A day in the life of Fox News

[Dinner]

I'm still trying to figure out why MM thinks it is terrible that a railway hub has several railway lines.

[The Mad Monk]

What makes you say that?

[Dinner]

You were certainly implying that some sort of corruption was occurring.

[Tupac Shakur]

I'm still trying to figure out why MM thinks it is terrible that a railway hub has several railway lines.

It's a poor design for high-speed rail. Viable high-speed rail corridors (like Tokyo-Osaka or Boston-DC) have multiple large urban centers strung along a single line. Having Chicago serve as a hub is a poor way to go about creating a high-speed rail network in the Midwest, as you'll end up building five very expensive lines that service only one or two urban centers each. Urban centers in the Midwest also aren't as populous as those in the Boston-DC corridor, which only compounds the problem.

edit: You should also consider that most Midwestern cities have crappy or non-existent mass transit systems, further reducing the value of high-speed rail.

[Tupac Shakur]

In other news...

China Backtracks on High-Speed Trains

[OneFootInTheGrave]

well slower it is, but at 300 km/hr is not deadly slow... 1500km in 5 hrs, dependable how they organize the line, is good by most of the world standards.

[Tupac Shakur]

I found the ticket prices for the new Beijing-Shanghai line to be the more interesting detail.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

well 1300 km for 63 USD... that looks very cheap to me... I guess if they have enough middle class people to use the train, they will be packed... from 10mil+ city to another of the same size... there should be plenty of customers who can pay

clearly the rural Chinese are not yet at the stage to go out on such train trips for tourist purposes...

For comparison London- Paris is about 70£ ~ 110 USD for 450km... so in total Chinese still pay about 5x less per km than Europeans...

[Tupac Shakur]

I guess if they have enough middle class people to use the train, they will be packed... from 10mil+ city to another of the same size... there should be plenty of customers who can pay

Yes, that's true. The potential problem comes when you start expanding the system to smaller, less affluent cities. Is the middle class in China large enough and geographically dispersed enough to support a high-speed rail network that's planned to reach 25,000 km by 2015?

[Dinner]

In other news...

China Backtracks on High-Speed Trains

They're taking a logical path which, incidentally, I advocated a page back. It seems no one wants those $350 sleeper cars for a 2-4 hour trip and instead everyone is opting for the cheap $9 seat ticket so the Chinese Railway folks are eliminating the stupid sleeper cars and replacing them with more of the cheap seats which actually sell. Of course, that means an over all reduction in revenue so they're cutting costs by reducing speed so that cheaper trains can be used. Again, common sense. I imagine the charges of political corruption in hiring are also hurting them but even so they are continuing to expand their HSR network at an amazing pace albeit a slightly slower pace then previously forecasted but still at an amazing pace and faster then anyone else in the world.

[Tupac Shakur]

Did you not read the article? The cheapest ticket is $63.

[Dinner]

I found the ticket prices for the new Beijing-Shanghai line to be the more interesting detail.

$63 sounds like a bargain to my ears but the author is being rather retarded when he talks about monthly average income of Chinese workers. Those poor average workers from the inland areas won't be using HSR or flying and instead both HSR and airlines will be targeting the 300 million to 400 million middle class to upper class Chinese who mostly live in the coastal areas serviced by HSR. Who cares what the "average worker's salary" is in China if that's not the target demographic? They might as well complain that the average worker can't afford to buy a car yet some how more cars are sold in China then in any other country because the car companies are targeting the well heeled who have money not the average peasant who makes next to nothing; there are literally more middle and upper class people in China then there are total people in the US so the target demographic is both huge and wealthy enough to afford the service which is why HSR trains in China are packed.

[Dinner]

Did you not read the article? The cheapest ticket is $63.

The $350 & $9 price comes from The Economist article you linked to earlier but was for a different line. Either way the problem is still the same; no one wants expensive sleeper cabins but the 1st class and 2nd class tickets are selling like hot cakes so they're ditching the sleeper cabins and putting in more 1st & 2nd class seats.

[Tupac Shakur]

$63 sounds like a bargain to my ears

You aren't from a developing country, despite the fact that California has the credit rating of one...

[Dinner]

Read the rest of the post, sweet cheeks.