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posted by martyb on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-very-low-flying-aircraft dept.

Xinhua reports:

China on Wednesday increased the maximum speed of bullet trains on the Beijing-Tianjin high-speed railway to 350 km per hour (kph), reducing the inter-city travel time by five minutes.

The route now runs a Fuxing (Rejuvenation), the newest bullet train model developed in China.

The increase will shorten travel time between Beijing South Railway Station and Tianjin Railway Station from 35 minutes to 30 minutes with no price difference in fares.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:27PM (9 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:27PM (#719331) Journal

    There's a lot of very propaganda hand wavy stuff about "The stock market returns 7% on average" and stuff.

    Like centuries of well-documented history?

    High speed trains can be profitable, at least on one route in China over a short period of time,

    Whose books are you using?

    but a fairly poor investment choice compared to competitors with longer track (oh the pun) records... This is basically why GE Capital isn't funding high speed rail all over the USA or anywhere else for that matter.

    It's remarkable how few routes are actually profitable. I know, I know, profit isn't everything. But a lot of other modes of transportation can consistently show a profit.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:52PM (8 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:52PM (#719343)

    It's remarkable how few routes are actually profitable.

    I couldn't find the correct link:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Tianjin_intercity_railway [wikipedia.org]

    So I posted about a cousin route to be kinda on topic. Now that I found the actual data (assuming you trust Chinese numbers, which is always a fools game) I can comment on the actual line rather than a similar line.

    Apparently the "real" (by Chinese accounting standards, LOL) construction cost was $2.3B and the rate of return is essentially zero as it randomly reports minor profits or losses never much above or below break even.

    This is funny quote:

    To be able to repay principal, ridership would need to exceed 40 million.

    There are 60 trains (if none are down for maintenance) and they take a half hour per run, and 40e6/(48*60*365) = 38, so in theory given an infinite supply of travelers (which doesn't exist, LOL) and infinitely efficient station logistics to handle that many trains arriving and departing, then it could very in theory be profitable. Recent numbers are not being released which in China means they're bad, but the best numbers they could release were from 2010 and that was a rate of 25 million.

    The easiest way to increase train speed as any railroad dude knows, is reducing the passing track type stuff by cutting service. According to the wiki article they had tossed some more sets in service to get the interval between trains down to 10 mins which likely increases congestion... my guess is they'll be a VERY quiet press release that, merely coincidentally, at the same time as congestion dropped and speed increased, they dumped service back to one train every 30 mins or something. I'm not saying this is guaranteed but its certainly the simplest cheapest face saving way, very Chinese, would not be surprised if this is how it all turns out. So a train every 10 mins on a 30 min route means some route congestion occasionally but dropping to a train every 30 min on a 30 min route means times are good.

    Note that IF their peak ridership was 25e6 that sounds like a lot, but they claim to run every 10 mins, so 25e6/(365*24*6) means they're putting about 475 people on each train, its not like the trains are empty, they're just not profitable, until they get about 800 or more riders per train.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:55PM (7 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:55PM (#719462)

      Please, never get involved in sizing infrastructure. Especially not for a country with over a billion people.
      "Sir I understand your frustration, but VLM's math was pretty convincing: the best ROI we could get on the Beijing-Shangai transit was the gravel road, and you need to ford every river because only the Yangtze is worth having boats on. Another 6 weeks in the traffic jam and you'll get there. You may want to bribe the truck to get on front, unless you really hate your lungs"

      China, like Europe, is investing in infrastructure. Quality of life and business desirability over raw ROI.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 10 2018, @05:12AM (5 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 10 2018, @05:12AM (#719803) Journal

        China, like Europe, is investing in infrastructure. Quality of life and business desirability over raw ROI.

        Spending != investing. Investing implies expected positive ROI. If raw ROI is a mess, it's an indication that quality of life and business desirability are also taking a hit too.

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 10 2018, @05:18AM (4 children)

          by bob_super (1357) on Friday August 10 2018, @05:18AM (#719806)

          Called it: "Roads are a waste of money, unless you put tolls."

          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 10 2018, @12:26PM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 10 2018, @12:26PM (#719881)

            You can make a lot of money off the economic growth roads provide. On the other hand, if you engineer and build a "50M per year" choo choo in an essentially fully developed area and less than 10M per year ever ride it, then you're just a really bad engineer/manager.

