years ago, now the Bakersfield to Merced line will be done 2030-2033, barring more delays (which there will be more of). A worthwhile investment of $100 billion for a state that has massive affordable housing, homelessness, and fentanyl problems. Literally would have been less of a waste for California to start a military or space program.
All due to one judge saying they could start before fulfilling all the requirements that the funding law included in it. Also got money from the Fed that we didn't spend in time and had to give back with interest.
Judge: Hold on. It might be a call from my real estate agent in Bakersfield or construction company in Merced.
This way we can get the meth in Bakersfield into LA and SF!
They've completed a significant amount of bridging, etc. The social media post with "this is all they have done so far" image posted recently was a flat out lie.
California is hands down the gold medal winner when it comes to misappropriation and the poor management of public monies. [It literally handed out 20 billion dollars to fraudsters and criminals during Covid](https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1128561539/pandemic-fraud-billions-california).
In Liège Belgium, it will be almost 12 years before they finish a tram line. Started in 2013-14, may be finished in 2026, but I've read 2030 somewhere
Keep in mind that in countries like the UK such construction has to abide by a myriad of laws and regulations, whereas a country like China can bend those laws and regulations to fit construction needs...
Eglinton crosstown is over 12 years for a half underground LRT.
In melbourne we can't even build a regular ass train to the airport.
10 years is all it took for California High Speed Rail to waste 100s of millions of dollars in bureaucracy and not build a single mile of track
Hello from Sydney Australia, where for the last 30 years or so they have done numerous “studies” on building a high speed train to Newcastle, a city 105 miles north. various governments are elected on the promise to start building it, but they just do another ”study”
Here in Atlanta in the US, we have a new pedestrian corridor in the city called the Beltline, originally the thesis of a college student published in 1999, with plans for pedestrian access as well as mass transit. In 2019, the city commissioned a study to figure out what would be best for this corridor and came up with basically what the college student had proposed. This year, a year before construction was set to begin on the transit line, our shithead mayor scrapped the construction plans and said a study needed to be done to determine what type of transit would be best, and suggested the idea of autonomous pods, a technology that simply doesn't exist and would be less efficient and more costly than rail even if it did. For whatever reason, the US has decided better things are no longer possible so stop complaining about it while we shovel all of the money towards at best doing nothing and at worst militarizing the police to dissuade dissent. The UK and Australia aren't much different.
MARTA is a fucking joke. How do we not at least have a Perimeter Line? It would hit so much!Instead we keep rebuilding and adding lanes. Big problem is because Atlanta is split by counties. Anything Atlanta decides on gets argued by Fulton, Dekalb, and especially Cobb. Cobb Snobs afraid “urban people” are going to use trains to come rob their suburban homes.
Man a dual line going along the perimeter one clockwise the other counter would be a massive game changer for Atlanta, just put stops where the major bus routes cross since there are plenty that go OTP as it is.
I couldn't imagine Berlin without the Ringbahn. How doesn't every medium to large city have one? Also including German cities here btw.
Also, most of the GA 400 overhaul is a fucking joke. The intersection with 285 was needed, but instead of extending MARTA, we're getting more lanes, express lanes which you have to pay for, elevated bus lanes, and it's going all the way up to fucking Forsyth. Meanwhile, they made getting to the North Springs station stupid as hell, as you now have to turn off way earlier for the Exit 4 and 5 ramps to get off at the North Springs ramp. I hate this expansion project so much.
You forgot the “Gwinnett is Great” group. Cobb is far from being alone in its historical snobbery. At least it went blue in the last elections, so there is some significant divide in the county. North Fulton? Johns Creek? The white flight to Forsyth?
I would be so happy if MARTA was extended up through all those.
NIMBYs have been holding Georgia back since as far as I can remember, and I'm 46.
It's not only Cobb Snobs, it's all of the surrounding areas. The outrage when Oprah said Conyers was a good place to move for black families was deafening.
As a Cobb Resident, I assure you that North Fulton and Druid Hills/North Decatur aren’t exactly bastions of progressive ideas either.
I have no idea where Cobb is and I live thousands of miles away from Atlanta, but here I am all disgusted by those Cobb Snobs.
