85
High-speed rail construction since 2008
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
85 points (96.7% liked)
Fuck Cars
13038 readers
289 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This chart is a good example of what happens when transport infrastructure is judged through a purely economic lens versus what happens when affordable travel is seen as a necessary feature of a civilised society. (Not to mention the jobs created and the carbon saved.)
Yup, the Chinese first built a metro line and then let the area develop, and even Europe is now doing the same (Letňany and Západní brána in the two biggest Czech cities). It avoids demolitions since there is still clear space for cut-and-cover tunnel construction.
If you think about it that's how people have founded new towns for most of history. They didn't go somewhere for a "job" or "vacation." It was simply because getting there wasn't that hard. See every town on a river, in a valley, or near the ocean
I would disagree, while I do not believe that public transportation needs to be self-sustaining at all; they should be built/deployed at a capacity as its needed in order of minimizing waste
If a train line is not profitable, its not used
How do you feel about rural roads? Should we not build them unless we can make them profitable?
Unironically what a bunch of red states have been doing, while blaming rural decline on large liberal municipalities.
Highly-used roads are even less profitable since they need expensive repairs much more often.
To your point, though, the idea that every service has to make a profit is most of what's wrong with me modern society.
The very approach to calculating "profit" is backwards.
We're not measuring the economic value ad of the lane of transit. We're measuring the margin between cost of the lane and the immediate rent produced.
Concepts like "hours lost in transit" or "physical harm from accidents" goes entirely out the window. Negative externalities are never measured by capitalist economics.
Not sure that's the same. Dumping a bunch of gravel is far cheaper and less wasteful than a rail line.
Edit: I will add that I don't agree that profitability should be the foremost consideration when it comes to building public infrastructure.
If rural roads were a high cost investment meant to transport very large crowds and very large amounts of cargo to a place lacking such needs? And if we had a much cheaper alternative capable of running vehicles meant of transporting smaller crowds and small amounts of cargo? Then yea, we should not build those rural roads
Peak car/capitalist brain. You gonna hold roads to the same standard?
1 Yes, I would hold high roads as they are comperatively a more expensive investment meant for a larger volume of transportation.
2 China is state capitalist, but for its dictatorial nature there is no accountability so there is no after effect of such a colossal fuckup
Any investment or possible "profit" is lost as soon as a road needs repairs. And high-use roads need repairs waaaaay more often and are a lot more expensive than maintaining a rail system.
Will not repeat myself, please read the comment you commented under
I think you have that backward, even accepting the idea that profitability is an important metric. If a rail line is not used it is not profitable.
Which part of the
is misunderstandable? I used profitibility as a metric of usage as trains, especially high speed ones meant to transport a fuck ton of people; which I also wrote down
Building at capacity might not be the most efficient solution. First, towns grow. Second, China keeps costs down by standardisation (the Chinese HSR system has, if I remember correctly, 3 models of trains and two standards of track). And third, China is vulnerable to earthquakes and floods. So having alternative routes is useful.
The issue specifically is that there is no population centres in which these unprofitable lines run through
And no, government don’t and should burn thousands billions; and hundreds of millions in upkeep every year because what if maybe urbanization stops and people for whatever reason move back to the countryside