A huge W for public transport. I assume the PRC already owning the land is significantly decreasing bureaucratic cost / time, allowing for such fast advances.
In sharp contrast the US (and some European countries) keep running after tech bro “innovations” like the hyperloop rather than sticking to actually working systems. Most of them will never see a real purpose because they were never realisable in the first place or will be slimmed down to a point where conventional public transport would have been the better option. And tbh, most of them are really just bait to keep those countries in a state of “looking for alternatives” whilst their current infrastructure is rotting away. And with especially the US being a nation centered around individual transport the vision for public transport is imo clearly lacking.
Europe in general isn’t hit by that as much, seeing the benefits of current public transport solutions (at least nowadays… the 90’ and 00’ were different thanks to neoliberalism and making short term profits instead of doing long term investments), but it is hindered by the clusterfuck of nations / different railway standards. The EU is trying to manage some of it (with ETCS / ERTMS) as well as the new coupling standard (DAC) and track gauges slowly but steadily going towards 1435mm but there are still a lot of things to do such as a transition towards a standard current or even more important: unified train registration (atm a train/carriage needs to be registered for each country separately which leads to unnecessary train switches at border crossings). For example Italy requires carriages to have a fire extinguishing system whilst some other EU countries don’t or some mountainous countries require specific braking tests. Having unified safety standards would make things a lot easier.
But at the upside at least some European railway companies do have a vision. For example, the ÖBB (Austrian federal railways) plans to have high speed rail connecting the main cities as well as European alpine corridors like the Brenner, Koralm and Semmering, regional trains for distances covering abt 200km and are reachable in abt 2 to 3 hours and (sub-) urban rail for metropolitan areas. In bigger cities, they want to provide bike sharing at the stations whilst they want to make car sharing available in rural areas to help cover the last few kilometres through the mountains/woods/fields, where busses only go on a daily basis if you are lucky and the bus driver doesn’t skip your stop and take a shortcut because they believe nobody will be waiting there anyways and they might reach said vision in the next upcoming years and likely less than a decade.
So TL;DR the PRC is profiting off of their property law, their ability to centralize standards and them going the (at the moment) optimum way instead of hoping for innovation from tech bros with fancy power point presentations and zero knowledge of physics, Europe is doing alright but is a bit of a decentralised mess and the US is getting a bit distracted by “innovations” and their mantra of individual transport.
(My experience in the area mainly comes from working at a state-owned railway company and being interested in the matter in general. If there is anything to add or if I have gotten something wrong, feel free to comment.) ^-^
This is a cool chart, but I wonder how someone could normalize this data for the size of a country, or how many miles are between its major metropoles, or something. China’s a lot bigger than most of the other countries on this list, and the HSR is concentrated in the heavily populated eastern half of the country.
For context, the total length of high speed rail in the world is 59,000km. So China, which makes up 17% of the world’s population contains 2/3 of the world’s high speed rail.
The closest comparison would be Europe, which has about the same land mass and half the population of China has around 11,000km of big speed rail.
It’d be hard to quantify, but I’m sure some statistics person could compare transportation methods, that includes speed, distance, energy usage, population, capacity, and probably a few more, per capita.
You could isolate it to a country’s top X biggest cities, and how traveling between them compares in all those metrics.
The hyperloop really encapsulates how car brained and isolated Americans are - even public transit should be individuals in a car alone one at a time.
I got a bunch of the new Toyota ad during my podcast today and the entire thing was a guy going on about how much he fucking loves traffic and rush hour now so he can hang out in his Toyota even longer.
A huge W for public transport. I assume the PRC already owning the land is significantly decreasing bureaucratic cost / time, allowing for such fast advances.
In sharp contrast the US (and some European countries) keep running after tech bro “innovations” like the hyperloop rather than sticking to actually working systems. Most of them will never see a real purpose because they were never realisable in the first place or will be slimmed down to a point where conventional public transport would have been the better option. And tbh, most of them are really just bait to keep those countries in a state of “looking for alternatives” whilst their current infrastructure is rotting away. And with especially the US being a nation centered around individual transport the vision for public transport is imo clearly lacking.
Europe in general isn’t hit by that as much, seeing the benefits of current public transport solutions (at least nowadays… the 90’ and 00’ were different thanks to neoliberalism and making short term profits instead of doing long term investments), but it is hindered by the clusterfuck of nations / different railway standards. The EU is trying to manage some of it (with ETCS / ERTMS) as well as the new coupling standard (DAC) and track gauges slowly but steadily going towards 1435mm but there are still a lot of things to do such as a transition towards a standard current or even more important: unified train registration (atm a train/carriage needs to be registered for each country separately which leads to unnecessary train switches at border crossings). For example Italy requires carriages to have a fire extinguishing system whilst some other EU countries don’t or some mountainous countries require specific braking tests. Having unified safety standards would make things a lot easier.
But at the upside at least some European railway companies do have a vision. For example, the ÖBB (Austrian federal railways) plans to have high speed rail connecting the main cities as well as European alpine corridors like the Brenner, Koralm and Semmering, regional trains for distances covering abt 200km and are reachable in abt 2 to 3 hours and (sub-) urban rail for metropolitan areas. In bigger cities, they want to provide bike sharing at the stations whilst they want to make car sharing available in rural areas to help cover the last few kilometres through the mountains/woods/fields, where busses only go on a daily basis if you are lucky and the bus driver doesn’t skip your stop and take a shortcut because they believe nobody will be waiting there anyways and they might reach said vision in the next upcoming years and likely less than a decade.
So TL;DR the PRC is profiting off of their property law, their ability to centralize standards and them going the (at the moment) optimum way instead of hoping for innovation from tech bros with fancy power point presentations and zero knowledge of physics, Europe is doing alright but is a bit of a decentralised mess and the US is getting a bit distracted by “innovations” and their mantra of individual transport.
(My experience in the area mainly comes from working at a state-owned railway company and being interested in the matter in general. If there is anything to add or if I have gotten something wrong, feel free to comment.) ^-^
Spain and France especially seem to be doing a good job building high speed rail:
This is a cool chart, but I wonder how someone could normalize this data for the size of a country, or how many miles are between its major metropoles, or something. China’s a lot bigger than most of the other countries on this list, and the HSR is concentrated in the heavily populated eastern half of the country.
For context, the total length of high speed rail in the world is 59,000km. So China, which makes up 17% of the world’s population contains 2/3 of the world’s high speed rail.
The closest comparison would be Europe, which has about the same land mass and half the population of China has around 11,000km of big speed rail.
It’d be hard to quantify, but I’m sure some statistics person could compare transportation methods, that includes speed, distance, energy usage, population, capacity, and probably a few more, per capita.
You could isolate it to a country’s top X biggest cities, and how traveling between them compares in all those metrics.
It’s just a pity that renfe’s new high speed trains built by Talgo seem to be a shaky and noisy experience as highlighted here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhEopBWNbTc
The hyperloop really encapsulates how car brained and isolated Americans are - even public transit should be individuals in a car alone one at a time.
I got a bunch of the new Toyota ad during my podcast today and the entire thing was a guy going on about how much he fucking loves traffic and rush hour now so he can hang out in his Toyota even longer.
FML.