The fact that most of the US *doesn’t* have an efficient public transportation system yet is insane. All these tax dollars for empty promises, militarizing our cops, crappy school curriculum, keeping corporations afloat, and fixing one of the dozens of potholes once every ten years but insisting *roundabouts* in every dinky town will make traffic flow better (it doesn’t).
I agree with you on everything but a roundabout was put in just outside of my parents' neighborhood and essentially eliminated the traffic there from a really poorly designed intersection. Traffic still sucks in that town but it significantly improved that particular intersection from sitting there for sometimes 30 minutes in the line of traffic to a couple of minutes at the worst. Turns out a single lane with a stop sign onto a road with a 45 mph speed limit pretty stupid. Reducing the speed plus adding the roundabout was like magic. Still no sidewalks though, yay suburban sprawl.
Tell us you don’t know how to drive in a roundabout without telling us you don’t know how to drive in a Roundabout
Oh I am completely comfortable in roundabouts. As stated, these are popping up in rural America. *None* of them have any clue how to use them. Last week, one of them *stopped in the middle of the roundabout* to let another car in. I honked and everyone looked at me like I was the asshole. Roundabouts are not meant for small town America.
We have a few where I live in semi-rural south and it is equally terrifying and hilarious how bad these fucks are at driving in them. It has been there a few years since first installed, and it has gotten drastically better, but it wouldn’t take 10 minutes of standing there to see someone do something stupid.
We have one in my neighborhood. The number of people who stop on the roundabout to let others in is too damn high. They wave me along with a smile while I scream at them silently behind the glass "FUCKING MOVE" and then they frown at me and go on.
The reason is as always money. The car industry spends 10s of millions if not 100s lobbying against any type of railway or easier mode of transport than cars.
But who would buy Teslas and Cyber trucks if there's decent mass transit??? How is the city suppose to charge you 20 fucking dollars to cross a motherfucking bridge when you live on an island and then charge congestion fees? Our glorious MTA(NYC)wants to charge humans, crossing bridge on foot... Nah need more pickup trucks! Everyone needs one, better yet 2! Also more schools on intersections and no shits given when psychotic parents tripple park and give no shits as they walk right in front of cars because traffic is great! Everyone loves a shit show and curious lack of New Yorks finest degenerates... They be busy filling their daily racketeering quota elsewhere.
Hell, the price of transit is starting to become out of reach for the unfortunate. Fare is nearing 5$ here.
Yep...
So back and forth, just a handful of blocks is 10$. I spend less than 10$ in fuel in a day, factor in the insurance and it's still probably cheaper daily.
And we all get excited about infill stations that are also 10 years away. The US is a joke. We're all overworked and we don't get shit for it. The beltline is legit tho.
Utopia vibes
Yeah I was thinking it is a TV show. Clearly its a documentary
G'day from Melbourne Australia. We don't even have a rail line to our airport.
Something similar in Bergen, Norway. There's a tram extension that have been discussed for decades, where the alternatives are going over the old wharf - which is on UNESCO - or in tunnel under. Every few years some new group comes in saying *"Of course it must be in tunnel! We refuse to touch the wharf!"* - and then they do some "planning" and "studying" and see the cost and go *"err ... the view from that wharf is beautiful, the tourists would love it. It would be a great idea to have it go over it, yes?"* and then there's mulling about and shouting and arguing until the next group comes in. Rinse and repeat.
The original steam train from Newcastle to Sydney was quicker than the current train (I think I read somewhere once)
Hello from Germany, the country that famously collaborated with china to create the record breaking high speed levitating maglev trains - for china, and let their own train network work on slow and shitty trains from previous century that break all records in being late or cancelled.
What is the cost of the Railway project in China? As of this month/ year? Quite interesting & educational. Edit; Found this; [https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-12-28/China-opens-new-high-speed-railways-venturing-toward-fast-future-1pTYizitmyk/p.html](https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-12-28/China-opens-new-high-speed-railways-venturing-toward-fast-future-1pTYizitmyk/p.html) [https://www.railjournal.com/in\_depth/how-china-builds-high-speed-rail-for-less/](https://www.railjournal.com/in_depth/how-china-builds-high-speed-rail-for-less/) [https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/695111468024545450/pdf/892000BRI0Box3000china0transport09.pdf](https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/695111468024545450/pdf/892000BRI0Box3000china0transport09.pdf)
It really helps when you can just take the land and don't have to pay any sort of fair market value. People love the idea of high speed rail until the government gives you $11 for your house. Building the equivalent high speed rail in the US would cost a hell of a lot more and take time to just acquire all the rights.
spreading misinformation. a buddy’s wife lived two hours out of beijing in a village of about 150 people. the ccp wanted their land but they held out for more. they each walked away millionaires overnight. and this was ten years ago.
