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China on Thursday rolled off the production line a prototype magnetic-levitation train with a designed top speed of 600 km per hour in the eastern city of Qingdao.
The debut of China's first high-speed maglev train testing prototype marks a major breakthrough for the country in the high-speed maglev transit system.
The testing prototype, which has one car only, can check and optimize the key technologies and core system components of the high-speed maglev system and lay a technological basis for the forthcoming engineering prototype, said Ding Sansan, head of the train's research and development team and deputy chief engineer of CRRC Qingdao Sifang Co., the train builder.
China is the third-largest country in the world by area. If they successfully implement a high-speed rail network, will American objections to scale finally be overcome?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:03AM (37 children)
China already has a high-speed train network, just not mag-lev.
Correct though that the US won't do the same because it would require a large government investment, and too many people have been convinced that it's Communistic for government to provide actually useful services.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @05:34AM (36 children)
If it's such a no brainer, then why don't you provide the investment yourself? Too expensive, right? Then why doesn't some consortium of businesses do it? Not profitable, right? Then why doesn't government do it? Because those allegedly useful services come at an enormous cost - a cost that is completely ignored by your complaint above.
It's not the public perception as communism that is a problem here, it's your economic illiteracy.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday May 26 2019, @06:40AM (10 children)
A consortium of businesses is only going to put forward the money for this if they see it as more attractive than their other short term prospects. In a free market, that might not be a big problem, but what we have is far from a free market and big money has plenty of short term scams to outperform building long term infrastructure.
And when you have a monopolistic good (as train tracks are, there's a tremendous initial investment to clear and construct lines, it makes no sense to do the whole thing *twice* plus they would have to cross each other at times) you have the best argument for collective ownership.
Spreading the cost widely is the only way to get it built, but it's worth building nonetheless.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @09:59AM (9 children)
If it is worth doing it once, then that is a strong argument for doing it more than once, particularly given the usual competitivity arguments that come from having multiple suppliers.
Worth building is very different from worth a particular price to build. For a glaring counterexample, we have the California high speed rail debacle. There is some value to building a high speed rail between Merced and Bakersfield (the part of the high speed rail that California has managed to find funding for), but not worth the ten billion USD that is currently estimated to cost. The theory is that somehow there will be additional public funding to cover somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 billion USD additional (so far and climbing!) to get rails between LA, San Francisco Bay, and Sacramento, and that somehow the ridership of this rail system will justify its cost.
But that theory has already gone off the rails over the past decade with ballooning costs (it originally was going to cost 40 billion USD for the whole system, with half covered by the federal government). One doesn't have to be anti-Communist to wonder at the attraction of high speed rail when it costs so much and doesn't have much of a role in the US's transportation system.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:14AM (5 children)
Except for property rights multiplied by geometry.
Imagine trying to complete the trans-continental railroad without land grants.
Now try to imagine doing it a second time, without crossing the first route non-consensually.
Oh yeah, now imagine a fourth and fifth route, under the same conditions.
Can you not see the diminishing returns relative to effort?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:41PM (4 children)
Plenty of stuff is constrained by property rights multiplied by geometry. Most businesses have a physical footprint after all.
It's just as much a problem with government-based approaches.
It doesn't take a monopoly to figure how to do that.
Roads do more than that.
Sure, but it doesn't start at one.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:39PM (3 children)
Not at the same level though.
Like I say, just imagine trying to complete a transcontinental railroad without using monopoly (state) power.
Forget about completing it, try to just purchase the land necessary. Remember, no government handouts, no eminent domain, you have to come to a deal with each and every landowner on the path. If one says no, then you have to backtrack and reroute to avoid him. Each time you reroute you have to go to a less desirable route. If you have to do it often, you wind up with a snake track instead of a nice straight line.
Just getting the land lined up, before you can even start laying track, that would be extraordinarily difficult. And to the best of my knowledge it never happened on this scale in any country in the world.
It certainly didn't happen in the US. Railroads were built on state power, from the very beginning.
"It's just as much a problem with government-based approaches."
Eh, no.
Well, "just as much" is pretty imprecise, perhaps I don't know what you mean.
Government power neatly solves the main problems that would otherwise apply. Of course, it brings it's own set of different problems to the situation, but it does have the tools to do the original job. Eminent domain means you can plan a reasonable route and then build it, and all the little people in your way just have to get out and let you do it. Grants and subsidies guarantee an attractive profit from the beginning, which allows you to draw private investment capital that would otherwise have better places to go.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @11:57PM (2 children)
At the time, most of the land wasn't owned by anyone. It wasn't a case of eminent domain, but rather that ownership of the land wouldn't have been recognized otherwise without some sort of government approval. Else, for example, a government (at a state or national level) could just seize the land later.
The problem is that any such use of eminent domain has the same problems and conflicts of interest no matter how it is employed. Might as well use it to obtain rights of way for multiple competitors as for one inefficient state monopoly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @01:48AM
You'd need to create a huge wide multi lane corridor that could handle a dozen competitors to do it properly. Open up a bunch of corridors and giving out sections to competitors is equivalent of the Bell monopoly break up where they broke it up by region. So as far as anyone was concerned there was still a monopoly, it was just named differently in their area versus another area.
