This isn't true. High speed rail is alive and well in Europe. Geography, politics and history are all significant factors that you can't explain so easily.
> the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless
Highly speculative. Nothing beats rail for capacity to move a lot of people around quickly.
> So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do
Quite the opposite.
The alternative to not continuing to build up rail is that people start not making trips within China due to the difficulty. (Obvious grandstanding projects like HSR to Urumqi and Lhasa not included.)
An electric airliner is still unattainable. Synthesizing jet fuel using electricity is of course possible, but must be massively less efficient than using that electricity directly in electric motors with efficiency > 0.95 and recuperative braking.
The carbon footprint of building the railway, likely with massive amounts of concrete to use to support the rails, and the steel for the rails (to say nothing of maglev infrastructure) — that's going to be huge. Building a pair of airports should be much less expensive.
I could see it for a 13 hour flight, maybe. Train tracks don't cross the Pacific, though.
Canada Hockey Place (aka Rogers Arena): Vancouver Canucks NHL team home stadium and concerts. Cypress Mountain: Very popular local mountain for ski/board and snowshoeing. Pacific Coliseum: Used for PNE, concerts, and events. Richmond Olympic Oval: Popular skating rink UBC Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre: Amateur sports teams and other events. Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic Centre (aka Hillcrest Centre): Now used as a rec center. Whistler Creekside (aka Whistler Blackcomb): The go-to location for ski/boarding nearby. Whistler Olympic Park: Unsure. Whistler Sliding Centre: Unsure.
Vancouver seems like an exception though. Canada is a wealthy country where the average person is likely to participate in sports (skating, hockey, skiing) that facilities were built for.
Also they didn't have to build new ski resorts, since the area already had some of the best ski resorts in the world.
It's a very different scenario in a country where people have far less discretionary income to spend on sporting venues.
It makes a lot more sense to have a self driving car drive you to the high speed rail station, and then drive you from the train station to your final destination. Self driving cars don't run at 160+ mph, but high speed rail does.
Yes, the 'bygone days' of maglev trains. I don't know if you've ever travelled in Japan or China but the convenience and comfort of high speed rail easily surpasses flying. And in many cases, so does the speed.
In most normal countries, rail is critical transport infrastructure. It's not a conspiracy.
The benefits of rail over air are absolutely endless. And I haven't even mentioned the lower carbon footprint of electric rail (you can make electricity from renewable sources. Can't make jet fuel).
This isn't true BTW. Biofuels are made by pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
I've been on vacation in China in 2015. I preferred the high speed train over the standard delay of one or two hours because of airspace traffic congestion.
That's a problem that will be replicated exactly for boarding a train destined to travel at 278m/s.
The consequences for a major security failure on a high speed train are, if anything, more dire than those for even a very large passenger aircraft. An 800,000kg barely-subsonic chain of rigid torpedoes barreling through dense population centres is serious business.
Yes, it is extremely bad when 60-100 ton railcars are being thrown around like toys, at nearly the speed (about 30m/s slower than most .45 ACP) some handguns fire bullets.
*as you can with a _plane_
Setting aside hijacking, which would not be the mechanism for a train attack anyway, the more likely attack on an airplane is suicidal self destruction at this point I would think, with all the new mechanisms in place.
If TSA is this silly with planes, given the relative lack of attractive plans open to attackers now, what makes you think they won't get even sillier with trains than they already have.
As for hitting a specific building, that depends: does your high speed rail line pass near any attractive targets? If the train is 800,000kg (not unreasonable I think?) and is travelling at the rated 280m/s or thereabouts, that's about 31GJ (please check my math) or 7.5 ton TNT equivalent of sheer momentum that can be convinced to continue travelling in an undesirable direction.
Seems like it may be a bit of a risk, at least enough that somebody could be convinced to thoroughly screen passengers.
Passenger railways make sense in places where one metropolis is close to another, and to yet another, etc, with suburbs commuting to these cities, too. This is what you see in Europe like Germany / Netherlands / France, this is what you see in central Japan, this is what you see in coastal China; all these places have very high population density, It works to an extent in US Northeast. All these places have dense and working passenger railways.
But they are a major investment that needs to be repaid, so they need a lot of use. I don't think I'd pay twice as much to get from NYC to Philadelphia twice as fast (say, 45 minutes instead of 90-100), and even 4 times as fast (say, 20 minutes). It would cost comparable to hiring an small airplane already, because there's no such a mass daily ridership. And most places in the US are much lower density. Airplanes are more economical over large sparse spaces.
Fully autonomous self driving cars are decades away[0] - assuming 15-20 years that about 20% of one's lifetime, developing rail is only a few years effort.
I do not understand how electric cars would doom rail.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.in/transportation/cars/experts-s...
Electric is also giving ferryboat transit a new lease on life in terms of energy cost/emissions impact. The SF area fleets have ordered a few electrics already - and they've been expanding service, adding new terminals. It's a return to an older model for regional transit and it has plenty of upsides, with the big caveat of needing a viable coastline.
Between those two, I think you have the model for a lot of future transit infrastructure. Regardless I would also not claim rail is "doomed".
And it has the problem of a massive carbon footprint to go along with it. If we are serious about combatting climate change, we need to find ways to move as people with as much throughput and convenience as airplanes today without burning as much fossil fuel.
Given that electric commercial flight is a way off, high speed electric trains are an existing technology to achieve that.
Presumably that's even truer in China (where 'Party' is capitalized), but at least they're getting a high-speed rail out of the deal.
The elected and appointed officials of both parties serve their parties first. The party is more important than any one elected official and certainly more important than the voters.
high speed rail is romanticism from bygone days when rail was the only alternative to long distance travel. air travel pretty much superseded it and is doing so all over the world. the advent of self driving and electric cars will doom them regardless. In an authoritarian state like China the state can tell people were to live which makes it far easier to put services where those people are. Let alone the one item ignored is that much of the population does not travel long distance and that holds true for many countries. So rail is more of a benefit for the well to do and it makes a great jobs program and political payday as well