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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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Beijing-Tianjin Train Reaches 350 km/h (217 mph)
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:55PM (7 children)
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)
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)
Called it: "Roads are a waste of money, unless you put tolls."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 10 2018, @12:26PM
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)
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)
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
And significant diminishment of quality of life via the cost.
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.
Because?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 10 2018, @12:32PM
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.