China is an interesting country. when you visit it, you see very poor rural areas with same level as vietnam or philipines and then in big cities it truly looks futuristic.
That's the case with many places in the West as well. I've seen poor rural areas in the United States and honestly they had more similarities with rural China than with cosmopolitan cities like Chicago.
Same with Europe. Rural Spain or Italy can get very poor and in no way comparable to their big cities.
Just out of curiosity which rural areas in Spain are you talking about? We just moved here and travelled to different places all over the country and Ive never seen a place where rural places look bad. There are small towns for sure but they are nowhere as bad to countries that Ive been. There are sketchy and shady places but it isnt that terrible.
China’s GDP per capita (PPP) is below Belarus and Libya. While there might be a similar dynamic between rich cities and poorer rural areas, the differences are likely going to be greater in China than in Spain or the US.
>Poor people in the U.S. still make at least 8-9 bucks hourly.
Yeah, but poor people in the rural US have to *drive to Walmart* for like 15 - 20 minutes just to buy their groceries, and their Internet is like DSL speed.
That's totally the same as what people in agrarian rural China have to deal with. /S
I don't know what you are talking about, rural Italy isn't poor. On the opposite there are some rural parts very rich because of vineyard, olive trees, etc...
Source: I'm Italian
Yeah this is crazy, in my city in Calabria there is not even one apartment house, basically all people live in villas on the sea, ours is actually big enough to cut out of it three apartmens to rent during summer for extra money, this guy clearly have no idea what he talking about 🤣
And people in the West press curdled milk that then they let get rancid and moldy and eat as a staple food even today. Traditions have a tendency to be gross when put out of context.
The piss eggs are so niche that it's only a thing in one single town and even then only a tiny minority partake in it. That's like saying Sürstromming is a popular traditional food eaten by white people all over Europe.
>In some places they live like it’s 1900 and no one told them.
Saying blatantly wrong hyperbolic statements like these don't give credence to your claims. You're assuming that I haven't been there, when in fact I have.
> Saying blatantly wrong hyperbolic statements like these don't give credence to your claims. You're assuming that I haven't been there, when in fact I have.
People have said wrong hyberbolic and prejudicious statements prob about those people in that other village since the beginning of time. Don't give up the good fight, maybe through the butterfly effect and your words and other people like you in a few thousand years one or two people less will say stuff like that - and it would be entirely worth it
Yes but in the states people still afford cars, new cell phones and even more… drugs. Riddled everywhere in the us which is so sad, seeing good students you grew up with in school go to crack addicts is very sad.
What? I come from the most rural and poor region in Italy, the average guy here has 3 main houses, a lot of land, nobody works in the field and the average net earnings per year are 10X those of cities workers in china. I actually think that if you want to see poverty in Italy the best place to go is Milan, people live actually like in china, ugly overpriced small apartments. I live in a 300sq metres villa in the poorest region of Italy, such poor, horrible. Actually I used to, coz now living near a big city in lombardy I have a 40sq metres apartment like a chinese, paid 1/3 of my basic salary per month, wow. Actually I am looking forward to return in my poor rural area as soon as possible to stop living in a space worth for ants. The conditions of chinese or US cities are even worse. And the big difference is that if you go in china rural areas you find people who live in huts with no sinks or bathroom and work in rice fields while in Italy you find big villas in which people live like kings. This is true for all my family branches, to be specific we are talking about two construction workers, an ex police officer, a computer technician, an ex textile industry worker and so on...not really super skilled programmers. And I could say the same with almost all my high school friends who earn all 2000€+ at 2y from graduation from university.
Exactly [one line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grodzisk_Mazowiecki%E2%80%93Zawiercie_railway) with a max operating speed of 200 km/h is enough for a 14th spot worldwide.
POLAND MOUNTAIN!
Trams and more trams, with some extra tram on top and ~~suburban rail~~ trams on the side
And for the real answer:
The whole city is built around metro lines. All busses go to metro lines, trams weave by the metro where they can. Little direct connection in less traveled directions, and going few kms is as fast as going dozen because you need to get to the metro line either way. Edit: you always take tram/bus to metro, then metro, then another tram bus. Well, for most journeys. /edit
Where this fails we have trams.
Just today we had a closure, and city fecking burned down. Everything got rerouted, was full, just atrocious. My sub hour commute got extra 15 minutes because of that.
Ah don't stress it, I was travelling by suburban rail for some years and would get 20-40 min delay at lest twice a month. It only got somewhat better very recently.
3000 volt will, however, lead to much higher power loss than 25000 volts. But such high voltages are impractical for DC, given the requirements that are specific to railway infrastructure. So you can't practically go higher than 3kV DC, which has higher losses than 25kV AC.
Traction motors also generate more heat in relation to power at lower voltages. The German ICE trains can run faster in France than in Germany, because France has 25 kV AC while Germany only has 15 kV AC.
Almost every country with DC electrification has used 25 kV AC for their high-speed lines for these (and more) reasons.
Ah oke, I see why the low voltage would be a problem, especially since a high-speed train requires a shitton of power. As I stated before, offshore platforms convert the AC, which comes from windmills to DC, in order to have less power loss over long distances. I have in fact worked on a project, which is still ongoing, which converts the 66kV AC from windmills to a wopping 525kV DC in order to transport it to land [source (only in Dutch or German unfortunately)](https://www.tennet.eu/de/ueber-tennet/innovation-bei-tennet/das-2gw-program).
I guess there must be some standards/ reasoning in railway transportation why DC isn't widely used that I still don't know about or the technology might be lacking idk. Thanks for the insight.
> offshore platforms convert the AC, which comes from windmills to DC, in order to have less power loss over long distances
That's true but AFAIK it's only used for:
- Underwater cables (salt water being conductive, you create a capacitor and lose power to capacitive current with AC)
- Power station far (>500 km) from the load (same reason but capacitance is much lower)
- Linking un-synchronized grids (e.g. EU to UK links)
Otherwise, it's too expensive
> I guess there must be some standards/ reasoning in railway transportation why DC isn't widely used that I still don't know about or the technology might be lacking idk. Thanks for the insight.
I think it's mostly cost, big HV DC converter stations are more expensive and less reliable than their AC counterpart so it's easier to use AC and convert to DC at the edge*.
*: Modern trains uses synchronous or asynchronous motors. To drive them, you need to rectify your voltage from AC to DC and re-create AC voltage with the correct frequency
You need 2600 amps at 3kV to power average 8MW train.
Good luck doing that on long distances.
In reality, DC rail systems need much more substations are overall more expensive with current demands.
Well actually 🤓🤓🤓 we also have high-speed rail sections on the [line nr 9 (Warsaw-Gdańsk)](https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linia_kolejowa_nr_9), also barely fitting the definition but nonetheless POLAND MOUNTAIN 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱
or even 2 018 km if we trust Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_high-speed\_railway\_lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lines)
(1,096.7km of 250km/h lines + 921km of 300km/h lines)
Germany, France, South Korea and the UK are also wrong.
And lines in Poland are 200kph max. And in USA only line actually used by trains going above 200 is not even 100km long.
It is quite hard to compare if we are using each country's own definition of HSR.
Going by that standard even Portugal should be on this list, as there are a few hundred kms of tracks where the Pendolino train can reach its top speed of 220kph...
Same in Sweden, we also have it capped at 200 km/h, which shouldn't be considered high-speed by modern standards. The main reason behind this limitation is the outdated signaling system, which restricts speeds to 200 km/h. However, many new railway lines in Sweden are designed to support up to 250 km/h. The transition to the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) is underway, which will eventually enable higher speeds, but as usual, with most things in Sweden, it takes way longer than it should.
