Comment on Too bad we can't have good public transportation
balsoft@lemmy.ml 1 day agoIf they wasted money on building HSR on a lot of places where it’s not needed
There’s no such thing as “HSR where it’s not needed”, especially in a country that’s building housing at an insane pace. Each HSR station will just get a city built around it (hopefully not a car-dependent hellhole) and people will flock there.
this means there’s gonna be a debt that never gets paid by the utilization of the rail. Bad investment.
Chinese government can print an infinite amount of Yuan out of thin air. They don’t care about internal debts, what they do care about is popularity among their people, and “build more HSR” is a really popular policy in China because it obviously and immediately improves quality of life for loads of people.
Thinking about everything in terms of “profit motive” is exactly why the US is the way it is.
vga@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
That’s not how any of this works. Sure they can do that, but they cannot control the effects of having done so.
balsoft@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Ok, so infinite Yuan is a hyperbole, but for something so relatively cheap and so massively beneficial as rail, profitability really doesn’t matter. China has more than enough resources and influence to eat the cost now and reap the benefits for the next century.