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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: 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."

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (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?