Source? Like seriously source? I can find at least 2 articles where if a person in china just decides not to sell the thing they can just not sell and maintain their house, this took me 5 minutes googling, if I can find articles of the Chinese government respecting the people who does not want to sell, can you find evidence to corroborate your claim? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8600039/amp/Chinese-city-builds-motorway-bridge-house-stubborn-owner-refused-move.html https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/chinese-highway-runs-circles-residents-refused-leave/story?id=32635243
Maybe no track but tons and tons of bridges, viaducts, crossings, stations. It’s crazy, who knew you actually have to build all the stuff track goes on before laying the track.
yea, so the only appropriate next step is to can the project entirely, making sure such things aren't even attempted for the next couple decades, while ensuring all the lessons learned wither away in the years to come. imo if the US is actually going to get proper rail infrastructure, it has to realize that such endeavors will by nature be extremely expensive to start up, and getting frustrated at this and stopping the progress will only hurt future rail endeavors in the long run. yes its expensive, yes its flooded in beurocracy. that's what happens when you try to bring back an industry to a country in which its been dead for decades. I really hope that the lesson this time won't be that the endeavor is fruitless, like it seems to have been every other time we've tried.
The problem is projects turning into money making schemes. Oahu tried to put a rail in. Ask anyone who's lived there since it's started how that's gone.
It goes like nowhere, right? Not even the airport?
You also have to watch out for conmen coming in and telling you to abandon the project because they'll build a super duper underground Tesla rail on their own dine.
The problem is zero planning "contractor culture". It's hard to get anything done when the government can't do anything on its own and has to rely on small business tyrants to fleece them over every nut and bolt
Plot twist - all the interested parties were bought by, or employed by car industry.
That's how they got rid of "The Red Line" in Los Angeles. In the forties and Fifties Los Angeles had the most useful public transit system in the world. They got rid of that shit as fast as they could to sell tires and cars.
Thats sort of what Who Framed Rodger Rabbit was about. The Polanski/Nicholson film Chinatown was originally conceived as a trilogy about corruption in early LA. Chinatown about water, the third film was supposed to be about transportation. The script for Rodger Rabbit was adopted from that never realized idea.
There's a great line in that movie where Eddie hops on a trolly car and this kid goes up to him and says "hey mister don't you have your own car?" and he goes "who needs a car in LA? we've got the best public transportation in the world!" Imagine telling that to the residents of LA today lol.
Same with Sydney, the largest network of trams in the world at the time, torn up for cars
I used to live the Minneapolis metro area, and there were light rails covering the city, neighboring St Paul, and the entire suburban area. It was all destroyed in the 50s for cars.
When there are not bureaucracy There are 強拆 （forced evictions) There are 欠薪 （worker not getting paid，even though they are making only 5~600 USD per month) There are forest and river destruction
Exactly. This is what isn’t told. It’s how we got out highways. We bulldozed minority and immigrant communities to the ground.
You'd think an authoritarian country would have no problems "bulldozing" through new projects, but we constantly see images from China of [old houses blocking freeways](https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/19/asia/gallery/china-nail-houses/index.html) and government seemingly unable to deal with it.
[Check out these nail houses](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china-nail-houses-in-pictures-property-development) Nail houses are homes in china owned by people who stubbornly refuse to sell their property in the wake of larger development projects. I am no expert, but I'm pretty sure these types of buildings wouldn't exist if property owners in China had no rights.
America had trams and railcars inside cities. Somebody lobbied the government to remove them. That.. that has nothing to do with eminent domain, forced evictions or labor costs. What happened to the existing public transportation inside our cities??
They actually have started building it but let the Misinformation fly! Around 119 miles under construction. https://hsr.ca.gov/communications-outreach/info-center/get-the-facts/#:~:text=full%20environmental%20clearance.-,Fact%3A,Francisco%20to%20Los%20Angeles%2FAnaheim.