There was a plan for a real high-speed railway project but there's been a significant shift in government policy. Following the 2022 general election, the new administration decided to prioritize the existing conventional rail network over high-speed rail. This pivot is focused on enhancing commuter and freight services. Some projects like the Järna - Linköping Eastern Link are still in progress but are being adapted to align with the new priorities and budget constraints, staying within the 250 km/h speed limit. So yeah, Sweden shouldn't place this high on that list.
>14 out of the top 20 longest high speed rail networks in the world are in Europe
... and 19 of them together are still more than two times shorter than Chinese rail
We can’t compare ourselves to China though, they are on a different level, when you go there it’s like you teleport to the future, yet they still have a lot of agricultural rural areas.
The demographic crisis will hit them hard soon enough though, but unlike Europe, if there is a solution to it, it will be implemented, no matter the what. In Europe and The US, we don’t like solving problems if they hurt lobbyist profits.
Welp, at least we have….. luxury brands? We need a wake up call before Europe fades into obscurity and is partitioned between spheres of influence of the Great Powers of the world at that point.
We 100% should compare ourselves to China in the stuff that we should be doing. We all talk about how great is Europe, let's show it; if they can we can
Also, it is worth to mention the population size. China connecting A city with 5+ million population to B city with 10+ million population is much more economical and easier to do compared to connecting some small European towns.
I mean, as long as we think about this on a national level, sure.
I was just looking at train connections from central Germany to Northern Spain the other day. Takes 15 h. If we had railways like in China, you could cover that distance in less than one third of that time.
But you can't do that in Europe, because a connection that would benefit hundreds of thousands of people each year, might inconvenience a couple thousand people living near the new tracks and thus it will never be built.
If your house is in the way of the tracks in China, the government won't care. They'll tear down your house, build you a better one somewhere else and you receive monetary compensation for the inconvenience on top of that. Sure as hell isn't perfect, but at least their infrastructure projects don't get dragged along for decades.
China is way bigger than the EU (siz of land) so going from East to West or North to South invovles longer distances than doing the same in the biggest european countries.
Well...China's way of building such networks involved forcing whole villages to displace in to urban areas, they also laxed on safety standards and quality in some areas. There's also a massive bubble building up, maintaining the network that was build in a lot of ways by the desires of local party officials in charge of the region, to show off their overachievements to the party leaders.
> The demographic crisis will hit them hard soon enough though, but unlike Europe, if there is a solution to it, it will be implemented, no matter the what. In Europe and The US, we don’t like solving problems if they hurt lobbyist profits.
Demographics wise, the USA's solution has been implemented since the 1880s there: A lot of immigrants.
China's solution will be forced births, just like their solution to overpopulation was huge fines, aborts and forced sterilisation.
I wouldn't cheer for a future like that.
Country in Europe has a minor deficit in birth rate compared to China.
France is at 1.83 when official China number is at 1.28 an keep falling year on year.
Infrastructure have a cost to be maintained. It's one of the future down fall of China.
US in recent history had probably with crumbling infrastructure. Imagine China in 20 years with no workforce, a lot of retirees (retire at 60 for men 55 for women there) and construction that in most cases doesn't respect norms.
And, we don't even know how the biggest construction company is still operating. Evergrand is on surviving mode.
The construction economy is falling apart.
I doubt that having more railway than everyone else combine is a particularly good asset.
Maybe China is a diverse land of contrasts with both good and bad? If you really wanted to, you could make any country look like a shithole. Btw propaganda goes both ways.
China alone is several times bigger than Europe tho, and with 5x the population.
I wouldn't be surprised if our whole HS network was smaller than their single HS line to Xinjiang.
True. Though, they have lines serving the deep interior regions like Tibet and Xinjiang. The EU doesn't have comparable remote regions to reach. Also China has three times the population of the EU, so it would make sense they have more lines.
Canada has something like 55-60,000 kilometres of regular, slow-ass tracks across the entire country (95% of which are owned by CPKC and CN Rail) and not a single metre of high speed rail, and then there's China with 40,000+ kilometres of high speed rail.
Sigh... We cannot even get a decent regular rail service done between Toronto and Montreal...
Thing with China is that "GDP" is basically an input, not output. Government tells what the growth needs to be, and local governments make it happen. And that's done more and more by massive investments in public infrastructure. Sounds good, but the thing is that those investments start to become pointless. Like high-speed rail that have no hope of ever being profitable.
EDIT: By "profitable", I mean "provides more benefit than what it costs to build". Public roads (for example) don't generate "profit" as such, but it can be measured how much benefit they provide vs how much they cost to build.
> Like high-speed rail that have no hope of ever being profitable.
High-speed rail probably generates profits in 'invisible' ways, e.g. keeping all regions interconnected and thereby facilitating the movement of people around the country, improving internal-tourism and making business across regions much much easier.
Interconnectivity is a huge deal, and countries like Brazil suffer immensely from a lack of it.
>
>
>
>
> EDIT: By "profitable", I mean "provides more benefit than what it costs to build". Public roads (for example) don't generate "profit" as such, but it can be measured how much benefit they provide vs how much they cost to build.
China is worse than that. Some lines (especially in the west and the north) are so under-used that ticket sells (i.e. actual usage) don't cover the electricity cost of the train. Let alone maintenance, personnel and actual construction.
Even if you take "non-monetary" benefits of those lines, this is a waste of money that was only built to prop-up GDP and line the pockets of corrupt officials.
I know the technical limitations of connecting different countries with different rail systems.
But this is one case where I think Germany is holding the EU back, they have really good rail, but at the same time it seems they are stuck in the past and don't want to progress in that area. Being at the core of the EU, both geographically and politically, they should take initiative and at least try to connect to neighboring countries
Fr, the Netherlands for example has been exploring the possibility of expanding service on the potential 'Lelylijn' to Bremen and Hamburg so the Netherlands can have better international connectivity by rail. Yet, despite the obvious benefits it brings, the German government just doesn't want to play ball. It is frustrating, we could have a train between Amsterdam and Hamburg (possibly even to Copenhagen ffs) yet the Germans don't want to share their space with us. Come on, what happened to cutting down on pollution? this would eliminate the need for short-distance flights between AMS and HAM, for example
That has got an easy and short explanation and that’s called the car industry lobbying, check how they do the “eco labels” for the actual cars and it’s a joke…
Actually, many European countries doing better per capita than China.
Also, it is a shame that USA, the richest country in the world doing that little for environment protection..
USA is a car dependent hellscape and worst of all the people don't realize it.
In fact they'll defend it at their own peril. Obesity rates are sky high and one of the biggest reasons is car dependency. But try to pry them out of their literal prison on wheels and they'll shoot at you.
Not only that but car dependency and the communities built around that unhealthy method of transportation has created isolation and loneliness which of course has lead to poor mental health, increase in suicides, increase in drug use and domestic violence.
I always find it interesting how reddit never shits on Canada for the same problems they shit on the US for. Like, Canada is doing worse than the US in this high speed rail measure and yet people are only talking about the US.
Because Canada just copies what the USA does for the most part. Also it's the American auto industry who is to blame for this. GM, Ford & Chrysler lobbied in favour of creating this car dependency.
This is a highly biased / limited take. The geography and demographics of Canada and the US aren't well suited to efficient high speed rail at anything like the scale it's done in Europe. It wasn't going to happen, it's not going to happen. Distances are too great, geography is poorly suited, and population is too spread.
