From the New York Times today, China plans to finish 5,000 miles of high speed railways by 2012 at speeds of 215mph, faster than the fastest Japanese bullet trains, which go up to 185mph. New high speed lines are being opened monthly in China, while we are still bickering about our first high speed line, the 84-mile Tampa-Orlando line scheduled to be built by 2014. The Florida line will have a max speed of just 168mph.
China Railway-High Speed (CRH) line
From article:
The Chinese bullet train, which has the world’s fastest average speed, connects Guangzhou, the southern coastal manufacturing center, to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours, it travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak’s fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York.
Even more impressive, the Guangzhou-to-Wuhan train is just one of 42 high-speed lines recently opened or set to open by 2012 in China. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014, an 84-mile route linking Tampa and Orlando, Fla.
China is investing $100 billion into its high speed rail project, while we spend it in the bottomless pit of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Chinese are even updating many of their freight train lines to 155mph.
Why is China in such a hurry to build these lines? For economic reasons:
China’s lavish new rail system is a response to a failure of central planning six years ago.
After China joined the World Trade Organization in November 2001, exports and manufacturing soared. Electricity generation failed to keep up because the railway ministry had not built enough rail lines or purchased enough locomotives to haul the coal needed to run new power plants.
By 2004, the government was turning off the power to some factories up to three days a week to prevent blackouts in residential areas.
Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation’s passenger traffic onto high-speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than $100 billion in stimulus at the projects.
Administrators mobilized armies of laborers — 110,000 just for the 820-mile route from Beijing to Shanghai, which will cut travel time there to five hours, from 12, when it opens next year.
More photos:
The last time I took Amtrak was from Ann Arbor to Chicago, a 230 mile trip. It took me 6 hours, twice as long as the Guangzhou-Wuhan trip for 1/3rd the distance and at the same ticket price. For perspective, that's the equivalent of driving down the Interstate at 60mph versus biking at 10mph. This is damn shameful.