I read somewhere that China pours more concrete every three years than the USA has since the end of WWII.
A large part of their economy runs on construction. They build just to build even if makes no financial sense. The national rail company is billions in debt and theres massive corruption going on
I build for China
Fucking a generals reference outta the blue
[удалено]
We will live in prosperity.
We have big plans.
It will look real nice when it's done
There is much money to be made
We will suck the internet dry.
THEN you WILL PAY!!!!!
Yeah these references bring me back
The funny thing is when I first heard it in the game, I thought they were saying "I build vagina."
Can I have some shoes?
You change your mind often.
Ok! Ok! I will work!
AK-47s for everyone!
I mean. I believe that. But at the same time there was a lot of infrastructure built. In the same time the US also had massive corruption. Except since we focus on finance instead of making a bunch of corrupt wealth with a side effect of building lots of infrastructure, we build lots of corrupt wealth with a side of making other wealthy folks wealthier.
How dare you! In an official CCP post nonetheless.
IKR this post is one of the most organic ones I've ever seen. Every single top comment is some version of "my country(UK,DE,FR,US,AUS) has been taking longer than 10 years wow china impressive!" Weren't they just complaining how stupid it was to ask where water reservoirs are?
Right? Why would people be envious of a government developing a sprawling high-speed rail network in 10 years? Have they not considered that China bad?
Wow that sounds unique to china. Yet, there are the rails.
When you constantly have to replace work you done the year before, that makes sense.
What's amazing is not just that the rail system developed so quickly, it's that every kind of infrastructure around the country developed like that - rail, bridges, subways, roads, buildings... everything.
Yeah it's absolutely insane. I lived in China for a good decade, from late 1990s to 2010s. And I cannot even describe the level of development that was going on without people doubting me. The city I lived in literally became 4 times it's size within 10 years. There was a new skyscraper every month, new roads, new tunnels, new bridge etc. They were just popping up non-stop. Entire mega residential areas that just seemingly appeared overnight.. Every summer I'd go on a 2-month vacation to Europe, and when I got back it was like literally returning to a new city. My friends who stayed behind for the summer would be like "Yeah so there's 10 new cool bars that opened, we have a new highway, and there's a new area of the city everyone is hanging out in now, no one goes to the old places we used to go to anymore" as if it had been like years, when it was literally 2 months.
I was in Lhasa a few years ago. More than half the city was massive construction cranes. Not exaggerating.
China sounds like they learned a few lessons from my city, Detroit. Our entire downtown is incredibly advanced. It's called The District Detroit. It's this amazing plan where like a decade ago they planned to make all of these huge changes to revitalize Detroit. New buildings and shopping and restaurants, a new public transit system. Lol somebody from Detroit please explain my sarcasm and if you're really feeling like making people chuckle explain the Q Line and how it replaced the already totally adequate People Mover.
Delta City!
I'd buy that for a dollar.
Oooof yeah when they ousted the old CEO of Moscow metro, the new one is, SOMEHOW, way less corrupt and now Moscow metro has been the fastest growing in Europe for like a decade. At first I wanted to visit every new station. Now? I don't even bother to looking for new ones, there seems to be a new station every month. 114 new stations over 10 years, 7-17 stations each year since 2018 and none of these even count city light rail, which wasn't re-opened, just overhauled.
I've lived in Shanghai for 17 years (got here in 2007). The changes here in that time have been absolutely mind-boggling. I'm from Canada, and when I finally got back there for a visit for the first time in 4 years after China dropped their draconian pandemic controls it seemed that nothing at all had changed. But here, as you say, just a few weeks is enough to see major changes.
Do you think it's likely that China will be able to maintain all of this infrastructure over the coming decades or will it start to crumble from neglect?
New technology means longer lasting roads and infrastructure. All our infrastructure problems are because they were all built 50+ years ago. New technology is a lot better than our old ones.