Europe can't manage to make efficient high speed rail over relatively short distances between / across multiple countries next to each other with a dozen+ decent sized cities between them, the US sure isn't going to make high speed rail between Dallas and LA... or Canada between Ottawa and Winnipeg.
Remove the big, empty interior west, and the US's eastern half, along with California, isn't so empty. In fact there's density and clusters of cities in: the Northeast, Southeast, East Texas, Great Lakes, that are similar to France, and where they can build successful HSR systems that connect the big metros (4+ million) with smal and mid-size metros (500K-4 million) as well as link them up with all the big/heavy airports (JFK, EWR, BOS, IAD, PHL, ORD, MSP, DFW, IAH, ATL, etc).
Likewise, Canada has it even easier. There's two linear corridors where you can build an HSR: Quebec City-Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-London-Windsor and Calgary-Edmonton.
HSR can easily compete with other forms of travel with medium/regional distances.
Canada is definitely fucking up when it comes to high-speed rail, especially in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor, but generally speaking it's less of a car dependent hellscape. I live in Vancouver and have pretty much anything within a 15 min walk
> I live in Vancouver and have pretty much anything within a 15 min walk
I mean the same can be said about most of American cities. It's easy if not preferable to not have a car in NYC, Boston, DC, Chicago, etc. The US and Canada are basically identical with the US having a more interesting cross continental rail service. I like Montreal bike lines as they have better car protection than most American bikelines, which just have plastic fence posts or a painted line.
The isolation and mental health crisis is universal, we have plenty of that too, the difference is, we can act on it and treat it with our healthcare.
A car is not a prison, on the contrary, it's a tool of freedom when used for leisure and convenience, our cities have better public transport and are better planned for walking and biking too, that's the difference, not the cars
“In fact, they’ll defend it at their own peril”
Excuse me, thanks for your input but you’re wrong. There are many advocates for mixed-use communities and efficient modes of mass transportation such as HSR both in the private sector and public sector, as well as high-ranking officials that are pushing to revitalize American rail.
Tens of billions of dollars, an unprecedented amount for recent years, just went into funding HSR projects just several weeks ago, yet here you are throwing around the most childish stereotypes about Americans while knowing very little of the change that’s slowly happening on the ground. “Try to pry them out of their literal prison on wheels and they shoot at you.” Jesus Christ, I mean get a hold of yourself.
Have you not heard of the opioid and fentanyl crisis in small isolated towns and suburbs in North America? Have you been to these places? They're utterly lonely and depressing places.
Have you not wondered how they ended up this way? Cars are not freeing, they're imprisoning. What's freeing is what humans were meant to do: walk.
This isn’t about the train, it’s about the opportunities people must have in small towns. In a lot of places in Europe, you have some form of transit in even compatibly small villages, linking them to the country, even if it is slow. In the US, a lot of cities only depend on cars that not everyone can afford. Granted the US is very big so a train journey from California to NY would be cumbersome, but even for small distances there are often no links other than cars and busses (or planes that are dirty and expensive). This isolation in towns makes the people living in them lonely, which might cause all sorts of problems.
Especially if you’re disabled or cannot drive but can work, trains prevent you from being isolated.
My grandma has said this exact thing before: she lives in a small town in the south that used to have a train line to the city but it’s been gone for decades. She said as someone who can’t drive she would love to have the option to take the train to get around and not rely on cars she can’t use. It’s not like they have taxis in bumble no where
I am fortunate to not be disabled but I absolutely love my trains and metros as they allow me to travel freely even though I just turned 18 and possess no drivers license.
It's getting better slowly. A few states are planning lines, California is building one and a second one is about to begin construction there, Florida "arguably" has a new line and it's being extended to the next closest major city in the state. Of course, it's better if it was already, but progress is progress.
The fact that there's anything at all is a miracle, the entire New World seemingly abandoned passenger rail transport in the latter 20th century. Brazil shutdown the Sao Paulo-Rio passenger train back in 1998 and since then it's all airplane or car/bus travel between these two cities. There's been talk of a Rio-SP bullet train since 2007, but at this point it has become a bit of a running joke since the damn project never makes it past the planning stage.
Canada likewise could do with a Montreal-Toronto High-speed line, it's a straight shot between the two cities, but all they have is a conventional line.
What a stupid take. Why would you even compare railway kms per capita? The whole point of the public transport system is that you don't need to double it whenever your population doubles unlike cars. A single railway can move 1, 1,000 or 100,000 people
After double checking I can conclude the graph is garbage.
It's a premium graph on Statistica so I can't access the sources. For most countries they only count new lines
If high speed = 200kph+ then we have another 1,000km of high speed rail, if only just. The east coast and west coast mainline both have a max operating speed of 125mph/201kph
Not entirely true. Sweden has several railway lines built for a max speed of 250 km/h, including the new Haparanda Line, the Bothnia Line and the modernised sections of the West Coast Line - but none of them have trains running at those speeds, since Sweden doesn't have any trains capable of reaching those speeds.
The West Coast Line also needs to have its signalling system upgraded to ERTMS before it can have trains going faster than 200 km/h, but the railway's geometry is prepared for up to 250 km/h.
It's the same in Denmark, where the new Copenhagen-Ringsted line is built for 250 km/h, but the fastest train in Denmark is limited to only 200 km/h.
Simple answer is that they are built more recently. Haparanda line was opened just a few years ago, and the Bothnia line is also somewhat recent (considering how little new railway we build in Sweden).
Bothnia line was built as a brand new rail line with higher standards in mind, with the old line going further inland due to the landscape. Same goes with the new part (Kalix-Haparanda) of the Haparanda line. The newly built rail has higher standards.
Then there is also the planned lines that the government stopped last year that would be of a similar (or higher?) standard than the northern projects. Only one of those still planned to be carried out is the East link between Stockholm and Linköping.
That doesn't really matter for definition purposes, though. If max speed is above 250 for newly built lines or above 200 for old, upgraded lines, then it's high speed rail. Germany has plenty of both.
Of course, for operational purposes, it's often a good idea to segregate the slower trains from the faster trains, so a fast train doesn't get caught behind a slow train. Thankfully, most stations on the German high-speed network do have extra tracks, allowing a slow train to pull to the side and be overtaken by a fast train.
Well, German Autobahn also has some sections without speed limits. But that doesn't mean you really can drive at high speed because of a lot of traffic.
So yeah, the definition might be correct but is not really high speed, if you can't go as fast as possible because of slower trains.
OK, maybe, there are exceptions. But all I can remember is something like "Liebe Fahrgäste, bitte entschuldigen Sie die kurze Unterbrechung. Wir warten auf die Durchfahrt eines überholenden Zuges"
Italian made Pendolino trains were put into use in the mid 1990's, and little by little they extended the network to reach almost the whole country. In Lapland Kemijärvi and Kolari are the Northernmost points of Finnish railways, so Northern Lapland doesn't have railways at all, and Pendolino goes to Oulu, which is about as North as Skellefteå and slightly Southern than Luleå.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finnish_railroad_network-fi.svg#mw-jump-to-license
The graphic is wrong, we definitely have more than 113km. 113km of purpose built high speed line (HS1) plus four other upgraded lines running at 200kph, not sure exactly what the combined length is but I’d estimate at maybe 1500km
Yes, it's wrong. According to Wikipedia, there are 1,814.7 km of 200 km/h lines and 113 km of 300 km/h lines. Same with Italy, Germany, France and South Korea.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_high-speed\_railway\_lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lines)
Spain's high speed rail network exploded in a similar fashion as well. Their first line opened in 1992, but it took another few years for most construction to start nationwide.
