China Aims To Ride High-Speed Trains Into Future

[Benjamin Frank]

I was a child when this topic was posted. Twelve years later, and China's eating our lunch. Not just them, either - but also India, the various European countries, even smaller countries like Morocco. Where are ours?!

I wonder how true this is. A command economy (and China is essentially state capitalism) can look very good focusing on one or two things, while everything else is left lagging. 

That's essentially what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin (prior to World War II anyway.) They announced great achievements in heavy industry, which were likely at least partly true, but at the expense of consumer products.

To be sure there is a big difference in that the Soviet achievements were based on implementing already existing Western production methods, whereas China is engaging in innovation, but I still think there are reasons to question how their overall economy is performing.

[PSOL]

The faction promoting consumer goods and advocating western production levels won out in the late 60s in the USSR, and all it did was get them in uncontrollable debt and fail at raising consumer good production while costing investments in information technology. The US basically ensured that the USSR would be a global nonfactor by getting off the gold standard and getting them vulnerable with grain imports. It was a cataclysmic failure, and the investments in information technology got credited as a capitalist innovation in the late 90s/early 2000s. Also after the mid-30s, “western production” practices in the USSR wasn’t a thing as they started innovating.

China by the year is less and less a state capitalist economy, much less than Singapore is right now, and they are currently facing overproduction that no private investment or B&R initiative can support in an acceptable timeframe to get where they need to be to come out of their rivalry with the US terminally unharmed. They are screwed and any hope for them ran out a decade ago.

[Benjamin Frank]

The faction promoting consumer goods and advocating western production levels won out in the late 60s in the USSR, and all it did was get them in uncontrollable debt and fail at raising consumer good production while costing investments in information technology. The US basically ensured that the USSR would be a global nonfactor by getting off the gold standard and getting them vulnerable with grain imports. It was a cataclysmic failure, and the investments in information technology got credited as a capitalist innovation in the late 90s/early 2000s. Also after the mid-30s, “western production” practices in the USSR wasn’t a thing as they started innovating.

China by the year is less and less a state capitalist economy, much less than Singapore is right now, and they are currently facing overproduction that no private investment or B&R initiative can support in an acceptable timeframe to get where they need to be to come out of their rivalry with the US terminally unharmed. They are screwed and any hope for them ran out a decade ago.

1.You didn't accuse me of saying anything otherwise, but I just want to point out to make it totally clear, when it came to promoting heavy industry at the expense of consumer products, I was referring only to pre World War II.

2.I'm not familiar with the Soviets not using western production practices after the mid 1930s.  As far as I know, most of their gains in heavy industrial production were using western machinery (and production methods) purchased through exports of agricultural products.

[PSOL]

The faction promoting consumer goods and advocating western production levels won out in the late 60s in the USSR, and all it did was get them in uncontrollable debt and fail at raising consumer good production while costing investments in information technology. The US basically ensured that the USSR would be a global nonfactor by getting off the gold standard and getting them vulnerable with grain imports. It was a cataclysmic failure, and the investments in information technology got credited as a capitalist innovation in the late 90s/early 2000s. Also after the mid-30s, “western production” practices in the USSR wasn’t a thing as they started innovating.

China by the year is less and less a state capitalist economy, much less than Singapore is right now, and they are currently facing overproduction that no private investment or B&R initiative can support in an acceptable timeframe to get where they need to be to come out of their rivalry with the US terminally unharmed. They are screwed and any hope for them ran out a decade ago.

1.You didn't accuse me of saying anything otherwise, but I just want to point out to make it totally clear, when it came to promoting heavy industry at the expense of consumer products, I was referring only to pre World War II.

2.I'm not familiar with the Soviets not using western production practices after the mid 1930s.  As far as I know, most of their gains in heavy industrial production were using western machinery (and production methods) purchased through exports of agricultural products.

1. I know, I was just pointing out the history. Also the lack of consumer goods made pre-WWII is understandable given that the Soviets had very little in the way of cheap access to make them and had security concerns and quality of life metrics to pass. That required hard industry taking the priority over investments not made.

2. Due to their unique economy and the situation in the USSR, it was very different than in the other capitalist countries.

[parochial boy]

I was a child when this topic was posted. Twelve years later, and China's eating our lunch. Not just them, either - but also India, the various European countries, even smaller countries like Morocco. Where are ours?!

There is an element of be careful what you wish for on the whole though. So if you take France, the TGV's are incredible... provided you want to go to Paris or Paris is broadly in the on the wy to where you want to go to. Because regional and provincial lines have been neglected and left to rot in relation to a high speed network that is totally focussed on the capital.

