John Atkin picked this up off his iPad: Chinese High-Speed Trains Leave Airports in Their Wake – another demonstration of how quickly North America is, by comparison, becoming Third World.
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You contradict yourself there: show me a Chinese company creating future-products like iPads. The Chinese are great at buying other people’s ideas; the Americans are too embarrassed to, so flounder.
(Vancouver also appears to be embarrassed to use foreign ideas. Witness the “innovative” two-way bikelane, that confuses the hell out of any cyclists and drivers that want to turn onto or off it.)
Question – how many Chinese people can afford to take the highspeed train?
It is fine to say – look at how many high speed trains/metro lines etc. China is building – but to add on the tag line of admiration for it implies that you like the structure of their society. Let us admire Europe, rather than a murderous oligarchy that can command an entire societies resources (including labour) in pursuit of a goal.
Put another way, when/if BC builds Site C, should they deal with the local population the way China did with Three Gorges? We complain that Gateway was rammed down our throats … compare that process to the way it is when Shanghai wants to add a metro line.
@Chris B
Well then, just look to Spain, who started their high speed rail network after they became a democracy. The success of the network there has been similar to that experienced in China. Spain is also massively expanding their Metro and LRT systems.
We are way behind Europe, China and even South Africa, whose line was built by a Canadian company. We are even behind the US in high speed rail.
If everyone starts building high speed rail, then we’ll all be third world soon enough — or more specifically, we’ll all be under water, literally speaking.
It might not be economically feasible in Canada, specifically in BC, though. From my understanding, high speed rail would require a whole separate set of tracks that’s straight (well, I meant a large curve radius at least) and doesn’t intersect any street at grade (read: many viaducts/tunnels). Not to mention the difficulty of engineering large amount of tunnels in the Rockies to keep the requirement of “kind of straight tracks.”
US’s high speed rail isn’t really high speed, as it averages at 90 km/h due to having to cross certain areas at low speed.
Plus, North America is not China; there is bound to be industries lobbying against it and NIMBYists shooting the project down while the cost balloons.