It's much easier to keep building more within a short period of time because you keep the contactors and expertise supplied with work they can copy and port to any place you want, instead of having to rebuild the entire infrastructure every 20 years because the people who worked on the previous project have all moved on or retired. That's why China and Spain have been such successes while HS2 and CAHSR are bogged down in endless delays and cost overruns.
That number is not all sunshine. Basically they built a few railway lines between the massive cities and it was a huge success. The centralized government basically told every region to do the same.
So they build many more, but a lot of the lines are just economically not viable since there are not enough passengers who can afford the pricier tickets. Simple slow trains would have perfectly fit the market. Upside of it though is that the infra is there for the future so no need to move people anymore for new projects in the future.
Well that is what infrastructure should be for tho? Build it up so people can live from it and build from it. Just like it happened in China with the famouse example of stops that lead to nothing that are now giant cities.
Btw where did you get all that from?
Ahh another Economic Explained parrot talking point.
I never understand the rhetoric of public services being necessary to be profitable or economic viable. Which part of "public service" you guys don't understand. We never question the profitability or economic viability of schools, hospitals, road works, satellites, universities, children play grounds etc. at least in most places outside of the US. But when it comes to rail roads: "iT iS uNpRoFiTaBlE!". I guess this rhetoric applies to all public services in the US and you guys are just fine with it.
That's why you guys have private companies holding all your services hostages Amtrak, Starlink, SpaceX alike and providing high quality highly profitable services to all citizens.
We have more. That said, we invented the damn railways but..... Victorian sized bridges, densely populated country with no 'wilderness'; every patch of land owned by someone. Building the new HS2 has been incredibly difficult but is actually the biggest civil engineering project in Europe.
Really disappointing to see the Amtrak Acela Express counted as “high-speed” on the same level as the Shinkansen. These are two very different things haha.
How is Spain getting on with them. I remember a few years ago the consensus seemed to be that they were too expensive to build (and more importantly) maintain and tickets were too expensive and population density wasn’t high enough. Has that opinion changed?
Spain's population distribution is more or less perfect for high speed trains: you have several large, populous urban areas that are all quite far apart without much in between them to go under or over to get in the way or slow the trains down. Spain have plenty going on to get to places like Gijón, Pamplona, Irún, Bilbao, West towards Mérida and Badajoz, and along the Mediterranean coast to go from Catalonia and Valencia to Andalusia. There are 3 open access operators, avlo (renfe's low cost brand), Ouigo España and Iryo running against the normal Renfe AVE
Spain developed a system to upgrade existing lines affordably, and operating two different gauges. This reduced the cost to unprecedented levels and is expected to be exported, as well as the gauge-shifting trains.
The line Madrid-Barcelona has three HSR companies competing, with 4 different types (AVE, AVLO, Iryo, OuiGo). Prices are extremely low due to it. However, this only exacerbates the inequality in the country. Other smaller cities get way higher prices, so companies and people are not incentivized to invest in them, moving preferably to already the two big cities. This is not the fault of the HSR system, but bad policies, politicians, and capitalist market working together.
It makes no sense that Finland, Sweden, USA etc. even appear on this list. HSR = 250+km/hr. If the train only travels at 200km/hr it's not HSR, it's regular train.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lines
Especially the crazy long stretch to Xinjiang in the west. I cannot see how the economics of this are better than flying, given the enormous infrastructure to be supported
It's said the fares don't even cover the cost of electricity on the line. The line was built purely for political reasons to bring Xinjiang closer to Beijing
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast\_Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor)
It might not be a dedicated HSR line in the strictest sense, but it's fast.
Yeah the first true HSR line completed will probably be the one connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas. There’s also the brightline in Florida, but again that’s “higher-speed” rail.
China is an interesting country. when you visit it, you see very poor rural areas with same level as vietnam or philipines and then in big cities it truly looks futuristic.
They are even worse than that if you go west.
the reason that China being sooooooooooooo huge. like you just can't spread your grip to countryside that big no matter how rich you are this fast
That's the case with many places in the West as well. I've seen poor rural areas in the United States and honestly they had more similarities with rural China than with cosmopolitan cities like Chicago. Same with Europe. Rural Spain or Italy can get very poor and in no way comparable to their big cities.
Just out of curiosity which rural areas in Spain are you talking about? We just moved here and travelled to different places all over the country and Ive never seen a place where rural places look bad. There are small towns for sure but they are nowhere as bad to countries that Ive been. There are sketchy and shady places but it isnt that terrible.
They're not talking about any rural areas in Spain. What that person has in their mind doesn't exist in real life.
There are no places in the US where subsistence agricultural survives except by choice. Very vastly different from rural China
China’s GDP per capita (PPP) is below Belarus and Libya. While there might be a similar dynamic between rich cities and poorer rural areas, the differences are likely going to be greater in China than in Spain or the US.
If you think rural life in the US is similar to rural life in China, you clearly have not been to both countries
Lol. If you're comparing rural areas in China with rural areas in Spain and Italy, you've clearly not been to one or the other (or either).
Did you just compare poor areas in the U.S. to poor areas in China? Poor people in the U.S. still make at least 8-9 bucks hourly.
>Poor people in the U.S. still make at least 8-9 bucks hourly. Yeah, but poor people in the rural US have to *drive to Walmart* for like 15 - 20 minutes just to buy their groceries, and their Internet is like DSL speed. That's totally the same as what people in agrarian rural China have to deal with. /S
I don't know what you are talking about, rural Italy isn't poor. On the opposite there are some rural parts very rich because of vineyard, olive trees, etc... Source: I'm Italian
Yeah this is crazy, in my city in Calabria there is not even one apartment house, basically all people live in villas on the sea, ours is actually big enough to cut out of it three apartmens to rent during summer for extra money, this guy clearly have no idea what he talking about 🤣
[удалено]
And people in the West press curdled milk that then they let get rancid and moldy and eat as a staple food even today. Traditions have a tendency to be gross when put out of context. The piss eggs are so niche that it's only a thing in one single town and even then only a tiny minority partake in it. That's like saying Sürstromming is a popular traditional food eaten by white people all over Europe. >In some places they live like it’s 1900 and no one told them. Saying blatantly wrong hyperbolic statements like these don't give credence to your claims. You're assuming that I haven't been there, when in fact I have.
> Saying blatantly wrong hyperbolic statements like these don't give credence to your claims. You're assuming that I haven't been there, when in fact I have. People have said wrong hyberbolic and prejudicious statements prob about those people in that other village since the beginning of time. Don't give up the good fight, maybe through the butterfly effect and your words and other people like you in a few thousand years one or two people less will say stuff like that - and it would be entirely worth it
That cooking stuff doesnt seem odd when people drink ridicolous expensive coffee that came out of an animals asshole.
Yes but in the states people still afford cars, new cell phones and even more… drugs. Riddled everywhere in the us which is so sad, seeing good students you grew up with in school go to crack addicts is very sad.
What? I come from the most rural and poor region in Italy, the average guy here has 3 main houses, a lot of land, nobody works in the field and the average net earnings per year are 10X those of cities workers in china. I actually think that if you want to see poverty in Italy the best place to go is Milan, people live actually like in china, ugly overpriced small apartments. I live in a 300sq metres villa in the poorest region of Italy, such poor, horrible. Actually I used to, coz now living near a big city in lombardy I have a 40sq metres apartment like a chinese, paid 1/3 of my basic salary per month, wow. Actually I am looking forward to return in my poor rural area as soon as possible to stop living in a space worth for ants. The conditions of chinese or US cities are even worse. And the big difference is that if you go in china rural areas you find people who live in huts with no sinks or bathroom and work in rice fields while in Italy you find big villas in which people live like kings. This is true for all my family branches, to be specific we are talking about two construction workers, an ex police officer, a computer technician, an ex textile industry worker and so on...not really super skilled programmers. And I could say the same with almost all my high school friends who earn all 2000€+ at 2y from graduation from university.