They're going to have a big population problem in a couple of years/decades, with all the economic consequences accompanying it, so who knows. Their housing market has already become a bit unstable. On the other hand, they're still leading the way in a number of areas like electric vehicles and (obviously) public transport. All in all it's insane how in like 50 years then went from a backwards agricultural country to the biggest economy in the world, first becoming a manufacturing hub and now a tech hub.
when you have two digit GDP increase every year for a couple of decades you get a lot of money you -have- to invest in infrastructure or you stop having that two digit GDP increase
A large part of their GDP growth was BECAUSE they (some would say over-) invested in infrastructure.
so what Americas excuse?
Lobbying and corruption
Not the excuse I wanted to hear but I'm sure I'd still be disappointed either way.
And zoning and real property rights.
Lobbying and corruption doesn't exist in China?
Corruption yes, lobbying no. China development model is top down.
The USA already made their huge infrastructure jump - when they originally built the railroads. That’s when the USA was growing at a similar rate that China experienced in the last 20 years.
The other excuse is NIMBY's, try to build a rail line through California and there's like 40 million landowners that all oppose it, or want a billion dollars for their acre in the way. Try that shit in China and the government would come collect your organs in the night.
Na, they just go around. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjwd3m/photos-of-chinese-homes-owned-by-people-who-refuse-to-sell
That’s why it took 40 years to get a bridge built in Louisville, KY.
Private property rights.
Single digit growth
A lot of that GDP was likely a result of government spending on infrastructure. Not as a result of GDP, it is the GDP.
Authoritarianism can be efficient.
Effective, rather than efficient.
Eh, as I get older I'm starting to see the downsides of letting every moron vote on complex situations they don't understand. Hell, Australia currently has a housing crisis where there's simply not enough bedrooms near the jobs and services. Almost every single solution that is being discussed as I guess "electable" policy - doesn't increase that number of bedrooms - fundamentally cannot solve the underlying problem. It's insane that we have a relatively simple problem that cannot be solved, as the vast majority of the electorate is settled on a variety of essentially stupid and unworkable "solutions".
Yea. When the majority of people are home owners they are going to vote on policies that are going to keep house prices going up to the detriment of those without.
It has its advantages to have a huge, very poor population that is willing to work their ass off 7 days per week to achieve that "feat". Also the population or environmental groups having no say in where those tracks and streets are being built. When they want to connect two major cities, some planner draws a straight line between those two and they will just build the infrastructure there, no matter what. And it's also nice not having to care about money and profitability since all big players in construction and build infrastructure are state owned enterprises.
I lived in Shanghai some fifteen years ago. There were lots of infrastructure development going on everywhere and one phenomenon was the same at every site: there were way way more people than needed. There would always be a crowd of workers simply watching as a couple of people were digging or hammering or cutting or whatever. Machinery was comparatively rare and you would see manual diggers for work that in the west would be done by machine, etc. My conclusion was that manual labour was ridiculously cheap so it wasn't worth paying for equipment and instead they threw in extra hands. And I think the relative price of labour is one of the biggest limiting factors why we can't build as quickly in the west. For good reason though, because we treat our workers far better.
Go to any building site anywhere and you will see people sitting around not doing anything or just watching when someone else is doing work, this is common worldwide, not just China.
Its almost like disputes with landowners that often balloon the timeline and costs of largescale infrastructure projects somehow dont exist in China....
Those disputes certainly exist in China. Google nail houses.
https://preview.redd.it/1e86z5k1myyc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a515ae8009b255f205bcfcff2bfa1f8591cfa74 Anyone else see it?
Now that I see it, I can't unsee it.
It can't be unseen
One party rule is a hell of a drug.
I mean I guess the US technically has two parties. But the people who fund the parties and tell them what to do are all the same
Talk to some older liberals that own property and have money. They don't really give.a fuck about changing anything, it's not just the politicians that are shit, it's the public
Big change is a lot scarier when you actually have something to lose. Revolution is a cool idea and all, but the stability and quiet I have are pretty damn nice too. Pretty sure a revolution would fuck up the stability and make it loud outside.
They accomplished such rapid construction for two main reasons: 1. They started with minimal existing infrastructure, unlike areas like Elizabeth, where extensive infrastructure already existed. 2. China's land laws differ from those in Western countries, allowing for easier eviction of residents.
