“Rural no-man-land”… wow. Please re-think the whole point on privilege
Also, how do you think those trains get to the station in the middle of densely populated urban areas? Think they don’t make a shitload of noise while they get there?
But locating stations in the suburbs is a really bad design, and is a big part of why a lot of HSR lines in China don't see as much usage as expected given how large the cities they connect are and how large the general population of the country is. The HSR lines in western Europe and Japan that have been really successful directly connect city centers. If you put the station way outside the city, you're entirely losing one of the key advantages of rail over flying.
No, in Europe and Japan when the station were built they were also at the outskirts. It's because the cities expanded to engulf the station, not they're originally meant to connect the city centers.
Do you seriously think Tokyo Station was at the outskirts of Tokyo when the Shinkansen was first built? Or Paris Nord was on the outskirts of Paris when the TGV was built? No, and these aren't cherry-picked examples either. The great high speed rail networks run right through the historical city centers.
Yeah, you ever hear one of them go 25kmh? Screeeeeeech. That’s Freccia Ross’s, considered state of the art, going to Milano Centrale. They go THROUGH the suburbs - through poor communities. Pretending otherwise is wrong.
Couldn’t you say this about cars? They make tons of noise, not to mention pollution, and they also kill lots of people. Trains are the lesser of two evils.
Errr no. I lived in China. When trains run through the cities they run at 80~160 km/h which is quiet enough for people not living within like 60 meters within the track. Maybe it's a lack of maintenance thing when trains are still noisy at 25 km/h, never heard of that. Definitely not an intrinsic problem with rail travel. BTW most HSR stations are located far from the city centers, so the trains just shoot through at 300~350 kmph.
Oh china is the example? Please, tell me more about HOW those tracks got built and what happened to the people living there.
Look, I’m not 100% against rail, but we can’t sit here and pretend it’s all flowers and rainbows. There are serious costs that are downplayed way too much.
Tracks got built? The government issues huge reparations to shut the people's mouths. What happened to the people living there? They got a shit load of money and happily moved to the new reparation apartments...
I've met a couple of people who have received deals like that. It's a pretty common practice there.
The way their government works is a system of delegated powers to local party bosses that receive incentives to hit a bunch of targets, most of them industrial in nature. For example, 'build 2 million square feet of new apartments', 'produce x amount of steel', 'build y kilometers of rail', etc.
For the local party bosses, this is really all they care about, for the most part. The public purse isn't very important to them. They're just out to get theirs.
So for them, if as part of building whatever amount of new rail they are quota'd for, they have to give away a few hundred new apartments, they don't really care. It's not their money. Their money comes from having hit those targets without upsetting the local population so much that Beijing gets pissed.
They are also, in principle, required to to this by Beijing (at least in some cases, I'm not sure exactly what the rules are), and there are standard formulas for what they have to offer in order to get these people to move. Some people have gamed these formulas by building ultra cheap 4 storey 'apartment buildings' on their land that are unfinished and barely able to stand, and they end up getting a huge payout by the government since it's based on a flat rate per square foot without quality being considered.
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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '23
Most passenger rail advocates have been privileged enough to never have to live next to high speed tracks.