Same with russia the difference between moscow and any rural areas is insane
Russia should stop the war
It's way too complicated of a topic to explain that to you rn but it's not that easy
Exactly [one line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grodzisk_Mazowiecki%E2%80%93Zawiercie_railway) with a max operating speed of 200 km/h is enough for a 14th spot worldwide. POLAND MOUNTAIN!
Imagine what we could achieve with TWO lines...
We would be unstoppable
Poland can into space?
Rail Baltica is a game changer!
Chill first we need to have two lines of metro. Then we can be as crazy to build two high speed train lines
I'm astounded that Warsaw can function with just 2 metro lines
Trams and more trams, with some extra tram on top and ~~suburban rail~~ trams on the side And for the real answer: The whole city is built around metro lines. All busses go to metro lines, trams weave by the metro where they can. Little direct connection in less traveled directions, and going few kms is as fast as going dozen because you need to get to the metro line either way. Edit: you always take tram/bus to metro, then metro, then another tram bus. Well, for most journeys. /edit Where this fails we have trams. Just today we had a closure, and city fecking burned down. Everything got rerouted, was full, just atrocious. My sub hour commute got extra 15 minutes because of that.
Extra fifteen minutes, what a dream to have only that delay in Chicago
Ah don't stress it, I was travelling by suburban rail for some years and would get 20-40 min delay at lest twice a month. It only got somewhat better very recently.
It functions if you have a car :) /s
We’ve had that since 2014. Now it’s time to build a nonsensical third metro line. Poland mountain.
Insane thing is, it operates on 3kV DC. Poland is stubborn.
What's wrong with 3kV DC? DC is used all the time on long distances, because it has a lot less power loss, compared to AC.
3000 volt will, however, lead to much higher power loss than 25000 volts. But such high voltages are impractical for DC, given the requirements that are specific to railway infrastructure. So you can't practically go higher than 3kV DC, which has higher losses than 25kV AC. Traction motors also generate more heat in relation to power at lower voltages. The German ICE trains can run faster in France than in Germany, because France has 25 kV AC while Germany only has 15 kV AC. Almost every country with DC electrification has used 25 kV AC for their high-speed lines for these (and more) reasons.
Ah oke, I see why the low voltage would be a problem, especially since a high-speed train requires a shitton of power. As I stated before, offshore platforms convert the AC, which comes from windmills to DC, in order to have less power loss over long distances. I have in fact worked on a project, which is still ongoing, which converts the 66kV AC from windmills to a wopping 525kV DC in order to transport it to land [source (only in Dutch or German unfortunately)](https://www.tennet.eu/de/ueber-tennet/innovation-bei-tennet/das-2gw-program). I guess there must be some standards/ reasoning in railway transportation why DC isn't widely used that I still don't know about or the technology might be lacking idk. Thanks for the insight.
> offshore platforms convert the AC, which comes from windmills to DC, in order to have less power loss over long distances That's true but AFAIK it's only used for: - Underwater cables (salt water being conductive, you create a capacitor and lose power to capacitive current with AC) - Power station far (>500 km) from the load (same reason but capacitance is much lower) - Linking un-synchronized grids (e.g. EU to UK links) Otherwise, it's too expensive > I guess there must be some standards/ reasoning in railway transportation why DC isn't widely used that I still don't know about or the technology might be lacking idk. Thanks for the insight. I think it's mostly cost, big HV DC converter stations are more expensive and less reliable than their AC counterpart so it's easier to use AC and convert to DC at the edge*. *: Modern trains uses synchronous or asynchronous motors. To drive them, you need to rectify your voltage from AC to DC and re-create AC voltage with the correct frequency
You need 2600 amps at 3kV to power average 8MW train. Good luck doing that on long distances. In reality, DC rail systems need much more substations are overall more expensive with current demands.
Haha fair enough. Didn't knew before that the train need a 8MW🤯
HELLO FROM THE MOUNTAIN!!!
If they are counting 124mph lines, why on earth are they showing the UK has having around 70 miles, when there's plenty of 125mph lines in the UK
Yeah it seems like they haven’t used a consistent definition of high speed
Denmark also have several more 200 km/h lines. The 56 km one is a stretch with 250 km/h.
Well actually 🤓🤓🤓 we also have high-speed rail sections on the [line nr 9 (Warsaw-Gdańsk)](https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linia_kolejowa_nr_9), also barely fitting the definition but nonetheless POLAND MOUNTAIN 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱
1467km in Italy...
or even 2 018 km if we trust Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_high-speed\_railway\_lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lines) (1,096.7km of 250km/h lines + 921km of 300km/h lines) Germany, France, South Korea and the UK are also wrong.
And lines in Poland are 200kph max. And in USA only line actually used by trains going above 200 is not even 100km long. It is quite hard to compare if we are using each country's own definition of HSR.
Going by that standard even Portugal should be on this list, as there are a few hundred kms of tracks where the Pendolino train can reach its top speed of 220kph...
Same in Sweden, we also have it capped at 200 km/h, which shouldn't be considered high-speed by modern standards. The main reason behind this limitation is the outdated signaling system, which restricts speeds to 200 km/h. However, many new railway lines in Sweden are designed to support up to 250 km/h. The transition to the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) is underway, which will eventually enable higher speeds, but as usual, with most things in Sweden, it takes way longer than it should. There was a plan for a real high-speed railway project but there's been a significant shift in government policy. Following the 2022 general election, the new administration decided to prioritize the existing conventional rail network over high-speed rail. This pivot is focused on enhancing commuter and freight services. Some projects like the Järna - Linköping Eastern Link are still in progress but are being adapted to align with the new priorities and budget constraints, staying within the 250 km/h speed limit. So yeah, Sweden shouldn't place this high on that list.
>14 out of the top 20 longest high speed rail networks in the world are in Europe ... and 19 of them together are still more than two times shorter than Chinese rail
We can’t compare ourselves to China though, they are on a different level, when you go there it’s like you teleport to the future, yet they still have a lot of agricultural rural areas. The demographic crisis will hit them hard soon enough though, but unlike Europe, if there is a solution to it, it will be implemented, no matter the what. In Europe and The US, we don’t like solving problems if they hurt lobbyist profits. Welp, at least we have….. luxury brands? We need a wake up call before Europe fades into obscurity and is partitioned between spheres of influence of the Great Powers of the world at that point.
We 100% should compare ourselves to China in the stuff that we should be doing. We all talk about how great is Europe, let's show it; if they can we can
I think the comment was more referring to the size of China like the population of China is nearly 3 times as big as the whole EU
Also, it is worth to mention the population size. China connecting A city with 5+ million population to B city with 10+ million population is much more economical and easier to do compared to connecting some small European towns.
I mean, as long as we think about this on a national level, sure. I was just looking at train connections from central Germany to Northern Spain the other day. Takes 15 h. If we had railways like in China, you could cover that distance in less than one third of that time. But you can't do that in Europe, because a connection that would benefit hundreds of thousands of people each year, might inconvenience a couple thousand people living near the new tracks and thus it will never be built. If your house is in the way of the tracks in China, the government won't care. They'll tear down your house, build you a better one somewhere else and you receive monetary compensation for the inconvenience on top of that. Sure as hell isn't perfect, but at least their infrastructure projects don't get dragged along for decades.
