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high speed rail go brrr
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Giant infrastructure projects are a weakness of democracies. It's tough to get everyone to agree and pay for huge projects that take long term vision and planning.
Or you could call it a strength because it's stable and can't be changed too fast by one guy with a short term bad idea.
You can do it through democracies. Taiwan has two sets of high speed rail systems.
Are they expensive to maintain? Absolutely. In fact they bankrupted 2+ companies until the government decided to step in and foot part of the bill. But then again, if the government isn't willing to pay for basic infrastructure, what are taxes for?
(Also as a tangent, the Taiwan high speed rail bentos are to die for. I had it 5+ years back and I still remember it. Super cheap meal in a disposable bamboo lunch box. Usually there are 1-2 choices per day. I had chicken thighs, pickled veggies, steamed pumpkin, and half a marinated tea egg. The bottom half of the lunch box was filled with rice. 10/10 would eat at a busy train station during rush hour again)
I go to China for business fairly often and there is this one area where the government decided a new subway line should be installed, so I watched it get built over several trips. The property owners in the way were, as far as I understand it, booted off the land but compensated. And boom. A year later the subway line was done and hooked up to the rest of the existing subway infrastructure with completed stations, entries/exits, and even retail shops in the stations. It blew my mind.
The city definitely needed the subway line, but I was amazed at the efficiency. In my American home town that idea's been debated for decades and is yet to be finished because at first it was getting voted against and then finally after the public supported and approved it, the NIMBY experience began and it took a decade of land use planning to choose the route. If it actually runs efficiently before the 2020's are finished I'll be impressed.
I see this in Thailand too. Lived in the bay for a decade. There's posters in every bart showing the future and expansion of it. Afaik, none ever happened.
In Bangkok I see a few new stations open every year basically.