For instance, I'm heading of to Brittany next week, because Paris is basically on the way I can bomb in and and out of it and basically cross the entire country in 7 hours including the swap between stations. It is so much quicker and easier that it rules out even thinking about flying. But supposing I wanted to get to Rennes from Nantes, two top 10 cities barely 100km apart - there are two trains an hour, the slower of which takes two hours. And that is a good connection, try to get from Rennes to Caen, barely 150km away, you basically can't. Or to middle sized towns elsewhere in Brittany, you're stuck with a network of like 5 trains a day running at arbitrary intervals and which are functionally useless. Which is a huge problem on the whole, as it means that French trains are good for getting in and out of Paris, or around the Grand Paris region; but almost unusable for travel around provincial or rural France.

This contrasts somewhat starkly to Switzerland where the conscious decision was made to veer away from flashy high speed. Instead, every middling town has a local rail network that would be the envy of a major metro elsewhere in the world and every podunk village has at least two trains an hour stopping there. The size of the country helps, but so did fundamentally making the right decision to focus on network density and connectivity over the senseless waste that would have been a 300km/h train from Geneva to Zurich.

Point being, if the investment is coming from the expense of other projects, then it pays to think about what the priorities are. In a country as huge as the US there are fairly limited High Speed networks that would really provide value. Beyond that, they will never compete with planes. But there is a huge deal that could be out of putting that sort of investment into building really dense and well connected networks around the big sprawly metro areas. As an example, Cook County has a population density similar to that of the canton of Zurich - in the former, less than one in five commute by public transport compared to nearly 70% by car; while in the latter 47% commuted by public transport and only 39% by car (pre-Covid). So before spending a fortune on high speed rail lines that might just function as a glitzy toy for the better off (as is often the case with the TGC), why not build the sort of regional or local rail networks that will both lead people off the road and provide the sorts of freedoms that you get from say, not needing to drive everytime you want to go into town?

[Benjamin Frank]

I was a child when this topic was posted. Twelve years later, and China's eating our lunch. Not just them, either - but also India, the various European countries, even smaller countries like Morocco. Where are ours?!

There is an element of be careful what you wish for on the whole though. So if you take France, the TGV's are incredible... provided you want to go to Paris or Paris is broadly in the on the wy to where you want to go to. Because regional and provincial lines have been neglected and left to rot in relation to a high speed network that is totally focussed on the capital.

For instance, I'm heading of to Brittany next week, because Paris is basically on the way I can bomb in and and out of it and basically cross the entire country in 7 hours including the swap between stations. It is so much quicker and easier that it rules out even thinking about flying. But supposing I wanted to get to Rennes from Nantes, two top 10 cities barely 100km apart - there are two trains an hour, the slower of which takes two hours. And that is a good connection, try to get from Rennes to Caen, barely 150km away, you basically can't. Or to middle sized towns elsewhere in Brittany, you're stuck with a network of like 5 trains a day running at arbitrary intervals and which are functionally useless. Which is a huge problem on the whole, as it means that French trains are good for getting in and out of Paris, or around the Grand Paris region; but almost unusable for travel around provincial or rural France.

This contrasts somewhat starkly to Switzerland where the conscious decision was made to veer away from flashy high speed. Instead, every middling town has a local rail network that would be the envy of a major metro elsewhere in the world and every podunk village has at least two trains an hour stopping there. The size of the country helps, but so did fundamentally making the right decision to focus on network density and connectivity over the senseless waste that would have been a 300km/h train from Geneva to Zurich.

Point being, if the investment is coming from the expense of other projects, then it pays to think about what the priorities are. In a country as huge as the US there are fairly limited High Speed networks that would really provide value. Beyond that, they will never compete with planes. But there is a huge deal that could be out of putting that sort of investment into building really dense and well connected networks around the big sprawly metro areas. As an example, Cook County has a population density similar to that of the canton of Zurich - in the former, less than one in five commute by public transport compared to nearly 70% by car; while in the latter 47% commuted by public transport and only 39% by car (pre-Covid). So before spending a fortune on high speed rail lines that might just function as a glitzy toy for the better off (as is often the case with the TGC), why not build the sort of regional or local rail networks that will both lead people off the road and provide the sorts of freedoms that you get from say, not needing to drive everytime you want to go into town?

If the costs were lower, high speed rail would really solve the housing problems.

[Zinneke]

Look I love trains, I hate long car journeys, I can't drive but I've resigned myself to eventually learning because the fact of the matter is it'll probably cost far less to just phase out of fossil fuelled cars and replace them with electric than it will to tempt the families, boomers and all sorts of entitled mouth breathers to take a train once in a while because MUH FREEDOM and also the infrastructural cost of the rail network itself. Like parochial boy explained the investment should go into big metro areas (and I consider Flander + the Netherlands for example to be one big metro area where eventually a 10 minute supertrain from Brussels to Antwerp would make sense) just so cities don't turn into the giant parking lots we made them until the Ecologists came to power.