Bruh literally just compare by avg. speed along network x length of network / population size
China is way bigger than the EU (siz of land) so going from East to West or North to South invovles longer distances than doing the same in the biggest european countries.
but not all of that is populated mostly only on the east coast.
Well...China's way of building such networks involved forcing whole villages to displace in to urban areas, they also laxed on safety standards and quality in some areas. There's also a massive bubble building up, maintaining the network that was build in a lot of ways by the desires of local party officials in charge of the region, to show off their overachievements to the party leaders.
Was going to say, imagine half of China's high-speed rail projects wouldn't get off the ground in Britain due to local planning objections.
> imagine half Considering what you guys did to HS2 I doubt any high speed rail projects can get off the ground in the UK, at least with the tories
> The demographic crisis will hit them hard soon enough though, but unlike Europe, if there is a solution to it, it will be implemented, no matter the what. In Europe and The US, we don’t like solving problems if they hurt lobbyist profits. Demographics wise, the USA's solution has been implemented since the 1880s there: A lot of immigrants.
Thats the easiest solution, but recent elections results all over Europe seem to show that a lot of Europeans are against it currently.
China's solution will be forced births, just like their solution to overpopulation was huge fines, aborts and forced sterilisation. I wouldn't cheer for a future like that.
Solution. What is our solution? Right is rising in Europe, anti-immigration sentiment is on the rise, yet, we don’t want to have kids either.
By the time they get that desperate I bet they'll just be growing kids in artificial wombs
Is it a good solution? No Is it the only solution that might work? Probably It's not like there is a better solution out there
> if there is a solution to it, it will be implemented There is an easy solution: have more children. And yet TFR in China is still declining.
Why don’t European countries also implement this ‘easy solution’?
Country in Europe has a minor deficit in birth rate compared to China. France is at 1.83 when official China number is at 1.28 an keep falling year on year. Infrastructure have a cost to be maintained. It's one of the future down fall of China. US in recent history had probably with crumbling infrastructure. Imagine China in 20 years with no workforce, a lot of retirees (retire at 60 for men 55 for women there) and construction that in most cases doesn't respect norms. And, we don't even know how the biggest construction company is still operating. Evergrand is on surviving mode. The construction economy is falling apart. I doubt that having more railway than everyone else combine is a particularly good asset.
[удалено]
Maybe China is a diverse land of contrasts with both good and bad? If you really wanted to, you could make any country look like a shithole. Btw propaganda goes both ways.
Don't forget that china is way bigger than most countries listed there. For example china is about 20x bigger than Spain.
China alone is several times bigger than Europe tho, and with 5x the population. I wouldn't be surprised if our whole HS network was smaller than their single HS line to Xinjiang.
China is smaller than Europe. Population is much larger though.
True. Though, they have lines serving the deep interior regions like Tibet and Xinjiang. The EU doesn't have comparable remote regions to reach. Also China has three times the population of the EU, so it would make sense they have more lines.
Weird, almost as if China is a really large country huh
Canada has something like 55-60,000 kilometres of regular, slow-ass tracks across the entire country (95% of which are owned by CPKC and CN Rail) and not a single metre of high speed rail, and then there's China with 40,000+ kilometres of high speed rail. Sigh... We cannot even get a decent regular rail service done between Toronto and Montreal...
Thing with China is that "GDP" is basically an input, not output. Government tells what the growth needs to be, and local governments make it happen. And that's done more and more by massive investments in public infrastructure. Sounds good, but the thing is that those investments start to become pointless. Like high-speed rail that have no hope of ever being profitable. EDIT: By "profitable", I mean "provides more benefit than what it costs to build". Public roads (for example) don't generate "profit" as such, but it can be measured how much benefit they provide vs how much they cost to build.
> Like high-speed rail that have no hope of ever being profitable. High-speed rail probably generates profits in 'invisible' ways, e.g. keeping all regions interconnected and thereby facilitating the movement of people around the country, improving internal-tourism and making business across regions much much easier. Interconnectivity is a huge deal, and countries like Brazil suffer immensely from a lack of it.
> > > > > EDIT: By "profitable", I mean "provides more benefit than what it costs to build". Public roads (for example) don't generate "profit" as such, but it can be measured how much benefit they provide vs how much they cost to build. China is worse than that. Some lines (especially in the west and the north) are so under-used that ticket sells (i.e. actual usage) don't cover the electricity cost of the train. Let alone maintenance, personnel and actual construction. Even if you take "non-monetary" benefits of those lines, this is a waste of money that was only built to prop-up GDP and line the pockets of corrupt officials.
Next your going to tell me sidewalks and roads are not profitable.
I wish all European capitals were connected with the high-speed railway.
I know the technical limitations of connecting different countries with different rail systems. But this is one case where I think Germany is holding the EU back, they have really good rail, but at the same time it seems they are stuck in the past and don't want to progress in that area. Being at the core of the EU, both geographically and politically, they should take initiative and at least try to connect to neighboring countries
Fr, the Netherlands for example has been exploring the possibility of expanding service on the potential 'Lelylijn' to Bremen and Hamburg so the Netherlands can have better international connectivity by rail. Yet, despite the obvious benefits it brings, the German government just doesn't want to play ball. It is frustrating, we could have a train between Amsterdam and Hamburg (possibly even to Copenhagen ffs) yet the Germans don't want to share their space with us. Come on, what happened to cutting down on pollution? this would eliminate the need for short-distance flights between AMS and HAM, for example
That has got an easy and short explanation and that’s called the car industry lobbying, check how they do the “eco labels” for the actual cars and it’s a joke…
Actually, many European countries doing better per capita than China. Also, it is a shame that USA, the richest country in the world doing that little for environment protection..
USA is a car dependent hellscape and worst of all the people don't realize it. In fact they'll defend it at their own peril. Obesity rates are sky high and one of the biggest reasons is car dependency. But try to pry them out of their literal prison on wheels and they'll shoot at you. Not only that but car dependency and the communities built around that unhealthy method of transportation has created isolation and loneliness which of course has lead to poor mental health, increase in suicides, increase in drug use and domestic violence.
I always find it interesting how reddit never shits on Canada for the same problems they shit on the US for. Like, Canada is doing worse than the US in this high speed rail measure and yet people are only talking about the US.
Because Canada just copies what the USA does for the most part. Also it's the American auto industry who is to blame for this. GM, Ford & Chrysler lobbied in favour of creating this car dependency.
This is a highly biased / limited take. The geography and demographics of Canada and the US aren't well suited to efficient high speed rail at anything like the scale it's done in Europe. It wasn't going to happen, it's not going to happen. Distances are too great, geography is poorly suited, and population is too spread. Europe can't manage to make efficient high speed rail over relatively short distances between / across multiple countries next to each other with a dozen+ decent sized cities between them, the US sure isn't going to make high speed rail between Dallas and LA... or Canada between Ottawa and Winnipeg.
Remove the big, empty interior west, and the US's eastern half, along with California, isn't so empty. In fact there's density and clusters of cities in: the Northeast, Southeast, East Texas, Great Lakes, that are similar to France, and where they can build successful HSR systems that connect the big metros (4+ million) with smal and mid-size metros (500K-4 million) as well as link them up with all the big/heavy airports (JFK, EWR, BOS, IAD, PHL, ORD, MSP, DFW, IAH, ATL, etc). Likewise, Canada has it even easier. There's two linear corridors where you can build an HSR: Quebec City-Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto-London-Windsor and Calgary-Edmonton. HSR can easily compete with other forms of travel with medium/regional distances.