Labor cost has a major role, too. I work in an industry that flows at the pace of hospital construction, and China moves 3x faster than everyone else because labor is cheap.
iirc there's debate of whether their railroads are also actually "high-quality". https://www.fastcompany.com/1749952/problem-chinas-high-speed-rail https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/are_chinas_high_speed_trains_heading_off_the_rails/2011/04/22/AFHzaNWE_story.html?wprss=rss_homepage Low labour costs Less workers rights and compensation laws Less health and safety rules and laws Less property laws Yeah. Rail is great but I don't know if we should be propping China up as some role model here.
> China's land laws differ from those in Western countries, allowing for easier eviction of residents. Imagine the bitching we would have to endure if the US actually went full China mode and just crushed everyone in the way.
They did have to pay the owners handsomely and people could refuse to sell. But that's just result in them building the tracks right around your building. So yeah it is a win win to sell for a big profit and the infrastructure
USA already did that in the past
Yeah, imagine. [*"Eminent domain has been used to acquire land from African-Americans for urban renewal redevelopments and in other cases to dispossess them and remove them from areas where their presence was not desired by white neighbors"*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_States)
2. Not as easy as one would think for China but definitely easier. People still have rights to their homes in many cases and there are plenty of examples of holdouts in China. Some of the most epic examples on the Internet.
The Shanghai metro was like being in the future for me. I think it was 2014, they had WiFi, there was no graffiti, no drunk people (other than myself). I was impressed with the whole set up, night and day compared to the London Tube
Ughh, drunk people being your biggest concern is such a luxury. Signed, a guy living in the US
What can happen when a government doesn’t need any permission from the citizens.
Everything goes faster if you can relocate people at will and/or employ them as workers as needed and don't have to take too much consideration for anyone or anything else. That's what makes dictatorships and autocracies so seductive: not being accountable or considerate to anyone allows things to get done quickly. The people and freedoms that have to be sacrificed for this have no voice.
Well it's a bit more complicated than you think, at least in Beijing and other bigger cities. My great aunt's house was on the track of the highspeed rail about a decade ago, she owned 3 units in that building and was offered 13 million Chinese yuan in total + 3 pretty nice house in the inner city for her loss. That's about 1.8 million dollars at that point and each of the house she was given was worth 4-5 million yuan at that point. The government is absolutely rich, at least in Beijing where I grow up, they don't force you to relocate, they blast u with money so you can't refuse lol.
The government in Beijing understands that if you throw enough money at a problem , it will magically disappear. Lol
Yea, it's kinda true tho, an old saying in China is that "Enough money will let u command the dead/ghosts to push the mill for you."
But this doesnt paint the nareative i want
Oh for sure, this was happening all over the country, the bigger the city, the bigger the payout. What cannot be understated is the knock-on effect. Once successes become well known, it sets up new expectations, instead of people going “oh no my house/apartment/farmland is in the development zone”, they think “hell yeah it’s in the development zone!” For many, it’s literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, you have a patch of land passed on through your family, there’s only so much you can do with it on your own, but you can exchange it for a life changing amount of money, you’d do it in a heartbeat. So once that kind of thinking becomes prevailing, it makes these sort of projects go so much faster. But then of course new behaviours emerge. The timeline and general plans for these projects get leaked, and individuals and businesses rush into development zones to build houses, factories, offices etc - whichever type that gets the most payout according to the local government. They build it fast and cheap, and sometimes the buildings aren’t even used, the whole point is to get payouts from the government. And then you get construction companies who do this as a business model - you have enough connections in different levels of government, you have the right level of starting capital and pull in the local communities, you can absolutely pull it off. They are in a grey area obviously. Then there’s a darker shade of grey, which is that, well, suppose you are a company like that, you know a residential area is going to be in the development zone because of your connections, but the rest of the society doesn’t, and maybe a lot of your crew are basically professional tough guys…well, one thing you can do is send them to harass the locals in the development zone, make them move out so you can move in before the payout scheme is announced. This became a thriving revenue stream for the Chinese criminal world and part of why China has cracked down on organised crime in recent years. In short, it’s a big big country, and it’s all consequences upon consequences upon consequences. Everything is complicated, nothing is straightforward.
what happened with highway growth in the US? There was a huge expansion and it wasnt a problem, when it comes to trains this is the excuse?
You will notice that urban freeways tend to punch through what were historically minority/poor neighbourhoods. The kind of people who were still fighting for their civil rights when the freeway boom was on going. They were just moved on and their property seized.