            Can you engineer a high speed rail system that runs on 10M/yr trips? I could state and emphatic "maybe" but I donno if it scales that well.

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by khallow on Friday August 10 2018, @12:28PM (2 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 10 2018, @12:28PM (#719882) Journal
            First, you didn't call it in this thread (a quote which strangely enough appears nowhere in the discussion nor in a modest amount of google searching I did on the subject of tolls and bob_super in SN). And just because my argument is predictable (though not in the way you did mischaracterized it), doesn't mean it is wrong somehow. The reason it keeps getting made is because people continue to ignore basic economics when it comes to spend other peoples' money on infrastructure projects.

            Insisting in the complete absence of any sort of criteria that infrastructure is important ignores that infrastructure has cost as well as benefit. And it's very easy for high cost infrastructure to have negative value as a result even if it moves a lot of people around (or the many other benefits that infrastructure can have).

            It's common for high speed rail projects to come up with rosy predictions that are never met. Then defenders of the system then come up with intangible arguments like you have to defend continued operation of these systems. Just because we need some sort of transportation system, doesn't mean that the current add on to a transportation system is worth the bother.

            As it turns out, roads can also be negative value infrastructure. For example, the Big Dig [wikipedia.org] of Boston was an almost $15 billion project (in 2006 dollars) which was projected at the start to cost only $6 billion (again in 2006 dollars, well over double its original cost) and disrupted traffic in central Boston for 15 years (which probably is a cost comparable to the cost of the project!) with elevated maintenance costs due to poor construction, leaks, and design flaws. But at least road congestion has been pushed out of the city center for now. The claim anyway is that the improvement saves somewhere around $200 million a year for Boston motorists in fuel and wait times which is a ridiculously low amount given the cost of the Big Dig improvements. As a rule of thumb, if you're not seeing at least 5% of the overall cost in benefits per year, you're not breaking even.

            Keep in mind that if high speed rail were cheap, we wouldn't be having this argument. We'd just have it going everywhere even in low density countries like the US, probably with substantial private investment.
            • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 10 2018, @05:07PM (1 child)

              by bob_super (1357) on Friday August 10 2018, @05:07PM (#719977)

              The big dig is providing significant returns in quality of life, and therefore extra -taxed- property values. How many less lungs diseases, courtesy of traffic jams moving outside the dense areas? Wait, is that a negative, because lung cancers are good for hospital bottom lines, or is that a broken window fallacy ?
                Shades of gray [bostonglobe.com] rather than pure binary motorist-based financial threshold, perhaps ?

              > As a rule of thumb, if you're not seeing at least 5% of the overall cost in benefits per year, you're not breaking even.

              Dirt roads it is.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:03AM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:03AM (#720177) Journal

                The big dig is providing significant returns in quality of life

                And significant diminishment of quality of life via the cost.

                How many less lungs diseases, courtesy of traffic jams moving outside the dense areas?

                Probably an increase since the traffic jams now happen more to the west of Boston, outside of the city center, and hence, downwind of more people.

                > As a rule of thumb, if you're not seeing at least 5% of the overall cost in benefits per year, you're not breaking even.

                Dirt roads it is.

                Because?

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 10 2018, @12:32PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 10 2018, @12:32PM (#719883)

        business desirability

        In the USA the left wing dominated areas are mostly not doing very well because businesses don't want to pay taxes that are a multiple of other areas because building something five times larger than required gave some govt official kickbacks or nice feels. The people don't like it either, paying for literally useless stuff is expensive and awards no quality of life benefit.

        Its like debating why there's too many handicapped parking spots (as a way to discourage driving) and the stereotypical way to fight common sense is ranting about "you'll want those spots when you're old" and its like, naah, if we got rid of half of the handicapped spots we'd merely have 9 out of 10 empty all the time instead of 19 out of 20 empty all the time now. Now the "thing" is shitty internet-shopping service spot, so we've lost ten more permanently empty parking spots to dotcom delivery services and online ordering that apparently almost no one uses because the spots are always empty.

        I admit, I do park in the "Professional Parking Only" spots at home depot simply because its funny.