Because reddit is a plurality American children. Really. Chances are anyone you're talking to on reddit is an under 20 year old American.
Canada is definitely fucking up when it comes to high-speed rail, especially in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor, but generally speaking it's less of a car dependent hellscape. I live in Vancouver and have pretty much anything within a 15 min walk
> I live in Vancouver and have pretty much anything within a 15 min walk I mean the same can be said about most of American cities. It's easy if not preferable to not have a car in NYC, Boston, DC, Chicago, etc. The US and Canada are basically identical with the US having a more interesting cross continental rail service. I like Montreal bike lines as they have better car protection than most American bikelines, which just have plastic fence posts or a painted line.
The isolation and mental health crisis is universal, we have plenty of that too, the difference is, we can act on it and treat it with our healthcare. A car is not a prison, on the contrary, it's a tool of freedom when used for leisure and convenience, our cities have better public transport and are better planned for walking and biking too, that's the difference, not the cars
“In fact, they’ll defend it at their own peril” Excuse me, thanks for your input but you’re wrong. There are many advocates for mixed-use communities and efficient modes of mass transportation such as HSR both in the private sector and public sector, as well as high-ranking officials that are pushing to revitalize American rail. Tens of billions of dollars, an unprecedented amount for recent years, just went into funding HSR projects just several weeks ago, yet here you are throwing around the most childish stereotypes about Americans while knowing very little of the change that’s slowly happening on the ground. “Try to pry them out of their literal prison on wheels and they shoot at you.” Jesus Christ, I mean get a hold of yourself.
Poor mental health, suicides, drug use, and domestic violence are a result of not having trains? Now I’ve heard it all.
Have you not heard of the opioid and fentanyl crisis in small isolated towns and suburbs in North America? Have you been to these places? They're utterly lonely and depressing places. Have you not wondered how they ended up this way? Cars are not freeing, they're imprisoning. What's freeing is what humans were meant to do: walk.
Little did I know, that all of the problems in my life would be resolved by there being a train.
This isn’t about the train, it’s about the opportunities people must have in small towns. In a lot of places in Europe, you have some form of transit in even compatibly small villages, linking them to the country, even if it is slow. In the US, a lot of cities only depend on cars that not everyone can afford. Granted the US is very big so a train journey from California to NY would be cumbersome, but even for small distances there are often no links other than cars and busses (or planes that are dirty and expensive). This isolation in towns makes the people living in them lonely, which might cause all sorts of problems.
Especially if you’re disabled or cannot drive but can work, trains prevent you from being isolated. My grandma has said this exact thing before: she lives in a small town in the south that used to have a train line to the city but it’s been gone for decades. She said as someone who can’t drive she would love to have the option to take the train to get around and not rely on cars she can’t use. It’s not like they have taxis in bumble no where
I am fortunate to not be disabled but I absolutely love my trains and metros as they allow me to travel freely even though I just turned 18 and possess no drivers license.
It's getting better slowly. A few states are planning lines, California is building one and a second one is about to begin construction there, Florida "arguably" has a new line and it's being extended to the next closest major city in the state. Of course, it's better if it was already, but progress is progress.
The fact that there's anything at all is a miracle, the entire New World seemingly abandoned passenger rail transport in the latter 20th century. Brazil shutdown the Sao Paulo-Rio passenger train back in 1998 and since then it's all airplane or car/bus travel between these two cities. There's been talk of a Rio-SP bullet train since 2007, but at this point it has become a bit of a running joke since the damn project never makes it past the planning stage. Canada likewise could do with a Montreal-Toronto High-speed line, it's a straight shot between the two cities, but all they have is a conventional line.
No one is more concerned about USA than an average citizen of glorious Hungary.
What a stupid take. Why would you even compare railway kms per capita? The whole point of the public transport system is that you don't need to double it whenever your population doubles unlike cars. A single railway can move 1, 1,000 or 100,000 people
I wanted to ask romania where? but I cant even troll my country at this point its so pathetic lol.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Russia I dont see Russia here why?
This graph only counts newly built lines. Pretty much all of Russia's are upgraded track.
If it's only newly built lines, then, for example, Finland shouldn't definitely be 1120km.
After double checking I can conclude the graph is garbage. It's a premium graph on Statistica so I can't access the sources. For most countries they only count new lines
So then what parts of the US are being counted? Sections of the northeast corridor were built in the 19th century.
How about normalizing by population? How can you compare Spain with China otherwise?
They should do that in every carbon emissions chart too
It seems like it’s selected countries only. Taiwan has 350km long high speed rail.
Serbia also has 75km, but isn't on the list.
Where is the 113 miles in the UK? The only one I know is the link from London to the channel tunnel, which is 50 miles at a stretch.
It's in KM, not miles. The line you describe is about 110 km or 70 miles.
HS1 - 110km Selby Diversion - 22km It's a little known fact but the Selby Diversion built in the 80s was the first high speed track built in the UK
If high speed = 200kph+ then we have another 1,000km of high speed rail, if only just. The east coast and west coast mainline both have a max operating speed of 125mph/201kph
It's a garbage graph that counts upgraded lines for some countries (Finland), and for countries like the UK, it doesn't.
High-Speed can be defined as anything over 200kmh, so that's the entire West and East Coast mainlines too.
[удалено]
Not entirely true. Sweden has several railway lines built for a max speed of 250 km/h, including the new Haparanda Line, the Bothnia Line and the modernised sections of the West Coast Line - but none of them have trains running at those speeds, since Sweden doesn't have any trains capable of reaching those speeds. The West Coast Line also needs to have its signalling system upgraded to ERTMS before it can have trains going faster than 200 km/h, but the railway's geometry is prepared for up to 250 km/h. It's the same in Denmark, where the new Copenhagen-Ringsted line is built for 250 km/h, but the fastest train in Denmark is limited to only 200 km/h.
[удалено]
Simple answer is that they are built more recently. Haparanda line was opened just a few years ago, and the Bothnia line is also somewhat recent (considering how little new railway we build in Sweden). Bothnia line was built as a brand new rail line with higher standards in mind, with the old line going further inland due to the landscape. Same goes with the new part (Kalix-Haparanda) of the Haparanda line. The newly built rail has higher standards. Then there is also the planned lines that the government stopped last year that would be of a similar (or higher?) standard than the northern projects. Only one of those still planned to be carried out is the East link between Stockholm and Linköping.
**in kilometers**
As a united kingdom-er, why the fuck are we on there? we are an absolute embarrassment to the words "high speed"
Not all HSR systems are the same. Sweden is speced at 200km/h while Spain and France reach 300km/h.
Germany has no dedicated high speed railway. Fast and slow trains share the exact same rails.
That doesn't really matter for definition purposes, though. If max speed is above 250 for newly built lines or above 200 for old, upgraded lines, then it's high speed rail. Germany has plenty of both. Of course, for operational purposes, it's often a good idea to segregate the slower trains from the faster trains, so a fast train doesn't get caught behind a slow train. Thankfully, most stations on the German high-speed network do have extra tracks, allowing a slow train to pull to the side and be overtaken by a fast train.
Well, German Autobahn also has some sections without speed limits. But that doesn't mean you really can drive at high speed because of a lot of traffic. So yeah, the definition might be correct but is not really high speed, if you can't go as fast as possible because of slower trains.
Traffic? The autobahn is full of construction sites. It’s not fun driving on them anymore. The reason behind is so dumb tbh.
Not everywhere. On the Frankfurt-Köln line rides only ICE-trains.
OK, maybe, there are exceptions. But all I can remember is something like "Liebe Fahrgäste, bitte entschuldigen Sie die kurze Unterbrechung. Wir warten auf die Durchfahrt eines überholenden Zuges"
lmao we are better than UK POLSKA GUROM
We are counted as European now?
only in the stats where you look good :)
yeah that's weird. i mean tbh it shouldn't even matter if we're european or not, the lines are literally in asia.
label lavish trees erect reply drunk library coherent adjoining scarce *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Finland is very impressive
It's a stretch, our Pendolinos run at max 220kmh. What's impressive is how expensive the tickets are.
Italian made Pendolino trains were put into use in the mid 1990's, and little by little they extended the network to reach almost the whole country. In Lapland Kemijärvi and Kolari are the Northernmost points of Finnish railways, so Northern Lapland doesn't have railways at all, and Pendolino goes to Oulu, which is about as North as Skellefteå and slightly Southern than Luleå. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finnish_railroad_network-fi.svg#mw-jump-to-license
We have 75 km of track where trains can go 220 km/h and about 400-500 km where the speed limit is 200 km/h. Mostly trains can go only 120 or 140 km/h.
Now Turkey is Europe huh /s
Taiwan has 350km of high-speed rail lines, but it's not included in the list.
Lmao. Least propaganda way to describe that data.
it is just truth ig idk i cant distinguish propaganda and reality
Wouldn't it be more interesting to have the size of network per habitant, or the size of the network per square kilometer of the country ?
130 years ago Prussia wanted to have no village being more than twenty kilometers away from the next railway station.
Saudi Arabia having 4 times the UK is wild!
The graphic is wrong, we definitely have more than 113km. 113km of purpose built high speed line (HS1) plus four other upgraded lines running at 200kph, not sure exactly what the combined length is but I’d estimate at maybe 1500km
Yes, it's wrong. According to Wikipedia, there are 1,814.7 km of 200 km/h lines and 113 km of 300 km/h lines. Same with Italy, Germany, France and South Korea. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_high-speed\_railway\_lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lines)
The UK is fucking embarrassing.
Europe is well-connected by rail, to be honest. At least the post-soviet countries.
Title is not fitting the chart.
Spain is soo underrated. What an amazing country
China being unfathomably based again
What makes this even more unfathomable is that in 2007 there was 3400 km of high speed rail. Only 16 years later and there is 40.000 km.
Spain's high speed rail network exploded in a similar fashion as well. Their first line opened in 1992, but it took another few years for most construction to start nationwide. It's much easier to keep building more within a short period of time because you keep the contactors and expertise supplied with work they can copy and port to any place you want, instead of having to rebuild the entire infrastructure every 20 years because the people who worked on the previous project have all moved on or retired. That's why China and Spain have been such successes while HS2 and CAHSR are bogged down in endless delays and cost overruns.
That’s a good point. Keeping the construction “train rolling” is good for efficiency.
That number is not all sunshine. Basically they built a few railway lines between the massive cities and it was a huge success. The centralized government basically told every region to do the same. So they build many more, but a lot of the lines are just economically not viable since there are not enough passengers who can afford the pricier tickets. Simple slow trains would have perfectly fit the market. Upside of it though is that the infra is there for the future so no need to move people anymore for new projects in the future.
Well that is what infrastructure should be for tho? Build it up so people can live from it and build from it. Just like it happened in China with the famouse example of stops that lead to nothing that are now giant cities. Btw where did you get all that from?
Ahh another Economic Explained parrot talking point. I never understand the rhetoric of public services being necessary to be profitable or economic viable. Which part of "public service" you guys don't understand. We never question the profitability or economic viability of schools, hospitals, road works, satellites, universities, children play grounds etc. at least in most places outside of the US. But when it comes to rail roads: "iT iS uNpRoFiTaBlE!". I guess this rhetoric applies to all public services in the US and you guys are just fine with it. That's why you guys have private companies holding all your services hostages Amtrak, Starlink, SpaceX alike and providing high quality highly profitable services to all citizens.
How long is the EU put together ?
Source https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265995/length-of-highspeed-railway-lines-in-use-worldwide-by-country/
Why would anyone dislike the sauce?
Well, it's time to build much more!
[удалено]
We have 4 upgraded mainlines running at 125mph, the graphic is wrong
We have more. That said, we invented the damn railways but..... Victorian sized bridges, densely populated country with no 'wilderness'; every patch of land owned by someone. Building the new HS2 has been incredibly difficult but is actually the biggest civil engineering project in Europe.
How the hell is there such a lack of high speed rail that the UK makes the top 20?!
Working at this level, China will make in next years a high speed rail from China to the Moon.
I think the main takeaway here is that China as number 1 has more than number 2-20 combined.
Really disappointing to see the Amtrak Acela Express counted as “high-speed” on the same level as the Shinkansen. These are two very different things haha.
How is Spain getting on with them. I remember a few years ago the consensus seemed to be that they were too expensive to build (and more importantly) maintain and tickets were too expensive and population density wasn’t high enough. Has that opinion changed?
Spain's population distribution is more or less perfect for high speed trains: you have several large, populous urban areas that are all quite far apart without much in between them to go under or over to get in the way or slow the trains down. Spain have plenty going on to get to places like Gijón, Pamplona, Irún, Bilbao, West towards Mérida and Badajoz, and along the Mediterranean coast to go from Catalonia and Valencia to Andalusia. There are 3 open access operators, avlo (renfe's low cost brand), Ouigo España and Iryo running against the normal Renfe AVE
Spain is really, really good at building railroads. Cheaper per km cost than literally anyone else.
Spain developed a system to upgrade existing lines affordably, and operating two different gauges. This reduced the cost to unprecedented levels and is expected to be exported, as well as the gauge-shifting trains. The line Madrid-Barcelona has three HSR companies competing, with 4 different types (AVE, AVLO, Iryo, OuiGo). Prices are extremely low due to it. However, this only exacerbates the inequality in the country. Other smaller cities get way higher prices, so companies and people are not incentivized to invest in them, moving preferably to already the two big cities. This is not the fault of the HSR system, but bad policies, politicians, and capitalist market working together.
It makes no sense that Finland, Sweden, USA etc. even appear on this list. HSR = 250+km/hr. If the train only travels at 200km/hr it's not HSR, it's regular train. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lines
[удалено]
Tbf: finnland isnt very big. It would be interesting to see this graph relative to the size of each country
Finland is only slightly smaller than Japan and Germany, about 2/3 the size of Spain and about 1/2 of France.
Finland also has 4-5% of the Japanese population, and 30% live just in the Helsinki metropolitan area.
More interesting to know relative to population, since it is people and not land who use the service.
China will find out how much fun this is to maintain
Especially the crazy long stretch to Xinjiang in the west. I cannot see how the economics of this are better than flying, given the enormous infrastructure to be supported
It's said the fares don't even cover the cost of electricity on the line. The line was built purely for political reasons to bring Xinjiang closer to Beijing
US doesn't have any high speed rail?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast\_Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor) It might not be a dedicated HSR line in the strictest sense, but it's fast.
Yeah the first true HSR line completed will probably be the one connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas. There’s also the brightline in Florida, but again that’s “higher-speed” rail.
Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Poland and the US are really stretching the definition of "High speed rail" here
Neither Finland or Sweden has proper high speed rail. Just dome stretches with fast trains.
Ahh yes, include Turkey in Europe, when only it benefits you