China Looks to Rails to Carry Its Next Economic Boom

[pampango]

Source: New York Times

From one end of the country to the other, China is in the midst of a railroad boom that promises to transform the world’s third-largest economy, after those of the United States and Japan. By making it easier to move people and goods, the railroad mania will gradually shift the center of economic gravity inland, accelerating the development of central and western China in an echo of America’s experience in the 19th century.

Taking freight and passenger traffic together, China already has the world’s busiest railroad system. But measured by the size of the country and the needs of 1.3 billion people, the system is puny. The density of the network, measured in kilometers of line per million inhabitants, is less than a tenth of those in Russia, the United States or Canada, a seventh of the European Union’s and about a third of Japan’s, according to the World Bank.

This sparse network, totaling 86,000 kilometers, or 54,000 miles, at the end of 2009, is so overburdened that it carries a quarter of the world’s rail traffic on about 6 percent of the world’s lines. The economic case for expanding the rail network is clear-cut. During a country’s development phase, total demand for transportation tends to grow faster than income.

But some critics say China is putting too much emphasis on high-speed rail lines capable of accommodating speeds of as much as 350 kilometers an hour. China already has the longest operational high-speed network in the world, at 6,552 kilometers, and it intends to double that total to 13,000 kilometers by 2012 by upgrading existing track and building new lines.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/business/global/13inside.html

[onehandle]

1. In a few decades China will rule it all. They will design, manufacture, and sell all goods.

We will be 100% dependent on them.

[liberation]

4. That is if it does not collapse first...

having been to China many times, every time I see two things... amazing level of development, and an ever increasing gap between the working people and those making money hand over fist. At some point people having to work 12 hrs on a shit job for a bowl of rice are going to start losing it and get really pissed when they see the well fed wealthy people with all sorts of expensive toys. Wealthy people are driven by greed, and even though they are initially very successful they tend to ignore that envy at a grand mass scale is a far more destructive engine than their greed-powered one.

They are also literally shitting where they drink. And no amount of trains are going to change that level of unsustainability.

[midnight]

2. This is something.... Milwaukee has been trying to get down while having

a teabagger as co. executive, who will not move forward and will cost the county the development and growth it needs....

MILWAUKEE - The federal government is giving the state of Wisconsin hundreds of millions of dollars for a high speed rail system but Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker believes the state should return that money.

"It's kind of like when you're winning a sports car in a raffle. If you don't have the money to pay the insurance what good is it to have the great brand new sports car," said Walker.

Last month, the Obama Administration awarded the state $823 million for the rail line that would link Milwaukee to Madison and beyond.

But Walker, who's running for governor as a Republican, wonders if the state can afford it after construction is completed.

"Anyone who is being intellectually honest has to acknowledge the cost of operating is a legitimate question to raise."

If Walker is in the Governor's office, he says he would turn down those federal funds. He says he would support the rail line if it was self-sustaining.

Democrats disagree.

"This is tremendous economic opportunity for this state," said Adam Collins, spokesperson for Governor Jim Doyle.

Collins claims the rail line would provide thousands of jobs.

While not giving specifics, Collins believes the state could afford to maintain the rail line, saying Walker's questions are more about politics than what would help people.http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/84269647.html

"Trying to insert petty politics into a project like this that stands to have major economic gains for this state for generations is short sighted," he said.

[galileoreloaded]

3. Well, they are about ten years ahead of us on about everything

so I think things look quite promising in the US 20 years from now.

[Javaman]

5. Every time I read things like this...

it breaks my heart.

If our nation just hadn't been so degraded over the last 45 years, we would be reviving our rails. But alas, we dream of high speed when low speed will do the job just fine.

The slow spiral.

[Heywood J]

6. We do have a rather large network of rail here, but

in order to make more use of it, we'd need to twin (or more) large sections of track, or clear more right-of-way. We're already running into difficulty with passenger rail because it uses the same lines as freight and has to rent from private companies. Especially when it gets into urban areas, there isn't a lot of spare track to increase shipments of goods and people. In addition, a good portion of the existing track was designed around the needs of the last century, prior to the population shifts and industrial exodus.

Rail can and must be used more to reduce carbon emissions from trucks and planes, but it needs a major overhaul to bring it into the 21st century.

[Vogon_Glory]

7. We Could Have Much More Passenger Rail Here, BUT

We could have much more passenger rail here in the US, BUT we haven't shown the willingness to pay for it. We'd not only need to pay for new locomotives and passenger cars, but also stations and the siding tracks for the trains when they take on and discharge passengers. In some places, freight traffic is so very heavy that parallel main tracks would have to be built to add passenger service to existing rail corridors.

The trouble is that the federal and state government has shown time and time again that it's unwilling to pay for it. Amtrak has been kept at starvation levels or near-starvation levels since its establishment in 1971, and many right-wingers still want its destruction for their trophy walls. In many parts of the country, particularly west of the Mississippi River, Amtrak's service network has shrunk, not grown, from what it was in its first decade of existence. Attempts to add a gas tax of one to two pennies per gallon to pay for Amtrak expansion and heavy rail transit have been blocked by right-wingers since the idea was first proposed over 15 years ago.

One of the unpleasant realities of government expenditure that right wing-nuts repeatedly deny is that at most you only get what you pay for.

I don't see a positive turn-around for passenger rail here in the US until after Movement Conservatism and its Tea-Party derivatives have been permanently discredited as political movements in the minds of a majority of American voters.

:argh:

:patriot: