Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada
TheFonz@lemmy.world 1 day agoThe reality is the high speed rail it China is not solvent and is operating at a tremendous loss. That’s just reality. The question is if that loss serves a larger benefit to Chinese society. It’s a gamble either way.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Again, the same applies to e.g. the road network in the USA. Infrastructure is there to facilitate economic growth and freedom. Without roads it’s much harder to transport goods, get people to work, give people the mobility to move to jobs that are farther away while still being able to live closer to where they want and so on and so on.
And the same applies to public transport as well.
Only supreme idiots would argue that roads should turn a profit. And public transport is much cheaper at transporting people than roads.
It’s !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world that people don’t understand what infrastructure is and what it’s there for.
TheFonz@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
I don’t necessarily disagree, but it would be silly to compare roads to high speed rail. One has a much higher barrier cost to entry while the other model offsets the cost by distributing it across the population. Yes, yes I know. I’m not saying one is better than the other. I’m just explaining the roi based on the startup cost. But yes, of course the benefits of infrastructure extend beyond the price to manage it. But there comes a point when the return is negative. Many of the Chinese high speed branches are crossing extended distances to literally nowhere. Only a portion of the network is serving an extremely densely populated area. So it’s a bit of column a and a bit of column b.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
The same holds true for roads as well: Build a massive highway somewhere in the mountains where nobody lives and it will cost a ton of money while having very little benefit. And highway bridges and tunnels are also very expensive to build.
For comparison, I pulled some numbers from Germany. High speed train tracks cost €25mio/km (not counting bridges or tunnels). Highways cost €20mio/km (again not counting bridges or tunnels). So it’s not that far off.
On the other hand, maintaining a high speed track is much cheaper, at around €70k/km pa., while maintaining a highway costs €390k/km pa plus another €180k/km pa. administrative cost.
But the real kicker is capacity: A 2-lane highway has a capacity of 3000-5000 vehicles per hour. At an average occupancy of 1.2 people per car, that’s 3600-6000 people.
An Austrian Railjet for example, can carry around 1700 people and you can run them at 3-minute intervals on a high speed track. That’s a total capacity of 34 000 people per hour. They are usually not run at that frequency, because that’s vastly more than what’s ever necessary, but you get the point. High speed rail has such a massive capacity, that it’s virtually unlimited, for a price that’s very comparable to a regular 2-lane highway.
When it comes to cargo, low-speed rail is even much more efficient than trucks on roads, with the major downside being that you have to unload the cargo to trucks for local distribution.
But my main point here is that roads aren’t some holy heal-it-all solution that’s never a waste of money while rail needs to be profitable on its own, like a lot of people seem to perceive it. A highway is not more of a basic human need than high-speed rail.