The Chinese rail network now carries 23 million passengers a day. Multiply that by 365 and it carries 8.365 billion passengers a year. And does not account for the increase in passengers during major holidays.
Now consider these two facts. First, India’s rail network carries 23 million passengers a day also. But it took the Brits and Indians 172 years to build out the network. China did it in under 30 years.
Second: California voted in 2008 to build a high speed rail network between Los Angeles and San Francisco with a completion date of 2022. Operations are projected to start in 2030 now.
Ponder that for a moment and then puke.
The future does not happen in America anymore.
Nota bene: Jan’s comment reminded me of something I saw in China. It was the summer of 2003. After the first big SARs outbreak. I was in far west China trying to get to India. At the time there was zero high speed rail. Understand? Zero. To get to Tibet and then Nepal and finally India I had to travel across Qinghai, starting in Goldmud where I ended up in Lhasa, Tibet.
If you’ll allow an old backpacking traveller a brag, I’d be grateful. At the time, every backpacker I ever met considered the Golmud to Lhasa bus trip the sine qua non of the complete backpacker/traveller. You could not consider yourself a true traveller if you had never made this journey. 40 hours above 10,000 ft. (3,050 meters), often times as high as 14,000 feet (4,267 meters) on a sleeper bus, in which every passenger has altitude sickness of one degree or another. Puke in the aisles. No clean up. Restroom breaks rare, maybe five the entire journey. It is a badge of honor I wear with pride to this day.
Late at night about 24 hours into the journey we drove in to a traffic jam of epic proportions. A crazed, disorganized, enormous traffic jam on a dirt road somewhere between Golmud and Lhasa high up on the Himalayan Plateau. It took an hour to get through. But what I saw mezmerized me like nothing else and I will never forget it. The Chinese, busy at Buddha knows what hour, building a High Speed Rail Link between Golmud and Lhasa, much constructed on damn near permafrost conditions. Look it up if you disbeleive me.
They did it. It’s a first class wonder, the new rail link, complete with oxygen bars, etc. . .
But me, I’m glad I did it the hard way. It has more meaning.
Lamentatio finalis: Our mad rush to adopt technology in every aspect of our lives has robbed us of many beautiful and rare experiences, many of which are gone forever. I’ll leave you with one example. In 2008 I took the ferry from Penang, Malaysia across the Straits of Malacca. It was a leisurely six hour ride from Penang to Medan, Sumatra. While making the crossing I saw just how strategic a waterway it was: the sheer mass of container ships was mind boggling.
When I returned to Malaysia in 2011 specifically to share with my father the experience of the ferry ride acrosss the Straits, the ferry had been shuttered by low cost airlines flying from Penang to Medan. To me that is a loss equivalent to someone torching a Rembrandt in a Dutch museum. Irrevocable. Gone forever.
Bob
Modern civilisation is going to crash and burn. Actually it’s crashing and burning right now. China is the demented speed fiend pushing the accelerator down as hard as it can heading into a dangerous bend.
Sean Paul Kelley
@Bob: actually, I strenuously disagree. With birthrates falling in every region of the earth except subsaharan Africa, expected to top off and then see absolute population decline by the end of the century, if and it is a BIG IF, can get a hold of climate change, we have a real chance to survive what many call the great filter. I’m ambivelent but hopeful.
Jan Wiklund
True for Sweden too. They are building one of the missing links of the railway network, the one between Umeå och Luleå in the far north. With the speed they use it will take ten years. If they had built the original network from the 19th century with that speed they wouldn’t be finished yet.
The north-atlantic countries are stuck in rentierism. Creating new resources is everywhere defeated by the urge to make money out of the existing ones.
Like & Subscribe
Anyone invested in the system has to delude themselves and believe it will go on forever and ever amen, otherwise they wouldn’t be invested. Climate change is a canard. Not that it’s not a real thing, because it is, but because it’s only one part of the equation which equals destruction of the biosphere. It gets all of the attention because so much effort has gone into usurping the valid concerns about climate change and exploiting those concerns to perpetuate the growth economy as if you can grow your way to harmony, not sustainability, with the living and non-living planet.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.