Regional monopolies are just a regulatory capture of local space that benefits a single entity. Infrastructure and utilities should either directly compete with others in a given area, or be controlled/owned by the community. Another option is to have the government own and build the infrastructure and have multiple operators leasing it out for use. As long as there is no collusion that can work quite well as its much easier for the big players to keep pressure on the government to keep their part working.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday May 27 2019, @09:47PM
At the time, most of the land wasn't owned by anyone.
:-) Of European ancestry...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:29AM (1 child)
It can hardly have a role if it does not exist. The reason it costs so much is the legal and environmental battles it must go through, and I'm told in the case of the Californian rail the corruption around it; not the physical works. Those battles are due entirely to the American attitude towards rail.
Extensive "high speed" road systems, which have far greater environmental impact, are accepted without a murmur though. Same in the UK; I recently went back to an area I have not seen for 30 years and was shocked at how much road building had been done in the meantime, taking up broad swathes of land, much of it with even broader cuttings, embankments, and sprawling flyover junctions, all paid with public money. In one place a naturally wooded hill in an otherwise flattish area had been almost entirely removed - looks like the engineers made a bee-line for it as it is cheaper to buy natural land than agricultural land. These new roads were not even particularly busy. Yet I never see any national (let alone international, like right here now) controversy or anti- campaigns against these new roads such as the new HS2 rail line in the UK is getting.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @11:33PM
On the first sentence, that is a No True Scotsman argument. Passenger rail exists in the US, it just doesn't have a prominent role like it does in other parts of the world.
Nor is American "attitude" towards rail somehow responsible for the variety of standard legal and environmental-based obstructions to any sort of big project in the developed world.
What is in large part responsible for the corruption of the project is its relative uselessness. There's already multiple transportation systems that service the region and do the job that the high speed rail would do. Thus, there is little reason for any of the participants to deliver on the project in a timely and cost effective manner. It's just a status signaling project from the start and much of the desired goals of the project were completed with the announcement of the project. Thus, there's little interest among any of the involved parties to avoid massive corruption and inefficiency.
They serve a need and don't cost 400 million pounds per mile [independent.co.uk] (which happens to be a snap shot on a cost escalation upwards).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @11:34AM
> If it is worth doing it once, then that is a strong argument for doing it more than once, particularly given the usual competitivity arguments that come from having multiple suppliers.
In the case of rail in USA, I think we have things ass backwards. We have the rails owned by private companies and the rolling stock (Amtrak) owned/supported by government.
If the government owned and maintained the rails (a sensible parallel with the highways and airports), then industry could compete on the trains.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Pav on Sunday May 26 2019, @06:46AM (22 children)
And THAT summarises your blind spot precisely - public ownership in certain domains, especially for "natural monopolies" - even the "Chicago boys" concede that. Fire brigades, health insurance, public education, the military, all kinds of infrastructure including rail and power (excluding perhaps the power generation facilities). When ideologues attempt to rub some free market magic on these types of problems the higher price becomes the "real price" according to them (ignoring the fact taxpayers used to pay a lower price for a better product when the service was government owned).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday May 26 2019, @06:53AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:00AM (10 children)
I don't buy that high speed rail is a natural monopoly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:52PM (9 children)
Wake up and look around, nobody cares what you buy or don't.
'cause your opinion is not an asset, on the contrary.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @12:07AM (8 children)
So what? Did you think before you wrote that?
The natural monopoly is one of the standard and often valid arguments for ruling out a market-based approach. Here, it's used to rule out private-side competition. But a key problem is being missed here. A huge part of the cost of construction, particularly in urban areas, is obtaining land and dealing with the legal hassles, such as NIMBYism. Building additional lines on an existing right of way add significantly less cost to a project because most of these hurdles have already been overcome.
In other words, adding competitors is substantially less costly than putting in the first one. That means a market-based approach is worth considering here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @03:14AM (7 children)
"Government - good for the first one, bad-bad-bad boy after, kill it with fire."
Summarises perfectly 'socialize cost, privatise profits' attitude your are pushing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @03:53AM (6 children)
The first train already has run over that concept. The costs are well socialized from the start. The benefits are concentrated among the contractors making that train - unless of course, one changes the model, say along the market-based lines I suggest.
By introducing competition, we have the possibility of socializing some benefit that originated with the social cost of taking that right of way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @09:28AM (5 children)
Riiiiight, because the Maglev hispeed train is able to run alongside and on the same routes as the steam powered or diesel ones. There just aren't any change required, no considerations on slopes, the tightness of the curves, everything is fine and dandy.
Yeah, well, maybe the passengers be in for some higher gees and the tracks will need some adamantium alloyed in - but that's not khallow's problem,The Free Market will wave its wand.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @11:41AM (4 children)
Well, yes, it can.
Right again. It wouldn't be the first time a transportation system had to fit the real world rather than the other way around.
Correct once again! You're getting better at this. Just try not to be sarcastic next time.
