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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: 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.