Egoculexegonos
And also consider making great infrastructures BUT with not proper foresight.
A few weeks ago there was a horrific train accident in Spain, in one of the high speed lines (AVE). It’s been on the news for days now. Lots of politicians and media throwing shit around about it but the engineers I’ve checked seem to agree in one factor: AVE is dying out of success. High speed trains have been in Spain for about 3 decades. In that time the number of lines increased. Up to ~2020 it was manageable: suitable traffic in every line; it was rather expensive and mainly used by wealthy people. Roughly after covid new companies (Ouigo and Iryo) started to offer more AVE services, journeys became more affordable, more and more people started taking AVE trains and now it seems the infrastructure might not be really suitable for so much traffic. And it seems its too expensive to adapt things now. This might not been the only factor involved in the accident but it appears to be crucial.
Sean Paul Kelley
@Egoculexegonos: I recall visiting Spain on my first overseas trip in 1994 and riding the AVE fromm Madrid to Granada. It was a fantastic experience for a 24 year old American idiot backpacker.
That said, something engineered 34 years ago–the first lines opened in 1992 yes?–needs revision and updating. We don’t do infrstructure investing in the West anymore, sadly. Unless we can make it a profit center. Not everything should generate profits. Alas, no one listens to Ian and I about this.
It makes one wonder how the Chinese high speed network will age. And I wonder about comparisons regarding Japans rail network. They’ve poured billions into their trains since, well, always.
Jefferson Hamilton
“I’m glad I did it the hard way.”
“Once in Russia,” Gurdjieff recalled, “I lived like a gypsy. I had a horse, donkey, tent, friends. I make 20 or 30 kilometers one day, then stop rest two days. Only such travel is real. Then you know how is—you know if each place has two or three stones. Go this way from Paris to Turkestan and will complete education have.”
Olivier
@Sean Paul Kelley “It makes one wonder how the Chinese high speed network will age.” The part in Tibet at least will not age well because the permafrost is thawing. A major accident there someday would not surprise me: strict high-speed rail tolerances and shifting ground are not a good combination!
Egoculexegonos
@Sean Paul Kelley: It’s been regulary mantained but, probably, not well enough to adapt it to the quickly changing situation. Ouigo and Iryo’s blatant dumping since ~2021 (tickets often were close to free) changed traffic frequency radically (Madrid-Barcelona +50-70%, Madrid-Valencia +50-100% , Madrid-Andalucía approximately +50% ). The Transport Minister tried to change it in 2024 (especially against Ouigo, if my memory serves me well) but the Court ruled against it. It seems they didn’t want to shoo investment away or something. Nothing strange, anyway, in a lawfare and utilitarian legal system like this.
On the other hand, almost everything coming from China is truly awesome. Hopefully they’ll manage their infrastructures more wisely than we, Westerners, do (it’s actually difficult not to! LOL)
About backpacking, I know what you mean. I did two InterRails (each one=1 month of travelling all over Europe by train for a fixed fee) on my own in my early 20s. Not as extreme as your journeys but those were great experiences for a sorta scaredy-like character like me. Had to deal with many unexpected events, to properly manage my limited budget, I slept wherever I could, met loads of interesting people and saw lots of places without a guide… Crossing the Polish border back in 1992, for example, was maybe one of the most surrealistic situations I’ve ever experienced. I managed to not be too cosy or comfortable for some time and noted I could deal with unexpected and changing situations. All those memories and experiences are still truly important for me.
different clue
I remember reading years ago about Tibetan permafrost beginning to thaw around key railroad supports and stuff, and that the Chinese builders were taking steps to counter it.
I found a little article about it. I don’t know how effective those steps still are at this moment, or how effective they will remain into the future. But they have been making the effort.
” The Tibetan Railroad: Innovative construction on warm permafrost in a low-latitude, high-altitude region. ”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272491648_The_Tibetan_Railroad_Innovative_construction_on_warm_permafrost_in_a_low-latitude_high-altitude_region