To summarize, unless you build your human civilization around the transportation system, you don't get to have many of these choices in the first place. It's the same with any other transportation system. Airport runways won't be lengthened just because your plane needs a longer one. Roads won't be changed just because your vehicle has a really wide turning radius. If your train idea can't handle the right of ways that have been obtained (or, sure, within reason increased), then don't put it there.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @03:31PM (3 children)
Must be nice in that universe of yours, where engineering and physics have no bearing on reality.
Make sure you stay there, this one is messy, constrained and sucks. Like a square law of centripetal force with speed - 3 times the speed, 9 times the strain on the tracks at the same curve radius.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:17PM (2 children)
News flash: you live in that universe too. There's plenty of examples of rail systems that had to travel slower (which is the real world solution to physics) and make other compromises because they couldn't get the optimal right of way. These can even lead to nasty accidents [wikipedia.org] (the bend in question being due to the limitations of normal right of way acquisition).
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:14AM
There are technologies that attempted to place high speed trains on existing infrastructure eg. tilt trains. Unfortunately they mostly don't work. Even after drastically improving they line they still can only achieve a modest increase in speed before the failure modes become way too dangerous.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:21AM
For anyone who's interested here's a link [wikipedia.org]. Unfortunately this article doesn't go into why engineers serverely downgraded the theoretical top speed (ie. a 200km/hr train having a failure when not travelling in a very straight line is bad news).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:03AM (9 children)
Another fact that I don't buy. It's certainly false in the case of phone systems and passenger airlines in Europe for a glaring counterexample.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:39AM (1 child)
I guess you just forgot to exclude British Telecom in that assessment. They are shit with shit Indian call centres manned by shits who talk shit. And I do remember the previous nationalised phone system. I was left without a phone connection for 6 weeks by BT because their Indians could not understand the concept of a line brought down by a tree (don't they have trees in India? - wouldn't surprise me). I changed companies after that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @07:44PM
So is there more to Europe than the UK?
That choice wouldn't have existed prior to privatization.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pav on Sunday May 26 2019, @02:37PM (6 children)
Australias national telco (rebranded "Telstra") was such a disaster part of the governments mandate was unscrewing the situation, which of course was out of public hands... so a new telco called "NBNco" was formed. Unfortunately during the long rollout process of new infrastructure the government changed, and the neoliberal ideologues who made the original mistake of privatising were voted back in. They purposely sabotaged the rollout so badly it's now a worldwide laughing stock - they actually downgraded the fibre-to-the-node infrastructure by buying all the poorly maintained privatised wires (for BILLIONS!) just so they could say "See! The private sector was just as good!".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @12:27AM (5 children)
I guess we shouldn't privatize stuff that way, right? Notice we've gone from saying that such privatization doesn't work to cherry-picking cases where it doesn't work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Monday May 27 2019, @02:07AM (4 children)
Private is usually more expensive then public due to needing to make a profit on top of operating costs. The exception is when someone who wants to kill it is put in charge and they then proceed to sabotage it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @03:39AM (3 children)
This is based on the completely unwarranted assumption that public entities operate anywhere near the efficiency of private businesses so that the additional cost of profit matters. My view is the converse. The existence of profit means that private businesses have an incentive to operate at a higher level of efficiency and lower operating costs.
Sure, one can come up with companies that are ridiculously inefficient, particularly companies that get plenty of their business from government contracts and funding, and hence, can operate at similar levels of inefficiency without consequence. But most businesses don't have that luxury. And sorry, there are no government organizations anywhere in the world operating at the efficiency and effectiveness of a UPS, Amazon, or SpaceX.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday May 27 2019, @03:45AM (2 children)
Private companies operate efficiently in a competitive atmosphere. Generally governments get involved in businesses where for various reasons, there is little or no competition.
Once a business is in a position where there is little or no competition, efficiency doesn't matter as much as profit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 27 2019, @03:54AM (1 child)
I've discussed how to make that competitive atmosphere in high speed rail. I don't think the problem is intractable.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday May 29 2019, @04:25AM
Well, let me spell it out - initial outlay and maintenance is so huge only the busiest routes in the world are worth a high speed rail link. Even with a private duopoly the profit motive is roughly halved, and a duopoly is not much better than a monopoly (few players make competition easy to "avoid"), and the huge infrastructure overhead has just been doubled for this dubious reason.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday May 26 2019, @10:07AM (1 child)
No I would not invest in US rail, not because there are no routes that could be profitable, but because I know that the paranoid opposition to rail in the USA, and the generally out-dated view of rail there, prevent it ever being built, or operated properly even if built, and my investment would just be spent on lawyers fighting losing battles and on out-of-date operating practices. People like yourself broadcasting that it is uneconomic make what you are saying self-fulfilling. Rail is a long term investment anyway which does not suit current attitudes.
FWIW I have had shares in certain UK railway companies, and done OK.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 26 2019, @11:37PM
Like what? Don't confuse opposition to projects that don't do much and cost much with a private project that would neatly sidestep most of those objections.
It's uneconomical because it delivers much less value than it would cost, not because of my mental failwaves. Most proposed and existing high speed rail projects in the world have this problem. It's not somehow unique to US attitudes concerning rail projects.