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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: 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.