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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 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.