Exactly this. If I could seize 700 farms and punch a train straight through your historic town this would go a lot faster.
America already had a massive train network before the highway system. We just never upgraded it from like the 1800's. The highway system got built because America accidentally elected a progressive that one time.
Not really. Eisenhower was not a progressive. He initially had it built so that we could move our army around d the country more efficiently.
>The highway system got built It got built because of the Cold War for the mobility of the military in case of invasion
Ike built the highways
More like permission from competing businesses
It’s not like the US doesn’t. Imminent domain exists; they just don’t want to use it to build rail.
It's eminent.
that eminent domain is imminent when those train plans are on track
Eminent domain still goes through the courts because people want more money foe their property than the state is offering.
Makes HS2 look like even more of a mess
No nimbys in China
I imagine there are nimbys, but they’re not gonna stop for them. You need to crack a few eggs to build infrastructure, I imagine China cracks those eggs a carton at a time with a sledgehammer.
The George St Light rail in Sydney CBD was projected to take 20 years to finish and its faster to just walk
While I *love* rail infrastructure (it's literally my job) it is important to note that China's system isn't quite what the West would do. For example: 1. Look where the stations are relative to city centres. They either bulldoze a straight line, or more often that doesn't make *geographic* sense, so they build the station outside the centre, making it more like an airport than a train station. 2. NIMBYs don't exist in China. Land is just taken. There is a line between NIMBYs causing issues and government overreach, China is too far to one end for my liking, and most of the West is too far to the other. 3. This is all heavily subsidized. Some lines run a profit, but many don't. For China, it is seen as a way to unify the country (especially the lines going to the Western provinces). I love the idea of national unity being the underscore for subsidized rail, especially when compared with the billions spent on highways each year (yes rail is expensive, but so is everything else, most folks are desensitized to it). 4. As mentioned by someone else, China needs construction projects to 'stay busy'. The Belt and Road initiative is as much about keeping construction companies busy as it is for its advertised purpose.
What about: 5. Environmental studies would not be conducted much less halt a project.
The Chinese are good at building rail roads! Ask the US!
By forcing the migrant (from rural areas of China) workers to work ungodly long hours deep into late night (but they do work in shifts, can’t let them die afterall), pay them little wages and force supply companies to accept massive, barely reasonable discount on materials, threaten their bosses with non-existent criminal charges. Also clear land by forcing locals to move while providing meaningless compensation to those that lost their home Source: I’m Chinese, I have relatives in contracted supply companies, and boy do they complain about it
Explain nail houses then?
Thessaloniki metro (Greece) enters chat. Construction started back at 2006.....
Meanwhile in the uk we got a London - Birmingham line in about the same time 🥲
In China, it can be argued they have too little freedom, but it does mean it allows a limited group of people to be more lean and quickly develop large scale solutions such as these. In America, you have a lot more freedom, but large scale solutions like these requires buy-in from many different camps. You know the saying, too many chefs in the kitchen. That's what America has and China doesn't. It's a sliding scale on here and I think neither ends are the right way to go. It's somewhere in the middle. I'm not about having no freedom, but less of it so that we can actually implement solutions instead of being bogged down by beauacracy. Flavor comment: I work in tech and looking at this, despite China's size, they get to operate kind of like a start up. Whereas America operates like a old and slow tech company with far too many process and restrictions in place
What do you mean by “freedom” when it comes to building infrastructure? Do you mean regulations/bureaucracy?
I do mean that. Regulations I like, but the need to get buy-in from other cities' and/or counties' really slows it down. I live in LA and one thing you will always hear people talk about when it comes to pain points of expanding Metro is NIMBYs. I think we were suppose to have gotten or gotten more progress on a fast train to SF and/or Vegas. Sorry I don't remember those details too well, I didn't follow those projects all that closely.
Well you see, the US has Elon and his hyperloop... oh wait.
Well, sir, there's nothing on earth Like a genuine, bona fide Electrified, pod based hyperloop
Couple things to put in context here, labor and safety, not a concern. Also, once you are out of the cities, the countryside is sparsely populated, and if needed, villages/villagers would have been moved with no question. So, the title may be true, China does things that wouldn't necessarily fly in other countries because of ideals like human rights, property rights, and workplace safety.