Chinese airspace is already incredibly congested and unreliable. They just had to build a new 100-million capacity airport for Beijing because of a lack of capacity at the existing airport.

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.)

Rail yes, highspeed rail maybe not. Whether china has the market and will to sustain widespread 1000kph rail is untested.

China has about 30000km of highspeed rail. Pretty sure that counts as widespread. Sure, it's going at a leisurely 250–350km/h, not the 600-1000km/h from the article. But I don't think anyone claims that each train has to go 1000km/h from now on.

6h vs 18h for a trip are two different universes. Sleeper trains are cool and all but a shorter ride is better.

It is time but also energy. At 1000kph a train (at sea level) has massively more drag than an a380 at altitude. Even on electric, these things may have a greater carbon and financial cost than proponants want to admit.

An electric train can have near-zero carbon footprint, because electricity can be generated from nuclear fuel, sunlight, wind.

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.

Gonna have to ask you for a cite on that one. Climbing costs energy, as does lift. Piston engines and electric both get better mileage than turbines.

I could see it for a 13 hour flight, maybe. Train tracks don't cross the Pacific, though.

No way. You can't even compare this to US car culture. A combustion engine for every single individual emits way more carbon.

Nearly every country’s Olympic venues fall into disuse. That’s one reason why the Olympics are probably best held in the US or UK or France, etc. where countries already have the resources. When countries like Greece or China built these resources they basically went into disuse immediately after. Even the Olympic village built in Atlanta cost more to refurbish than it would hlikely have taken to build from scratch, because these things are built in tight deadlines, and only really need to last about 2 weeks, so all sorts of shortcuts which make them unviable for non olympics use end up being taken to get them done by the deadline.

China's olympic venue isn't the most fair example, though. A handful of countries have let theirs fall to waste not long after the fact.

That's strange, because the olympic stadiums are perfectly fine, holding concerts, sport events and the likely routinely. I wonder where people got the idea that Beijing Olympic Stadiums are dilapidated, it's more like the exact opposite.

Olympics are, and always have been, PR projects. I can't think of any country that actually uses its Olympic infrastructure adequately.

All of the venues used for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games are used extensively, the only two I don't personally know if they are used extensively are the Whistler Sliding Centre, and the Whistler Olympic Park.

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.

> All of the venues used for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games are used extensively

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.

Olympic venues are almost always underutilised after the games.